Romance Fiction: Porn for Women?

Publication year
1988
Pages
101-109
Comment

Porn, I suggest, is the representation of the eroticisation of relations of power between the sexes. In the overwhelming majority of cases what is depicted in films and magazines is women as a commodity for male consumption. The woman, like the slave in Hegel's master-slave dialectic, is represented as wanting nothing so much as to satisfy the desires of the man who gazes at her. [...] Mainstream romance fiction, I would argue, is a form of pornography. It is porn in precisely the same sense as Penthouse and Mayfair, except that it is written from the woman's point of view. There is plenty of evidence that the romances are erotic. (103)