To tell you the truth, I’m kind of sick of virgins in romance novels. Orgasmless widows are tiresome too. But to me, virgin widows are the worst. Virgin widows and women who have sex with the hero, break up with him and then remain chaste until he comes back (oftentimes years and years later) are characters that make me want to snarl and gnash my teeth.
It didn’t start out this way. When I first started reading romance novels—and I mean actively seeking them out, instead of turning to my sister’s collection of old-skool romances out of desperation when my book-buying budget ran out—everything was fresh and new. Extremely naïve debs from days gone by I didn’t have a problem with. Girls were a lot more sheltered back then. Eventually, however, I noticed an odd, rather disturbing pattern emerging in almost all the romance novels I encountered, regardless of the period setting: all the women were virgins. If they weren’t virgins, their previous love lives had been unequivocally horrible. You name it: childhood sexual torture, rape, abusive ex-husbands, impotent ex-husbands, lousy boyfriends who couldn’t find a clitoris with a flashlight, a magnifying glass and a couple of bomb-sniffing dogs—the heroines weren’t allowed to come or even so much as cream their panties watching the hot stableboy muck out the stalls before the heroes showed up with their magical Fleshy Sword of Pleasure +10. If the heroines weren’t virgins and had experienced orgasms in the past, it was only because the heroes had generously bestowed them, but once the heroes leave, the poor heroines are left in a holding pattern. Do not pass go, do not find another orgasm, do not collect $200.
(On a related note: I am also bloody sick of traumatic de-flowerings. I am tired of how the heroines go from “bring the morphine drip STAT” agony to eye-rolling ecstasy in 60 seconds. I’m not asking for strict realism in my romance novels, but please, some variety would be nice. Not everyone’s first time involves pain, not all girls have intact hymens, and reading about a virgin heroine whose first time is beyond stellar is much more believable if penetration was merely uncomfortable instead of a sea of stabbing, searing, tearing pain.)
Many romance novel authors seem to turn themselves inside out and stretch all credulity to create physically untouched heroines whose counterparts are, more often than not, immensely slutty men who slide their dicks into anything remotely moist and warm. Not only that, but if there are female villains, they are usually sexually voracious creatures. What does that say about the state of the sexual double-standard, eh? The authors probably don’t mean to reinforce the old Madonna/Whore dichotomy or imply that women who enjoy sex for its own sake are all morally corrupt, but that’s the collective message one could easily come away with after reading a few hundred romance novels. This message is hammered home hardest in the contemporaries featuring the heroine who doesn’t take another lover (or only one or two phenomenally lousy ones) after breaking up with the hero. One Pamela Burford Harlequin Temptation I read some years ago literally got flung against the wall when the divorced heroine admitted she hadn’t slept with anyone else after divorcing the hero, while the hero had had no trouble getting laid.
In short, many romance novels do not allow women to be independent sexual entities, while the men definitely are, and the unfairness is provoking, to say the least. I understand the appeal of an “untouched” heroine, one whose world is only really and truly rocked when the hero comes along. I dig that fantasy. But isn’t part of the fantasy also how the hero’s world is only really and truly rocked when the heroine comes along? So how do romance novel authors achieve this without glutting the market with virgin heroes and legions of heroes whose ex-wives all suffered from vaginismus?
By utilizing the emotional component, of course, and by making the sex that much more explosive because of the heightened emotions. Oftentimes the physical chemistry is portrayed as being out-of-control hot, so hot that the sexually experienced hero is often at a loss. So why don’t more romance authors utilize this method on heroines too, especially in contemporary novels or historical romances with sexually-experienced heroines? I don’t know. Possible reasons probably include laziness, adherence to tradition (whether conscious or unconscious) and the belief that it’s OK for a guy to be the hugest whore in the world but that it’s icky for a girl to have had multiple sexual partners and, God forbid, actually ENJOYED the experience.
However, in the hands of a skilled author, it’s possible to make annoying archetypes like the Orgasmless Widow into believable, sympathetic characters; Loretta Chase, for one, did it twice in Mr. Impossible and Captives of the Night. What makes her Orgasmless Widows interesting, however, is how both of them enjoyed the sex but were left unfulfilled, only to have their husbands make what enjoyment they had seem wrong and shameful. This is a much more nuanced take than the army of sexually sadistic and/or impotent hubbies usually inflicted on the average Orgasmless Widow.
I’m not saying I dislike these romance novel conventions enough that I’m going to make a buying decision based on the state of the heroine’s purity. I do reserve the right to relentlessly make fun of these archetypes when I encounter them, and if they’re done poorly, they’re definitely grounds for docking the final grade a point or three. In fact, now that I think about it, I want to propose a standardized scale for rating how good a job authors do when portraying the heroine’s sexual (in)experience. I’m going to call it the “Bitch, Please!” scale, with the unit of measurement being a BP (yes, it’s metric—an extremely exasperating justification for a heroine’s virginity may rate a kiloBP, for example). It’s based on how often the book makes me say out loud or think emphatically “Bitch, please!” when the author explains why Priscindella Prissypants has been married for six years yet doesn’t even know where her vagina is located, much less what to do with her clitoris. For instance, Amanda of The Real Deal gets at least 50 BPs for her unduly stankeriffic bisexual husband and her beyond-rotten childhood, while Holly of Where Dreams Begin rates only 8 or so BPs.
So, think the BIPM will be adding BPs to the International System of Units any time soon?
