Romance novels have always been sneered at, while the new vogue for disparaging various sexy, successful books as ‘mommy porn’ always makes me want to stab things — not necessarily in defense of the books themselves, but in outrage at the need to establish adult female desire, and particularly the desires of mothers, as being somehow comic, diminutive, novel. It’s a species of sexual condescension — oh, you’re 40, female and fond of orgasms? how quaint! (or how disgusting, depending on the level of misogyny involved) — that’s so entrenched we’ve almost ceased to recognize it as such. But once you stop to contrast Internet and magazine porn with the sex scenes of romance novels — or, as we might cautiously venture, to contrast male-oriented porn with female-oriented porn — there’s a single, massively significant difference between the two forms above and beyond the obvious: The presence of actual, mutual desire in the female-oriented media.
The whole article is interesting, but this particularly caught my eye.
