There’s a ginned up war going on about why men don’t read and whether there are enough books for men, and–. It is like most of the war between sexes crap on social media and in the cultural vessels these days ginned up. Or at least it smells ginned up and designed to make men mad at women and vice versa and to have us rip at each other. … Look, when it comes to my getting offended at a post by a friendly about how men yes do read…. considering who I am and what I do, and that I am one of those people who often prefers the stuff men prefer in reading (not to say 90% of the time, but close) things have gone too far.
I’m not going to link the friend who lost his mind on twitter here. My purpose is not to start a war I don’t have time for (the desensitization therapy turns off my words some days, which is bizarre) but to try to set some things straight.
What pissed me off about the post was the implication that a) all of women’s romance is erotica. b) that women only read a lot because they’re getting their freak on.
This is stupid and demeaning to an entire sex, a little over half of humanity. It also happens to be huge, blatant lie and one he should be way too smart and connected (to women) to believe. Then again, some of the women he talks to might have that idea, because frankly trad pub has that idea about women and pushes it on the women working for them. (Baen excepted, as far as I know. I was never asked to put a sex scene in, at least.)
First and at the risk of pissing maybe the half a dozen of you who’ll decide I’m attacking you — I’m not. If you’re stupid enough to think that, though, the door is thataway — yes, men and women read differently and for different reasons. Men and women are in fact different from the moment of conception. I feel a little guilty that the last appearance of Leslie Fish in the comments was her being obtuse about this, being convinced that men and women would have the same strength if only women (like men, in her mind) were encouraged to “eat hearty” and be strong. Coming from hitting puberty in the seventies that made me stare, because in the seventies was encouraged to “eat hearty”. Dan and I have the exact same metabolic problems coming from the fact that we’re descended from sturdy stock, and we both half-starved ourselves from twelve to twenty five. How starved? Like…. a slice of bread a day for him and a cup of popcorn for me. (And espresso. I lived on espresso.) We think we both eat a full meal once a week or so.
Anyway this was insane because anyone who knows human biology knows that male and female embryos are different. We get different hormone baths. Our brains, as well as our skeletons and musculature develop differently.
Yes, there are, not even intersex but people who for some reason or another get “the wrong hormone bath.” There is reason to believe I was one of those for part of the pregnancy, which explains some of the very strange anomalies and also possibly why my brain is weird. I’m not denying some people think they got a ticket for the wrong ride with some justification. And I’m not going to tell you that you’re “textbook female” or “textbook male” Like all other human characteristics, this one moves on a spectrum, but it’s a little more marked and clearer than the other ones.
. 99.9% of men, barring abnormality, will be stronger than 99% of women the same age and in same or better physical condition. One of the ways we’re different, though some of us lean more the other way are the ways our brains work. Most men think from A to B To C while women think in webs. It’s perfectly possible for women to be logical and direct, but that’s learning. Naturally, there’s the webbing promoted by estrogen.
And when it comes to sex most women will think in relationships and connection, while most men think visually. This btw, seems to be one of those things in which Heinlein’s idea that we’re not a single species but symbiotes comes into play (It’s wrong, of course, but it’s describing something real.) Because what’s hilarious about that difference in “What turns you on” is that both sides are utterly blind to “this is a built in thing. They can’t change, because this is part of how it is. And no, they’re not just pretending, they really are different.”
So, men send women dick picks, because if she sent him a picture of her private parts that would be a HUGE turn on. And women climb the corporate ladder convinced the perfect marriage and the family of her dreams is at the top. (Security is a huge turn on for women. See Billionaire Romances. Because to the back brain that means safety for all the babies. It’s shorthand for “connections that keep my babies alive.”)
That’s where we are. So men and women read DIFFERENT THINGS FOR THE TURN ON. And yes, both men and women do things that are specifically for the turn on.
Men will mostly watch porn or look at pictures. This baffles us (this is something in which I’m utterly female, btw) just a little. I don’t want to look at some stranger’s junk! Absolutely no interest. Sure, women like looking at gorgeous men. Hence all the Kirk losing his shirt episodes and the calendars of “firemen and kittens” say. Gorgeous men are attractive and pretty to look at but for most of us it’s not a directly sexual thing. (Again, remember there’s a continuum. I’m sure there are women who are visually turned on. They’re just rare.) It’s more of an aesthetic and admiring thing.
FOR A TURN ON — note not for other fun — women mostly READ erotica. Back in the bad days when most of these were on sites online like Jasmine Gardens for Jane Austen Fanfic with erotic overtones, I lost interest very rapidly because my mind interrupts everything when it finds an infelicitous turn of phrase. “Oh, you’re turned on. Stop the show. No. Stop. Turn it all off. Right. Do you see she used affect when she meant effect? Ewwwww.” In fact, in general I don’t buy “red hot” romances, Jane Austen fanfic, Regency, modern or otherwise, because I find most of them giggle-worthy. (Guys, no seriously, I accidentally put one of those on audible while I was cleaning. I wanted a low-involvement, no drama thing, because I was concentrating on cleaning. So I got a JAFF. I was downstairs, de-crudding the kitchen. The computer playing the book was this one — up the stairs and at the other end of the house. Which was a problem when hit the scene of Mr. Darcy beating off into a sock. Laugh with me. LAUGH. It never occurred to me to yank off the headphones, for some reason. Instead, I ran hell for leather across the house and up the stairs to turn the narration off, spazzing and saying “ew ew ew ew ew” all the way. Dan saw me come in running and still laughs a this.)
Anyway, that’s what men and women do for turn-on, which is not the same as what men and women like to read. No, seriously.
Where my friend was wrong was assuming ALL romances are erotica and they’re all read one-handed.
At some point, some twit said that romances were “lady porn.” And all the guys, of course — symbiotes, remember? — thought this was LITERAL. Romances must be all sex back and forth, nothing else. That’s why women read so many of them. NOW they got it. That’s what it was and it’s all it was. It’s been in the air ever since. Not helped by the fact that trad pub believed this and when all out of ideas started pushing authors to put more and more sex in, making some stuff utterly unreadable.
The original twit was right if by “lady porn” you mean fantasizing about the perfect relationship and the dream woman. Look, yeah a lot of women use romances for that. Particularly single (either always or divorced/widowed) women and/or women in marriages that have turned cold or are going through a burn-low phase.
Yes, that’s one of the reasons women read. It’s one of the reasons men used to read too. Stuff like James Bond is pure male fantasy. All women want him, all men envy him and he’s hyper competent. I don’t see absolutely anything wrong with the male fantasy books and think we need more of them. The fact that trad pub, the movie industry and society in general have decided the male fantasy must be shitcanned while females are allowed to fantasize nonstop of marrying billionaires (which somehow isn’t demeaning to normal men?) is at the root of this whole “But why don’t men read?” debate.
BUT let’s not fight by saying “Well, it’s because women read trash.” Men read trash too. In fact I’d lay you (shut up. No more phrasing now) good money that a lot of erotica is read by men. Why? The Harem subgenre. It’s such a male fantasy that I think the female buy-in is minimal. And yet not only do they sell like hot cakes, but there’s a sub-genre of romance (And science fiction!) where the harem kink raises its persistent head. (I don’t care, as long as the science fiction justifies it and is interesting otherwise. But it IS there.)
First let’s be bluntly honest: if you’re measuring by sales from trad pub you’re sort of arguing why all houses are built out of wood by looking at parts of the US and ignoring everything else. At this point I don’t know what percentage of booksales is trad pub. And before ten of you get their ’tisms on and start giving me statistics, yeah, that’s nice, but how reliable are they? Trad pub never knew how many books THEY sold, I very much doubt they’re very informed about everyone else’s sales, okay? The business still uses 19th century accounting practices, which in the modern age are somewhere between ridiculous and LOLWUT?
However, let’s take the premise as fact and assume that women read more than men. This was the post my friend was answering to. Some leftist preening Karen said men read less than women because men are less empathetic.
Yes, yes, that’s the ticket. It’s not because for the last 25 years publishing and Hollywood and the insane cabal of leftists controlling them decided that all action heroes must be female; that ninety pound chicks could kick the ass of 300 lb guys without even a figleaf of bioengineering; because the male fantasy of the hyper competent male drowning in pussy was banned from publishing; the male fantasy of breaking new frontiers and creating a homestead with the woman as his reward — the western — was banned from publishing; and in fact all forms of male fantasy and ideal were banned from publishing. It also has absolutely nothing to do with the books pushed in school, which, while they turn both males and females off reading turn males off more. Look people, we know our boys and young men are near onto angels, because none of them has gone on a rampage when forced to read the tenth book about why males bad females victims.
BUT — and this is a guess — women probably read a little more than men. I wouldn’t say a ton — and I’ll explain why later — but I think women read slightly more than men.
You can’t tell it by “romance is the biggest genre, because it sells 10x more than all other genres” because romance readers aren’t all female. Not even vaguely. it’s just that men hide it as much as women in Portugal when I was growing up hid reading SF. I used to think our marriage was weird, because unless I’m depressed and going through a Jane Austen Fanfic phase, which probably hits “romance” but trust me, is a different thing, I read thrillers and adventure, and Dan reads romance. (He’s going to kill me for putting this out there.) TBF we both read science fiction, fantasy, etc. But for “popcorn books” (i.e the ones you’ll read six of a day if you’re on vacation) I read adventure/thriller and he reads romance. I used to think this was super-weird for a mathematician. And then I kept running into more and more hard science guys who low-key love romance. I HONESTLY think it’s the pattern. Romances are highly structured. And I think when they’re on “scrolling on” pattern, not paying strong attention, they prefer romance because it’s so predictable. It’s soothing, in a way.
Anyway, what I’m hinting at above is that by far in the statistical distro of book reading, those who determine differences are almost exclusively the super readers.
How do I explain this? Oh, yeah. Okay. Look, most people don’t read. AT ALL. Male or female they just don’t read. I find it both odd and reassuring that as far as we can tell the percentage of people who read for fun is now the exact same as it was in Shakespeare’s day. I don’t remember the percentage, either, but that’s like 26% and it’s probably inflated because reading is seen as a positive trait, something people brag about. So in self-reported surveys, they’ll say they read. And they probably don’t.
BUT most people who read — again, I’m PFA because we can’t tell for sure. Surveys aren’t science — like 80% read one or two books A YEAR.
My mind just stuttered on that one. I think that happened to me a year, because I had post-partum depression and was seriously ill in the aftermath of pre-eclampsia, so I couldn’t remember what I’d read from a day to the next. It might happen again if I get demented in old age. But otherwise, how do you ONLY read a book a year? Do you have to run your finger on the page? Do your lips move? No, don’t answer that. I’m being silly. Most people of course read the ONE BOOK that all their friends are talking about because they get it pushed on them. Or more likely buy it, read half of it, see how it ends on the net and pretend they read it. Their entertainment is movies and gaming. (This is alien to me, but I’m aware I’m the broken one here.)
So they’re more like the rest of the population than not. Reading is not really a thing. However where it is it tends to be social and social signaling, so it would be mostly a female activity. That’s some of the skew.
THEN there are the super-readers. Shut up, yes. we do keep a cape in the closet. Only it has coffee stains and cat hair on it. We read preferentially or at least on an equal footing with the other entertainment.
I think the low def of super readers is a book a week, but well, there are the others, people like me who read …. a lot of books a week. I haven’t counted recently.
I don’t read as fast as I did in my forties when I routinely went through six books a day. An expensive habit back then. But it’s usually at least one a day, unless I’m on vacation or there are such circumstances. Yes, this is around my normal duties. BTW the slow down is mostly my eyes. I don’t see as well, so I have to concentrate more, and that slows me down.
Those of us who are super-readers usually have what I call a “popcorn genre.” That’s something you read like people eat popcorn. It’s not a gourmet meal. It’s not something you do to appreciate every bite. It’s the reading you do because you MUST read, and you chain read.
Most of mine, TBF are mysteries. All sorts of mysteries from true crime to procedurals to cozies. I go through phases. But I also go through phases of thrillers or adventure SF. I’d do it more if there were more I could discover to read. Dan reads romances, but also urban fantasy, fantasy, SF, and ends up reading whatever I bought too, because we share a library.
Anyway, let’s posit that the “Women read more, reeeee” thing is true. The big difference will be in these super-readers. And the big difference would be — I posit — that most women have indoor, safe jobs where they can have downtime by reading. While a large portion of men have such jobs also, there is a non-insignificant number in the trades or in highly minutious, high-concentration professions that don’t allow downtime during the work day to read.
That, combined with trad pub swallowing their own ink by the bucketfull and determining that male fantasies are verbotten and female fantasies mandatory, even in things like science fiction and fantasy, are I believe the great determinants of the (probably less than 5%) difference in male and female readers. (Remember we’re already a minority.)
