“Liberation” has neutered, if not desexed, pornography by providing equal access to many of the literary entertainments that were once a part of male privilege. But women still appreciate the sexiness in circumspection—and there’s plenty of written evidence to that effect in a popular category of paperback pacifiers for women called “romantic-suspense.” Even if you’ve never read one of these books (and virtually no man has), you’ve certainly spotted them revolving on the drugstore carousels: glossy-black-castle—white-nightie covers stacked between Erle Stanley Gardner and Irving Wallace. Puerile and imitative, nearly all of them. But because they continue to romanticize inhibitions—even at a time when, all around us, people are losing theirs—they’re read by women of all types as a kind of chaste and courtly pornography.
Modern romantic-suspense novels have respectable forerunners, like Bronte’s Jane Eyre and James’s Turn of the Screw; but in this particular species of writing, evolution reversed
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