What a Fun Study

Okay, so four female scientists walk into a bar. Later, they applied for a grant to find out why no one would buy them a drink...

Well, I don't know that it happened that way, but there are signs in this article in the Telegraph that the female scientists need to interview some males.

It turns out that combining 40% bareness, tight clothing and provocative dancing gets the most guys to approach you. Less clothes than that gets less attention from the guys.

The female scientists jumped to the conclusion that more than 40% bare is a signal for "general availability and future infidelity". I have to snicker at that, because it assumes that men approaching women at a dance club are looking for permanent monogamous relationships rather than "general availability" or - ahem - a dance? Not what I would call a "scientific assumption", given what I remember about club-hopping guys from my younger days.

I would put forward two other hypotheses to be tested - first, that women who cover 60% of their bodies with tight clothes are more selective about presenting their assets than those who let half or more hang out. Second, that the most powerfully attractive thing about a woman is often the part that the man imagines.

Racquel Welch was a sex star for decades without uncovering more than that 40% number. Okay, there were a few swimsuit scenes, but more often she was wearing full scuba gear and the guy only lowered her zipper four inches. She'll always have a perfect body to all her male audience.

This post also relates to writing... Ansen Dibell, in his excellent book Plot (in the Elements of Fiction Writing Series) noted that "[t]he monster you imagine, as a reader, is much more frightening than the monster you see."

Be sure to cover up that 60% or more and let the reader imagine the scariness of the monster, the sexiness of the hottie, the honor of the hero. Of course, make sure you understand and meet your audience's needs and expectations. If you're writing for midgrade, you need to spell things out a little more than for an adult audience.

If you're writing erotica, you spell out other things.

Myths About YA (?)

Over on the Swivet, guest Courtney Summers blogs about some myths about YA.

Honestly, I don't know that these beliefs are common and I don't know that they are totally wrong, either.

For instance, to what degree can you swear in a YA novel? In any novel?

I find swearing, by which I mean the literal depiction of particular swear words, to be intrusive and to negatively affect my reading experience. Sure, most people swear, but most people poop, and most people pick their noses, and that's just to get started, eh? We don't generally show pooping in stories, at least not as much as we actually do, because it's pretty boring and icky. So is swearing.

The question is, what function does it perform in the story? I'm not really talking about an occasional "Damn", I'm talking pervasive f_ing foulmouthedness. Hollywood types think it makes their show "edgy", or gets them the coveted PG-13 rather than the PG the story would deserve without the gratuitous nastiness.

In any case, I'm not sure that anyone believes you can't get away with gratuitous swearing, sex, drugs etc in YA, since clearly there are books that do.

I'm also not sure that you actually can get away with them, since they are so easy to do wrong, and if you do do them wrong, your book will not sell to libraries and will die a sad, lonely death.

My suggestion - write an awesome story, where the characters are so frelling fascinating that the reader won't notice that they aren't shagging each other and vomiting meaningless epithets and imbibing mild organic poisons.

Do that, and don't worry about the myths - you'll become a legend.