Romance Novels

If you are a woman, do you read romance novels? You are not alone.

Another tidbit in that book "A Billion Wicked Thoughts'' is that romance novels generated $1.37 billion in sales in 2008. The romance genre has the single largest share of the fiction market. At least 74.8 million people read romance novels in 2008. And more than 90 per cent are women.

To put those numbers in perspective, about 100 million men in the U.S. and Canada accessed online porn in 2008 only a quarter more than the number of women who read romance novels. About 25 per cent of the porn watchers are women. But women won't pay for porn and the companies often flag credit cards with female names that try to pay for porn. But they will spend over $1billion on romance novels.

Another interesting thing is that sex is not absolutely essential to a romance novel. But the sex scene is important. The heroine is sexually inexperienced until her lover introduces it to her. The awakening to love is that much more powerful when it's accompanied by a sexual awakening as well.

Since our readers tend to be kinky, do you like a romance novel with no kink?

There's more on what women like in their romance novels, but I thought I'd ask my readers what they like and see if it fits with what the authors say they like.

And who knew romance novels are a billion dollar industry? Hmmm. Maybe I should try to write one. LOL.

Your thoughts on romance novels.

FD

Why Are We Like We Are?

I have come across a fascinating book called, "A Billion Wicked Thoughts.''

It is written by two neuroscientists who have a initiated a revolution in the scientific study of sexual attraction. They point out that very little sex research has ever been done. Kinsey interviewed only 18,000 middle class Caucasians. It was groundbreaking but not a broad sample. And people don't often tell the truth about their sexual desires. So they went to the Internet, analyzing the sexual behavior of more than one hundred million people around the world. They analyzed a billion web searches, a million websites, a million erotic videos, a million erotic stories, millions of personal ads and tens of thousands of digitized romance novels.

They point out that if you have a fetish, it is on the Internet. Nobody exists who has a desire that other people don't have. They say if you type in, "Find people that have sex with goat that are on fire'' and the computer will say, "Specify type of goat.''

They say men prefer plump women to thin ones and men often seek erotic videos featuring women in their fifties and sixties. So much for the supposed preference for thin young women.

I haven't even finished the book and will share more in the future but wanted to share one fascinating tidbit with you. In the history of mankind, only 40 per cent of men have reproduced while 80 per cent of women have.

They quote one social psychologist, Roy Baumeister, as saying what this means to us.

"If you (a male) go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won't have children. Most men who ever existed did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances...Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed, but if you stay home, you won't reproduce anyway. We're descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).

"For women throughout history, the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Taking chances like (sailing off into the unknown) would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. Women might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you'll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We're descended from women who played it safe.''

I hope you find that as fascinating as I do. I recommend the book but will be sharing more of their findings.

FD

Thank You

My blog has now passed the 300 mark in followers and I just wanted to thank all of you who stop by and comment and become followers.

As regular readers know, I like to ask questions and so many of you have been kind enough to provide your thoughts and observations. I started this blog a couple of years ago at the urging of the lovely PK at elisnewbeginnings.blogspot.com and never expected to get the feedback I have gotten. I also want to thank all those lurkers who stop by and don't comment. I appreciate you reading the blog and ask you not to be so shy. Feel free to comment or become a follower. I should also thank Bonnie at bottomsmarts.blogspot.com for starting her Love Our Lurkers Day, which convinced me to start commetning.

As some of you know, I started this blog as a home for my Training Lisa series of fiction stories and somehow have let a year go by without updating it. One of these days, I plan to do that too.

Anyway, once again, I want to thank everybody who has welcomed me to this community. It is nice to find like-minded folks here to share our thoughts. And if you read but don't blog, feel free to start one of your own. We like to make everyone feel welcome.

America in 2011

I suggest you read this link to a blog entitled, "Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit.''

It is about a n Arab looking woman traveling on 9/11 sitting in a row with two men she didn't know who were Indian and what happened to them when somebody said they were acting suspiciously.

It makes me wonder if we haven't if we haven't overreacted to the tragedy of 9/11.

Read the blog and tell me what you think.

http://shebshi.wordpress.com/

FD

Getting Wet

Following is a link to a post on the blog by pouredoutlett.blogspot.com.

http://pouredoutlett.blogspot.com/2011/09/niagara-falls.html

If you click it on, it is about how she tends to squirt, but recently had two of what she calls Niagara Falls orgasms because she got so wet.

She asks by asking if any or the readers can relate to that so I will ask the same question.

Your thoughts?

FD

Being Normal

I found what I think is a fascinating story on the NY Times website. It is hard to describe it so I ask you to read it. If you do, I think you will find it interesting. And if you do read it, I would be interested in your comments.

FD

By THEODORE ROSS

Townies is a series about life in New York.

¶Life in New York City requires the acceptance of a contradictory narrative about what loosely can be called ordinary existence. Even as a native of this city, I struggle to regard the punishment of its costs, the strain of its pace and the futility of its endless competitions — major, minor and residential — as normal.

¶But who’s to say what’s normal? It has been said that the only normal people are the ones we don’t know very well. But I disagree. Normal people, if they can be located outside the playpens of mythology and tall tales, are exactly those we do know, in our families and relationships, by choice or happenstance, or as is so often the case in this impossible city, out of necessity.

¶I thought about that a couple of weeks ago, in a setting abundant with the trappings of normal American life: one of my 5-year-old son J.P.’s peewee baseball games. The field where he plays sits in a little park off Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, on a tree-lined block of brownstones in the shadow of the construction site that will one day be an arena named for a global financial services provider. There is a playground in the park, and on this humid early evening, children scrambled up the jungle gym and ran screaming through the sprinkler. Young men played pickup basketball on the asphalt courts adjacent to the field. Teenage boys capered about on bicycles and skateboards, vying for the approval of the girls on the church stoop across the street. Old men loitered on the park benches, furtively sipping beers camouflaged in paper bags.

