ladybusiness | (Reply)

From:

Oh, right! I see how I have conflated the Regency/romance bits. It's not so much that I expect Regency romances to have explicit sex, per se, but more that I didn't realize how heavily this was influenced by Regency tropes (which I am Very Bad at), misunderstood the recs of "romance" (where I expect certain things re: boning) and then got derailed by the amount of philosophy, so it was a big old mess. I really DO think there's a breakdown in how I understand romance novels so your bemusement is valid! Because like with everything in the world, I came to the field ass backwards due to where I grew up, what types of books were available to me, how people referred to them when they were like, removing them from my hands because "romance novels were for adults". Looking back, I'm not sure that adults around me didn't simply use "adult romance" to mean "porn" tbh. Romance, as a field, is so complicated and nifty! There's tons of stuff under the umbrella re: intimacy! This is certainly what I have learned in this whole slightly comical situation.

I'm okay with Suck Fairy! I can generally parse out the bad stuff with older work now (thank you, practice with classic SF novels by DUDES). Thanks for the resources list, too! I will check some of these out for sure. A friend recced me The Convenient Marriage due to my preference for other tropes, if I can get to it before my library demands it back. But now I am SUPER DUPER excited by the nonfiction recs. I didn't actually think there would be books on this subject.

Anyway, this wasn't clumsy at all! It was great, thank you so much for the additional context and taking the time to share what you know. I realize I have stumbled all over the place re: terminology. I'm gonna learn from this, I SWEAR.