What’s Underneath
I stumbled across Lara Rose’s blog entry about a Blaze she recently read. First, I have no idea what book this is or who the author is. Her comments on the idea of “chick lit, Blaze style!” as to this book were pretty interesting.
On the women-become strong-when-they-wear-sexy-clothes idea she says:
Main heroine wrote a book that’s supposed to empower women. Cool! What a great idea. Changing one’s self for a man, just to impress said man, is always a bad idea. Only all the book did was empower her to dress all slutty and ask for sex when she wanted it. And when she should have worn something slightly conservative for a business dinner, she was all everything’s going wrong! my man wants to change me and I’m letting him. Have I learned nothing? waaaaah. Seriously, if the question is “what have I done for me lately?” It’s not forcing myself into six-inch heels and super tight clothes just because men think it’s sexy. (and that completely goes against the whole doing for me, don’t it? duh.)
This is a popular romance theme. It popped into my head while I was writing one of my novellas for Viva Las Bad Boys! At the start of the novella Jackpot, the heroine is wearing a wedding dress (don’t panic - she’s not a bride or an abandoned bride - she has other reasons unrelated to an actual wedding for wearing the dress). At a later point, the hero (not a groom) gets her out of said wedding dress and sees that she’s wearing sporty cotton underwear (at the time I was picturing underwear Jennifer Love Hewitt wore in a magazine ad I saw). I never thought about going the sexy underwear route. Didn’t work for this heroine or make sense in the context of why she was in the wedding dress. It would have been trite and too romance novelish.
Lara is talking about something slightly different, but it’s all about character and believability, isn’t it? Sometimes what seems the sexiest in one context doesn’t work at all in another.