As for sex I like it thank you, but I prefer it outside my books because most people — there are exceptions — write sex absolutely horribly, plus throw it in where it has no business in the plot. BUT trad pub has determined that’s what people want and pushes it into everything, in an attempt to sell their old fish in a sexy wrap. Meh. Ignore them. They’re dinosaurs lumbering towards extinction.
HOWEVER I do agree we need to bring the male fantasy, male heroes AND — this is very important — boy heroes back into being a thing. Because even if most people won’t read for fun later in life, people reading when they’re young makes them more fluent in reading and reading fluency correlates to success in every area of life.
This is not my calling. Not that I’m against it, but I tend to write weird. Yes, I do have more male than female readers and fans, probably by double, because my weird has a ton of adventure. BUT I couldn’t write James Bond like stuff anymore than I could write billionaire romances. I’m not interested enough to do so.
If you are, do kindly write it.
And while on that, I want to give a shout out to Raconteur’s Press books for boys: my friend’s Dave Freer’s Storm Dragon and J. Kenton Pierce’s A Kiss for Damocles, both Prometheus nominated works.
Here I’ll note that good books are good books, and that males and females read good books. How many young women started with Harry Potter. BUT there are female-preoccupation books that obsess on relationships and clothes and such, and male-preoccupation books, hinging on adventure and daring do that will appeal more to one than the other. I’ll also say that an uninfluenced market will have both. And also that yes, at young ages it matters even more to have both, as little boys want to fantasize about being the hero.
Having already got one of my nuclear family on the war path once he reads this, I might as well continue the work and get younger son to want to kill me too.
When he was about 4 years old, we were out grocery shopping and younger spawn blurts out “I wish I were a girl.” Now, I’m very glad he wasn’t ten years younger and even in his day very glad he said it to me, not a teacher.
Since this is my very boy boy, the one who was mostly noise with dirt on it, and who couldn’t keep knees on his pants because of climbing inadvisable things and who, at that point would rain matchbox cars in all directions if you shook him, I decided to figure out why in heaven’s name.
The answer was easy: Cartoons. Every cartoon character he liked, who did science things or adventure things was a little girl. Or a little female cartoon thing, at any rate. Being 4 he assumed that was how the world was, so he wanted to be a girl so he could fly spaceships and have adventures. Yes, I disabused him of that notion.
THAT ladies and gentlemen is how bizarre things have got. And why yes, we need dreams for boys to dream upon. And having a few books on men who are heroes (Oh, I just figured out why men read romances. Yes, men are allowed to be good and important in those) is good too. I do a lot of the last, because I like heroic men. And women. And undefinable humans who were gengineered out of their heritage. (Deal.) But we do need more workers to that vineyard.
So instead of bitching and adding fire to the ginned up war between men and women, which benefits no one but the extinction rebellion freaks? Write books that men might also want to read. Or that men and women both like to read. Or that are — simply (ah!) fun.
Stop bitching and write or promote good books.
(Sorry this post is so long. My body has decided I only need to sleep four hours a night, so I’m very foggy. This has to change, and will change with strict sleep hygiene, but that will take time. Hopefully it’s still understandable, anyway.)
According To Hoyt 
To me there are not ‘books for men’ or ‘books for women’ there are just books. Some people like them, some don’t. Some tend to be more popular with women (see fantasy romance), some more popular with men (see military SF). That doesn’t make them ‘for’ one sex or the other.
I guess I’m saying, books are ‘for’ the people who enjoy reading them, whoever they are.
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yes. But they’ve been AGGRESSIVELY demeaning the average men’s expectations.
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I actually saw Dungeon Crawler Carl for sale at TARGET the other day. Massively popular. (I haven’t read it yet, but it’s one I’ll want to be in a particular mood to read. Husband and eldest have read and liked it.)
The series was self-pub, but it has apparently been acquired by Ace, because there are still some publishers around who know a good thing when they see it. Hmm. I know the same holds true for the Silo Trilogy—Wool and its sequels—by Hugh Howey, and was that also true for Andy Weir? I’m noticing a trend here, male authors, writing books that are action-oriented and which often feature male protagonists, self-published and then picked up by a big publisher once demand shows a sure thing. And why is it a thing? BECAUSE THEY AREN’T GETTING IT ELSEWHERE.
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Nephews were reading Dungeon Crawler Carl and enjoying it.
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I think Larry Correia was the first to get picked up.
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GameLit fiction is one of my popcorn reads. That particular series is pretty good so far because in the midst of the cursing, the talking cat, and the craziness of the dungeon crawl is the story of a guy who grapples with realistic choice and emotion. Good stuff. Carl is not a Gary Sue. He makes mistakes.
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Those men aren’t human, and thus are not worthy of any consideration at all.
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Louis L’Amoure, Zane Grey, and others kept me sane during my Naval Days. It would be interesting to see how women would react to watching a movie on the mess decks when a sexually charged scene would come on. Hell out to sea long enough was enough for people to yell out screw her John at John Wayne during his movies. And he never had a sex scene that I knew of.
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Forgot about Zane Gray. Tarzan books. The civil war youth adventure books (including Norton’s Ride Rebel Ride, and Rebel Spurs). (Generally an orphan who got taken under the wing of someone. Never a female, FWIW. ) Thorne books which was a stranger who lied about being relative of twins who lost their parents coming to America pre-revolution war, insuring they were not “sold” into indenture (even though parents paid for the voyage. Two books.) Early eastern US colonization, two book series regarding two female cousins, one English lord army officer, one frontiersman, and what happens (fictionalized on author’s family history, but only mentioned in afterward of second book).
I read Norton, Clarke, etc., including Dune. Honestly, anything I was allowed to check out from late grade school, through middle and high school, that was SF, and western adventure.
Note, never got into the Jack Ryan Sr. books before “Executive Orders”. Rainbow Ops, and Jack Ryan Jr., books, when they come on sale, yes.
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There is a very strongly implied one in The Quiet Man. But that is about it.
But I’m not sure how your comment relates to mine, when I was talking about how American women (in general, not all) don’t view low-status men as even being human.
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Seemingly low brow acting men, can be very high brow in practice and vice versa.
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Which is just as much of a social-media driven stereotype as “Men don’t read.”
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It’s no surprise that women–not just American women–instinctively express withering disdain for “low-status” men. A well-raised woman soft-pedals that, but it’s a wired-in tendency.
Consider the opportunity cost the first women paid for sinking their limited reproductive resources in some loser’s loser kid while every better man’s genes went to someone else. All that waddling gestation, all that worry, wasted on a kid who’s more likely to feed the first sabretooth that spots it than to give her any grandchildren? Can’t have that.
Her monkey ancestresses said “NO!” to the punky monkey males for umpteen generations, until even the punkiest male was big enough not to have to take NO for an answer. So how does she stay hypergamous when even the losers can take her?
By making the losers not want her.
Rejecting a man is a woman’s most important–and most frequent–sexual activity. It’s a ticklish business: she has to discourage him just enough that he leaves her alone, without pissing him off so much that he… doesn’t.
I imagine women used to teach their daughters how best to handle that.
I also imagine that some of that skill has been lost to Feminism’s silly social-media-driven idea that she shouldn’t have to walk on eggs/protect Male Fragility/demean herself/whatever-the-bleep they’re shrieking thru bullhorns these days.
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Yep. WOMEN ARE TURNED ON BY SECURITY. It’s like men expressing disdain for ugly women. You don’t if you’re a nice person, but it’s there.
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It’s when they start b****ing about ugly women with unpleasant personalities who aren’t putting out that I have to laugh gently at them. The XY version of “the food is terrible and served in such small portions.”
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In general, ugly B-words refusing to breed is kinduva nice problem to have ;)
Specifically… Dude! That woman who’s Not-Smiling at you is Not Interested, and she’s honestly giving you the easiest out she can. Be grateful, and retire gracefully, your time, money, and dignity undamaged. The bullet is dodging you!
Bring back women teaching girls to reject like a lady. Bring back men teaching boys to take that like a gentleman.
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Then there are the women who fall madly in love with famous criminals.
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“I can fix him” is a dangerous thought pattern. No, honey, you can’t. If he actually loved you, he would fix himself, because he’s the only person who can initiate that.
My husband used to smoke a bit. He stopped when he decided he wanted to date me, because he figured I wouldn’t want to kiss him if he tasted like smoke. (Good call.)
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Especially when tied to the thought pattern “the problem is always HIM” and a legal system that’s a Harbor Freight full of hammers to work with.
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The Crazy/Hot index.
/shudder
burn it, burn it with fire!
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The word “peacocking” seems to apply; honest fitness signaling via an “expensive” handicap. BadBois attract law-enforcing “predators” like a huge neon tail does. “…and I’m still here, mama! Come n’get a winner’s DNA!”
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That’s the neolithic brain right there. “he’s evil and kills people. He’ll offer security.” Sigh.
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Men love bad boys too, just nonsexually. “That dude is bucking the authorities so hard and so confidently, he’s going to end up in charge and I want to be on his good side when it happens” is every bit as weaselly from a certain point of view as the female wiring, and every bit as pragmatic from a different point of view as the female wiring.
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That rings 90-plus percent true, but there’s probably also a significant Odd minority who thinks “That Bad Dude is sooner or later gonna get around to me. Better solve that while it’s solvable.”
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I can’t find the meme right now, but there’s a great quote:
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Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5HQ9UKIKrR4
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Women are turned on by men who provide security, because a secure, supportive environment helps her babies survive.
Women are also turned on by Big Buff Prettyboi, because Big Buff Prettybaby has a better shot at survival in any environment.
EvPsych leads her toward a “Fannie Farkel/Ferd Berfle” strategy–ask a Boomer–mitigated by Mr Farkel’s wired-in jealous resistance to this, and further inhibited by memetic “thou shalt not” prohibitions.
Somebody Did A Study of nuclear families’ DNA and found–leaky memory warning–something like 15% of the kids weren’t related to Hubby, and that the cuckoo was extra-likely to be the family’s Winner, with more friends and better grades than the (half-)sibs.
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That study had more holes than (literally) there are bastards in a Royal European line.
First, we don’t know how many people are chimeras and paternity tests flag that as bastards.
Second, if I remember there were other problems. I don’t have the time, because I HAVE to go write a short story that’s overdue, so I’ll rub Foxfier’s lamp and leave it at that.
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I can’t vouch for the study. Both the study (I saw reference to it in the mid-1990s) and whatever study “debunks” it are surely as suspect as anything else from the captured Soft Sociological “Sciences”.
Even a sloppy study can stumble into a valid conclusion. The Farkel/Berfle Strategy plausibly looks like a winning move–though a husband’s genetic interest in thwarting it (and hers in getting one in anyway) makes for such complicated “arms-race” feedback that overall it might not turn out to be the Win it superficially looks like.
It does seem that lots of modern academic “debunking” is motivated by shrill emotional reaction to the Offending original paper.
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It’s about sex. You need to apply your skepticism waaaaaaay further back.
Soft sciences were already captured. Remember how eugenics got rolling? Heck, remember how Marx got popular, as a “scientific” form of human interaction?
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I can’t find your point in that. Yeah, it’s about sex–the Stork Hypothesis, like the Cabbage Leaf Conjecture, has not stood up to empirical research.
Yeah, soft sciences were captured long ago. Did I say otherwise? How far back should my skepticism start?
And can I accept everything earlier at face value?OK, I’m edging into snark; it’s irritating to see vaguely suggestive prose like that in a context that implicitly suggests clarification is forthcoming.
Has someone shown that cuckoldry is rare in marriage? Or that the cuckoos are NOT, statistically, fitter than their half-sibs?
It seems that a high incidence of bastardy in Royal Lineages–who have way more security than has a milkmaid married to a guy who can only pick up a cow and throw it at his enemy–is an anecdatum in SUPPORT of female Farkel/Berfle-ing.
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The one branch of my family that had something like that setup (in ashes of a formerly occupied wwii country, man married woman who already had a son out of wedlock, raised him as his own along side the kids he actually had with that wife), the half-sib was handsomer than the other kids, and very bright, though all three of the boys were. But he was also a raging conformist and social climber, which made him the biggest financial success of the family but also a bad father and husband. It all depends on what your metric for success is.
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You got lied to, most likely by folks who were the last in a long chain of got lied to. If I remember correctly, it’s mostly notable for not being one of the ones from Kinsey.
(If you don’t recognize the name, and value your sanity, don’t look. He’s also the source of the common percentage for claims of homosexuals in the population, which he got via counting victims of prison rape, and was one of the scientific promoters of pedophilia being natural and healthy right on down to infants.)
For what it’s worth, it’s not just your memory making it so you can’t find it, the actual study itself wasn’t published.
