Gary The Gull's Blog

National Geographic’s demographic information must be confusing—after all, what do 13 year old boys and middle-aged women have in common? Well, for the 13 year old, a strategically selected spiral bound notebook excuses the graphic photographs of sagging, aboriginal breasts as a school project. For a middle-aged woman, a strategically selected National Geographic helps offset the embarrassment of the accompanying shallow romance novel covered in man-titties. At least the boy has a chance of learning something from his purchase.

Romance novels are hardcore pornography bound in softcore pornography placed on shelves for women to giggle at publicly and then buy in secret. They’re filled with unrealistic expectations of emasculated men who act tantalizingly, but safely mysterious. These men are temporarily allowed penises for frequent, but managed trips to the bedroom, where female protagonists are placed on pedestals and violated repeatedly in French or Spanish.

The covers of romance novels traditionally feature men with exposed washboard abdominals gazing lustfully at women who hardly seem to acknowledge their existences. The men, who invariably have too much blond hair on their heads, are bald in the other areas not left to the viewer’s imagination. Weird. do women really want this? The publisher Silhouette Books seems to think they do not.

Silhouette Books, in their Silhouette Desire series, has a different view of what women like—shiny things.

According to Silhouette, women still like ripply, exotic abs; however, they also like diamonds, belt buckles, martini glasses, and cuff links—provided they’re shiny enough to produce lens flares.

In fact, they seem to think that women really, really like shiny cuff links.

Or maybe those are watches…it’s hard to tell because the lens flares drown out most of the detail in those illustrations. In any case, I can’t imagine women are really that attracted to spots of light. I’ll have to try dangling well-polished spoons in front of women to be sure, but I’m really inclined to think the publisher’s illustrator just discovered the lens flare filter in Photoshop (for the rest of you budding pornographers, it’s under [Filter], [Render], [Lense Flare...] and it only works in RGB color mode) and went crazy. The resulting covers made it past marketing because marketing is either trash or apathetic. I’d feel sorry for Tessa Radley, Brenda Jackson, Yvonne Lindsay, Barbara Dunlop, Katherine Garbera, Day Leclaire, and the rest if I didn’t find their “works” as shallow as the hyper-sparkly cuff links, watches, martini glasses, and belt buckles that adorn them.

Of course, if these novels really do keep women climbing into bed with their fat, balding, middle-aged husbands, then more power to them. I’ll take my National Geographic and a bottle of K-Y Solo®, thank you very much.