Virtuosity

Subject: Established Virtue Standards for Romance Heroines
Date: 5/22/2008 1:04:40 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: OldRomanceGirlsClub@netzero.com
To: Non-Club Members

It has come to our attention that you newly-published romance authors out there are ignoring the respectable virtue standards we have established for novel heroines. To address this horrific situation and protect the purity of our beloved genre, we have prepared the following guideline to help you appropriately craft the right sort of heroine in the future.

1. Body Features: The heroine must never like her bosums, which should be on the small side, or so large that she must wear baggy shirts and walk around hunching her shoulders to disguise them. However, whatever size, shape or condition they are in, they must be considered beautiful and perfect by the hero. Also, please stop calling them breasts and all those other graphic terms in your stories. Nice girls do not use these words. As for that place below the waist that we are too ladylike to mention, please have it be a complete mystery to the heroine, and only refer to it in the most nonspecific or flower-like terms whenever the hero, well, we're too ladylike to talk about that, either.

2. Employment: Virtuous heroines have decent nine-to-five jobs as secretaries, librarians, or office managers; occasionally a heroine may work shifts if she is something like a hospice nurse or a veternarian's assistant. However, the heroine must be prepared to abandon her employment as soon as she marries the hero, so please stop educating your heroines so much and giving them these complicated career jobs better suited to the hero.

3. Intimate Experience: We urge you to refrain from giving your heroine any intimate experience. However, if she has fallen from grace in the past with any man other than the hero, her experience should be depicted as painful, brief, and/or utterly disappointing, and take place during the heroine's freshman year in college. Better yet, give the heroine some form of drug- or alcohol-induced amnesia about her first time, have her believe that she is no longer a virgin, then reveal that she is still intact the first time the hero brings her to the full flower of her womanhood. Also, please stop calling intimacy "sex" or, worse, the eff word, and only refer to it as "making love."

4. Language: The saltiest word the heroine should ever use is "damn", but never in conjunction with "God." All other outbursts and swears should be along the lines of "Oh, fudge!" or "Sugar!" or something similarly sweet. No heroine in romance should EVER use the eff word, the cee word, or that other cee word.

5. Lesbian or Gay Secondary Characters: Acceptable lesbian or gay characters with whom your heroine is very distantly acquainted with must be portrayed as interesting boutique owners, quirky co-workers, or single next-door neighbors who are always bringing her the gourmet food they cook too much of. The lesbian or gay character should constantly joke about his/her sexual orientation but must never actually be seen in the presence of their bedpal of the moment. Nor should any relationship your lesbian or gay characters have be regarded as emotionally valid, long-lasting, loving, tender, etc. The heroine herself will never ever ever even think about having sex with another woman.

6. Nearsightedness: Somehow you did not get the memo about how a truly virtuous heroine must wear glasses to see, and the glasses should disguise how beautiful her eyes are until the moment the hero gently removes them prior to their first kiss. Please stop giving your heroines perfect vision and send them to LensCrafters at the first available opportunity.

7. Oral Ministrations: We urge you to refrain from using this specific act in any more of your books. It is disgusting, and none of us do it. If for whatever reason you must have your heroine do it for the hero, please remember that she must 1) be doing it for the first time in her life, 2) do it voluntarily while the hero repeatedly protests that she shouldn't, 3) perform the act only as proof of the depth of her love, and 3) be clumsy and amateurish at it while simultaneously giving the hero more pleasure than he has ever experienced in his life. Also, please don't refer to the act itself in explicit or anatomically correct terms, but have the heroine "pleasure him" with "her soft, trembling lips."

8. Protection: Although we do advocate you continue using safe sex in your novels, the heroine must never carry condoms in her purse or keep them in her house. It's best that she's not familiar with this form of protection at all. If the heroine does buy condoms, it must be for the first time in her life, and she should always purchase the economy-size box, preferably in stupid colors, and be in some way humiliated during the shopping experience. The heroine should never personally place a condom on the hero, and she should NEVER think about putting it on him while holding it in her mouth. Also, please stop calling them rubbers or condoms in the story, as this is vulgar, and only refer to them in the story as a "foil packet" the hero removes from his pocket.

9. Relationships, Serious: All of the heroine's former serious love relationships must have failed utterly. Any former marriage must have been to an older, unpleasant man who couldn't consummate it due to an unspecified but severe medical condition (but who will act as if he did as part of his revenge on his prodigal son, whom the heroine actually loves) or to a handsome but very young high school sweetheart who is tragically killed either on the day of the wedding or before the marriage can be consummated. Remember, the hero must be the heroine's ultimate (and hopefully only) lover.

10. Your Romance Ending: A perfectly virtuous romance heroine is only interested in living happily ever after, so please have her immediately accept the hero's offer of marriage, which should be made at some point during the last five pages of the novel. None of this living in sin or undeclared relationship portrayals, please. Also, if you do not provide a happy ending, we will hunt you down and slap the snot out of you at the next RT.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Working together, we can bring romance back to the standards set for us by our mothers and grandmothers. We look forward to reading the virtuous heroines that we know you will write now.