some of the biggest selling novels for women - including [...] The Sheik - contain scenes where the heroine is sexually initiated against her will by a man whom she later realizes she loves. This is not to say that the mass consumption of a story of kidnap and rape means that millions of women secretly desire rape, but to suggest that the romantic bestseller repeats a moment of fantasy where desire is transferred from the woman reader or writer to a male figure that symbolizes inexorable and unstoppable desire. This movement of desire from the woman to the man, and from the white man to the man of color, is especially visible as displacement and disavowal when one considers that most romances, including The Sheik [...] are written by women for women. It is, therefore, not just the heroine who is the product of the writer's fears and desires; the figure of the sheik, the luxurious orientalist mise en scene and the captivity plot can also be seen as places where patriarchally legitimized forms are rearranged, subverted, reenforced, or sidelined by women. The male sheik is both a representation of the kinds of forces of desire and opposition women face in their lives and a representation of Hull's own agency, just as Diana's plight is a way of writing about both female sexual desire and its difficulties. As Radway points out in Reading the Romance, rape goes on to form a recurrent trope in the plot structure of the mass market romance because it absolves the heroine from the responsibility of discovering and directing her desire. (204)