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 ›
The Teach-Me-Something trope suggests that men like to share their skills and talents by teaching them to the ladies in their life. One of the best examples of this trope is Failure to Launch: Sarah Jessica Parker helps thirtysomethings who still live… Read More ›
The Makeover is a well-loved trope in rom-coms and chick-lit. Promising the magic of instant personal transformation and potential romance, the lure of lipstick, eyeliner, and other thingamajigs is hard to reject. Today, April goes to work to discover if… Read More ›
