Pecker

Last week, I was given a romance novel to read. I hadn't cracked one of those babies in years and thought I might attempt to pen something myself but felt I needed to do a bit of research. I thumbed through and then stopped at one of the racier sections. OH.MY.GOD. Times have certainly changed in twenty odd years.

Back in my late teens/early twenties, I went through a period where I consumed historical romances like french fries. I just couldn't put the things down. I was young enough and still naive enough to believe in the whole prince-on-a-white-horse vision of love, which is somewhat remarkable considering my experiences with men up to that point had be rife with violence and dysfunction.

At fifteen, I accepted a ride home from work in the wee hours of the morning from a stranger. Predictably, that ended badly. That same year, a filthy, old goat I worked for stuck his hand up my skirt while I was on a ladder getting supplies from the storeroom. He had a daughter my age and I still feel squeamish when I think about it. At nineteen, I dated a boy whose anger issues bubbled over one night resulting in bruises and a frantic SOS call to my mum.

Anyway, thinking back, I'm sure that the romance novels contributed to my already warped sense of the Mars/Venus dance. Along with bad sitcom television, the drivel in Cosmopolitan magazine ("Learn How To Drive Your Man WILD!!") and the not so subtle messages from the school counselors ("maybe you should drop math in favour of Home Ec."), I understood that every woman, no matter how strong, would eventually be purposefully subdued by a man. My mother's Gloria Steinem-influenced voice was drowned out by Disney visions of happily ever after. It took me YEARS to sort through that pile of scat.

So, I'm reading this latest book and let me tell you, there is nothing chaste whatsoever about it. Gone are the clever euphemisms and allusions to the horizontal boogey. This stuff is soft porn; erotica at the very least. It's the type of book that I couldn't read in a public place for fear someone might glance over my shoulder and I'm not a prude. Really. I haven't a conservative bone in my body.

And from what I can gather so far, the women protagonists these days are definitely not suffering from damsel-in-distress syndrome, which is an improvement, for sure, but holy crap! I thought the sexual revolution happened in the 60's. Not so apparently, which causes me a slight problem. I can picture myself authoring a formulaic love story, you know:

boy meets girl
boy and girl fall in love
boy and girl have misunderstanding
boy loses girl
misunderstanding cleared up
boy and girl live happily ever after

and being okay with my family reading it. I don't think I am capable of writing paragraphs that contain the words, "pecker" and "muff" unless I'm talking about a hen with a scarf. Looks like I'm going to have to keep my day job.