Sexual Agency, Safe Sex, and Consent Negotiations in Erotic Romance Novels

Publication year
2019
Journal
European Journal of Social Sciences
Volume
2.2
Pages
92-96
Comment

First the pdf was available, but the article wasn't listed on the journal's pages and another article was given as occupying these pages in this volume. Now the whole journal seems to have vanished. I did find a journal with the same name, but its 2019 was made up of part of volume 57 and all of volume 58, so I'm assuming it's a different journal.

Unfortunately the pdf wasn't saved at the Internet Archive. I've left the link just because it did exist and I want to acknowledge that. The Semantic Scholar link provides a table that was in the paper.

However, I have found "Sexual Agency, Safe Sex, and Consent Negotiations in Erotic Romance Novels" by Laura M. Moore in the Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Social Sciences (Lisbon, 17-18 May 2019), pages 356-360. The wording is (as far as I can tell, and I did read pretty carefully) identical, as is the layout (so each line of text appears identical), including typos.

This makes me wonder if perhaps the journal withdrew the article because of it having been published in the Proceedings, or because it was about to be published in the Proceedings. I noticed that the font used for both is identical, and so is the layout, except for a slightly different position in the linebreaks. This made me wonder if the journal and the Proceedings were created by the same organisation.

Here's the abstract:

Sexual script theory asserts sexual values and norms are learned through culturally available messaging. A primary site for that messaging is through erotic romance novels written by, and generally for, women. Despite its mass popularity and potential influence on sexual scripts, the social sciences have rarely examined this genre for key themes and messaging. Utilizing content analysis methods, this exploratory research examines erotic contemporary romance novels for themes of sexual agency, safe sex practices and consent. Preliminary analysis of 68 scenes from across 20 novels reveal only half model clear safe-sex practices, but successful consent negotiations are present in all scenes with verbal consent scripts found in approximately 90 percent of the exchanges. These findings are compared to earlier studies and followed brief discussion of future research opportunities.