Focusing primarily on heterosexuality in the genre, Hannah McCann and Catherine M. Roach argue that popular romance novels center on fulfilling women’s sexual desires and pleasures in sex-positive ways, creating a fantasy space in which to explore the conundrum of women’s sexuality and sexual experiences in a male-dominated world (Chapter 19). Romance novels, they suggest, offer women a “reparative reading” of sexuality that allows them to reformulate sexual and gender ideas, consider the principles and limits of sexual consent, and to celebrate sexual and sensuous pleasures, yet the genre is only beginning to embrace representations of more diverse, non-binary, non-heterosexual identities, and more scholarly analysis of these LGBTQIA novels is needed. (17)
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Popular romance fiction is about sex, even when it isn’t. Sexual pleasure—and, most often, women’s sexual pleasure—is a fundamental and telling concern of the genre.
While not all romance novels involve sex explicitly, sexuality plays a key role in romance, even if merely to function implicitly as an event on the future horizon. As the historical romance author Anne Gracie argues, sex need not be the prime purpose of romance relationship or storytelling but it is always part of the resolution of romance fiction, insofar as “part of the Happy Ever After promise is the promise of fabulous sex” (in Fletcher 15). Sexual satisfaction is inherent to the appeal of the genre for its mainly female readership. Even in m/m romance stories, where the lovers are men, these women fans get to enjoy stories of sexual desire and fulfillment. As Candice Proctor describes, in the early 2000s, when some romance writers attempted to gain greater mainstream credibility by removing sex scenes from their works, there was an angry backlash from fans (17). Whether represented explicitly, metaphorically, or through mere discreet allusion, sex is an integral feature of the romance genre. (411)
From the introduction to the volume:
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