"'Estelle, what is fellatio?' asked Jasmine innocently. Estelle grimaced.
'It is a whore's trick, along with many other perversions. I suppose I should educate you for your own protection.'" - Virginia Henley, Forbidden

When I was nine, I discovered sex.

By fourth grade I'd been through the requisite Sex Ed, a classic case of the school acting in loco parentis, distributing handouts with wobbly-line drawings of gonads and uteri and projecting slides of tiny, tactfully blank-faced fetuses on the wall. Before that, I'd seen enough naked cousins and shared in enough coed bathtubs to intuit the jigsaw mechanics of intercourse, to, you might say, put one and one together. I'd even supplemented my sexual education with clandestine giggle-fests held during recess, perched on the jungle-gym with my girlfriends as we traded words like "boner" and "orgy" along with slap bracelets and troll dolls. But not until I held Millie Criswell's Temptation's Fire in my sweaty, precocious palms did the vast world of sex and sexuality swim into my view, shimmering like a milky, wonderfully-variegated crystal.

In the spring of 1991, my parents kidnapped me and my best friend for a long weekend in Virginia; Colonial Williamsburg, to be precise. It didn't take long for Charlotte and me to tire of tricorner hats and candle-making; and so, while my mother and father went to card wool with Paul Revere, the two of us made our way to the local Barnes and Noble. I remember our furtive glances toward the shelves decked with rows and rows of slender novels, all of which bore images of lush, scantily clad women locked in the embrace of some bronzed half-deity. I remember the sly, shy inklings of a plan hatching silently between my friend and me, the blind seizure of three randomly-chosen books, and the mad dash to the counter where, with averted eyes, we handed over our crumpled ten-dollar bills to the clerk whose quiet disinterest made us feel so grown up. Later, we sat homeward bound on the train, our mass market contraband protected from prying eyes by the shield of our American History textbooks; against a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, Temptation's Fire began busily cauterizing my psyche.

In many ways, my situation (a limbo between fear and trembling) resembled that of enchantingly beautiful twenty-six year old "spinster" Margaret Parker, whose no-nonsense efficiency and stoic demeanor had served her well as a nurse in the wild west of Purgatory, Texas, 1887. So deeply entrenched was Margeret's vestal mentality that nothing could have prepared her for the jolt of desire she felt when Marshal Chase Gallagher swept her onto the dance floor, holding her closely (too closely!) in his nut-brown arms. Marshal Gallagher was a rough man, a rugged man, an outlaw whose womanizing ways had earned him the nickname "The Silver-Eyed Devil," and who said things like, "Darlin', the word 'no' isn't in my vocabulary." How could Maggie resist?

At the tender age of nine, I was similarly ill-equipped to confront the rigors of such brazen sexuality, but, Lord knows, I was willing to try. With a secretive smile and a gaping jaw, I surrendered myself to Millie Criswell with the same reckless abandon that marked Margaret's submission to Chase on the shores of the San Carlos River, as coyotes howled in the distance.

"You obviously live in a fantasy that you are a fairy princess riding about the countryside on a unicorn." - Virginia Henley, The Falcon and the Flower

Romance novels account for 18% of all books sold in the United States, and 54.5% of all mass-market paperbacks. Last year, the so-called "romance industry" generated more the $1 billion dollars in sales- more than America's national pastime, baseball. 91% of people who read romance novels are female. 57% of are married, and 44% of are unemployed. 77% are white. Over 71% read their first romance novel at age 16 or younger.

In many ways, therefore, I was the ideal target for the lurid, lumbering beast of the romance industry- female, white, unemployed and underaged, ready to drop $5.50 every few weeks to feed my burgeoning addiction. I was also a hopeless romantic, a sucker for both the sentimental schlock of T.H. White's The Once and Future King and the high-brow, pubescent melodrama of L.J. Smith's The Vampire Diaries. I loved movies like the The Last Unicorn and The Princess Bride, in which beautiful maidens in beautiful dresses were rescued from death and disgrace by beautiful men on beautiful horses. From an early age, my imagination had been operating in a fairy realm of heroes and heroines, good guys and bad guys, love stronger than death. Most importantly, I had, before coming to romance novels, been swept off my feet by Wuthering Heights and the novels of Jane Austen. In those seductive worlds of wild moors and windswept castles, women swoon, men brood, and no one- not once, not ever- gets laid.

That's right: no sex. Not once, not ever. What made 19th century novels like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice into such raging successes was this: the eternal delay of gratification. Sure, we read Jane Austen for her incisive wit and elegant prose, but, deep down, we are praying, with the willful ignorance of the common reader, that when we reach the end of Pride and Prejudice for the umpteenth time, a hitherto-invisible chapter will suddenly materialize within which Mr. Darcy finally throws Lizzie up against the wall, rips off her muslin, and fucks her until all the china in Devonshire falls from the cupboards and shatters on the ground. We fall in love with Heathcliff because we know he's good in bed - the man can break trees with his bare hands, for God's sake - and we secretly wonder, at the conclusion of Jane Eyre, if Mr. Rochester's skills will be compromised by his crippled hand and untimely blindness.

Enter Harlequin. The romance novelist taps into all the secret longing of even the most intellectual readers- namely, their desire for smut. She (writers of romance novels are overwhelmingly female) unlocks those closed doors; she writes those hidden chapters. In the hands of a Millie Criswell or a Virginia Henley, bodices rip, codpieces scatter, and and euphemisms rain like bullets across the page. The romance novelist fulfills, in explicit detail, the X-rated fantasies constructed from PG material; she writes what you've already imagined, taking you in print where you've already gone in spirit.

