On the terminology, give it up, hon. :/ No amount of explanation, hinting or outright derision got the romance folks to stop calling SF romance "futuristic," despite the fact that it sounds incredibly dorky and doesn't cover the entire range of science fictional possibilities. "Menage" is just as silly, if not moreso for being actually inaccurate as you pointed out, but I doubt the romantic establishment will budge on that one either.
On the sex... yeah. [sigh] I was reading a blog entry the other day by an editor who posted a list of genre definitions. According to her, a "Romance" is about "a man and a woman." One and only one of each, period. Wow, I guess I'm not writing romance after all. Nor are the people writing lesbian love stories, nor the people writing poly love stories. I wouldn't have minded if it'd been, "This is what our house publishes:" but it was presented as a list of general definitions. I was more than a bit annoyed.
Given that level of conservatism and the narrow compass of what is and included in A Romance, I'm not at all surprised that anal sex is considered shocking and icky. And I agree with lunalelle that it's gotten worse since the sexual revolution, not better.
I read a romance in the late seventies, when I was in my mid-teens, which went a lot farther (as many did back then). I forget the title but it was a bestseller and you could get it at the supermarket, which was where my mother bought it. I didn't get all the way through it because the actual story was boring, but in one of the very early chapters there was a rather extensive snowballing scene -- vagina to man to woman to man and back to vagina -- which I thought was pretty gross at the time and still don't consider terribly sexy, to say nothing of a bit unrealistic. [cough] But I'd love to see what the commenters you mentioned would've felt about a modern romance with that sort of scene in it. Maybe yearning for the clean vanilla flavor of anal sex...? ;)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-10-17 08:16 pm (UTC)On the sex... yeah. [sigh] I was reading a blog entry the other day by an editor who posted a list of genre definitions. According to her, a "Romance" is about "a man and a woman." One and only one of each, period. Wow, I guess I'm not writing romance after all. Nor are the people writing lesbian love stories, nor the people writing poly love stories. I wouldn't have minded if it'd been, "This is what our house publishes:" but it was presented as a list of general definitions. I was more than a bit annoyed.
Given that level of conservatism and the narrow compass of what is and included in A Romance, I'm not at all surprised that anal sex is considered shocking and icky. And I agree with
I read a romance in the late seventies, when I was in my mid-teens, which went a lot farther (as many did back then). I forget the title but it was a bestseller and you could get it at the supermarket, which was where my mother bought it. I didn't get all the way through it because the actual story was boring, but in one of the very early chapters there was a rather extensive snowballing scene -- vagina to man to woman to man and back to vagina -- which I thought was pretty gross at the time and still don't consider terribly sexy, to say nothing of a bit unrealistic. [cough] But I'd love to see what the commenters you mentioned would've felt about a modern romance with that sort of scene in it. Maybe yearning for the clean vanilla flavor of anal sex...? ;)
Angie