there are a couple of so-called rules that exist in romance novels, all of which can be broken. But there are some things that I suspect looked like rules ten or twenty years ago, but which we might scratch our heads about now, or even roll our eyes when the execution is too ridiculous.

For instance, I’m suspecting it used to be a rule that the girl had to be a virgin. Unless she was a widow, and then–MAYBE–fifty percent chance, she was a virgin. It also used to be a rule, I think, that the girl had to resist the idea of sex as much as the man pursued it with single-minded zeal. But I think the new generation of readers is breaking those rules to bits. I don’t have a problem with sex, and I don’t have a problem with virgins, but I have to roll my eyes at the convolutions that used to crop up to keep those rules inviolate.
Now I’m beginning to wonder whether there’s another romance trope that’s going by the wayside. You know what I’m talking about: the hero and heroine hate each other on the surface; they’ve spent well over a hundred pages fighting; but that rage boils up into physical attraction and then they can’t keep their hands off each other (or he kisses her to punish her or prove his dominance) and next thing you know, he’s lifting her skirts and bam–he plunges inside and she has the first orgasm of her life. Even though we’re all reading it and thinking–no WAY. If she were that sensitive, wouldn’t she have noticed it before when she touched herself? And who is that sensitive? Seconds? Really? They were just yelling at each other half a minute ago! There’s only one conclusion: The hero has a magic schlong. Everywhere it touches, orgasms burst forth. (This is not to be confused with the other romance trope, the glittery hooha, which I suspect is going nowhere).

So I was thinking about the last two debuts that I read (see previous post), and I realized that although both books had a sensuality level that was burning hot, neither one featured a hero with a magic schlong. Sex–good sex–takes work and an emotional connection. The sex isn’t always good in both those books, and that fact makes both books stronger. In a way, that made the sex that was good even hotter, because it felt more real. And they aren’t the only ones–Eloisa James writes heroines who don’t always have orgasms with their heroes, and I’m sure she’s not alone.

So what do you think? Trend or aberration? Is the magic schlong going by the wayside? How do you feel about magic schlongs–in your fiction reading and writing, of course; we’ll leave the TMI for Tessa on Tuesday.

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