Take away the bondage, and Fifty Shades of Grey is an old school romance between a worldly-wise but emotionally constipated hero and a naïve but emotionally intelligent heroine. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, almost all romance novels, historical and contemporary, featured this kind of dynamic. Like Mad Men’s Don Draper, the hero knew all about fine wine, guerilla warfare, engine repair and female orgasm, but some traumatic event had scarred him and left him completely closed off to any emotions, especially his own.

The heroine, on the other hand, was unworldly, having lived a life so sheltered that she had barely tasted wine, let alone orgasm. (I know, it’s easy to make fun of this trope now, but let’s face it, the female orgasm can be at least as tricky as engine repair, and almost as hard to pin down as guerilla warfare.)

I’m not going to list the many reasons this paradigm changed—or how grateful I am that it did—but the old school romance hero started out as teacher but wound up as student, which gave both hero and heroine clearly defined character arcs.

[Nowadays? Not so much...]

You would think that no one had ever written an erotic romance before.

All of a sudden, everyone’s buzzing about Fifty Shades of Grey, the ebook that started life as a fan fic of Twilight. (For anyone too busy monitoring Middle East affairs to have checked the entertainment news, the author, E.L. James, recast Twilight’s vampire hero as a dominant entrepreneur and made the heroine of legal age to consent to being tied up, punished, and pleasured. )

Despite the fact that the writing is as subtle as a Victoria’s Secret thong, with more eye-rolling than Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer, Fifty Shades of Grey has an undeniable appeal. First of all, it’s straightforward. In a time when so many romances seem to have wildly complex plots featuring mad scientists, Russian gangsters, evil cults, or terrorist networks, Fifty Shades keeps all the conflict focused in on hero and heroine. It’s like an old school Harlequin, the kind Violet Winspear used to write, with the shy but spunky innocent coed and the jaded, sophisticated, domineering boss who has to learn that women aren’t just playthings.

[As you do...]

It used to be the hero who brooded. There he stood, in a corner, warily keeping his back to the wall, moodily gazing off into the middle distance, holding the heroine at arm’s length—until she got under his skin and he got under her petticoats. The heroine might be an innocent miss, a feisty spitfire or a bookish bluestocking, and she might pout or sulk, but she did not brood.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

In Suzanne Collins’s dystopian Hunger Games trilogy, the heroine, Katniss, is the one who does the brooding. Clever, resourceful and so guarded emotionally that even she doesn’t know what she really feels, Katniss has more in common with classic romance genre heroes than she does with heroines.

She certainly doesn’t fit any of the female master archetypes set out by Tami D. Cowden, Caro LeFever, and Sue Viders in their book, The Complete Writer’s Guide to Heroes and Heroines: Sixteen Master Archetypes.

[There’s a new heroine in town...]