Happy Wednesday! There are no Star Wars links this time, I promise! No guarantees for next week though. We hope you enjoyed the long weekend and are ready to get through the rest of the week. Power through! You got this!
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Bawdy Bookworms has some cool, new adult toy sets! Both Elyse and I have reviewed their subscription boxes in the past and really enjoyed them. Recently, Bawdy Bookworms debuted two single purchase boxes with mermaid and unicorn themes. I want both of them. Though if I do have to choose, I might be more Team Unicorn.
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Via Two Bossy Dames, Sarah linked me this piece on “lumbersexuality” and we had a great, brief discussion about it.
The lumberjack seems like a startlingly apt symbol for hipsters to appropriate. On one level, it’s just a neat metaphor for gentrification: Lumberjacks were, after all, an ad-hoc army of Caucasians, invading regions they imagined to be empty, sucking up the local resources, and leaving vast, bland spaces in their wake. But there’s much more to the lumberjack symbol than another glib comment on urban white culture. This particular brand of bearded flannel-wearer is a modern take on the deeply-rooted historical image of Paul Bunyan, the ax-wielding but amiable giant, whose stomping grounds were the North Woods of the upper Midwest. Paul and his brethren emerged as icons in American pop culture a little over a century ago. What links the mythic lumberjack to his modern-day incarnations is a pervasive sense—in his time and ours—that masculinity is “in crisis.”
The article made me examine my attraction to lumbersexual heroes and recognize that they’re always white in romance.
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Are you a romance reader who lives in or near Cape Town? There’s a book club starting up in your area from Reader Lara! If you’re interested, please fill out this Google Form.
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After doing a photoshoot with her own cat following her wedding, a photographer now does post-wedding shoots with brides and their adorable cats! Weddings aside, she also photographs cats on their own. While I love the concept, I’m not sure I’d want to put a wedding dress near my cat.
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Need more book recs? Of course you do! Sil of The Book Voyagers has created an A to Z list of recommendations. Using the alphabet, she selects tropes beginning with a certain letter and then gives recommendations. It’s definitely worth a browse. Sil also mentioned transferring the list to her blog in the future.
https://twitter.com/thebookvoyagers/status/950077147527380993
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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Totally Team Mermaid!
(although the Unicorn edible glitter is tempting….)
Haha, I’m not necessarily anti-lumberjacks, but when they came into vogue, it was definitely a moment where I felt culturally out of step. I’m of an age where I can be classified as an “old milennial” or “young gen X” depending on who you talk to. And when hot hipster lumberjack became a “thing”, I was like “really guys? We’re doing this now?” It was one of those moments where I felt Officially Old (TM) and that the culture was passing me by.
I’ve got nothing against it, it just felt strange. I do enjoy beards on guys who can grow them well, so really, I cant complain. 😉
Just a heads up that both SBSarah’s books Beyond Heaving Bosoms and Everything I Learned About Love I Learned From Romance Novels are recommended in this post over at BookRiot
https://bookriot.com/2018/01/16/read-harder-romance-style/
It’s about their yearly Read Harder Challenge, which I have been trying to do for the last three years in order to expand my reading horizons. In this post a romance is recommended for almost all of the 24 challenges. The author got stuck on the true crime challenge – and someone recommended a book about Bonnie and Clyde – so I guess you could do the whole challenge with a romance theme!
“deeply-rooted historical image”? I thought Paul Bunyan was invented out of whole cloth (flannel, possibly) as logging-industry propaganda.
Thanks for including Sil! I love her recommendations!
‘Lumbersexual’: I think I just found the perfect way to classify the attractiveness of Jim Hopper on ‘Stranger Things’ 🙂
Big thanks to the Onion: https://local.theonion.com/man-wishes-women-in-crowded-bar-would-let-him-read-jane-1822201409
Jill Q. – I totally agree with you, lol and there’s a new label for our in-between generation: Xennial
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/06/28/xennials_a_23006562/
[…] Linkity from Smart Bitches. […]
This is a personal essay by romance author Andie J. Christopher, which I found really thought-provoking. It touches on consent issues, bad sexual experiences, and how both have affected her personally as a single woman and a romance writer. The parts where she wonders if romance scenarios are altering expectations on both sides, and how romance authors should (or indeed can) reshape the cultural landscape, are particularly thoughtful:
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a15595984/romance-novels-metoo-essay/