THE PLOT FORMULA AND PLAGIARISM IN ROMANCE NOVELS

For some time now I have been relaxing with romance novels...something I would have considered a useless expenditure of time and trivial reading. Now in my senior years, I no longer have to cram professional readings as everyone writes the same stuff but in their own invented language. Even clinical sex manuals are pretty bland.

The plot in romance novels is predictable; they have happy endings; women prove themselves to have value in historic times when they were considered mere chattel; whatever other problems the women face about the men, they are always virile, and considerate lovers to the extremely passionate women.

The men patiently bring their women to sexual climax before reaching their own; premature ejaculation, never mentioned, remains just a medical term in some book, somewhere. The shared sexual experience between them spells a positive prediction for the implied 'and they lived happily ever after'.

Those who write the books must read one another's because they use the same euphemisms rather than anatomical terms. The word penis does not exist...that appendage is lovingly referred to as his 'arousal' and he is always well-endowed. Stroked, it is referred to as his shaft. Usually orgasm is referred to as 'fulfillment'. Those scenes end with the man 'pouring his seed into her'.

Many of the writers must share the same ill-informed mother, teaching them about the wedding night. The women are prepped for great pain, which inevitably happens, in the book. Apparently these writers never studied anatomy. The term hymen has not appeared in the approximately 150 books in the romance category I have read to date. Instead, now named the 'maidenhead' instead of the insignificant tissue it is over the vaginal opening, the romance writers have moved it to the middle of the vaginal canal and cast it out of concrete, judging from the hammering, plunging through which is required to qualify as the woman being 'taken' made 'his' and all those other joining, mating concepts.