You can't make this shit up
...oh wait, someone just did. Something new from Urban Books. Another sure-fire bestseller for Bobavey's growing library of modern classics.
by White Chocolate
As my coworker E said, "Jesus Christ! What a hook!"Sex in the Hood 2 is an inner-city version of My Fair Lady. A beautiful, pampered biracial girl is thrown into poverty when her wealthy white father dies. Forced to live with her black grandmother in one of Detroit's toughest neighborhoods, Victoria is lost until Duke Johnson takes interest in her. To Duke, Victoria is the most beautiful woman in the world, and he wants her more than any woman he's ever met. The only problem is he's the leader of the most notorious gang in Detroit and everyone is scared of him, especially Victoria's grandmother. But his kind, warm hidden personality is the only thing Victoria can see as she lets Duke take her virtue. Together they begin to rule the mean streets of Detroit.
More "street fiction" from Urban Books.
Comments
i have to think that someone has to be enjoying some serious recreational drugs to be able to produce this stuff. White Chocolate? "inner-city version of My Fair Lady"?? someone help me.
It sounds more like it's based on one of Shakespeare's tragedies, really.
*deep breathes*
Can someone help me find my chi? I seem to have misplaced it.
And someone posted on CuteOverload the other day that romance fiction isn't trash because, after all, it does billions of dollars in sales every year...
*unless it would be really bad for you. in which case just go have a nice bubble bath.
But the thing that makes me saddest, it that most of this crap comes from writers of color. And further more...they think it's "creativity."
Here's my thing...
I know at least...not kidding you...at least fifteen writers of color, writing fiction, deeply imaginative, creative and thought provoking fiction. They are rejected repeatedly and told:
1. There is no market for what you're writing
2. Our research indicates that the African-American readership tends to gravitate towards stories with **insert rascist, ignorant, social nonsensical gibberish here**
I don't know who makes me crazier. The small minded, idiots that right this stuff and capitalize on dangerous stereotypes encouraging this small minded crap as "literature"...OR...the publishers who want to tell me as a writer and reader...that because I am African American, THIS is the shit I want to read.
...And this is the stuff they choose to publish. Instead of getting angry about it and demanding more...we call it "ours."
It's bullshit.
*whew...fans face* Thank you. I needed that.
"Why isn't the protagonist more overtly Asian?"
"We need the Asian characters to be described in more ethnic terms. Talk about what they look like, e.g. their slanted eyes."
"Where are the Asian themes? I.e., first and second generation immigrant conflict? Difficulties in assimilation?"
"No one will want to read this. The Asian characters are portrayed just like everyone else."
Think I'm making this shit up? Nope.
I find it difficult to separate this from all the hundreds of other media enterprises that glorify/glamorize racism, drugs, brutality,and violence. They just want to sell it to a market segment instead of the market at large and it's disgusting because they've targeted self-hate as their selling point. And still, people buy it without even knowing why.
The sadder thing is how deliberately it's done, in any cases.
Especially when I look at people who look back at me and go..."it's just a story."
I haven't read any romance novels about people of color But you know what? Romances about white people are just as trashy. They all have a gorgeous, vulnerable woman and a hunky stud who seduces (translation: rapes) her, and they "fall in love" and spend the rest of their lives having hot monkey sex together.
And they live happily ever after.
Amen.
I don't mean to say we can inspect and write about the human condition, and everything that falls within it...but this is irresponsible, lazy and just plain stupid.
Of course, in between sex scenes they'll need to have musical numbers a la West Side Story...
"Victoria....I just met a girl named Victoria...."
I would LOVE to see what Mathilde
would write about this topic....
As I said, I've never read any of them, so I'm not sure what you mean by "blatant self-hatred."
But it seems to me that they all promote women selling themselves to the first comer/highest bidder/anyone who'll take her. Maybe she doesn't come out and say "I have no self-respect" but that's what her actions clearly convey.
AFAIK, no "white" romances deal quite the lethal hand that RPM is seeing in books (and series) like this one. We might struggle with self-hatred as individuals, but we do NOT have to wrestle with the kinds of things she's (rightly) angry about, let alone see them on the big screen, small screen, and in books like this one.
Well, I've read maybe a dozen romance novels total in my life (I don't include Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer in this category), and that was eleven too many. The only one that I liked, and found even somewhat uplifting, was about woman, a wildlife photographer, who had been raped by a "friend" of her father's on a safari, or something where they were doing filming.
Amazingly, she didn't fall for her rapist, and she actually had psychological issues she was dealing with because of the rape. I can't remember who the romantic hero was--another photographer or something--but he was sweet and kind and patient with her, and let her have room to deal with her issues. Basically, he was the anti-trashy-novel romantic hero.
That's the one romance novel that I don't wish I had the hour back that I wasted reading it.