As a romance reader—even if you’re reading strictly kissing books—you’ve no doubt been told that romance novels are porn for women. We’ve run posts about the same topic, including Everything Old Is New Again: Reading Romance Novels are the Female Equivalent of Porn? and Eff You!: Romance Novels are NOT Porn for Women!
But even if that is true, is that necessarily bad? Maybe not, an article in Scientific American argues; The Sunny Side of Smut finds that “exposure to [traditional, not violent or fetishistic] pornography might make some people less likely to commit sexual crimes” and that pornography is “a moral issue, not a factual issue.”
How do you feel when someone says your choice of reading material is porn for women? Besides the obvious (porn itself), what would porn for men be?
