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As my last feature showed, we here at heatherwinston.com are willing to go to any length to please our readers. One of the questions I get all the time is "At which percentage does the standard error of means start to indicate that the findings of a particular linguistic study are not worth much consideration?” At that point I curl up into a fetal position and weep heavily for hours on end. When the flashbacks to sophomore year subside, I try to think of a least frequently asked question to get my mind off of things. One of these I have dutifully pursued this week. “What do women see in romance novels?”
No one asks this because we all know that just as all men like to look at “occasional” pornographic material, all women like to read weepy stories of Fabioesque men in forbidden love with buxom ladies. The only difference between the two is that the romance novel has a lot of foreplay leading up to a climactic scene or two where the all the dirty words are replaced by fanciful terms. The only foreplay you get from the porn is “You called for a plumber, Miss?” But the scientific curiosity instilled in me by my favorite college subject, statistics, says maybe there's more than that. I put my greatly honed research skills to work and carefully selected a random sampling of the romance novel genre from various sources. These are the novels I chose:
Now to shamefully admit my lack of depth of womanhood, before this project I had never read a romance novel. I had the chance when a particularly racy pirate themed novel was making the rounds at the study abroad program I attended, but I never took the opportunity to truly enjoy the wonderful things that being in a foreign country can bring. Those of you who are loyal readers may recall my playlette based on Pirate's Pleasure. I *blush* lost my romance novel virginity to this book. Well, if you discount those erotic A-Team fanfics, as I do. Ah, Murdock and B.A. were meant for each other. *sigh* In any case, my second tryst, with Border Bride, couldn't have been more different from my first. Whereas Pirate was full of descriptions of nipples and butts (never in those scandalous terms of course), Bride was pretty much a historical novel about the lives of Welsh living on the borders of England during the time the Plantagenets were wresting the crown from the Normans. I'm still eagerly awaiting Love with a Scandalous Lord and still have yet to decide whether I'm hoping it's a romp in sheer stupidity like Pirate or a brainy, non-thrill ride like Bride. Either way, I will post the results of my research as soon as I finish the last book. | ||||
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