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chelsebooks.bsky.social
Chels
@chelsebooks.bsky.social
1.5K followers 200 following 210 posts
Writer, romance book collector, and co-host of the Reformed Rakes podcast.

theloosecravat.substack.com
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chelsebooks.bsky.social
Sanj also wrote about this

baskinsuns.substack.com/p/sex-romanc...
This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this disconnected from bookish community because of some strangely regressive views on sex and sexuality. Last year, after St. Martin’s Press sent out PR boxes containing vibrators and lube to influencers, some of whom were not aware they were on PR lists for the publisher and hadn’t agreed to receive PR, there was a flurry of discussion around the implications of foisting sex toys onto non-consenting adults. The book being promoted was a queer adult romance novel by the very popular queer adult romance novelist Casey McQuiston, and all influencers involved were adults (as far as I know), but social media was still speckled with concern to the effect of: “What if I opened this PR box in front of a child! That’s so inappropriate!” I was, until recently, unaware of the actual shape and design of the vibrator in question, but without much information or context besides the meta-conversation about how inappropriate it was, the visual in my head grew bigger and wilder by the day. I was expecting a Hitachi wand with “jorkin my penits” engraved on the side. What I discovered was a dark green Beauty Blender in a tasteful brown cardboard case labeled “personal massager,” from Maude, the lifestyle brand. The lube was in a small, dark bottle labeled “organic personal lubricant.” I’d walked past the vibrator no fewer than 200 times when I walked into the C-Town at the end of my street when I lived in Brooklyn, shelved prominently just above the flowers. It is prominently, unavoidably visible to all customers, located in the entryway. The first time I squinted at it while retrieving a grocery cart, I thought it was a tulip bulb. Far be it from me to defend a publisher from criticism. SMP merits much critique (see the footnotes), and it is absolutely annoying or frustrating to receive mail you haven’t agreed to receive. It isn’t my ministry to tell people not to be angry about something. I do, however, find it hard to lend credence to the idea that the existence of this PR box constitutes material harm, and think that it behooves us not to construct hypothetical harm to defend our beliefs. When people started inventing scenarios of influencers opening PR packages in front of abusive intimate partners and being harmed, then attributing the fault of that imaginary, nonspecific harm to a marketing professional and not, say, the intimate partner, all I could think was that somewhere, we’d lost the plot badly. Also, the tenuous or wholly invented linkage of queer adult sex and sexuality (fictional or real) to harm against children is a tale as old as homophobia itself, and one that I watched supposed “allies” skate right past in their crusade.
June 2, 2025 at 9:57 AM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
Ruth Scurr: "Robespierre looked like a cat"

Me: oh damn. that's true
May 28, 2025 at 9:34 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
obviously don't use gen AI, especially for something this stupid. but also speaking for myself part of the appeal of the Jacobin club is that all of the prominent members had Faces of Weird Proportion
May 28, 2025 at 9:33 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
Worst case scenario if you leave it alone: someone gets away with grifting as a not super profitable identity

Worst case scenario if you don't: hostile environment for closeted trans people
May 22, 2025 at 5:01 PM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
like if you HAD to award him that year he was also nominated for Glengarry Glen Ross???

I may never sleep again
February 26, 2025 at 12:17 AM
chelsebooks.bsky.social
this is mostly a plea for more interesting titles
February 21, 2025 at 4:49 PM