For this Boner, Isabeau guides Morgan through the waters of fated mates, blood scenarios, and the requisite comfort/suffocation of inevitably. What is the difference between fate and destiny? Does the trope of love at first sight still sparkle through the lens of affect theory? Is male “passion” just camouflage for latent male aggression? Bring your own beret for this one y’all and start perfecting those french inhales, this may be our most philosophical Boner to date.
Folie Hamilton thought nothing of corresponding with her husband’s cousin, Lt. Robert Cambourne, deployed across the world in the interests of the East India Company, on behalf of the English Crown. But when love creeps into their epistles, no distance or arrangement is beyond collapse. This week, Morgan and Isabeau swoon over My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale, a tale of passion, conspiracy, and unbalance depicting an England on the brink of turmoil. How should historicals reflect past atrocities? What makes good allyship? What does it mean to stay informed, and how do we enact change? Remember: sexy books can still pose serious questions.
Are we at a point in history where our passions have become our capital? And what are the repercussions, if any, that sometimes it might be totally worth it? For this lil’ Boner, Morgan and Isabeau explore how WebToon is contributing to the romance ecosystem, do a little self reflecting, and politely ask for more WebToon coins PLEASE.
Lucy Muchelney is in a rut. But when she’s commissioned to translate a celebrated astronomy text by the deceased husband of Countess Catherine St. Day, her professional demeanor is eclipsed by desire. This week, Morgan and Isabeau turn their sights to 2019’s Great Big Romance Read The Lady’s Guide To Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite, a dovetail of caste and scholarly love set in post-Napoleonic Regency England. Why the Regency period? What responsibility should the present have in depicting the past? And is our refusal to hold the past accountable inviting a cultural retrograde? Keep your eyes peeled toward the cosmos for this one y’all.
Long before Twilight, and 26 years before Ol’ Abe Stoker had visions of Dracula, there was another drinker lurking in the annals of western lit. This week, Morgan and Isabeau explore the classic gothic vampire novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a prototype for the prolific genre. Set in a shloss in the forests of Styria, Laura, our heroine, describes her lonely childhood through epistles and recounts the arrival of a peculiar stranger, the alluring and abhorrent Carmilla, as if conjured from a dream. But the novel’s languor is underpinned with anxiety as desire mixes with consumption, and questions of Carmilla’s origin prove all too familiar. It’s a sensual nightmare that revels in the repression of the Victorian Age, and may help explain our continued obsession.
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One could say this is a boner about blow jobs. But blow jobs are about so much more than just blow jobs. This is a boner about power. A boner about tropes. A boner dissecting the misnomer of a “right” penis. It’s a boner about what we do with boners, and why what we do with boners does and does not matter.