"Have no fear, Arabella. I've done this before." - Charlene Hope, Beloved Innocent

Yes, it's a formula, a lexical dream that manifests your most latent thoughts into a cheap, pulpy pot-boiler. There is so much method to this madness that, if you've read ten romance novels, you've read them all- and I've read 76. Even the titles begin to repeat themselves: my collection alone includes Dreams of Desire, Flames of Desire, Runaway Desire, and, simply, Desire.

The title of a romance novel is a huge part of the package, and indicates the nature of the novel itself, the genre within the genre. Romance novels come in two basic flavors, Historical and Contemporary- not surprisingly, I preferred damsels in distress to career women in high heels. Contemporary romance novels often involve single mothers, divorced heroes, and, oddly enough, a healthy dose of inspirational Christian messages. I, however, like my hoop skirts raised and my theology present only in the odd interjection of "God's teeth, Sir Ruark, take your brazen hands off me!" Once in the historical domain, the reader has her pick of eras, although three epochs seem to appeal to the imagination more than others: the Wild-Wild-West (Separate Cabins, Dakota Dreamin', Lord of the High Lonesome), Regency England (Rendezvous at Gramercy, Lady Margery's Intrigue), and my personal favorite, Medieval Times (Knightly Love, Sensuous Burgandy, The Wolf and the Unicorn).

Embossed in glistening gold or deep purple script, strings of suggestive words adorn the cover of every romance novel, along with the customary illustration of man and woman caught in flagrante delicto. The image is as formulaic as the title: lots of hair, lots of skin, and the suggestion of an exotic setting- occasionally, a wild stallion is thrown in for good measure. Then there is the tantalizing blurb in the margin, a ten-cent preview along the lines of "He would sell his warrior soul to possesses her forbidden innocence!" or "She found rapture in her enemy's fiery embrace!" It is from the cover that one begins to get a sense of the characters- and, mind you, I use that term very, very loosely. In the somewhat uncanny How to Write a Romance Novel, author Maggie Osborne offers the following suggestion on character development: "Consult an astrology book. You'll find a ready-made character described for each astrological sign, complete with virtues and vices, preferred colors and jewelry, and occasionally a physical description."

Cosmology aside, Summer St. Catherine, Jasmine de Burgh, and Lady Aidan Prescott all have one thing in common. The heroine, whether a chesnut-haired minx or a violet-eyed innocent, is always beautiful, often proud and usually quite busty. But, more importantly, she is, nine times out of ten, a virgin. The ideal leading lady is pure and untouched, or as writer Beatrice Small puts it, "waiting to be plucked" - like a chicken. Nevertheless,with a nod to women's lib, romance novelists make their heroines spunky and headstrong, so she always puts up something of a fight before yielding to the titular hero, whose raging libido simply will not be denied. In Small's words, "the ladies are overcome by delightful, delicious lust, and although their minds may say 'no-no,' their luscious, flawless bodies say 'yes-yes!'"

And oh, the hero! He is the real gingerbread man, cookie-cut again and again from the same muscular, brooding dough. Besides being tall, dark, and handsome, he tends to have a first name which is also a noun, such as Brick, Rod, Steel, Lance, Wolf, or Stone- Emily Bronte, of course, achieved apotheosis with "Heathcliff"- and which often has an overtly phallic connontation. Like Mr. Darcy, he is also generally a big-time asshole, or, as they say in romance-speak, fierce, tormented, stormy, and passionate. Nevertheless, the hero's violent lust for the heroine never compromises his integrity and innate knight-in-shining-armor-ness. When the heroine is finally (ahem) plucked, she is a willing participant in her own seduction, and rare is the romance novel that treats rape as anything but an act of brutal, inexcusable violence.

Reading your first romance novel is, above all, an introduction to an entirely new and unique vocabulary. Not only is there a euphemistic code "brooding" instead of "psychopathic," but a highly-specialized language developed solely for the purpose of finding new ways to say the word "penis:" Think "crimson-headed lance," "throbbing member," "turgid shaft," "rampant sword," and the vaguely mystical "manroot."

The romance novel teeters constantly on the brink of porn; in order to differentiate itself from that decidedly unromantic genre, it must dissociate itself from a four-letter lexicon, instead employing the verbal and imagistic acrobatics of so-called purple prose. Fans of romance novels don't want to see words like "cock" or "pussy," and they sure don't want to read about any "fucking;" if they did, they could buy Hustler. Oh, no. They are paying good money to be transported, in the space of 200 pages, to a world where there's red wine instead of beer, and where The Boy not only respects you in the morning, he slays dragons for you, too; a world where people don't have sex, but out-of-body experiences. For example: "He was the Falcon. She let him take her higher and higher as he plunged deeper and deeper with his marble weapon. He totally engulfed her until they were locked in love. Together they soared to the heights until triumphantly they shattered into a million fragments, fusing into each other, bathing each other, then floating, sailing together on a sea of bliss."

"Oh, Sven! That wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be!" - Emma Hartley, Northern Nights

Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Girl hates boy. Boy and girl have sex, fall in love, live happily ever after. Or, you might say, boy seduces girl, girl capitulates, girl loses virginity to ergo falls in love with boy, boy and girl live happily ever after in Irish castle. These are the socio-sexual mentalities to which I, at the impressionable age of nine-and-a-half, was exposed, and from which I have clearly not yet recovered. You may wonder what such tacit indoctrination does to the mind of a young, heterosexual female, and you may assume, understandably so, that it turns her into a masochistic, anti-feminist, delusional bubblehead who spends her weekends at home with a pint of Ben and Jerry's and the latest issue of Romantic Times magazine, watching The English Patient amid the company of her sixty-one cats.