So my friend Lynsey wrote a post a while ago that I’ve been
thinking about a lot. The essence is: Do women get off to the sex scenes in romance novels like they
would to porn?
My immediate response was no way. Then: well,
actually, sort of.
For me, at least, it’s complicated. I
can’t answer for every reader’s relationship to the sex in these books, but I
can talk about my own.
I discovered romance when I was fourteen, and I’ve adored it
ever since. I can still vividly remember how I felt reading my favorite
stories. How strongly I identified with the heroines and fell for the heroes.
How I thrilled to their first meeting, to the give and take of their courtship,
to the drama of their arguments. How I ached
to see them come together, and how the writers brought the couples so close—only
to tear them apart.
After all that—the emotional roller coaster ride that I went
through with my favorite novels—the first sex scenes were sometimes
overwhelming to me. Sometimes I had to stop reading and shut my eyes for a
second, just to deal with it. I would read those scenes over and over, under
the covers with my flashlight so my parents wouldn’t know I was up late.
Sex scenes in romance novels can still be an intense
experience for me if I’m reading a book I really love. But what it isn’t, for
me at least, is a physical experience.
The satisfaction I feel is deeply emotional.
That said, I do see parallels between porn and romance. Both
are fantasies. With both porn and
romance, sometimes those fantasies are problematic. Sometimes what works for
you in both is something you know you don’t want in real life—I’ve written
before about my preference for dark, scary heroes in romance, and why I
wouldn’t want to actually date a guy like that. One hazard of being a fan of both porn and romance is that sometimes it's a little embarrassing to
admit which subgenres of each really do it for you. Both can be guilty
pleasures, and your fantasies in both may not always toe the appropriate lines of political correctness. For many people, both seem to tap into a part of the brain that wants what it wants, appropriateness be damned.
But the fantasy in romance is only tangentally about the
sex. In fact, some romance authors don’t give detailed sex scenes at
all. Whether explicit or not, the sex is the payoff—the intense emotional release the reader craves
after the tease of two people clearly absolutely crazy about each other who
come so close to getting together—but don’t. And don’t. And don’t—until they
do, in an explosion of passion that’s (hopefully) as epic as we imagined it
would be.
In my experience, porn is not about the story. Sometimes there is one, but usually it’s not very developed. And that’s fine, because I think most people
don’t come to porn for the story. They come for the sex. I don't know very much about erotica, but from what I've read it seems a closer relative to porn than romance; although story might be a little more emphasized in
this genre, it’s still mainly there to set up the sex.
Romance is all about the relationship. I come to romance to
read about a love that’s intense and passionate in a way that it’s
unrealistic to expect my real-life relationships to be. In real life, lasting
love often involves a trade-off between passion and stability. Romance lets me
live, for a while, in a world where I can have both in one person, and I don’t
have to compromise. That’s a fantasy, I know—but one that gets to me every time.
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