The female equivalent of Hugh Hefner

Chateau Heartiste writes about female porn addiction.

She is a verbal drug pusher, shoving words as potent as cocaine at her own gender.

But according to Laurie Kahn, producer of the documentary film Love Between the Covers: “More than 70 million people in the USA alone read at least one romance novel per year, and most of them read many more.”

The US Census for 2015 shows there are 100 million women between 18 and 64 years old living in the United States. If Kahn’s number is correct, and assuming that the majority of those “70 million people” are women, then up to 70 percent of American women are covertly consuming literary pornography.

Does any of this matter? Parents want to shield their kids from visual porn, but they don’t feel nearly the same protective affront when a woman is reading a pulp romance novel in public.

You are sitting on a bus during your morning commute. In the seat next to you, there is a male passenger reading Penthouse. Chances are you may feel upset, perhaps disgusted. You might even demand that he stop.

On the other side, there is a female passenger holding a book with a very plain cover, entitled Into the Fire. With a mysterious title like that, this book could be about anything. If you ask, the passenger will tell you that it is a “romance” novel by Meredith Wild. The passenger has always loved these kinds of books, she tells you, ever since she read Jane Austen as a teenager. Innocent fairy tale, you conclude.

Both passengers are consuming pornography. But the woman is doing it so discreetly that almost no one recognizes it—often, not even the statistics.

Read more here.

What is the most popular book genre?

From Wikipedia:

In North America, romance novels are the most popular literary genre, comprising almost 55% of all paperback books sold in 2004. The genre is also popular in Europe and Australia, and romance novels appear in 90 languages. Most of the books, however, are written by authors from English-speaking countries, leading to an Anglo-Saxon perspective in the fiction. Despite the popularity and widespread sales of romance novels, the genre has attracted significant derision, skepticism and criticism. Romance erotica seems to be on the rise as more women explore this new subgenre.

Read more here.

From Chateau Heartiste:

Pulp romance novels featuring badboys, jerkboys, and yes, rapeboys, are a $1.4 billion-a-year market (consumed almost entirely by women). Erotica-slash-porn for women is by far the most popular book genre. This tells us something very profound about women and their sexual nature that frightens feminists and tradcons alike.

Read more here.

Who are the male leads in Harlequin novels?

David Foster asks, "What does a Woman Want?" To find the answer he read the results of some research by two neuroscience researchers who

analyzed 15,000 Harlequin romance novels (fifteen thousand???) and tabulated the professions of the male leads.

I don’t know to what degree Harlequin readers are representative of romance-novel readers as a whole, nor to what degree romance-novel readers are representative of the female population as a whole…but for what it’s worth, here’s the list that resulted from the study.

1. Doctor
2. Cowboy
3. Boss
4. Prince
5. Rancher
6. Knight
7. Surgeon
8. King
9. Bodyguard
10. Sheriff

Thoughts?