Because it was an attempted survey of English unwed mothers out of post-war Unwed Mother Housing, and the guy who did the study said it wasn’t good enough quality to publish. As you may guess from the date, it wasn’t genetics. It was blood type. Which was finicky to get right with their testing materials!
This also gets mixed in with the results out of the Australian labs that do the tests to prove non-paternity even if both of the adults say that the kid isn’t his. (Like some areas in the US, a form of paternity fraud is claiming your child isn’t yours so that the gov’t pays your wife for the kid, so they do check.)
It varies a bit, but the American blood bank recorded rate of DNA tests in the US is fairly even at about one third of guys who think the kid isn’t theirs enough to test it are right.
There has been some attempt at doing long-term and in depth investigation without the sampling error, FWIW; like this:
https://www.kqed.org/science/11450/new-dna-studies-debunk-misconceptions-about-paternal-relationships
and they for obvious reasons don’t even get into questions such as “yeah, we know he’s not so and so’s biological son. We don’t have a note for adoption all the time” or “he’s his teenage sister’s biological child.”
Given the spin of “and the bastards are better,” it’s likely been warped by the folks who want to justify cheating, but it could also be aimed at destroying the successful by attacking their relationship with their parents and between their parents.
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Turns out that blood type isn’t a good determinant of paternity anyway, as you can have deep recessives.
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And a significant portion of the US has more than one blood type! Enough so that I’ve heard of folks being discharged from the military for medical reasons when this was discovered.
That’s how I got going into the rabbit hole — ran into the various murders because kids were doing blood typing at school, and they found out by that their dad “couldn’t” be their dad, and he killed them and/or their mom.
Probably only happened two or three times, but it was enough to be a known trope enough to be debunked, because that was the one you could do with like a porcelain plate.
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I’m sorry? Come again. More than one blood type in the same person?
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quote:
NOTE: A small number of people have two different ABO blood types. They are not simply AB codominant. Apparently, most of these blood chimera click this icon to hear the preceding term pronounced individuals shared a blood supply with their non-identical twin before birth. In some cases, people are unaware that they had a twin because he or she died early in gestation and was spontaneously aborted. As many as 8% of non-identical twins may have chimeric blood. Some people are microchimeric–they have a small amount of blood of a different type in their system that has persisted from a blood transfusion or passed across the placental barrier from their mother before birth. Likewise, fetal blood can pass into a mother’s system. This fact has led some researchers to suggest that the significantly higher frequency of autoimmune disorders in women is a result of the presence of foreign white blood cells that had come from their unborn children during pregnancy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250723202330/https://anthropology-tutorials-nggs7.kinsta.page/blood/ABO_system.htm
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Oh, yeah, and the number of people I know who are their “sister”‘s kid adopted by the grandparents because sis was like sixteen is… 8. I realize I know a lot of people but even so, I’d say before out of wedlock became widely accepted in the middle class in the 80s or 90s THAT was super-normal. Maybe VERY normal. What percentage? I don’t know, but probably 5% maybe (MAYBE) 10% of births. Easier when babies were born at home.
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I’ve got cousins my mom’s age who are their sister’s kids, but they’re weird because it was the result of a failed marriage, not teen pregnancy.
I have NO IDEA how it was something that they managed to keep anybody from discussing.
(Although the sister figured it out, because her brother looks exactly like their dad– cousin had to be told. That’s the one I’ve told you about where when he was riding a horse you kept wondering if he’d get up and pack the horse around just for funzies.)
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Wrong comment string. Answers as to why individual tests with “multiple blood types”. Reasons 1 & 2 would be why someone might not know and enter military. Last would be a more recent introduction over the last few decades.
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Bloody bleedin’ bloody bloody WP—-
Sorry.
Foxfier, your post timestamped “January 10, 2026 at 4:46 pm” is the one I wish I’d seen first; I wouldn’t have been so snide about the one on 4:48. (My snideness @ 6:01 is stuck in mod, and maybe your others were too when I wrote it. WP, man…)
Anyway, I like the ~1% bastardy rate better than the 15% from the older “study” that sampled those Brits. It suggests that Farkel/Berfle-ing is less common (so, probably less of a Winning Move) than originally thought. And yeah, ABO-typing is way noisier than DNA.
Gotta wonder what’s the mechanism that keeps the Farkle/Berfle suppressed. Because it still looks like a successful strategy, provided Hubby doesn’t slaughter everybody involved… hmmm. Maybe THAT’S the mechanism.
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Partly because women bond with men. Women and men are very different in SEXUAL psychology and physiology. Meaning women release hormones that make us BOND with the one we’re with. (That’s why multiple partners are psychologically bad for women,) WE KNOW this. It’s why reverse harems aren’t common in history.
Now the evolutionary reason for that? Probably what you said. Not big nowadays but evolutionarily the woman’s husband would have killed EVERYBODY. Possibly the whole village.
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In the real world, so-called Reverse Harems depend on a group of men who are emotionally close to each other choosing to share a woman.
That emotional closeness over-rides the man’s desire to kill anybody who messes with His Wife. 😉
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I actually saw that used in a (romance) scifi novel to make a seriously alien species!
….author still had to go waaaaaay loony toons type tone to make it work, and it’s the only group in the entire thing that manages to make the reverse harem not horror, but it was nice to see someone had done research.
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We’re also finding that guys do bond, sexually, unless there’s other serious issues– it’s just slower. Waaaaaay slower.
I have a not even half baked theory that the supposedly macho “love ’em and leave ’em” sexual archtype, which they keep trying to shoehorn women into, is actually an abject failure to bond.
There’s at least two different folks here who have been looking into Avoidant Attachment Style relationship issues, and while saying I am suspicious of the pushed “parents said to control emotions” theory, it does seem to match up closely to folks I knew before and after they were involved in hookup culture.
If you can’t trust a high from a mature relationship, your psychology gets formed around the physical high, which is basically fast food.
And it fades as that first blush fades.
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All good!
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WP doesn’t seem to like the N-word. This is the 2nd time it has automodded (or bit-bucketed) mention of “n*clear”, whether it’s N Power or N Family
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Let us not forget the Canned Sunshine variety
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One thing to keep in mind when considering evolutionary biology impacts on gender behavior variances is context, specifically scope. To an early human lineage young lady making her mating choice, she was looking at a very, very small pool of potential mates, maybe a couple or three, possibly tens, probably nowhere close to fifty. The impact of assortative mating strategies when it’s limited to Wilma’s choice of Fred or Barney is a simple sorting choice – which of the few choices is likely to result in more babies living to adulthood so they can have their own babies?
The issue becomes complicated when, as now with the internet, the pool appears to be thousands and thousands of candidates. swipe-left a few thousand times and the hindbrain sorting queue gets packed with lots and lots of candidate mates who, in the small town or urban neighborhood scope of even a hundred years ago, would be high ranked and completely acceptable. But the visible range is now every guy on the planet who is on the app, so the sorting algorithm gets filled with garbage data and is broken.
Combine that with the absence of the rejection participation also built into the apps, where the only cost of rejection is a swipe left, and the whole structure gets skewed.
The interesting thing top me is how that assortative mating strategy changes when the girl actually knows the guys in the candidate pool – the only-choose-the-top-candidates thing basically goes away for all female rankings, and the choice playing field becomes much more level.
So I think the way to “fix” things is to go back to making those yout get to know each other in supervised contexts, not necessarily religious but in the format of “church socials”, so the infinite-candidate-pool thing has a real world counter.
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Yep. Today’s human instincts were honed by paleolithic problems. The New Tech–starting with Moon Watcher’s fancy new Assault Femur–made new, bigger, faster problems. The old, instinctive solutions no longer fit.
Those hookup apps train their users to evaluate hundreds of candidates as fast as possible, mainly by appearance. A widespread truthy factoid is “10% of the men get 90% of the swipe-rights” …from women whose Inner Monkeys see a big, buff, handsome dude and, even if they can’t get his Committment, they can get his genes.
Of course she doesn’t articulate that so cynically, and may be unaware (and angrily deny) that that’s what’s happening. But Prettybois make prettybabies so she’s up.
If she catches and keeps Baby but can’t keep Prettyboi, she’ll soon develop a true, unfeigned loving itch to move in with the best attainable Mr Beta Niceguy. (This is another paleolithic instinct that fails if the Tech trains Mr Niceguy to hold out for a 10/10 hottie too.)
(Somebody wants to point out that women care less about men’s “looks” than I seem to think. Agreed! But they do care about what kind of baby they’re gonna get, and, absent any other info, babydaddy’s looks are a good clue.)
In real-world “church social” settings, the ladies still aim for the best mate available, even in the much smaller pool. The difference is that they can evaluate “best” by criteria more useful than profiles and selfies on Apps.
Which likely leads to stronger pair-bonds, leading to more surviving kids–kids who might be a little plain-looking, but better than Prettyboi’s in every other way.
I’d love to see a Great Die-Back of Screens’n’Speakers, if not their extinction. But I shudder to think of the cataclysm that would take.
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perhaps if we stopped saying everyone and no one and actually “embraced diversity” some of this nonsense would go away. The wife reads cozy mysteries, I read history —. I used to read a lot of science fiction but, alas, not much is published that interests me anymore. I’m not much for ebooks so my choice is quite narrow so what fiction I read tends to be rereads.
They’re out in the streets in Iran again. I really hope it works out for them. For that matter, all of us, a regime that seeks Armageddon isn’t for anyone.
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I’m praying for Iran. Hard.
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Apparently MI6 has info putting mullahs and gold arriving at Moscow airports, which an opposition member brought up at question time in Parliament, to effectively “no comment” from the commies in power.
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Fog of war warnings but they’re reporting that mosques and public buildings are on fire all over the country, The fighting is widespread and it’s reported — FOW — that they’ve burned down mosques and the mullahs have lost control of Tehran. They’ve reportedly burned Khomeni’s tomb.
Yookay and Pakistani twitter is ablaze with indignation, which is just flippin glorious.
God! I hope it’s true.
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I actually would be scandalized if the CIA toppled Tehran, Havanna, and Msocow.
Because it would mean that I’ve misjudged both their competence, as well as the fundamentals of what is possible to do on purpose.
Preference cascades I’m more theoretically okay with.
It just seems weird, given Iranian interests in Venezuela, for kidnapping one man to be close in time to the other thing, unless Iran’s regime was very fragile. Which it does seem to have, water. But, oil would not have been very immediate.
A recent update of ‘what’s going on with shipping’ implies that this tanker seizure was pretty premeditated, and actualyl in cooperation with the UK. And that Iran was shipping something to Venezuela, then redirected it to Russia before the US landed helicopters.
If it was the tanker, known to the Iranian security services could have propagated out.
I’m remembering that Israel and the Mossad had recently had some pretty good penetration of organizations inside Iran.
I do not believe that Bibi or Trump or any other human leader can orchestrate so many high-stake gambles. Encourage a portfolio of good gambles, yes. And sometimes a portfolio will be part of a bunch of freak incidents building in a nonlinear way.
Anyway, I model in ways that would have had issues in 1989.
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How interesting. Yes my wife reads a lot more books than I but we do share. I spend about as much time reading on the internet. Blogs, newspapers, scientific pubs, and some substacks. And paper and electronic books. I read a lot faster than her, most books I finish in one to two days. She will take a week or more and probably four times the actual reading time. So there is also a difference in how we read.
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I read a ton of history, politi– Oh, that’s why I’m down to a book a day. I thought eyes. EH.
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LOL. Point taken.
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The Western wasn’t just killed because it had masculine appeal, but also because it’s the American equivalent of the mythic saga cycle.
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So true about Trad Pub Inserting sex everywhere.
My friend was telling me last night about a book she was reading (cozy mystery) that just had way too many sex scenes in it; to the point where she knew nothing about the characters, except what they did having sex. And she was very bored with the book and stopped reading it.
Even Regency romances do this…gaaaah!
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Sex and Sensuality?
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*Snrrrk*
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Persuasion
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There’s one that suckered me into liking it. Then near the end the “hero” seduced the heroine. Behaving as no gentleman would toward his best love.
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Oh yes.
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BGE touched on something that I agree with.
Trad Publishing (and Lefties) have forgotten that readers have “different interests”.
A book that I enjoy reading more than likely somebody else may think “Nah, not for me”.
And yes, there are plenty of “Not For Me” books that other people will enjoy.
And There’s Nothing Wrong With That!
Except in the Minds of the People who think “We Know Best”. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
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They’re hunting ONLY for mega blockbusters, which means they want to be the one book a year. And don’t seem to understand that’s all social posturing.
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This seems to be cross contamination from Hollywood, as they abandoned everything other than “potential tentpole blockbuster” years ago.
The difference is the tech for self publishing is there for books, and only almost there for movies (though it’s getting really close).
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Trad pub is Hollywood for ugly people.
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How close, you ask?
