Deborah Cooke: Author

Are romance novels pornography?
Are the sex scenes in romance novels pornographic?

I heard the p-word again recently, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. I never engage with other people over the p-word, and today we’re going to talk about why.

My main reason is that the p-word carries a tremendous emotional charge. It’s a provocative word – if you’ll forgive the choice of adjective – intended to get a response from the writer. It’s often tossed into a query to provoke the writer, perhaps to annoy the writer into saying more than he or she should. Why would it irk someone?

Let’s have a peek at Websters, where we’ll find this definition:

pornography: obscene literature, art or photography, esp. that having little or no artistic merit.

Ouch! It’s pretty astonishing that someone would even say that word directly to a writer in relation to his or her work or genre of work, but there you go. It happens. It happens pretty regularly when you write romance.

Just to be absolutely clear about our terms, let’s see what Websters has to say about the adjective obscene:

1. offensive to modesty or decency; indecent; lewd. 2. causing, or to intending to cause, sexual excitement or lust. 3. abominable; disgusting; repulsive.

The other thing about the p-word is that the dictionary definition isn’t the full story. Pornography is “bad”, according to Websters, but what precisely makes it “bad”? What distinguishes it as undesirable? If we work with “obscene” and the definition of it intending to incite desire, shampoo commercials could be considered obscene. Certainly movie trailers could be. It can’t just be the quality of the work – we could just call that “poor work”, or “work of little artistic merit”. Why would we need another word? Pornography refers to work that is sexually explicit, but not all work that is so. Erotica is sexually explicit yet distinct from pornography. How?

For many people – myself included – pornography is distinct from erotica in that pornography is exploitative of women. Pornography objectifies women and often denigrates women. In contrast, erotica – which is also sexually explicit – explores women’s sexuality, often from their own perspective. Erotica is a positive portrayal of women and their relationships with their own desire and bodies. Erotic romance is another step along that continuum, telling of a romantic relationship with sexually explicit scenes.

While I don’t write erotica or erotic romance – never have, never will – this distinction means that romance can never be pornographic or pornography. The two are mutually exclusive, pornography objectifying women and romance celebrating women. The quality of the work is another variable altogether.

Does the p-word needle me? You betcha. It would be lovely to have a snappy comeback, but I can never think of one in time. Instead, I usually ignore the p-word because an argument about semantics is one that is easily lost.

But now you know why.

What do you think about the p-word, erotica and romance?