What would a teenage boy learn about women from reading romance novels?
I think mostly he would learn that moms read lame stuff, and then maybe be squicked out about his mom (or any mom, somebody’s mom) reading it. Romance novels are, to teenagers, largely the province of housewives and other adults of limited imagination. Teens are label-aware; if he reads Bukowski he’d consider himself above those books, and since the largest province of romance is “historical” (especially the ones you find in the garage; possibly they actually grow there, like mold), I don’t think he’d make much of a connection between the women in the books and any woman he might imagine himself having sex with. Those women wear much shorter skirts and don’t spend as much time on the windswept moors. Holden Caulfield didn’t have MTV or the internet or the Victoria’s Secret catalog; even the most clueless of virgins are far savvier than they were even 20 years ago. Now, pop culture as a whole, and the easy availability of internet porn, might have left him with a proto-asshole attitude
17 is pretty old, and your protagonist sounds too sophisticated to really believe that he’ll learn about women that way. I agree with Lyn Never that this would be more believable in a younger character. I think if he did read those books, he would have to pretend to himself that he had other motives in order to keep his dignity. There’s a teenage character in this novel who reads romance novels to research women. He’s a supernatural creature, though, so he’s more estranged from regular humans than a punk is.
As others have said, it depends on the kind of novel, and when it was published. Old style seventies/eighties bodice rippers had lots of euphemism-laden (think ‘his manhood’ meets ‘her core’) sex (sometimes bordering on rape, hence the ‘ripper’ label), and were both scary and titillating to my teenaged (female) mind. The super old school ‘doctor/nurse’ (as my grandma, a fan, called them) novels from fifties and sixties have little to no sex, but were often about the sweet and good girl seducing the grumpy mean (and rich!) doctor. Modern romance novels are (mostly) less euphemism-laden, and less scary. You might want to check out some of the submission guidelines for various lines (usually posted on the publishers website), or one of the many ‘how to write romance’ books–they’ll spell out what you could expect to find in a modern romance novel, such as: the hero shouldn’t ever have sex with anyone else after he’s met the heroine, what kind of sex is allowed (ie, he can go down on her f
I used to read my aunt’s bodice-rippin’ romance novels as a pre teen…some of them were fascinatingly porny to me. I first learned of cunnilingus through one particular book set in the 17th century that featured a dark and brooding Fabio type hero and his ever suffering, but earnest mistress. One good thing that a young man might take away from reading cheesy romance novels is that fantasy and role playing in a relationship can be pretty awesome.