This close:
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Not bad at all.
Certainly liked it better than 1-2-3. Way more than the trash collection 7-8-9 and related drek.
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Economics and job security mostly. Their actual ability to shape markets has been almost eliminated — by folks like many of you here going independent — and the number of editor jobs in NYC has shrunk almost as fast as the number of publishers. How many are left in NY now, two, three? There used to be a lot more now there’s just imprints left if that, That’s just NYC, Boston used to be big too. All gone.
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They were doing it before indie was a thing, because their stupid model made them PREDICT if the book would sell or not, and counted if they were wrong, not how much they sold.
It was stupid. Totally Timwalzed
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I predicted things for a living. I was very good at it. It’s like baseball 4 out of 10 would make you the best that’s ever been. The reason I’m alive financially is that my investment strategy was about survival, not prediction, prediction might give me an edge, but could just as easily blow me up,
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My beloved seems to have developed the talent in the last decade or so. Right now he’s regretting not following his urge to buy more Rocket Labs when it was cheap.
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If we’re at a con together Dan needs to talk to him. Dan too has been learning this stuff and seems to have the knack.
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Do we actually know when that got rolling?
I don’t even know how we’d measure it… maybe something “practical” like firing the bottom 10% of sellers every so often?
That would explain why westerns suddenly vanished.
(apparently a lot of those were straight-up spicy romance, too, my mom traded bags worth of books with a neighbor guy and some were too much for her to finish)
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Well, since Borders started with the ordering to the net thing. Publishers got the illusion they could control sales. So I’d say like late 80s?
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That would roughly line up with my reading sometime after ’95 where folks were upset the various sections were changing– the surge in westerns, then the complete vanishing, the “one shelf for scifi and fantasy combined” then exploding but there’s nothing to read, YA exploding and then there’s nothing to read, at least if you combine it with “we know this will succeed, so we put what we know people want in it” but people don’t actually want that.
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Well, since the whole lefty group has apparently decided that people are infinitely interchangable, ot makes sense that they think everyone wants to read the same things.
And since they are the Smrt Peeple, they obviously know what will sell to the faceless masses.
I think it should be highly entertaining when they start feeding books into AI and asking what they should publish.
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I heard from my friends at Borders about Push Books, which was Corporate trying to get everyone at every store hand-selling whatever Flavor of the Day book (that they’d been paid to push, of course.) Did horribly, of course. This is because at the time, the CEOs had their major business experience in grocery stores, and were trying to treat a bookstore as a grocery store.
But books are not fungible. (Nor are they fungi.)
(One hopes.)
What Corporate hadn’t seen, when they saw high sales points for certain books at certain locations, was that there was usually love behind that spike. Christopher Moore got some of that love from the store I worked at when the GM loved one of his books enough to scrounge up every free copy he could to give to his staff—and his publishers noticed, too, and sent him over to brunch with the staff. We got to talk with him, get some nice food, and signed copies of his next book. (Funniest part was that he wanted to be a horror writer, but pivoted to humor when his descriptions of blood & gore got laughter from his writing group.)
Anyway. Such things happen but cannot be forced.
It wasn’t the last straw that broke the Borders back, but it sure as heck didn’t help.
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Yes, this.
Muchly ginned up.
I keep running into basically anything women read doesn’t count– including “didn’t even read the back of the book much less a summary” descriptions of books, followed by guys with freaking cat girl harem story avatars screaming about women being pr0n addicted monster f-ers.
I can’t tell if they’re being ironic or what!
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Well, generally, if I am saying that I make a point of not reading anything by women, I am either joking or being dishonest.
If for nothing else than I know that I have not stopped reading emails from my mother.
There are a wide range of women. I avoid some specific women. I highly value other specific women.
Generic statistical models of groups of people seem to have nothing to do with what I want to read. From moment to moment, I have no idea what what I will want to read next.
Sometimes very specific individuals are a good guide for me, and sometimes they are not.
My dudes, I think totalitarian regimes are bad for the quality of scientific literature. I do not always discriminate against papers on the basis of whatever regime. I have a hard time getting papers anyway, refusing to read anything written in the UK would remove my nose to spite my face.
Generally the funding sources are probably discriminatory in ways that are bad for science, but that does not mean that people cannot accidentally say something useful. And testing claims and bitter vindictive arguments are what science is supposed to be about.
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“My dudes, I think totalitarian regimes are bad for the quality of scientific literature.” I have it on good authority that most “scientific” papers from China are LOLWUT?
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But they HAVE figured out how to use AI to corrupt the AI used by “peer reviewers”, so there’s that.
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Are recent ‘scientistic’ papers from the USA any better? The government ‘science’ bureaucracies here are as totalitarian as anything behind the former Iron Curtain.
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We don’t default to confucionism, at least.
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Replication crisis.
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“Says the man with at cat-girl harem story avatar” would be a good comeback to those assertions.
… if one recognized who it is.
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I do actually try to do real exchange of ideas, figure out where folks are coming from, but it turns out that someone who thinks “the Rock but with tusks and he’s green” is horrible, while three cat-girls being desperate for your attention is totally cool and fine, aren’t big on engaging in discussion on moral issues.
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I ran into that with some of the Wheel of Time fans fuming about some elements of the tv series. (not saying their fuming in general wasn’t justified, I only ever knew the books through osmosis, kind of like Monty Python, B5 and Doctor Who, so am not the best judge.) Greg Owen made a reasonable point that he very much liked the platonic friendship/sisterhood between two members of one hero’s harem in the books and was annoyed that the tv series portrayed them as flirting with each other at a point when neither of them were yet involved with the hero. Pretty much everyone else commenting on this particular story change was all “rawr, horrible immoral wokists turned my favorite wholesome harem into a sleazy polycule” and I was like “Do you even hear yourselves?”
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:snickers:
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“Do you even hear yourselves?” may be the recurring question that astounded future historians ask when researching media from the 2020s.
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“the Rock but with tusks and he’s green”
Side note: The live role-playing game Critical Role had, in their second campaign, offhand mention of a steamy romance called Tusk Love. The players ran with it, making comments about the characters and the setup and so on. Well, now that Critical Role is a massively popular company with animated series and so forth, they got someone to actually write it.
Someone shared a photo of it in a public library under New Releases. It’s out in the wild.
Anyway. Green guy with tusks, there you go.
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I don’t know if I am impressed or horrified.
Yeah, the green beefcake means fantasy, and blue beefcake means scifi, goes back before kung flu…but I am impressed by the fandom’s dedication, and horrified enough I don’t know if I want to go look!
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On the other hand, harem anime often isn’t porn (aside from the general anime casualness regarding nudity). Tenchi Muyo, possibly the best known early harem anime, has zero sex. Another, Rosario+Vampire not only doesn’t have anything particularly risque in it (even though one of the main characters is a succubus), but the male MC only sees the first girl as a romantic interest. All of the other women never rise above friends in his eyes (something which they are painfully aware of).
I’m not saying a lack of porn is always the case. But it frequently is.
I suspect that the primary draws of many of the harem anime series is the idea that a guy who’s nice can attract pretty women who will genuinely be interested in him. The women are often more capable than the MC (at least at first; in both of the series that I mentioned, the MC ends up becoming stronger than nearly everyone else around him), but he’s still willing to stand up for them when necessary, and protect them as best he can.
The downside is that a lot of harem protagonists stay pretty milquetoast right up to the end of the story, and sometimes it appears that the only reason why all the women like him is because the plot demands it.
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That’s exactly the point.
What they’re screaming about being pr0n is … objectively not.
Except for when it’s declared to be for women to read, then bring out the screaming.
(Also, Tenchi is decades old; it barely even counts as a harem anime, though the story-type was clearly inspired by it. Among major limitations is there are female main characters who have zero interest in Tenchi.)
Non-human love interests where they’re not even subtle about yeah there’s casual banging which are generally Star Trek style aliens are totally fine if they’re female double-Ds, but not when they’re seven foot tall dudes who have to turns sideways to get through a door. (This ignores that the “dude is casual about sex” is almost nonexistent in romance, while it’s unusual but not startling to have the female doing casual sex for harem stories.)
If folks want to set standards, I’m there to discuss them, I think that the stories we tell are a great window into what people are hungry for — but if they want to give double the standards for the price of one, I see no reason to accept it.
And they all want to jump in bed with him, with the one that is reluctant about sharing the man she is giving her very self to being established as very strange/shamed for that, sometimes to the point of it being a warning sign of villainy.
There’s actually a rather cute sub-group of it where the guy is absolutely not down for that, at all, and is completely innocent about how the women end up in his bed all the time.
Obviously at the far end of the spectrum from the plot, what plot? hentai.
It is so baseline presumptive that book series like Beware of Chicken have to justify why the main character isn’t f*ing everything that doesn’t run fast enough; having male/female relationships that include sister and later daughter is a major advancement, and there’s examination of the kind of motivation that is involved in fairly realistic harem formation politics. (…through the eyes of a literal queen bee, creepy AF character, it’s a great story, highly recommend.)
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Uh…
While there are porn harem anime series, the harem anime genre in and of itself isn’t automatically porn. That’s my point. For that matter, even if the guy is sleeping with all of the women, so long as it isn’t shown (or heard) on-screen, it’s still not porn for guys (though the Japanese writing an anime where that happens and *not* making it graphic would be unusual). Wish fulfillment, sure. But not porn.
And yes, Tenchi Muyo is a harem anime. Six (possibly seven if Tokimi counts) females all falling for the same “nice guy” is a textbook example of it.
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Will you please go read what I actually wrote?
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I did read what you wrote. You’re lumping both the porn and non-porn harem stuff into one category. And you’re claiming that Tenchi Muyo isn’t a harem anime because of the irrelevant “some of the women aren’t chasing Tenchi” comment. Which doesn’t apply to the OVA setting, in any case.
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If you had read what I actually wrote, not only would you have realized that is exactly the dang point, from my having literally stated the conflation WAS THE POINT, literally saying “that is the point,” but you would have noticed you’ve now inaccurately quoted me twice on Tenchi.
Too bad, I was kind of looking forward to the opportunity to identify the overlap in “non-disposable sex” genres and where they have more even vs male/female split fans, and the development of the subtype of anime, but you don’t even have enough of a grasp of the various Tenchi shows to identify that wanting the main character technically yes for his body but so you can conduct mad science on it is…not The Thing.
I find the subject fascinating; the contents of your spleen, less so.
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GAH. Both of you — I just ran into this with Junior on Twitter — leave stuff in your head and are not nearly as clear as you think you are. If it helps it’s a characteristic of nose bleed IQ people.
Junior, the harem subset is male-enticing predominantly EVEN IF NOT PRON OR EXPLICIT.
Women might go for reverse-harem, but no woman wants to be one of many (okay, there are a few, but it’s a tiny subset)
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Tenchi is absolutely a harem anime. At the end of the last series he winds up married to 7 females, including Ryo-Ohki in her demi-human form, and Washu who turns out to be one of the 3 Primal Goddesses Of Creation.
I always considered Ryoko to be Best Girl. What did Ayeka ever risk? She was Crown Princess of Jurai, and nothing would change that. Ryoko risked her power, her freedom, and her life for Tenchi, when she didn’t have to.
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The Rosario Vampire anime i remember being fanservicey enough that a make relative found it awkward to watch in mixed company although I am told the Manga was not that way.
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Male relative.
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No, the manga wasn’t. The two diverged fairly early on, with the anime largely being continued silliness, while the manga was more serious (though still often with a silly tone). For example, I don’t think the anime touched at all on the issue I mentioned above of the other “harem” members being well aware that he saw them as nothing more than friends, and would never see them as more than friends. The manga also shifted from “monster of the week” stories to story arcs. And finally, the manga also ended with “Inner Mocha” eventually becoming “Mocha”, and the two leads largely as physical equals (by bringing him up to her level, instead of lowering her to his). The anime just kind of ended abruptly, iirc, after two short seasons.
Though as far as anime fanservice goes, I vaguely remember that someone important who was working on the show had a rule that no Mocha panty shots were allowed. Given that episode stories often ended with Inner Mocha in a school uniform skirt delivering a high kick, this meant that “magic skirt” rules were in full effect…
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I just checked, and the first Mokha panty-flash is 4 minutes into the first episode. Panty-shots and Barbie-doll anatomy are about the extent of the fanservice, though. Nothing on the level of High School DxD. 😄
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I must be misremembering. Maybe it was the manga author that had the rule.
And while I’ve only heard of High School DxD, yes, R+V was fairly mild in comparison. It was titillation. Which is somewhat ironic when you consider that there’s an actual succubus who’s one of the main characters (though at one point her own mother describes her as innocent, iirc).
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(looks in mirror)
Not my problem.
