Giving them ye olde flip test
A couple days ago I was shopping at our local Giant here in Ashburn Village with Adam when he did one of the funny things that toddlers are wont to do. I was pushing him in that behemoth of a kiddie shopping cart which he enjoys greatly. Mike hates them, but I do it because I choose to choose my battles with Adam. As long as the cart keeps moving and he can pretend to drive, he is mostly happy to sit and pretend to drive. When the time came for the dreaded check out, I ended up in the “No Tabloid, No Candy Aisle” which was an unexpected blessing until Adam caught sight of the crappy romance novels all at eye level. Stupidly, I had hoped he’d ignore books that were clearly not for children. I was wrong.
“Book!” he exclaimed and began systematically pulling books off the shelf. Once he had a book in his hand, he did something that looked remarkably familiar to me. He flipped through each book, presumably looking for pictures, and upon finding none save for the man with the swelling, er, muscles and a woman with a heaving bosom on the cover, he would unceremoniously dump it on the floor. This went on for several books and only ceased when I had the cart emptied and pushed him further up to where his little hands could find no more mischief.
What I found most amusing was that in my younger days, although not quite as young as Adam, I too would give romance novels the random page flip test. I was, however, not looking for pictures. I was looking for the naughty passages. If you could flip a book 5 times and not find one single reference to a throbbing whozit or a quivering whatzit, it probably wasn’t worth further examination. Books with semi-pornographic covers almost always passed the flip test and were hilarious to read. Which makes me wonder. Who actually writes this tripe? Why do they write this tripe? Do women who balk at the suggestion that their husbands might enjoy the odd naughty picture, secretly drink a glass of wine and settle down with these novels?
Is there a difference between women worrying about inferiority complexes because men are looking, by and large, at girls slightly over 18 (they swear!) with a bikini wax, a boob job and an air brush and reading a story about a tall, handsome man, with huge rippling muscles, a huge bank account, and who has apparently memorized the Kama Sutra? They’re both fantasies, aren’t they? The only difference is that to flip through a magazine or pull up a website takes a lot less effort than reading that book on the wife’s nightstand. I’m sure if husbands ever did just that, they’d be horrified. Suddenly, Playboy with its silly comics and “interesting articles” and the odd naked girl seems almost puerile next to the latest supermarket romance novel.
I feel it necessary to add that there are no such books on my nightstand.
Currently I am reading “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and The Princes of Ireland”.
Have you seen this? Some of them are pretty funny.
I used to do the flip thing with a collection of these books kept by the mother of one of my friends. It was very amusing. Usually on try 1 we would find something interesting.
I had a friend in college who always seemed to be sitting in the far off, dark corner of the library (near where the office I worked in was located, since the library staff hated the fact that we were allowed to use their space while the Technology building was gutted and rebuilt). She always seemed to be reading small paperback novels.
One day, I asked her what she was reading, and she handed me the book. The first words I read were something along the lines of “his long, throbbing member..”
I then understood why she was always in the far off, dark corner of the library.
I see a lot of ladies on the bus with fabric covers over their small-ish novels. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. Generally not a Bible, I can tell you that much.