Compare and contrast.

[randomness]

Thought for the late night, partly inspired by a face-to-face comment by rmd about gay regency romances mostly being written by and read by women, and partly from a post by digitalemur called Fun with YAOI, or things I come across at work:

Is there any similarity in this kind of man-to-man fiction mostly created and read by women to the girl-on-girl photosets mostly being photographed by and viewed by men?

Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaoi has a useful overview of the yaoi phenomenon.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I rather wonder how many romance novels you've read and in what timeframe. While they are very formulaic--like most heavily genred fiction--that formula has changed a great deal over time and depending on what category one is reading. I read them extensively in the late 80s/early 90s and have read one or two a year since then and been very interested at the changes in women's attitudes towards sex and in the societal roles in which the women are portrayed.

I'm not saying they're great, mind you, but some of your generalizations seem rather dated to me, or based on a fairly small sample size.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

Actually, my reading history is similar to yours, except that my highest volume reading period was in the mid- to late 90s when I was a teen. I don't know that I would say I read "extensively" at any point, but... put it this way, I read enough that the reason I only rarely pick up a romance nowadays is that I ran into exactly the problem I described above over and over again until I mostly gave up. While there are certainly exceptions (it's certainly *possible* to come up with a good het UST plot that isn't narratively ridiculous) I would say the problem is hard enough to avoid that most romance writers aren't good enough to do it. The formula may change (and I agree that there are meaningful ways the genre has modernized) but the centrality of a long period of UST hasn't, I think, and I do think that's getting harder and harder to do plausibly for modern het romances. (It should in theory be easier for period pieces, but in those cases the characters usually act so anachronistically that it seems silly, to me at least, when the one area they aren't liberated and modern in is sex.)

All that said, I certainly can't call myself a comprehensive expert in the modern romance genre, so you're free to disagree. :)