Sexual Consent

Here's part of the abstract:

This book presents key strands of feminist thought on the subject of sexual consent from across academic and activist communities and covers the history of research on consent in such fields as psychology and feminist legal studies. It discusses how sexual consent is negotiated in practice, from “No means no” to “Yes means yes,” and describes what factors might limit individual agency in such negotiations. It examines how popular culture, including pornography, romance fiction, and sex advice manuals, shapes our ideas of consent; explores the communities at the forefront of consent activism; and considers what meaningful social change in this area might look like. Going beyond the conventional cisgender, heterosexual norm, the book lists additional resources for those seeking to improve their practice of consent, survivors of sexual violence, and readers who want to understand contemporary debates on this issue in more depth.

There is a section on romance in the chapter on Culture and Consent (pages 108-112). This ends with the following paragraph:

In fact, consent has become an increasingly hot topic among romance readers and writers, especially following the proliferation of smaller independent romance and erotica publishers enabled in part by the lower costs of publishing ebooks. Authors seek to explicitly depict consent negotiation in their sex scenes, but also to examine unequal power dynamics in relationships and the impact those may have on consent. For a generation of authors who may have grown up reading bodice rippers, this is in part a reaction to that, but also a way to respond to an ongoing conversation in their community, meet reader demands, and move the genre forward. In this way, romance novels and the conversations they spark may actually help rewrite some of our dominant sexual scripts, rather than simply reproducing the tired tropes of rape culture. Of course, not all romance novels do this well, or at all, but there is certainly a section of the community—both readers and writers—that cares deeply about consent and that seeks to redress some of the issues the genre has historically been plagued by. (112)