Princess Peach—a well-known Princess-in-Pink—is not the biggest princess phenom is Taiwan. She takes second place to the Taiwanese Baby-Doll Princess. On day 16 of Romance in Real Life, BwB continues our week-long Distress in This Dress mini-series, and April plays a damsel in distress wearing… Read More ›
The Lady in Red… Popularized in such films as Moulin Rouge, Pretty Woman, Gone with the Wind, and The Matrix, the Red Dress is a cultural sign that clearly announces a woman’s passionate nature. On day 15 of Romance in Real Life, BwB continues our… Read More ›
V-neck sweaters, pencils skirts, black pumps, little red glasses, and glossy up-do’s… We all know the tropes that give working girls such as secretaries, librarians, and teachers their Temptress Twins: the hot secretary, the hot librarian, the hot teacher (original,… Read More ›
From Givenchy to Jimmy Choo, fashion and romance seem to go hand-in-hand. Can you even imagine Audrey Hepburn without her signature black dress or Carrie Bradshaw without her Blahniks and her designer bags? We know that “clothes make the man,” do clothes… Read More ›
From man’s bacon obsession to the Chick-Lit Heroine’s addiction to chocolate and Diet Coke, Romance novels and Rom-Coms have established quite a few food tropes. These tropes don’t just tell us what to eat; they tell us how to eat, too. There… Read More ›
Playing with several tropes at once (the teach-me-something trope, the love-is-not-lost-in-translation trope, the quirky-foreigner-in-an-exotic-land trope), Books with Benefits went out into the bustling city to learn how to speak Chinese. On Day 11, April tries to find men who will… Read More ›
Female wisdom passed down from generation to generation, insists that the key to making a man love you involves two things: looking nice and pretending to like what he likes. In the land where manga is king, Books with Benefits… Read More ›
Between our Cover Me and We’ve Got You Covered series, Books with Benefits has a lot to say about covers. Sadly, we most often talk about how covers are usually pretty horrible–a collection of overused iconography that colors the genre unartistic, mass-produced, pornographic pulp. Some folks… Read More ›
Love letters are the go-to persuasion tool for twitter-pated individuals from age 5 to 85. Though technology has evolved how we make them, it hasn’t changed our need to reach out to those we long for and tell them how… Read More ›
