Women, Sex and Pornography

There is a bit about Mills & Boon romances in chapter 8, "The Genuine Pornography of Women" and chapter 13 is titled "Caution - Bodice-Rippers at Work." The quotes below are from a Penguin edition so the pagination may be different from in the original.

Mills and Boon romances illustrate the fact that women can do without sex if love is present in big helpings but prefer sex, if it is present, to take place in the context of a loving relationship. (92)

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Mills and Boon romances have a vast international distribution so their appeal must transcend cultural differences. Monogamous marriage is the goal, with carnal sexuality placed in a richly emotional context. Female sexuality is aroused by touch; it is not self-generating and never impersonal. The impressionistic evidence from romantic literature reinforces research into male/female differences in attitudes to impersonal sex and it strengthens the claim that women are more turned on by reading than by looking. (94)

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A new kind of romantic fiction for women - sex plus violence - has emerged from the so-called permissive revolution. The genre is nicknamed 'Sweet Savagery', after Rosemary Rogers' epic Sweet Savage Love, although it was not the first book in the new style. The accolade for this seems to belong to Kathleen Woodiwiss. (137)

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Sweet Savagery [...] shows that many women readers are not confronting the problem of what female sexuality might be or should be. They know that intuitively. They are escaping into a fantasy world in which their ideal is already realised. (137-138)

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Rape seems to ameliorate the tension arising from confused messages about female sexuality. Primal anxieties are not easily soothed. Society has belatedly given women permission to enjoy their sexuality but, for many women, this permission is not enough to overcome primal guilt. One way of achieving pleasure without incurring guilt is to be raped or otherwise forced into coitus. Sweet Savagery makes sex sound a lot easier than the feminist novels paint it. (140)

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Sweet Savagery is a clear example of the genuine pornography of women. It thus fulfils a very simple function of providing titillation and escape. These novels seem to cater for the better educated woman with some tertiary training and perhaps more exotic aspirations than the Mills and Boon clientele, who are mainly women with fewer years of education and lack-lustre jobs such as clerical work and nursing. Sweet Savagery escapes into a colourful and improbable past but Mills and Boon romances escape into a world that is quite congruent with the readers' own world. (145)

[Typing this out in the middle of a pandemic, I can't let go the comment about nursing. It's extremely belittling.]