Hedging His Bets (Honey and Fur, #1) in SOS: Serious Overload of Series

Jan 26, 2020 Wealie rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1st-of-series, 0-series-read, novella, 0-purchased, 0-kindle, everything-wrong-with-romance, negative-sexual-behaviour, bad-plot, read-in-2020, stereotypical-masculinity

1 measly 🌟 - A travesty of toxic masculinity packaged as ‘alpha’ traits and god awful sexual descriptions. Avoid at all costs

I’ve read a number of cringeworthy sex scenes in my time, but when these authors described the protagonist’s vagina as a hole/sex hole, her anus as hole/illicit hole and labia as sex lips I found it incredibly difficult to keep reading. Only the fact this happened about 80% of the way through and the fact it was a novella convinced me to finish reading, if only to be able 1 measly 🌟 - A travesty of toxic masculinity packaged as ‘alpha’ traits and god awful sexual descriptions. Avoid at all costs

I’ve read a number of cringeworthy sex scenes in my time, but when these authors described the protagonist’s vagina as a hole/sex hole, her anus as hole/illicit hole and labia as sex lips I found it incredibly difficult to keep reading. Only the fact this happened about 80% of the way through and the fact it was a novella convinced me to finish reading, if only to be able to write this review.

As to how the male protagonist - a massive alpha douche werehedgehog who transformed into a cute pygmy hedgehog (and isn’t that an oxymoron) treated his so called mate - cue migraine inducing eye rolling. First he beats any man that shows any attention to her in her own establishment, breaking furniture and causing her lots of headaches. He apparently dates skinny girls while she denies him access to her because that way he won’t fantasise about her while he’s with them, oblivious to how this undermines her sense of self-worth, which of course is wrapped up in her looks and his regard 🙄. God forbid he, I don’t know, show his worth by courting her, getting to know her properly and keeping his junk in his trunk until he has his mate! Instead he constantly lies, stalks her, watches her in compromising positions without her knowledge and deceives her throughout the entire novella, never taking the time to truly understand his mate or doing anything other than get in her pants and of course by the end of the novella he gets his way and doesn’t pay in any appreciable way for his toxic masculinity.

Really, I’m getting fed up with a lot of authors wrapping toxic masculinity up as ‘alpha’ tendencies and then having their supposedly strong female protagonists capitulate to them without them accepting any consequences for their behaviours. Is it so hard to write strong male characters without falling on negative cliches? In principal I don’t have a problem with authors writing character who show toxic masculine behaviours when they are shown to learn and grow as a result of interaction with a female who challenges them to be better. ...more

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