“A high-octane, hilarious and revelatory look at the romance genre… Sarah and Candy are the undisputed experts on a subject they treat with affection, honesty, and scorching wit even as they skewer pretensions and prejudices. If you want to understand romance and why women love it, this sparkling book is required reading. It’s too much fun to be missed!”
— New York Times bestselling author Lisa Kleypas
Outtakes, Excerpts and Extras
Who Tells of Great Sexxing?
Book: Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels
A bit of copy from the book's Sex chapter - enjoy. In old-skool romances, you only rarely experience the sweet sweet love through the hero, but that’s largely because the old-skool romances were mostly told from the heroine’s perspective in the first place. In novels in which both POVs are given equal weight, most authors dedicate roughly equal real estate to both sexes for the POV of the nookenatin’. The male point of view is present in most recently-published romances not only because the hero’s journey has equal weight with the heroine’s, but because the added POV adds greater dramatic impact – at least, it does right now, simply because, like seeing a live penis on a major network at 8pm, it’s more unexpected. Hell, penises in general are unexpected unless there’s an NC-17 rating attached, since the sight of one is usually the hallmark of porn. So it is with the male perspective during sex. The thrust of the dramatic impact is usually in the emotional revelation smack dab in the middle of coitus, to wit: “Oh, shit, this sex is meaningful and I can't control my—AAGGHHHHHHHH!” The rake is undone and bound to one woman, the lothario is shackled for good, the gay hero is cured of that pesky preference for men (just kidding) – the Power of the her Magic Hoo Hoo is almost as great as that of the Wang of Lovin’—the She-Ra™ to his He-Man™, if you will. In a nutshell, the male point of view is used to reveal that it's not just another boning in the mist. The male’s coital or post-coital thought process can follow any number of patterns, but at its essence, the male has a great “Oh shit!” moment that this is not his father’s Oldsmobile – no, really. To coin a bad pirate joke, male sex point of view can be summed up in eight magic words: “Ahoy, there! Mating? This sex is meaningful! ARRRRGH!” The realization can take any number of forms, from, “Sex was never this good before – what is it about this woman?” to “This was supposed to be rote and meaningless, an experience to cleanse her from my system, and now I cannot get enough. I must have more!” But at the root of the rumination: her Golden Passage is the path to monogamy, redemption, and really, really hot boot-knockin’ forever and ever, amen. Marriage and monogamy are never a bad choice when the sex is that good, and of course the hero must choose the heroine, and her Miraculous Magical Mystery Tour Bus Tunnel for ever and ever. Sexual explorations aside, romance capitalizes on the idea that both men and women need emotional connections to truly enjoy sex, and thus it’s extra-more-better if the male realizes as well that in the math of scrumpin’, sex + feeeeeelings = Really Good Sex Wooo! It’s beyond amusing that two very disparate accusations are regularly flung at romance: it’s porn for women, and women need emotions with their sex or it’s just not satisfying for them. Oh, the phallus-laden logical fallacies, how they taunt us. The emotional super-glue applied to the man’s heart and his ultimate surrender to his emotional and sexual bliss definitely flip a finger – a choice finger, a long and erect one – at old and limp ideas of sexuality and emotional involvement. Be that as it may, the appearance of the male perspective in sex scenes is a good thing in our opinion, as it’s still up in the air as to who we as readers identify with, the hero or the heroine. So more experiential learning through the mental narrative of the hero as he boinks his way to blissdom is just fine by us.
