Romance Reader, Unashamed

[Louisiana1976]

Any reader of romance novels can tell you the stereotypes of the books and their readers. If you're not a romance reader, there's a good chance you can come up with them anyway: Frumpy housewives engaged in heavy breathing over thoughts of Fabio (as pirate, as viking, in a kilt...) ripping bodices. Rape fantasies for the sexually repressed. Tales of weak women rescued by strong men. Clumsy prose and overheated yet laughably euphemistic sex scenes. Feminists don't read romance novels. Smart, educated people don't read romance novels.

A great deal could be said about how fiction by and for women is rated in relation to more masculinist fiction -- whether it be Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens or Henry James -- but in this case, by "romance novel," I mean genre romance. Romances are the books in the romance section of the bookstore, not the books in the "fiction" or "literature" section that have a love story but are given a pass on the stigma of being romance novels. (For further definition, see this from the Romance Writers of America.)

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http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/27/819640/-Romance-Reader,-Unashamed

[virgogal]

1. Mystery reader,unashamed.

[valerief]

2. I remember the Flame and the Flower. The male lead was named

Hugh Jorgen, wasn't he?

[jwirr]

3. Another romance reader here. I read my first romance novel "Desiree"

in junior high and fell in love with history when I went looking to see what was fact and what was fiction. I still read and search the net for the actual incidents. I skip the sex scenes because if you have read one you have read them all but I like the plots and the morals. I actually have read so many of them that I have a notebook with lists so I do not buy the same one twice.

For what it is worth all genre have a list of stereotypes that indicate what they are talking about. I have never worried about what someone else thinks of me. I relax with my romance. It gets my mind off of the depressing history of my own time.

[JitterbugPerfume]

4. no reason for shame~~

everyone should read whatever makes them happy. The shame is that so many people don't read anything!

[gratefultobelib]

5. The Proud Breed by Celeste De Blasis. I unabashedly love it!