Books and a tiny rant!
I am the lucky winner of a copy of Strip Mauled, courtesy of jimhines! Shiny. Jim Hines, as you may remember, Bob, is the author of The Stepsister Scheme, and writes awesome things about domestic violence and violence against women like this recent post about the gang rape in California.
So anyway, he recently recommended a few books, and three out of the four had headless book covers. (No, not those headless book covers, different, new ones.
And here comes the rant.
These covers are, almost invariably, targeted at women. For instance, check out the covers to David Gemmel's popular Legend; Amazon has three covers there, and lo, they all have bodies and heads! But these female-protagonist aimed-at-women books usually don't do this. Why, you ask?
Because they want you, the reader, to put your head on the heroine's body. There's something very "I am America, and so can you!" about these books. You, the reader, will clearly be less likely to identify with a heroine who doesn't look like you, so we'll be sure that we won't distract anyone with those icky facial features. (Notice, too, that the bodies of these faceless women are generally clearly white; I worry a bit that the star of Bitter Night has anemia.)
Romance novels don't generally do this, but I think it's a factor of how the sf/fantasy industry differs from romance, and how sf/fantasy may be viewed as more 'intimidating' to female readers than the comfortable romance genre.
Now, the headless cover, in and of itself, is not entirely bad. It spares the reader having to complain about how the person on the cover doesn't look a darn bit like how he/she is described in the book, as long as hair color and body type match well enough, and I think there are places where you do want to say "I am America, and so can you!" But the sheer frequency of these covers is galling, as is the fact that this almost never happens to the male protagonists, unless of course it's a romance-y book aimed at women.
Us girls are just confused by faces, guise. They're scary.
Ugh.
So anyway, he recently recommended a few books, and three out of the four had headless book covers. (No, not those headless book covers, different, new ones.
And here comes the rant.
These covers are, almost invariably, targeted at women. For instance, check out the covers to David Gemmel's popular Legend; Amazon has three covers there, and lo, they all have bodies and heads! But these female-protagonist aimed-at-women books usually don't do this. Why, you ask?
Because they want you, the reader, to put your head on the heroine's body. There's something very "I am America, and so can you!" about these books. You, the reader, will clearly be less likely to identify with a heroine who doesn't look like you, so we'll be sure that we won't distract anyone with those icky facial features. (Notice, too, that the bodies of these faceless women are generally clearly white; I worry a bit that the star of Bitter Night has anemia.)
Romance novels don't generally do this, but I think it's a factor of how the sf/fantasy industry differs from romance, and how sf/fantasy may be viewed as more 'intimidating' to female readers than the comfortable romance genre.
Now, the headless cover, in and of itself, is not entirely bad. It spares the reader having to complain about how the person on the cover doesn't look a darn bit like how he/she is described in the book, as long as hair color and body type match well enough, and I think there are places where you do want to say "I am America, and so can you!" But the sheer frequency of these covers is galling, as is the fact that this almost never happens to the male protagonists, unless of course it's a romance-y book aimed at women.
Us girls are just confused by faces, guise. They're scary.
Ugh.