Soft-core pornography, specifically designed for women who would not frequent 42nd Street for any purpose, nor even attend movies regularly, is flourishing. One subset of soft porn, the Harlequin Romances, particularly demands attention. Their rise to popularity has been phenomenal. [...] The timing of the Harlequins' prodigious success has coincided exactly with the appearance and spread of the women's movement, and much of its increasingly anti-feminist content reflects this symbiotic relationship. A Harlequin heroine gives up a job more easily than her maidenhead; better yet, she abandons them simultaneously. [...] Harlequins focus on one aspect of female experience, courtship: not courtship in the Jane Austen style with its intricate processes of choice, but coupling in the wary primitive modes of animal mating. [...] The Harlequins last their stipulated 180-odd pages because the main protagonists are locked in a duel of sexual stupidity. Both are emotional illiterates. He is usually too angry, she too scared, to say anything honest about how they feel. (26)