I came across an article demonizing romance novels for the negative effect that the books have on women’s sexual health. The article used statistics from another article originally published in the British Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care. 

Here are the two major criticsms about romance novels from the article:

The first criticism was that the female protagonists in romance novels never insisted on birth control method or condoms for sex. In fact, in as many as 11% of the sex scenes in romance novels where condoms were mentioned, the women decided that condoms would decrease the amount of intimacy for the sexual encounter. Instead, the throbbing hot members of the men entered the women in the romance novels unsheathed.

The reasons for this criticism are obvious; the researcher wrote that many women were getting their sex education from romance novels and had no good role models for safe sex. In the world of romance novels, there aren’t all that many unplanned pregnancies and no STDs.

The second criticism mentioned in the article was that the sex in romance novels was extremely unrealistic; the article cited an example of a hero rescuing a woman, then ripping her bodice off, and having wild sex culminating in tremendous orgasms for both partners.

Again, most women don’t really have sex lives that can measure up to this high standard. When was the last time you were rescued from a burning building and then had passionate sex with a fire fighter in the alley next to the blazing building where your bastard husband had died?

Never. I thought so.

In addition, as many as 70% of women don’t have orgasms from penetration alone, which means that the women reading romance novels might have unrealistic expectations about their partners abilities to help them reach orgasms. The researchers ague that the unrealistic expectations can be damaging to a woman’s sexual health as well.

How damaging are romance novels?

Romance novels are not the only guilty parties for creating the idea that birth control is an unnecessary inconvenience or that orgasms are the easiest thing ever to achieve with a hero-type partner. There are so many movies and TV shows out there—which definitely reach a much bigger audience—that are just as guilty of unrealistic sex scenes and unrealistic romantic expectations.

How many times do actual teenage girls go from being the least popular geek at school to dating the Prom King?

Not too many.

How many teenagers get pregnant in movies? Not too many. Off the top of my head, Juno comes to mind, although there are a few more.