So I’ll be honest I started reading erotica when I was 12, thanks wattpad. Obviously I had no business doing that. However none that I’m older I’m able to recognize that a lot of romance books today are only popular because of the sex in them and not the plot. The plots are absolutely horrible. For example I once saw a dark romance book in which the mmc slaughtered the family of the fmc yet he smiled at her and asked if she was OK and of course she fell for him. Everyone in the comments was just swooning over it too.
It’s genuinely concerning. There’s definitely layers to this but woman should not be finding men who assualt, yell, cheat, or abuse the fmc as romantic. I feel like calling it dark romance is just a disservice to dark romance. There is nothing romancing about someone putting a gun inside your vagina.
I used to live reading romance books. But I prefer to read manwhas and romance Mangas now. Or I’ll just read non-fiction.
This hasn’t been the case for decades?
I mean, when I served deployments in the military, porn was banned but since the majority of care packages sent via MWR (Morale, Welfare, Recreation) were housewives “donating” the old romance novels, it was the most porn we could legally get. There were so many romance novels sent, I always got super excited when actual fantasy and sci-fi books made it. Even the shitty ones. I did find some good romance novels too but … there were just so many to dig through. I always pointed out to my buddies that if they wanted legal porn, they had plenty to choose from. It just didn’t have pictures.
I read a lot of romance and have since I was a kid. Yeah, there were authors who preferred the fade to black or flowery words to represent s*x but there have always been plenty who go full smut.