He hit, sprinted the bases and high-fived his teammates, then me, then my ex-wife’s girlfriend.

¶Standing at home plate with J.P. (I volunteer as an assistant coach for his team, the Red Dragons), I offered a few (mostly useless) batting tips, made sure that his helmet sat straight on his head and reminded him to have fun. He hit, he sprinted the bases, and eventually, when he reached home, high-fived his teammates, then me, then my ex-wife’s girlfriend, Kathy.

¶We separated about three years ago, and I found out about Kathy a few months later. We had put our apartment up for sale, and I had stopped by to make sure everything was in order before an open house. I noticed that someone had left a phone in the kitchen, and when I picked it up I saw that the wallpaper photo was an image of my son.

¶I was fairly certain the phone was not my ex-wife’s, but to make sure, I called her. The abandoned phone remained silent, and when she answered, I asked if perhaps she owned a second phone. She said no, Kathy — I believe this was the first time I heard her name — had some carpentry skills and had been doing a bit of work and forgot it there. They would stop by later to collect it.

Rich Tu

¶There is something disorienting, to say the least, about finding a photograph of your child in the possession of someone you have never met. As a parent, the shock of realizing that your child has a life and experiences and attachments independent of you never completely fades. It’s worse for divorced parents. J.P. has school, friends, his mother, the world he creates when he closes the door to his bedroom and orders me to stay out. Most of the time, though, that alternate existence remains safely theoretical. Confronting it head-on stung.

¶At the same time, the person who took this photo clearly cared about J.P., and for that I was grateful. I also — and this is embarrassing to admit — felt a sense of relief. It would have been worse for me if the unknown figure in J.P.’s life had been male. A man, another possible father, someone with a better jump shot, more adept with a wrench and a power tool, wiser, taller, and more at ease — would have been a greater threat. The photo suggested to me nurturing and affection and the world of motherhood. I understand that what I am describing is sexist and silly and an awful generalization. But it helped, and it still does.

¶(This is in marked contrast to the reactions of some of my friends and family members, who assumed that my ex’s sexual preference could not help but emasculate me, and worried that I might enter some panicked phase of male sexual overcompensation.)

¶J.P. took to the field and Kathy and I stood on the sidelines watching. We chatted amiably about J.P.’s summer camp and his eating habits (he will, apparently, consider a wider range of fruits and vegetables when in her care than in mine or his mother’s); the pleasures and irritations of my ex-wife’s large, loving and contentious Vietnamese family; and whether my ex-wife and Kathy felt pressured to wed now that New York’s marriage laws have been amended to reflect the new, and more just, consensus.

¶When the half-inning ended, J.P. sprinted in from first base, flushed, panting and demanding water. Kathy handed him his water bottle and patted him on the head while he drank.

¶Kathy and I are far from friends, but it’s easier to communicate with her than with my ex-wife, and so, when possible, I include her in the complex and fatiguing logistics of our shared parenting. In that light, our conversation during the game worked as kind of domestic diplomacy, a step along the path to knowing each other, a road that hopefully ends at a new normal.

¶The normal I am thinking of was in evidence on the ball field, too, in a way that I imagine would be hard to find outside of New York. The challenges and obstacles of this city throw people together in ways that encourage the intimacy that results in the ordinary. J.P.’s teammates on the Red Dragons come from families of wide diversity, a cross-section of class, race, income and sexual orientation. To watch them is to see change mingled with tradition, with ease, without judgment. It was the end of summer and children were playing baseball: what could be more normal?

---

¶Theodore Ross is the author of the forthcoming book “Am I a Jew” and a contributor to the blogDadwagon.

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Happiness

At the bottom is a link to a fascinating column I found today by David Brooks in the New York Times called the Haimish Line. It is a Yiddish word that suggest warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality.

I suggest you read the column, but he starts out by saying that in a safari in Africa, his family stayed in seven tents. The simple camps were friendly warm and familiar. The more elegant ones were colder.

He talks about Comfort Inns with the free breakfasts where people chat at the waffle machine. At the four-star hotels, they are quiet. He mentioned a book called "The Lost City'' about life in an old densely packed Chicago neighborhood where kids ran from home to home and people hung out on stoops. They moved to the suburbs and didn't know their neighbors.

He says on vacations we think of the Where. But when we come back we treasure the memory of the Who -- people you met in faraway places. And he links to an article on research on happiness that is worth reading. It says you should buy experiences instead of things, many small pleasures instead of a few big ones. Pay now for things you can look forward to and enjoy later.

If you click on the link, it says if money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right. It says rich people have better toys, better nutrition, more free time and better jobs but they don't tend to be a lot happier than people who have less because they don't spend it right. The things they think will make them happy often don't. For example, they say you can spend a lot of money on a new hardwood floor and it soon is just the floor but the memory of seeing a cheetah at dawn on a safari continues to provide delight.

The quality of our social relationships is a strong determinant of our happiness. You tend to be happier giving money to a food bank than spending it on yourself.

It also says that while people who have sex are happier than those that don't, it says the optimal number of sex partners in a 12-month period is one. It says that multiple partners are occasionally thrilling, but regular partners are regularly enjoyable.

And that people who enjoy the mundane joys of daily life are happier than those that don't. Which is why rich people don't get to enjoy small pleasures.

I could go on and on about this topic but you can read the link and then click on the link in the story for more details. And this whole topic of happiness may not interest you as much as it does me. Let me know your thoughts.

FD (I suggest you click on the following link and then to the link in the story)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/brooks-the-haimish-line.html?_r=1&hphttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/brooks-the-haimish-line.html?_r=1&hp