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I finally took to reading on Nancy Drew, classy lady, who solve mysteries with her friends. Also read Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, Heilein youth, etc. Romance? Yes. Physical sex? No. I skip the physical sex scenes if the author doesn’t fade it away (including Outlander, Cave Bear, etc.).
I’ve slowed down my fiction book reading. Somewhat. Definitely *new books, have slowed down. OTOH I have something like 900 books, new and already read, that aren’t archived. I reread, a lot (don’t know where I got that from, neither of my sisters, mom, or dad, ever reread anything). I occasionally get in the reread mode. Do not want to start a new book. So, I’ll reread a series. Sometimes reread a series is because a new one in the series is releasing. Just because I’m not reading fiction, does not mean I am not reading. I can no more not read than not breathe. I am reading something unless in a moving car (car sick), was coding (still “reading”, just way different, not reading code was a mental break), or in a dark theater. Watching TV? Reading or I doze off.
Hubby and son are the same. They read. They just don’t read fiction. Hubby came that way. Son? I tried. I really, really, tried. Harry Potter came out at the right time and ages for him. We, hubby too, started reading to him early and often. We bought adventure books from school that showed boys being adventurous. No pressure, but access. Sigh. Didn’t take. OTOH less expensive.
What do I read? Sarah’s books. Then there are the SF adventures and fantasy. Men and women being proactive together for an objective. The ones where the women are the stars is because the woman has some sort of edge. Sometimes physical, but not always. None of them are invincible. I take the parable of the door, Stirling’s Havel twins. Men and women are different. They think different, they have different physical characteristics. Same challenge, different solutions. Neither are wrong. Put them together, and mankind can and will conquer anything in front of us. Whether it is entrapping those who would enslave us, or go to the stars.
(*) New series releases. Me: “I will take my time to savor!!!!! I Will! I Will!” Including No Mans Land, FWIW. Did I? Do I? Worse than New Year’s revelations. 100% failure rate. The best I’ve been able to do is slightly over three days (translation, ~10 days for NML).
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The only thing that kept me out of trouble with No Mans Land is that it was broken up in 3 physical parts with a forced break between them. Otherwise it would have been start Friday after work and read all the way through the weekend with out a break. And I’m to old to deal well with those 3 am (it’s only one…more…chapter…really…) stopping points anymore.
Which is partly why my book reading is massively down from the 1 400page book a day to maybe one every few weeks and tends to be a start and not stop until done unless something really breaks the flow, as it’s hard to restart anymore. I’ve been trained to be interrupted every few minutes at work, and I get hostile when interrupted to many times while reading a book. And then the book has a bad taste, so once the story is broken I have to work hard to restart, when there is several hours of no interruptions.
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Or. I manage to actually quit and go to bed at a “reasonable” time. But … Wake up at 4AM and can’t go back to sleep. Sure, “I’ll read just until sleepy again and stop!” Finishing at 10AM.
What? I’m not the only one?
I waited until all three of NML were completed before buying. My bad (for my mental health, not Sarah’s pocketbook).
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THAT was last night. And it’s a re-read.
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Do Editors/Publishers even understand the difference between Sex Scenes and Romance?
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How about this for a book premise;
https://dailycaller.com/2026/01/09/congress-subpoenas-seth-harp-delta-force-commander-nicolas-maduro-anna-paulina-luna/
He Doxed a Delta Force Commander, how absolutely stupid can you be? Not only that, talked about the guys family. Dude if you live to see next year I’ll be surprised.
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If he’s lucky they’ll arrest him and pitch him in jail for a couple years. Safer in there.
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“Operational Detachment Delta”, like other US Army Special Forces, are “Quiet Professionals”.
So the -last- thing to expect is dramatic newsworthy revenge porn.
Now, a bunch of humiliating “you are so wrong” revelations, a dozen boring lawsuits from “uninvolved” now-endangered folks, and a few unfortunate “your services are no longer required” (you stupid nerfherder, sheesh what an idiot).
Much quieter, and vastly more effective, and the brand is protected.
Seriously folks. Those “island of misfit toys” folks value quiet like a religion to True Believers.
(grin)
Not that the ODDfellows had anything to do with recent events.
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So a completely hypothetical question just arose unbidden from my roiling subconscious: Speaking hypothetically with no reference to anything real, in standard Big Army practice does the name choice imply there are hypothetically actually three other active Operational Detachments, Alpha through Charlie? Or is that just the motor pool, mess folks and quartermasters shop?
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Judging by some of the Pressed Extruded Writing Product (PEWP) that my wife gets paid to edit freelance? Some don’t know the difference between a sex scene and a product description, much less a romance.
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argh
just had a bunny show up and go ‘what if she is a technical writer, and he does ad copy, and so there is simply page after page of product description’
I don’t even know what their company makes, on what sort of time scales, nor whom the market and competition are
Also, I don’t think I can write ad copy that could convey any sort of skill progression.
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Short answer – No.
Long answer – Hell, No!
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There’s a joke that I am obviously not a super reader, because my most recent estimates put the half a book rate at more than a week.
Okay, both nonfiction, and very short. The first one I had from a library, and basically I scanned the chapters that I wanted for reference, and did not have time to take good enough notes from.
Second was a dissertation, that I already had some version of some content from. So I read the sections most important to me now.
Anyway, I am feeling that my reading has been a little slow and unfocused, and I would like to get up to real speed.
This morning a borrowed a paper conference proceeding, and read/skimmed for which papers are most interesting for me. 500 pages, one to two hours, but like less than half of the papers were that relevant to me. (Because of where I am, skimming and sorting is an important reading skill for me, and the cover to cover stuff that I did by default should not be all of my reading. I still need it some of the time, but…)
I’m not sure if I actually read any entire books last year. (Then I go, oh, wait, I’m pretty sure Chancy’s latest came out last year, and I read that at least twice through. Plus rereading some old fiction on my kindle.)
Anyway, if I stick to nonfiction, books I actually fully read, and have any memory of reading, then for some period of time I have not been a reader. But, I have to set the cut off correctly, or it includes a couple of books that I each read fully at least once, and I reread a fair amount because short, and I could not figure out exactly what they meant and how to do it.
Anyway, I obviously have this as evidence for disbelieving any single simple sex-specific model of what people read, and why. (I know for a fact, based on half year data from last year, that I have at least three fairly different and distinct reading purposes. Nonfiction study, intel, fiction A, and fiction B. Of course, have not this comment provided evidence disproving that I am gender-fluid.)
I think I have an interesting trolling position to take in a what-people-read discussion. Scientific papers on machines are porn for wannabe engineers. (Real TM engineers have an existing relationship with one or more machines that they do actual engineering with.)
If I read quickly enough, I forget what I have read, and which things contained which details relevant to that problem or the other problem. So I need to take notes. I find it very frustrating to maximize my note taking speed, maximize my processing speed, and maximize my reading speed, at the same time, in between eating, sleeping, getting sick, and wasting a bunch of time following the news. And other tasks as required.
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Well duh, of course it’s ginned up. Most of it is from online platforms that live or die by…(forces down vomit)…engagement.
Whoever came up with making the world revolve around that needs their own circle of Hell.
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“50 Shades of Grey” sold incredibly well . So clearly there’s interest in what’s sometimes referred to as “Mommy porn”.
On the other hand, a survey I read while it was popular had a list of “The Twenty Books People Lie About Reading”. And right in the middle of this list of books which people falsely claim to have read was “50 Shades”.
So draw your own conclusions.
Male-coded books still exist and get published. But they tend to be “franchise” books. For example, the various novels Black Library published in the Warhammer 40,000 (and other GW games) setting. It’s not women who made the Horus Heresy books a best-selling series. At least for now. There are troubling rumbles at Games Workshop.
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Like Martin books, I do not pretend that I even picked up a copy of “50 Shades”, either of them. Haven’t read “Handmaiden’s Tale” either.
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The latter is actually pretty decent as an example of post-apocalyptic fiction. (As a child of the 80s, most of that at the time was nuclear, of course, but having an alternate version of TEOTWAWKI still means a variation.)
The problem is when people start believing it’s real. Or at least, not an American cosplay of Iran or Afghanistan.
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Handmaiden’s Tale draws attention because of politics, though. So it’s not exactly the same thing.
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Fifty shades was HYPER PUSHED because the publishers thought it was perfect. And we don’t actually KNOW how it sold.
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I suspect the same of the dark romance and dark fantasy romance that’s on the tables at the regional B&N. Dangerous dude, chick with a grudge/desire for power/sacrifice by family or kingdom, magic, really unhealthy relationship dynamics [based on cover copy and skimming a few pages], And all of it over and over and over with different covers.
The assistant manager says that they move pretty well (as in sales. Get your mind out of the gutter!) To each his/her/its/sea-life’s own.
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I dunno whether women really insist on this simplistic fantasy of the handsomest man with the mostest status and the thugliest heart, or whether it’s tradpub push but it’s certainly a thing right now. My own hypergamous impulses were shaped by men like Captain Nemo and Sherlock Holmes, so I don’t really get this idea of the good-looking arrogant goon with two gray cells to rub to together (because the heroine has to look good by comparison and she only has three.)
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I can imagine a place in a society for an arrogant gangster, with some sort of mitigating quality. I have questions whether such places are very stable. So a women might have to start out in pretty difficult circumstances to find it a step up in security.
But, when I start trying to come up with specifics my taste starts to go ‘nope, nope, want something more positive’.
(In terms of taste, I recently looked at the genre directories on webtoons dot com, where I have been reading for a couple years or so. I was surprised to see how much of the stuff I was looking was almost exclusively listed as action. The genre labels on the page I usually load from are not so narrow.
I knew that a lot of the romances there hit a point and stopped working for me, but I’m surprised that my taste on that site is so selective in that way. )
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Years ago Mercedes Lackey had fun with Diana Tregarde that way. She was writing a formula romance on contract, with plot, characters, etc given to her and was hating it because, among other things, the heroine was stupid. So Diana managed to give the girl a bit of a spine and the pirate captain a sense of humor, and the story became much more bearable.
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The games I play on my smart phone often reward you for watching ads that are drawn from a pool of advertisers. I used to occasionally see ads for story collections. So far as I could tell, it wasn’t major publisher material, though I didn’t really know where any of it came from. But the sample text on the page was *ALWAYS* some derivative of “Prisoner of the Werewolf Alpha”. I don’t remember anything in the ads suggesting that the stories were erotica, so I won’t call it porn (though that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t). But it was clear that there was an audience out there that was interested in stories in which the first person protagonist was captured by the biggest and baddest werewolf. Otherwise I don’t think they would have been using that as the attention-grabber for the ads.
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I’ve seen those ads too, but here’s the thing, when I go and look at the actual listing in android store for the app being advertised, it’s got a dinky number of downloads and mostly negative reviews about the app’s functionality and quantity of content. They’re not advertising, say wattpad, or royal road or any of the other big wheels in serialized fiction for mibile.
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It doesn’t do you much good to write quality material and then deliver it via mule cart.
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My point is that we don’t know how closely crappy fly by night apps is actually mirroring known market forces, as opposed to pushing shock value content to draw in the curious.
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One aspect of mule carts is you have to convince the mule he wants what you do….. 8-)
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It just occurred to me the, “Prisoner of the Alpha Male Werewolf,” may actually archetypal. The stories that rolled up on my games were all borderline S&M, though more hinted than shown. Either the narrator has been sold to the Alpha Male or she’s an extremely junior member of the pack.
Well, wasn’t a medieval story variation, “Patient Griselda,” where Griselda’s husband goes irrationally jealous and piles all sorts of legal, but questionable moral torments upon her, which she patiently endures until he comes to his senses? These werewolf fantasies may be tapping into that particular vein.
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Female domestic martyrdom fantasies always struck me as asexual but i could be wrong. think of those 1930s movies of women sacrificing everything for an ungrateful child or spouse. The trope persisted in Indian film industries at least into the early 1980s. It was also a common element in Victorian novels as well.
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My counterpoint is that there must be some sort of research showing that people are interested in it. Otherwise they wouldn’t be picking something seemingly so niche. It would be simpler to advertise just with a general passion romance sample page and title.
Knowing for sure would likely require digging around in the stats on fan fic sites, and checking to see what sorts of things people are reading.
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Could be people walk into B&N and go no farther than the tables by the entrance. All those bookshelves are just too much work, or too intimidating. Or maybe having their own tastes is too much work?
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The current store lay out is interesting. You walk in. Cookbooks are between you and the coffee shop on the right, check-out, magazines, and gifty stuff on the left. The tables right in front of the door are pop-literature, whatever is being pushed (all paperback), major sellers in current literature, and the biography or memoire of the month (my term, not theirs). The first shelves you see are new releases in literature, then new history (perpendicular to the literature, on the right). You have to go past two rows of history and literature, then turn at the customer service desk, go past the history table and two-fer table to get to the tables of dark romance and romantasy. They are separate from the main romance shelves.
