Romance Doesn't Mean Sex

I read recently that most women still love to read romance. However, the genre today has become much broader. Gone are the days when women devoured the Barbara Cartland model: virgins meeting alpha males, conflict and then uniting with a vow of marriage. Now it's more like sexually experienced woman meets man, they have sex quite early on and then go at it like rabbits for the rest of the novel.

Nobody wants to return to the pastel pink days of Ms Cartland and her counterparts because these stories had unrealistic plots and, usually, the characters were about as human as something from Madame Tussauds.

However, I don't like today's model either. First, there's nothing more boring to me than to have to plough through scene after scene of explicit sex. I'm an intelligent woman and intelligent women just want to get on with the bloody story, dammit! Second, knowing what the characters are doing behind closed doors takes away the reader's right to use her imagination. Had we women been exposed to what Rhett did to Scarlett, we would have forfeited the use of that delicious inner widget, (which we all have) and not figured out for ourselves how good it was.

In literature, the pen is the mighty medium of words, so it follows that the imagination has to be the medium of sexual pleasure. That is, of course, unless you're getting it for real!