As texts of desire they provide women with a means to claim their right to pleasure; at the same time, that discursive conquest of pleasure is secretive, masked by the history of romances as a collection of somewhat fanciful but chaste love stories, disguised by the very marginality of the romance as women's reading and, finally, buried in pages and pages of story - of other text - as a kind of camouflage. It is not entirely easy to find sex scenes in romance novels; they have to be read in their entirety before they yield their erotic content. (80)
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Females melt and dissolve in response to males' heated actions and words. Unlike fire, then, watery passion is more often gendered passion, a specifically female sexual response to male pleasuring. (89)
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In the world of romance, men are consumed by passion and in turn consume women. Women are consumed by men and passion and don't - metaphorically at least - consume a thing. This may reflect an ambivalence about women eating, as well as a distaste for men being likened to passive objects such as food. (92)
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