I suspect it is so that people have to work to get to the dark fantasy romance, and so that people who object to that sort of thing can find their preferred genre more easily. You also can’t get from the (large) kids’ section in the back straight from where the dark romance is. You have to go around several rows of shelves and end caps.
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I wouldn’t know; I haven’t been in a B&N for more than a decade. (Nearest one is a good half-hour away at least, in the next town over, and I wasn’t impressed the last time I went. Could be two decades, but I don’t know for sure.)
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The regional store has a large local interest section, a darn good world history section, and I skim the sci-fi and fantasy shelves to see what they are pushing, cover art trends, and so on. Some of their prices for teaching materials are lower than the ‘Zon, so I do a little business there.
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I *hadn’t been in a B&N in forever either, and the nearest is 30 minutes on a major Beltline slog. It is maybe 4 miles away. Used to stop in to browse physical books to see what I might be missing. Have discovered a few “Wait? There is a sequel?” Or “I missed the next release?”. The intent was to see if anything leap out at me that I do not discover browsing.
(*) Broke that this last December. Stopped in to see if anything non-fiction token might leap out at me for either hubby or son. FWIW nothing did.
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I watched 2 of the ’50 shades’ movies to see what all the hype was about. The whole way through both of them I kept saying “It has to get better, right?” Spoiler: it didn’t.
I recently watched a hentai romance anime about bondage that was much better. It had a happy ending — a rather strange wedding. At least, I thought it was strange when the bride happily said “I do” while trussed up and dangling from the ceiling… 🤣
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I like adventure, and highly recommend Dick Francis’s many, many books. His men are all smart and competent, and arrive with a good moral compass. They’re also stubborn, driven, and willing to sacrifice for the cause. I haven’t tried his son’s versions, so have nothing to say about them.
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I burned through pretty much everything I could find by him in the 90s, maybe early 00s. Maybe time for me to go back to him.
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Same. I read every Dick Francis I could get my hands on when I was in high school. Very well written thriller-suspense type stories. I like how his heroes are almost always everyman types, in that they’re not action heroes or larger than life. Just highly competent, relatively normal people trying to solve a problem and mostly trying to do the right thing.
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I was once a 3 a day reader. My record was 7 in a day, but I was pushing. Some time in the mid 90’s I slowed, then almost stopped. Everything being published was trash, or boring, or boring trash.
I still have a shelf of books I continue to re-read, but it’s mostly a recharge thing now.
I prefer my own books. I publish them at this point mainly so I can have my own copy. If anyone else buys them, that’s a bonus.
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YEP. Yep yep yep, roger that.
I went from Super Reader to only-reads-blogs when I started writing. Roughly 2014, when publishing fell off the cliff into the lava. If I’m writing it, it’s going the way I want.
To be fair, some will argue (legitimately, I do concede) that this is not likely to lead to Great Literature, because pandering to your own tastes isn’t really challenging yourself.
To which I can only answer that I have no responsibility to Great Literature. I want to go blast the world-destroying horror from orbit, and then everybody has a celebration party after. Blasting is good, and parties are good. Everything in it’s correct place.
But no sex scenes, because the correct place for that is someplace with the door shut. We can laugh at the walk-of-shame after the fact.
Should someone else want to know what happens when the monster gets lit up with two megatons per second, then they are welcome to read along. ~:D
Currently I’m writing about what happens when a dulahan gets mouthy about Main character’s girlfriend. I had to look up how much a human head weighs, so I could decide how far it would fly when kicked by a normal 19 year old wearing power-assisted armor. (Answer, not very far. About like kicking a bowling ball, if you really lay your boot into it you’ll break an ankle. But it could roll pretty good…)
That’s the type of thing I like, because I am old and maybe a little different. If I don’t do it myself there’s few others who will.
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Similar story to the two of you. Avid reader who started telling stories to fill the hole, and now read a lot less of other people’s stuff.
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Hear, hear!
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I have been absolutely binging the videos by a guy called Greg Owens because he’s actually engaging with questions like they’re questions, not conclusions that are reasons to laugh at anybody.
By that I mean I absolutely did watch the videos he did on The Acolyte, where he spent more time talking and thinking about the show than actual hours of the show. And it’s interesting to listen to! More interesting than the show about quote un quote the Jedi needing more oversight, starring main character Osha, where I am not sure if he’s joking about the second twin being Fema.
He’s got two relevant videos, one where he actually — gasp!– read some of the Romantasy books that are big main stream sellers right now, which is hilarious and only made more so by the after-credit scene, and then there’s this:
where a bit after the 9 minute mark he leads into this crazy idea that, just possibly, the personal assistant to Harvey Weinstein and her preference in males may not be 100% accurate as a stand-in for the average woman.
Dad jokes abound here. Also, he points out he might possibly have all eighty of those HD things.
(….which is definitely another dad joke. AD… HD… Eighty HD… get it?! I denounce myself, I am giggling.)
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His stuff is all quite good.
One thing The Acolyte did was open a lot of conversations on YT and blogs about why it was so bad, and how in the world those scripts made it through an actual corporate production structure to actually get all that money spent on shooting them. I mean, Kathleen Kennedy said when she read it, The Acolyte made her cry.
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Look, if anybody here hasn’t watched– this is great just for the names for the characters he comes up with.
Demographically, for commentary videos, we need more geeky married guys with six kids and indulgent wives. :D
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And Disney spent $256.7 million on this.
Over a quarter of a billion dollars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2025/09/25/cost-of-star-wars-show-the-acolyte-surges-to-quarter-of-a-billion-dollars/
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Well, because it was so good or because it was so bad?
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“Temu-thee Chalamet”
ROFL
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Am definitely too tired, because I am wondering about the Ali Express version of star wars, with kidnapped twins, and stuff, randomly cross wiring other things in for no good reason.
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Give it to fans, they’d probably make at least a Galaxy Quest level Star Wars movie.
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Does anyone remember the Movie RED? Staring Bruce Willis. He one of the most dangerous men in the world and read the Romance novels his wanted to be girlfriend was reading.
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Oh, yes.
Would be girlfriend to Helen Mirrim’s character: “What do you do?”
“I kill people, dear.”
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RED’s a hoot. There’s a sequel, which is nearly as good.
Sarah: “Did- did- did you vacuum?”
Frank: “A little, yeah, it was messy.”
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Yep.
It had some of those, “what you’d like to see,” moments, as when the young agent pulls the, “We only want to help him,” shtick on Willis’ girlfriend and she laughs in his face.
Come down to it, it’s interesting you have two young CIA types and the guy is, at base, sincere, decent and ruthless, while his female counterpart is a treacherous bitch (and ugly, to boot).
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Really? I didn’t think she was ugly. If her personality was…pretty much the opposite, I’d date her. 😛
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I was back in RED, not the sequel, thinking of Cynthia.
Catherine Zeta-Jones is emphatically not ugly. And she wasn’t treacherous so much as a rival.
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That’s who I meant, too. I just checked again, and she’s not ugly. Different hairstyle, a smile, personality transplant, I’d rate her a 6 or 7 easy.
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Check her out in Zorro with Antonio Banderas. I wasn’t aware there was such a thing as “strip fencing — rapier”…… ;-)
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I was on a varsity fencing team four years.
(very big grin)
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Well, okay, but all of that was pretty much the signal in the story that she’s the reincarnation of Elsa Krebs. Though she is better looking than Krebs, I give you that.
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I was listening to some women this week who had read a book that may have been historical, which evidently dwelt on the shortcomings of historical figures such as Miles Standish and others of his time. They were happily listing his unfavorable aspects and saying how great it is to know the facts instead of the rosy pictures of our forerunners that we were taught in school back then. It occurred to me that the benefit of the those favorable accounts was that they gave us characteristics to look up to and and emulate, and that if all we do is tear our ancestors down (using our modern-day outlook and experiences) then we have nowhere to go but down.
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They were never taught rosy accounts. No, seriously. Unless they’re older than I. I ALREADY WASN’T and I’m sixty three. This is a false memory of crazy people.
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The Courtship of Miles Standish is an 1858 poem about Standish being a rough and tough old soldier who wheedles a friend into Cyrano’ing for him to the woman he wants, only for her to tell the Cyrano analogue that he ought be making the case for himself not his friend. (With the additional subtext that Standish, who IRL did not attend Puritan church and seems to have come from a Cavalier-aligned, Anglican family with a sprinkling of Catholics, was a godless heathen and the romantic leads were good wholesome Puritans). Nobody has been rooting for Miles Standish in the pop-culture sense for a very long time.
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That’s the thing with the “Church history,” book my beloved got me for Christmas. It basically assumes all traditional church history is wrong, (aside from bits they can cherry-pick to support their theses) and their modern, progressive outlook is clearly a New, Fresh Approach and far closer to the truth. If, of course, first century Christians thought like 21st century academics.
I’m currently at the point they proclaim baptism is a transliteration of the Greek, “to bathe,” and therefore is not a sacred ceremony but simply an aspect of communal bathing used by the various clubs of the Anointed One as a way to create social bonds and a sign of resistance to the oppressive Roman Empire….
(I will not beat my head on the table. I will not).
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”…a sign of resistance to the oppressive Roman Empire…”
The same Roman Empire that was so into communal bathing that they built bath houses as pretty much the first civilized infrastructure in every colonial settlement they founded? How stunning and brave of those first century Christians to cleverly do exactly the same thing as their oppressors as their show of resistance.
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Oh, they admit that, they just gloss over it.
It might be better to say they actually go with what you said: that using Roman infrastructure and adopting Greco-Roman culture but doing it in the name of the Anointed One (because they play the same game with the word, “Christ,” they do with, “baptism”) is a subtle and sophisticated form of resistance.
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If first century Christians were going to stunningly and bravely resist Roman hegemony by just doing what the Romans did, only do it secretly in the name of that carpenter fellow, maybe they could have just agreed to honor the Roman pantheon, just as a means of stunning and brave resistance you see, and avoid that whole getting-eaten-by-lions thing altogether.
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According to Kindle’s stats, I read 53 titles last year, several of those being 5 or 6 book collections, and 64 the year before. My current streak is reading 61 consecutive weeks, and my longest day streak was 99 consecutive days last fall. I had thought I had slowed down as well as I got older, but recently I saw stats somewhere on my reading speed (not seeing that now in Kindle “Reading Insights”) at 60 pages per hour, which is what I used to do as a teenager (I used to be able to time things while reading by my page count).
So to me, two books a year is just crazy talk.
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Oh, and I just checked to make sure, and I am still a guy.
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I do regular pants check after I was informed I was a Mormon male. Several times.
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Do not forget the great rack.
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Last year I was out of work (but had to move after 18 years which took a good chunk of time for about 5 months), Amazon stats say I read over 660 books, over 200 weeks read (and only about 3 days in the year I didn’t read). The idea of two books a year seems like torture.
Although, for those who “don’t read”, how much time do they spend on blogs/facebook/X/etc consuming text?
For me, my popcorn books are Louis L’Amour, Pam Uphoff and similar. Ususally short books (a couple hundred pages) that I can read in a few couple hours, morally unambiguous, and yes, the good guy gets the girl (or the good girl gets the guy Echo Sacket in Ride the River), but as L’Amour put it “a wife to walk beside you, not behind you”
I think this is what make the John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara movies so great. Be it in the Quiet Man or Big Jake, they were both strong.
James Bond works best when the ‘bond girl’ is strong (enemy agent usually, but Christmas was strong enough to work), his worst was the poor fortune teller in the voodo flick
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Or Mary Goodnight in The Man With The Golden Gun.
I’ve mentioned before that Roger Moore’s Bond had a definite code of honor. Solitaire was his only seduction of an innocent. Otherwise, he spend time with mature, sexually active women who knew what they wanted. Watching him having to deal with corny jailbait was amusing.
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“Horny jailbait,” darn it.
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TBF hon, it was BOTH. LOL
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Jane Seymour. Live and Ket Die, the first Roger Moore version, That was my first Bond film and …. Sigh. Jane Seymour. Made quite an impression on a young man, well boy, let me tell you,
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Roger Moore was my first crush. I was… 8.
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He’s more attractive to me than Connery, but must admit Connery oozes testosterone.
Next favorite is Pierce Brosnan. And it turns out Brosnan is a Christian and happily married. For some reason my timeline got someone snarking at him and his wife because marriage and time have given her a more…matronly…figure. The response was pretty much, “Good for them!”
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Various mid-size essays, too; a lot of my informative-reading shifted from books to magazines to…well, online magazines, be they blogs or some other term.
Online content has the advantage of both being able to be updated as new information comes out, and of hyperlinks so you don’t trust them on what the primary sources says, you go read.
