For many young women, the initial introduction to their sexual awakening came courtesy of romance novels (frequently pilfered from their mom’s not-so-secret stash). Bodice-busters were our versions of Playboy, and served as a formative basis for our sexual fantasies and identities.
While romance novels are given grief and publicly mocked by many forms of popular media (usually written or engineered by men), it’s important to understand why women frequently feel the need to turn to sexualized fiction: because it’s one of the few outlets in which a woman’s pleasure is prioritized.
Recently, romance novelist Andie J. Christopher penned an essay for Cosmopolitan describing how the recent #MeToo movement has forced her to reckon with the reality that the sex she writes about in her novels is far removed from the sexual realities that many women (herself included) experience. In a culture that seems to be shifting priorities in order to emphasize what makes women feel sexually empowered, why is lackluster sex, in which a man’s completion seems to carry greater importance than a woman’s, still so commonplace?
“In this #MeToo era, women are becoming more open about sharing experiences that exemplify how our culture marginalizes the needs and wants of women,” Christopher writes.