Cats and breath

[lliira]

So I'm reading a couple Save the Pearls rippages and I'm seeing some commonalities between it and certain other terrible books, namely those of Stephenie Meyer and the Anita Blake novels of Laurell K. Hamilton.  I shall express them in question form.

1) Why are men in these crappy novels either actual big cats or compared to big cats, and why is this always supposed to be arousing?

2) What's with breath being a turn-on?

3) What's with the turned-on female main characters being completely out of control when they're turned on? A cat-like man twitches a muscle, or breathes, or exists anywhere near these girls and/or women, and all blood flow to the girls and/or women's brains completely stops. 

4) No, seriously. It's great to show that women have sexual feelings. It's not great to show that when women have sexual feelings, we supposedly become puddles of nothing but lust.  

5) What's with all these crappy novels having girls and/or women confusing lust with love in a totally transparent way? We're supposed to believe that solely because these guys turn them on, these women are actually in love with these guys, and identify with these girls because of this.  

6) All these novels are racist, by the way. 

7) Also all these novels are rape-cheerleading.

8) Do Stephenie Meyer and the Save the Pearls author both read a lot of Laurell K. Hamilton, or is this coming from some other common ground? 

Comments

[redsixwing]

1. Because feline == sexy, apparently? I think it's silly to reduce a cat to any single trait, but there we have it.

2. C.S. Lewis does this too, though with less overt sexuality, in the Narnia books. Every time Aslan shows up (speaking of powerful big-cat men) dude is panting on stuff as a blessing.

3-5. I don't even.

6-7. ARGH.

8. I think there's some cultural common ground here, particularly with points 3-7 - that particular set of nasties has a firm grounding in US mainstream culture.

[lliira]

There's a lot of stuff about God breathing life into people and such in Christian tradition, so the Aslan thing makes sense. What I don't get is why anyone would sexualize it. I've never been turned on by a guy's breath.

Cultural common ground, yeah. Those things are just so incredibly central to all these works, and I've never seen anything like it before that I can remember. Like, in the older rape fantasy romances I know about, the rape was acknowledged as rape. That doesn't seem to happen in these new books, which I think takes them to an entirely different level.

[chocolatepot]

I thought you were going to talk about cats sucking out breath.

I have no idea to your questions. I'd say it's novelty, but romance novels are usually fairly decent at depicting female sexuality as a thing. Maybe the commonality here is that there are a lot of women (including these authors) who don't read romance novels because they think they're "dirty" and therefore have no idea what they're doing?

[lliira]

They definitely have no idea what they're doing. What's weird to me is that three separate incompetencies could all have exactly the same really weird quirks. I feel like there must be some part of society that I'm unaware of for all these women to think breath is a turn-on, and to write like a woman who's aroused has no control over anything and can't think of anything but her arousal. At least LKH calls it arousal in so many words, unlike the other two.