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Yeah, I don’t read any less than I used to…possibly more now than ever…but up through my early 20s it was 100% novels. There was a 10 year stretch where I didn’t read all that much (but still probably a dozen books a year), then the reading picked back up when I got internet access — but it’s all articles, social posts, and blogs (news, politics, political philosophy, and a few other things I’m interested in). And my job requires me to do a fair bit of reading at work as well.
The question is not whether I read or even how much (the answer to both is “yes, virtually nonstop”), but WHAT I read. Fiction, it’s down to a couple books a year on average (lately by this author you may have heard of named Sarah Hoyt) unless I’m rereading old favorites on a comfort binge. Why DID I drop novels for the most part and never really come back? Might have had something to do with what was happening in publishing back in the ’90s, but I don’t really know.
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I can look up Kindle stats too. But they are meaningless because they don’t include Nook, or physical book stats. I suppose if I tracked what I am reading, regardless of source in Goodreads, then it might matter. Bottom line? Do not care.
I just know that two books a year comes under crazy talk. Reading and commenting here, I might be limiting reading to one book a week; might. That and I might have gotten hooked on the Reels on FB. Though I’m going to limit that because not kittens or puppies.
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They also don’t count re-reads or books you’ve SENT TO KINDLE as documents.
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My mom would read for pleasure. Dad still does. (He’s a David Weber fan.) I, of course, consume books as part of a staple diet, and even find myself writing them.
My sister? Doesn’t read for pleasure. I find myself wondering how the hell that happened. But she can only read a few pages at a time, for some reason. I sent her 30 or 40 pages out of an early draft of my second book because she had experience I needed to draw on, and it took her weeks. Funny thing was that she said that she enjoyed reading it. I gave her copies of both books published so far. I don’t expect her to finish them in the next several months.
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I am a compulsive reader as is my father. My mom and sister *DO* read, but only purposefully and rarely for pleasure, I thought maybe a book a month. Fast forward to my mom expressed interest in reading the alpha version of my novel. I give her a copy, which my dad promptly takes and reads and gives back to her. When I talked to her she said, “oh well it’s hard to find the time.” She’s retired and doesn’t get out of the house much. My sister expresses interest. Has never picked it up.
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“Leslie Fish in the comments was her being obtuse about this, being convinced that men and women would have the same strength if only women (like men, in her mind) were encouraged to “eat hearty” and be strong.”
A lot of women think that. They’ve certainly been told it often enough. And girls are stronger than boys at the same age, up to about 12-ish, as I recall. After that, the boys leave the chat and turn into the monsters we all become. Rawr.
Sorry girls, you’re not going to catch up by eating and working out. Not even if your name is Alice Haddison and you’re made of barbed wire, old army boots and hate. But if Alice gets herself a suit of Mobile Infantry armor…
Sex scenes? They’re dumb. Do the robot girlfriends get some with Our Heroes? Oh yeah. Do we need to hear the play-by-play? No, we do not.
People getting graphically un-alived to forward the plot and provide angst to power our characters? LAZINESS! Characters should come with enough angst and the situation itself ought to be more than sufficient to drive them onward. They don’t know that of course, but I do.
Also, am I writing about some soy-consuming loser who’s going to wuss out in the middle of the End of the World unless they un-alive his Mom first? No. Not a chance. Character is going to suck it up and perform their function with honor and a lot of bad language. The Bad Guys are going to rue the day they messed with Character, or his Mom.
Currently in WIP we are about to discover what happens when an evil spirit shows up in front of the dress shop on King Street and starts talking sh*t about Character’s fabulous girlfriend. Things are getting a little too comfy for Character, I’m afraid. We need somebody to get punched in the face.
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This – and I used to horse around with my 18-months younger brother and his friends. Yes, we would wrestle. About the last time that I could hold my own in a physical contest with the neighborhood boys was when I was about thirteen – that brief point when I was somewhat taller then the boys and about equal in weight and strength.
This experience is why I am so adamantly against so-called trans-boys competing as girls in high school and college athletic competition. A male who has gone through puberty is absolutely guaranteed to be taller, heavier, and physically stronger than a female of the same general age, build and level of training. It is not fair, and absolutely nothing anyone can say about it will make me change my mind on that.
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I had a ten year older brother. The fact I never backed down from a fight is down to my being a berserker, not my being stronger. OTOH the poor man was trying not to break me, and man did I take advantage of that.
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Back in the day when I was in junior high, I hated with the fury of a thousand burning suns those books which were ‘girl’ reads – they all seemed to be by a hack writer named Betty Cavanna, and about some sim of a teenaged girl who was picked on by the mean girls of her high school, and yearned after some unattainable male (usually a handsome jock athlete — jeeze, did anyone ever LOOK at the teenage male of our species? I mean … yuck…) and it was all about finding her confidence and the affections of that mythically handsome jock-type … and I HATED those books. I preferred the ‘boy’ reads which were all about adventure, and daring, and coming into adult responsibility and respect, and escape from prison camps, hard work, climbing mountains, exploring the far reaches of the earth … everything that the ‘girl’ books weren’t, to cut it short.
I never much got into romance, save maybe dipping into Georgette Heyer, now and again – because her writing was amusing, and very, very human. As an adult, I mostly preferred mysteries and historical fiction.
When I turned to writing novels myself, I thought I was going more or less down the middle, in writing stories with male and female characters and interests … but curiously, most of my biggest fans are male. Another writer friend explained it by saying that most of my stuff had a very gritty, realistic tone…
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As one of my adult characters tells the 15 year old girl who wrote him a love letter: “Try looking at the boys you never noticed. One of them might surprise you. Girls didn’t notice me in high school, that’s for sure.”
Later, when he was dating a teacher, she told him: “Remember Lisa? She joined the computer club and started going out with one of the nerd-boys. He treats her right.”
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We lived four doors down from an apartment of male Air Force ROTC guys at one point in college, and one of them was almost archetypally handsome. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, chiseled features, good body (so far as I could tell), decent voice…and, it seemed to me, the personality of a beer-soaked banana pudding.
But my best friend and another of my roommates both went head over tookus for him and things got a bit interesting. Fortunately neither of them were a mean girl type and both were smarter than he was, though they didn’t seem to realize it, so there were no back-stabbings, betrayals, and so forth. Just some fairly, ah, vigorous competition. For the record, neither of them caught him and I have no idea what happened to him.
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When I was working at summer camp, there was a waterfront director who was absolutely the stereotypical blond lifeguard archetype. At one point, he wondered to one of the other girls on staff if he were ugly. When she recounted this to us, we both stared at her in amazement, because he wasn’t, nor was he a horrible person.
Mind you, none of us were interested in dating him, and I’m sure that was mutual, but I think we all felt a little sorry for him, thinking he was repulsive when it was, in fact, the opposite.
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Most guys are like that, actually. One of the girls at work says I look like (famous actor type) and I don’t see it. I’m just an old dad bod that needs a haircut and a shave. But then again, the amount of “I saw Moses in the butter on my toast!” that used to run in the old sensationalist rags by the grocery counter tell me that folks just see lots of things that aren’t there- the brains just make random connections.
So far it’s up to two singers and three actors I’m supposed to be a doppleganger or body double for. Nah. Just a scribbler of stories, reader, and cat herder.
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Me too.
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The Mrs. was a fan of the “…In Death” series by JD Robb, so I read them as well, to be able to talk about them. And I enjoyed the series. Some were better than others, of course, but all were readable. I skipped the horizontal parts, but honestly, they weren’t explicit.
But then something changed. The world of JD Robb changed from mostly hetero with a few committed gay couples, to mostly gay, followed by gender confused, oh and that’s right, some boring cishet people. Usually, these were the villains.
So now I’m trying to get her to read Darkship Thieves.
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oh go for broke. Try NML. :D
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Re: men reading romance, it’s funny that the fanfic I just finished reading is a Jane Austen crossover fanfic where the Bennet sisters attend Hogwarts. (A couple hundred years in the past, so they don’t meet Harry Potter or any of the other recognizable characters, though many pureblood families are still around. So Elizabeth Bennet becomes good friends with Phoebe Weasley, and has a Longbottom in her class.) And next I’m moving on to checking out every Georgette Heyer book I can borrow electronically (from a large US library that allows us to have a library card even though we live overseas). In the order in which she published them, so I’ll start with her earliest, and probably not-so-good, works, and move on to her later works where she had more experience under her belt.
But I reflex-avoid modern romances, because I’m not interested in a story that’s one-third sex scenes (at least that’s the impression I’ve been given about those). I don’t actually mind too much if a book, instead of having a husband and wife retreat behind closed doors and fading to black, actually follows them into the bedroom and describes their activity in detail (as long as it’s not too much detail, e.g. doesn’t take up a third of the book). I’ve discovered that it makes me go “Awwww, they have a healthy marriage, I’m glad.” You’d think it would feel voyeuristic, but the fact that it’s words on a page rather than images gives a level of mental separation to it, so it doesn’t feel like voyeurism, at least to me. (Of course other people would have a different reaction, and I also appreciate books that fade to black while still telling me just enough that I can have the same “Awwww, they have a healthy marriage, I’m glad” reaction.) BUT! I do not like reading a story in which people are sleeping around in unhealthy ways, which is what most of modern romance (again, based on impressions rather than firsthand knowledge) consists of, AFAICT. I still remember my reaction to one story, though I can’t recall the title or the character names, where I saw it coming, and said “They hardly know each other! If he sleeps with her, I’m done with the book.” He slept with her. I stopped reading the book and returned it to KU.
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*giggle snort* I dodged around writing an explicit scene of heroine and hero getting it on horizontally in the romance that I wrote on a dare, by having the heroine describe it thusly:
“I’ll spare writing down the details; you know — tab A fitting into slot B, heavy breathing, heaving bosoms, shed clothing scattered on the floor and all that explicit stuff anyone can read in porny books with sticky pages. He was sweet and tender, considerate and amazing, everything that is best about the male of our species … and I couldn’t have believed that it could be so wonderful. Not just the ‘tab-A/slot-B’ but all the time in between – just being there with each other. Like a kind of mind-meld in the old science fiction TV series.”
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This goes for anime, too– my highly analytical older-Xanatos-clone husband loves sweet high school romance animes, and various low-grade work dramas that usually center around a romance, but soooooo much romance.
We overlap strongly on the comedy stuff like Silent Witch or Reincarnated as a Slime, thankfully, and stuff like Apothecary Diaries and Kaiju #8.
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Either I don’t read or I’m not a man.
Oh yeah, doesn’t that sound like something from the looney left?
Guess we’ll have to be satisfied with electronic picture books instead.
https://granitegrok.com/national/2026/01/friday-meme-thing-54
https://granitegrok.com/national/2026/01/midweek-memes-36
https://granitegrok.com/national/2026/01/monday-memes-170
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I read a little of a popular paranormarotica series, and bounced pretty hard off some of the tropes, even before we got to the … I’ll call it non-consensual consent. Walled the entire series after that. The idea that declaring a woman to be “a strong woman” is sufficient and her folding like a wet paper napkin every time someone (or something) says “Boo” doesn’t make her less of a “strong woman” … No.
I sort of like the older gothic romances, because the setting and background is so important as to almost be a character. On-screen recreational procreation just gets skimmed over, although usually there’s a fade to black, door closes, and that’s sufficient.
I like reading about guys who are good at what they do (ladies as well), who put forth the effort, and deserve the win. Adventure’s fun, too. Sex gets boring; connections, mutual respect and growth, and working through problems as a team are what’s fun. (But then I really liked Solomon Kane, the wandering Puritan, liked him better than I did Conan, and there’s 0, no, zilch kissing or romance in Kane’s stories. Go figure. *Rumples tail in shrug*)
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SUPER READERS UNITE!
*cough*
Yes, I have been known to read a book a day. Not seven-hundred-page epic histories of the War of the Roses, no.
I do remember in eighth grade or so, almost EVERYONE read. Some kids read SF, some read that V.C. Andrews crap*, Judy Blume was a fad the year before, some read nonfiction, but nearly everyone read SOMETHING. This was around 1985-86; when did that change?
*Flowers In The Attic made the rounds. I read it out of curiosity, but I think it’s the only Andrews book I’ve read in its entirety.
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They started pushing the MOST horrible books in school. If my kdis hadn’t already been readers…
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If I had to put dates on it, I would say it started to change in 1989 when America OnLine (AOL) appeared.
Then the iPhone in 2007 greatly sped up the rate of change.
People still consume a lot of text but less of it it is in the form of books.
