Gender and Book Covers: The Romance Novel Edition

You have to check out this wonderful romance novel cover pose experiment at GenreReviews.  The delightful blogess re-creates romance covers with her husband, and then gender swaps them.

Well, there’s a bit of truth to that. We’ve all seen countless romance novels with bare male chests emblazoned across the cover. Sometimes he has a head, sometimes he’s just abs and a pair of moobs. For bonus points, he’s wearing a shirt, but it’s inexplicably unbuttoned and flapping in the breeze along with his hair.

But you know what? Just as often, the covers feature a woman, her dress half a breath away from falling off her. And the most popular of all are the clinch covers, where you’ve got a couple in outdated clothes clinging to each other in improbable ways. It’s a standard of romance, and in fact is often the first thing people think of when they think of romance novels. And it’s incredibly, incredibly gendered.