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- From: dhardin@bbn.com (Dawn Hardin)
- Newsgroups: soc.singles
- Subject: Re: What do you Am men think about Am women?
- Date: 18 Nov 1992 18:56:16 GMT
- Lines: 37
- Message-ID: <lgl4egINNs0n@news.bbn.com>
- References: <riaedwards.1.720489492@halls1.cc.monash.edu.au> <MARTINC.92Nov17160134@hatteras.cs.unc.edu>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: bbn.com
-
- In article <MARTINC.92Nov17160134@hatteras.cs.unc.edu>, martinc@hatteras.cs.unc.edu (Charles R. Martin) writes:
- > In article <25766@sybase.sybase.com> mysti@sybase.com (Mysti) writes:
- >
- > Important point #2: In writing seminars, I have frequently been told
- > that men often write these stories and pseudonymify with women's
- > names.
- >
- > You have a source for that? I've heard exactly the opposite at writing
- > seminars etc. I know a number of such writers and aspiring writers, and
- > they're uniformly women. I don't hink I believe you.
-
- She's right, but I think it's outdated. In the 70's and early 80's
- the bodice ripper really came into a big market share, and a lot of
- publishing companies jumped on the bandwagon. They didn't have female
- authors in house, and this is before the genre really got established
- as a genre (before that it was all the sweetsie Harlequin and Regency
- stuff) so they weren't getting many unsolicited manuscripts. So they
- solicited stuff from authors that they knew, who were mostly male. It's
- sort of like the SF scene at the start of WWII, when the publishers went
- hunting up western writers because SF started to sell better than westerns.
- So they hit the market with lots of absolute bilge based mostly on some
- guy's wish-fulfillment misunderstanding of female fantasy (sex is never
- the heroine's "fault" because then she wouldn't be a good girl, hence
- all these silly quasi-rape scenes) and then women started getting into
- it. With the result of slightly better quasi-rape scenes, so one's IQ
- is lowered 10 points instead of 50 for every one that you read.* But if
- you pick up a bodice ripper written in the 70's and look at the copyright
- statement, you're very likely to find a man's name on it. It's not so
- likely any more.
-
- *Luckily, my IQ was fabulously high to begin with, so I'm still able to
- eke out an existance as a frequent soc.singles poster.
-
- Dawn
-
- Joseph Campbell gave me hope and now I have been saved.
- "Folk Song" by Bongwater
-