By Kait Jagger
Have you seen the guy your girlfriend’s been hanging around with lately? Six foot six, dressed in leather, long black hair, totally ripped? Oh, plus he’s a vampire. And he can make women come like a freight train. And, by the way, he’s sitting there right now, on your girlfriend’s bedside table.
J. R. Ward’s vampire king Wrath, Sylvia Day’s corporate hotty Gideon Cross, E. L. James’ tie-wielding dominant Christian Grey—with annual sales topping $1.4 billion, romance and erotica is the top- earning book genre in the world. Bedside tables around the globe are littered with erotic romance novel heroes who are better at sex than you. Apparently. But you wouldn’t know about that, right? Because you’ve never so much as laid a finger on an erotic romance.
I asked my husband the other day whether he would ever consider reading one, purely for bench-marking purposes. I can only compare the response I got to the look of distaste on his face every time the cat jumps up on the bed and starts licking its arse when we’re in mid-coitus.
And far be it from me to give you gents the literary cooties. But aren’t you even remotely curious about these sexual paragons your women are figuratively eating up? Indulge me for a moment, while I enlighten you as to what you’re up against.
‘He heard her gasp at his powerful entry, and her slick heat grabbed onto him, pulsating as she came.’
‘As I tightened and shook, I realized I was going to come from that, just from the expert thrust of him inside me.’
‘”Come for me, Ana,” he whispers breathlessly, and I unravel at his words, exploding around him as I climax and splinter into a million pieces underneath him.’
Two things to note here:
These sex scenes occur within pages of the two protagonists meeting, without any of the arduous, soul-searching action you had to go through just to get into your girlfriend’s bed, never mind getting her off. (Which shirt to wear, the Ralph Lauren or the All Saints? Does she want another vodka and Red Bull? Is two Instagram likes in the space of one day too much?)
In case you missed it, the men in these scenes are capable of magicing up orgasms through the sheer power of their manhood, or, in the case of Christian Grey, mere words whispered in Ana’s ear.
Related: How To Be A Real Man
Frankly, I’d be a little offended if I were you, assuming ‘you’ is a man who takes pleasing his partner seriously. A man who knows it takes more than inserting Allen key A into slot B to bring her to the heights of ecstasy.
Sure, you can dismiss erotica and erotic romances as mindless wish fulfillment, or voyeurism, or even women’s answer to porn flicks (because the shit you’re watching in those isn’t real either, right? Right?). The reality, of course, is that good sex—really good sex—requires skill and effort, particularly on the man’s part, and romance writers who try to make it look otherwise are doing you guys a disservice.
So I’d pay more attention to the man in the black leather pants, if I were you. He’s got a dick that’s ‘as big and magnificent as the rest of him’ and he isn’t afraid to use it.
Kait Jagger is the author of Lord and Master and Her Master’s Servant. She lives in Lancashire, England, and can be found at www.kaitjagger.com.
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