I will now be blogging here at Romantic Inks every other Wednesday until the end of the year. My intention this week was to write about my fondness for the term “Bodice Ripper” despite its inescapably negative connotation. Though I’m a bit more wary now to add my own thoughts to the multitude of discussion online, I suppose my hope in doing so is to give, for those readers and writers who shudder at those two words, who fight daily against the embedded condescension of society for anything that has to do with the romance genre, not just another perspective, but perhaps a reason to use those words as the beginning of a discussion rather than as another discarding of language in the attempt to control how others perceive our choices in life.

In my erotic anthology, On These Silken Sheets, there are no bodices ripped and no bosoms that “heave”, yet when I hear the stories within referred to as “bodice rippers”, even disparagingly, I can’t stop the small smile, the amused enjoyment I get from that term. I’ve been reading romance since 1984, the heyday of books in which bodices were actually ripped—by pirates, by Scottish lairds, by Viking warriors. I loved those books. My love for history was whetted by historical romance. My desire to travel, to learn more about the world, as well.

Romance in fiction, as those with a more academic bent than me can tell you, dates far back in history. There was the Roman Catallus with his sexual poetry. Then there were stories of courtly love as depicted by medieval authors. Even “Song of Songs” from the Old Testament of the Bible honors love and all its trappings. Mix this with the gothic, the sensationalist novels that allowed heroines to wander dark hallways and have adventures and then mix with the burgeoning of women’s lib and you just begin to get to the 1970s and the birth of the “Bodice Ripper”. Though perhaps it should have been used for The Sheik, one of my favorite romances, which I only read two years ago for the first time. As with many things I’d only heard of in the negative, I found it not nearly as shocking and horribly un-feminist as it is said to be. It delved into the psychology of the heroine so deeply that the way she falls in love with the sheik makes sense by the end. It might not be the choice, you, I or any modern heroine would make, but it works.

Not just any historical romance is a “Bodice Ripper”. Julia Quinn’s novels are far from it. Mary Balogh’s as well. This subject has been discussed around the web—most recently, this very week, on Racy Romance Reviews and Dear Author, where the question of defining the term “bodice ripper” was raised—and increasingly in academia, but mostly with the attempt to do away with the term, to validate the romance genre in doing so. And I understand this. It makes sense in lieu of the more recent spates of romance which refer back to comedies of manners and Jane Austen’s stories of polite society more than to the wild, sprawl of adventure that those 70s and 80s romances lived within.

So what does make something a bodice ripper, or if a romance is written today, what makes it of the same lineage as those “Bodice Rippers” and equally deserving of that title?

Of course there are the covers, the classic embrace of the protagonists, the woman’s leg bare, her bosoms half out of whatever dress she is wearing, and the hero half-holding her up. The continued use of similarly scantily clad protagonists, whether male or female, even in the face of dislike of the oft used term “Bodice Ripper” as a slur, suggests that it isn’t the old covers alone—where usually the bodices, by the way, were very much intact—that defines the term.

The most obvious, frequent complaint is that of the presence of rapes or “forced seductions” in the old 70s and 80s romances. Again, all the great recent academic research into the intersection of romance and women’s studies can tell us about why this trend was prevalent in those stories; that these rapes were a way in a pre-women’s lib society to allow women to be sexual, enjoy a sexual journey, yet not feel guilty because of all the lingering Victorian and mid 20^th century mores.

And while the term “Bodice Ripper” does connect with that particular theme, I think it doesn’t only refer to that. It can’t really, as there were so many books of the time that didn’t contain any such sexually-enacted violence. For me, the terminology really refers to any adventure so daring, so life affirming, that of course a dress at the very least must be offered up in exchange. Sometimes it is more than a dress; sometimes it is innocence, girlhood, childhood.

I don’t think I have written a real bodice ripper yet, but I hope to. I hope to write one that melds the epic, raucous adventure, the sense of possibility and frontier and danger that all my old favorites did, the story of a woman on the edge of becoming not only sexually awakened, but independent and strong and great.

“Bodice Ripper” might have been coined as a slur from the beginning, might never be able to shrug off being a pejorative, but for those of us within the romance community, who know and love the history and lineage of romance in general, who value its contribution to society—we don’t need to ban it or grow angry at every negative usage.

I suppose my contribution to the larger discussion on this topic is this: Language is never the enemy of readers and writers.