Monday, January 6, 2014

Alpha Mail: chick lit

A reader has an epiphany:
I realized another truism in chick lit which is that if the female protagonist is described as a bit homely then she will get to sleep with handsome men, the rest will be attracted to her, and even the other women will be a little sensual around her. It's the female equivalent to the wise cracking snarky gamma using his wit to get laid.

I understand why it sells as it lets them live in a fantasy world for a while, but the danger is when they start to believe the fantasy in reality.
Say what you will about the guys who read comics, but even if they like to dress up like superheroes, at least they don't genuinely believe they can fly or shoot webs out of their fingers.

We shall gently pass by the obvious question of how this particular reader has such in-depth knowledge of this particular literature.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

He may WRITE it. It's the single largest genre out there after Children's Books. If you can crank out enough estrogen soaked wordage, you can make a decent living. Sad but true.

Trust said...

Girl's are Assholes, Episode 3: Which "Sex in the City" character are you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc8FdUx3QNs

Ladies, picture a guy saying things like "i'm totally James Bond / Rocky / Bruce Wayne / Bradley Cooper" and you'll get how they picture you when you say you are so "Carrie Bradshaw." Although, if your cute and he smirks during your nonsens, he's praying you are a Samantha.

insanitybytes22 said...

"Say what you will about the guys who read comics, but even if they like to dress up like superheroes, at least they don't genuinely believe they can fly or shoot webs out of their fingers."

No, but apparently they genuinely believe they never sleep with homely girls. That's amusing.

TetanusScrote said...

Right now I'm doin' what Lamont described. Churning out chick lit erotica centered around werewolves and occasionally BBWs, all of them centered around rape fantasies. Its ghost writing for another author who is so swamped that I think I'm just one of many in his chick lit employ.

Sometimes I think about branching out and just selling this crap myself under a female name but I like what he pays me now. On Amazon there are so many of these books, they go for really cheap, they have stock image covers and then under the author bios its always the most cliche shit 'This author loves cozying up with a blanket by a fire as she dreams up her naughty tales and strums herself' etc.

Sometimes I inject a little bit of red pill into the stories, especially if they're first person narration I make sure to have the character notice things only as they pertain to her. If there's a nice guy orbiter type and he gets killed by a wolf, his loss barely registers for the main character.

A lot of times my employer asks me to write the women as spunky and independent so they can be conquered and for that I might have the werewolf say something along the lines of 'Your education doesn't matter, I'm here to face fuck you'. Obviously its never that explicit as women are the primary audience and the kind who read this stuff are the most craving for ego validation but still it makes the writing bearable.

Natalie said...

Ok, serious question. Is Harriet Vane (of Dorothy Sayers' creation) wish fulfillment or not? Her stuff is quite intelligent, but the red pill would suggest that Lord Peter could have done better. On the other hand, MMV and SMV aren't quite analogous.

Btw, men, let me suggest that you introduce Grace Livingston Hill and Emily Loring to the women around you. It's chick lit that promotes domesticity, loyalty, industry, chastity, and looking/acting like a lady. As a plus all the good preachers are manly men, and all the bad ones are weak, effeminate types. It's still chick lit, but it's not mommy porn or entitlement princess lit.

Revelation Means Hope said...

My wife's chick lit is primarily browsing the internet for new cooking and baking recipe ideas. Sometimes she can spend more than 5 hours per week reading it!

Whenever it starts to irritate me, I remember how much worse it could be....for example, my mother likes to read "historical romances" that she claims are educational as they help illustrate how people used to live. Right....you can guess I didn't pick up my game from my childhood home.

Revelation Means Hope said...

What exactly is a "bit homely"? that is true hamster bait, as about 98% of women are easily able to identify several things they don't like about their looks. I would also argue that quite a few "homely" women are able to get laid by alphas while they are young. They just won't have alpha men swooning over her.

It's basically the "Bella technique" used by the Twilight author - make the female a blank slate with a few irrelevant and vague flaws, so that all the female readers can project themselves into her shoes.

Anonymous said...

We shall gently pass by the obvious question of how this particular reader has such in-depth knowledge of this particular literature.

Actually, you should read Janice Radway's book Reading the Romance. Ignore the academic feminist nonsense and doubletalk and pay very close attention to how the heroes behave, the "villains" behave, and the heroines behave—it reads eerily like The Game, but with marriage and presumed monogamy at the end instead of the guy moving on to the next woman.

Reading the Romance is shockingly insightful about women—just not in the way the author intended.

VD said...

Is Harriet Vane (of Dorothy Sayers' creation) wish fulfillment or not?

Yes and no. She's obviously a stand-in for Sayers - how many women graduated from Oxford back then - but then, if you look at the sort of women men married back then, she's not at all impossible.

Also, Wimsey clearly wants a Mommy figure, and Vane provides that for him.

Duke of Earl said...

It's basically the "Bella technique" used by the Twilight author - make the female a blank slate with a few irrelevant and vague flaws, so that all the female readers can project themselves into her shoes.

Of course the only actress capable of portraying such a level of blandness was Kristen Stewart.

Though I suppose it could be said that was all she had to work with.

Jason

Eowyn said...

In Women Ruin Everything news:

One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy

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