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Every English class (not that I could write, or spell) the teachers gave up on me. Why? Assigned reading? I’d be done with the book over the first weekend, if I didn’t get it done by then? Why? Because I wanted to read what I wanted to read during reading class time. Also read in math, and other classes; any class I could whip through the assignment, and you know – read. Couldn’t get away with it in Spanish, home ec, science, or PE, you know the classes where one is expected to be doing something physical through the entirety of the class. Others pulled this too. They were the ones who got loud instead of stayed quiet. Guess who got away with reading. They, usually, didn’t. What this did do is set me up for hard times in college (not the only one). Until I figured that out. Took me awhile. Had to learn how to study so I could actually retain the information. HS? Not so much.
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Unfortunately, I lost most of my Doc Savage paperbacks (and a lot of other books) in one of my many military moves.
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Which is fair, because I think it’s the only book she wrote in its entirety, everything else being done by some ghost writer under her name after she died.
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I’m male, and I do read a fair amount. I am also a fairly fast reader. Audio, movies and television are so slow I get bored (also they are sequential – no easy skipping ahead or back). Besides, a few words and one’s own imagination can draw scenes in the imagination better than they can be depicted. Have gone mainly to nonfiction. There is enough excitement, adventure, mystery, romance, coincidences, and weirdness in them without resorting to reading fiction (although I have a number of favorites I reread). Their perspective is different, but I have no preference between male and female authors as long as they are good at writing. The selection of my books (usually used or thrift shop) is if it seems “interesting” regardless of topic (there are also a number with bookmarks partway through or not yet started piled in my living room that got demoted when a book more interesting appeared, depending on my current mood). My time to read a book is difficult to estimate since there are usually 3-4 in progress all at once. Also, some are exciting (like a history of American railways or the history of a small town in the Utah desert), read for a while in the evening, then put aside for “bedtime reading” like a description of North Dakota historical markers or a tourist guide to some out-of-the way country. The latter are interesting and educational, but not interesting enough to stay awake all night reading it. Happy reading!!!
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It must be a going thing. The four hours a night bit, I mean. Because lately, that’s been the thing that is going.
Also, women may not be visual creatures like men when comes to depictions of sex (opposite or otherwise), but I’d wager that the fairer sex is far more auditory than otherwise. I get more compliments on my voice and accent (not bass, but low) than appearance. Fluttery eyes, the whole bit. Gets some kind of chemistry going on in the brain and whatnot.
Far as romance goes, I’m having to shoehorn a mini romance plot in because the guys (yes, guys) rather insisted on it in the comments and reviews. Catgirls not for fanservice, but being all caring and empathic (still have issues about the word “empathetic”) about people, cooking good meals and good with kids rather turned heads, I guess.
Yes, guys tolerate teh romance, not just bromance. Men tend heavily towards wanting things like, oh, wife and kids. To protect and provide for, to have purpose beyond just making a dull wage and driving a nice truck. Those dadly instincts are in our genes, as are the husbandly ones. The meme where “Men want two things” and it has the 300 last stand on one side and the white picket fence with wifey and kidlets is real. Dudes want that stuff- and it is equally masculine to crave to test themselves both viscerally and not.
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Sounds like a fun read; I tried Googling (well, DDG’ing) “Dan Lane author” and “Dan Lane books” but all I could find was people who seem unlikely to be you. What is the title of that book? Or if it’s a WIP not yet published, what are some titles of books you’ve already published?
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Dr Z’s Zombie Apocalypse. Rough book, needs editing (as in a LOT of editing), but the bones of the story are there. Royal Road, Scribblehub, WordPress.
I also need to find time to upload the minor edits. Eh. Ask for anything but time.
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I’m afraid I hadn’t realized that you had five more chapters at Tanglemud. I have been fairly busy since november.
Or, more precisely, busy until mid november, crashing, reorienting/less busy, and stuff.
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Was rather insane and busy myself. No worries. Writing time has been rather scant of late.
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“Men want two things” – can confirm. BUT, the way in which they manifest can be quite different. (Well, the way in which the first one manifests. The desire for wife and kids is pretty universal: barring men who don’t desire women at all, you won’t find that much variation in what kind of graceful, feminine women men desire. Plenty of variation in body and facial type, but not so much variation in character traits: a woman who’ll be a good mother and homemaker is pretty universally desired.)
But, as I said before I sidetracked myself, the desire for something to do battle with can be very different. I do battle with bugs and poorly-documented software libraries. Others do battle with poorly-indexed library archives, or stubborn weeds that are trying to grow in the same field as their crops, or finicky mechanical parts that need to be bashed into working. (And, of course, many do quite literal battle, or at least train for it even if they end up serving only in peacetime). Yet in many ways, it boils down to the same thing: application of masculine strength to defeat some enemy and attain some goal.
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Yep. That was what I was getting at, but words got in the way. Men need challenge moreso than just bare physical combat. We test ourselves constantly.
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I think a lot of women need challenge, too, hence the whole mid-20th century feminism movement for stressed homemakers. (No matter how it got warped, it came from an actual need.) But for women, that challenge is most often intellectual or creative.
Hmm. New line of thought, must explore that.
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Men and women come from the same stock. We are more alike than different.
I think men and women approach and react to challenge a bit differently, but we do seek it out, the both of us.
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Not books, but…
I heard a few months ago that Beijing has banned any new “Billionaire falls in love with ordinary woman” TV shows in the PRC. Apparently they’ve been very popular, and the government is concerned that they’re warping the perceptions of the single ladies.
Mind you, given some of the other stuff I’ve seen about what’s going on in China, stuff like that isn’t the only reason why the birth rate is down in that country.
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Apparently bride price remains a thing in The Middle Kingdom, with amounts in the 350,000 to the numerologically significant 888,800 yuan range++ (~$50k to $127k) reportedly commonly asked in the cities, so the economy for the younger generation of guys (or their families who are supposed to do the paying technically) puts a bit of a damper on offers of matrimony.
++ Cite: (paywalled, but in the unwalled first para are those numbers): https://www.economist.com/china/2025/06/12/bride-prices-are-surging-in-china
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I remember a family dinner as a kid where at the adult table Grandma said in reference to ‘Men’s Magazines’, “Don’t those things get boring?” and one of my uncles who had a huge Playboy collection quipped, “You mean when you’ve seen one you’ve seen both of them?”
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Sarah, I guess I am writing a book for both you AND Dan then, though I would never call it a romance. What is funny is my lady first readers are all about the mystery and period setting, and my guy first readers are heavily invested in the relationship arcs. Perhaps it is because the relationships are not strictly romantic in nature, but encompass all the kinds of relationships you can have. Also, while not wholly opposed to an explicit scene (I generally skip over them, or forget I have read them) I think they tend to be a crutch to short hand real intimacy in characters which I dislike.
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This blog will have several people who remember that hilarious thing a year or so back on Twitter, where an author (whose very recognizable name escapes me) wrote parallel story outlines “as by (or “for”?) a man” and “as by/for women”, in which “the Immortal Billionaire Vampire Knight” was a Main Character.
One of the funnies was the man spending 5 chapters describing every clang and bang and bugle-blast of a melee, while the women gives the fight two sentences, then 5 chapters of her Heroine and her crew trying to decide how to feel about it.
Can anybody give a pointer to that? (My money’s on Foxfier here.) If you haven’t seen it, prepare to lol. Coffee-vs-keyboard precautions recommended.
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I know what you’re talking about. I might have been the original one to link it, though I’m not sure about it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a link for it now. All that I can say is that I originally saw it on X.
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Thanks for sharing it the first time. I couldasworn I’d saved it, because how could I have not? It was brilliant.
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google says it was Tamsyn Muir but I can’t find it.
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Worse, they’re a crutch that allows the writer never to learn to write actual emotion.
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Or even: I think they tend to be a crutch to shorthand real intimacy in characters. Which I dislike.
Thank you for getting my meaning even though the punctation in the OP made it ambiguous. One should have realism in characters whether you like them or dislike them. And one should also not use an explicit scene as a crutch to elide over difficult writing. Both things I dislike. Ha ha.
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<sigh> I do miss the days as a carefree grade-school student who read multiple books a day. But even so, even now, I still read 3-4 books a week, most weeks. Particularly stressful weeks, it’s less. Last week I managed…two, I think? Because Dad was having his third surgery in eight months on the damn shoulder–infection this time, so much fun–and in between that, stressing over work being slim because holidays, and because I deal with anxiety by cleaning things I didn’t get a ton of reading done. But I still managed at least two. I really can’t fathom only reading one or two a YEAR…but I also know I’m weird (and in good company, here :D)
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I can only read one book a week, if and only if, I am so busy I can only read during the “hurry up and wait” periods. Usually waiting in line somewhere, appointments (which usually are multiple wait sections), etc. I don’t wait well. My tendency really helps these days, given long lines at pharmacy and checkout lines at Costco. Long line? No problem. Pull out the phone, read.
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Note, I’m retired. Thus, the one book a week above is a minimum. Never that busy these days, unless we are traveling.
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Yes. Having a small handheld device that can hold thousands of books is the BEST. People ask me how I manage to find the time to read, and it’s like…well, I read in line, I read in the bathroom, I read while I wait for food to cook…I used to do that pre-ebook days as well, but it’s a LOT easier now :D (And my back is happier…)
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I read a lot of magazines (aviation, German women’s weeklies, academic journals) in grad school while stirring risotto or oatmeal. I mean, I was standing there, stirring, so the time had to be made even more productive, right? Now it is e-reader in one hand, wooden spoon in the other (no counter space for magazines in RedQuarters kitchen.)
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I suspect part of what’s driving this is defensiveness by men. There’s a concerted drive by some (largely female driven) to push attractive women out of visual entertainment due to things like “male gaze” and “appealing to toxic masculinity”. And so you end up with things like critics claiming that the creators of the video game “Stellar Blade” has never seen a real woman (i.e. calling him a virgin incel who only interacts with women via porn), when in fact the woman used as the model for Eve’s design and mo-cap is the game lead’s wife (iirc). Or the main character in Star Wars: Outlaws being based on the character’s mo-cap model, but with her attractiveness reduced.
One of the ways in which people respond to those sorts of attacks is to highlight hypocrisy by the people making the accusations. So if there’s a group of toxic women trying to make the women in games look “realistic” (translation: unattractive to men) because otherwise they might “stimulate” men, one way of countering that is by looking for evidence that lots of women spend time engaged with their own “stimulating” entertainment media. In this case, it would be novels with graphic written sex.
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It’s a vicious cycle. Looser social protocols in 1960s/1970s led to more aggressive objectification of women in pop culture, which led to female pushback, which eventually turned toxic against men, which led to male pushback, and now we’re at the stage where the male pushback is turning toxic as well.
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“Toxicity” on both sides has always existed. There are other things influencing it now. Part of it, I suspect, is a “limited pie” viewpoint shown by many of the so-called “feminists”. Their viewpoint simultaneously allows for every indulgence by women, while not allowing men to derive even the most mild enjoyment (even in private; and I don’t mean *THAT* kind of private!) from that indulgence. Men enjoying it is seen as taking away from a woman’s enjoyment of it.
Amusingly, as I’ve mentioned here before, female leads in video games often experience the “strange, new respect” phenomena with “feminists”. Today’s new female lead is the banner girl of appealing to toxic masculinity and male gaze. Tomorrow she’ll be proclaimed as an icon of femininity versus the latest female pixel lead. And it’s not because the new lead is necessarily more risque, or showing more skin. Bayonetta famously had clothes that were composed of her hair, and that transformed into the weapons that she used, which meant that she quite literally stripped when she attacked (naughty bits were not shown). I don’t think any of her replacements at the top of the “thirty minutes of pixelated hate” list have ever been so extreme. But now she’s proclaimed an icon of female empowerment in the video game world.
Just don’t mention the canon evidence that she’s happily married to a man, and has at least one kid. The “feminists” are in denial about that part.
There are some men who also have a “limited pie” view of the relationship between the sexes, but afaik they don’t have the necessary influence to be as big of a problem. Yet.
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That’s about my take as well.
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Free the trapped!
I’ve got a post stuck in moderation that I think explains part of the reason why this is getting attention right now. Can you set it loose?
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Philosophical question for the hive mind: is military history, especially popular military history such as the late Stephen Ambrose, a form of male fantasy? Being a heroic Marine on Iwo Jima, or in the Union army at Gettysburg, or crossing the Delaware with Washington?
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History, no.
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I think it can be, in the sense of giving a nice, neat narrative where you can put yourself in OtherFolks’ shoes– but it’s kinda reaching, similar to how serial killer writeups go into that slot for women.
It gives the sense of control and involvement with safe detachment.
That way tends to go into “everything is a story and thus fantasy” and that’s not really helpful for classification.
….although with science it would help a lot for identifying when someone is going away from the bare facts and over into making a story to try to make sense of htem, and possibly warping the evidence….
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No, because you’re a passive observer. It can help you to better understand the thinking of others, but it doesn’t put you there.
Fictional entertainment, particularly (but not limited to) video games, *can* put you there.
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