We in the modern era did not invent the female orgasm.
We didn’t invent sex, either.
I bet you’re thinking, “Duh.” Because, well, duh. But when people learn that I’m a professor of medieval history, they say the darnedest things. And when I tell them I’m also a romance novelist, it’s even crazier.
May I give you examples?
Bless me, friends, for I have sinned.
For, until recently, I did not believe that opposites could attract.
Perhaps second only to the Cinderella trope, enemies-to-lovers is a foundational pier of the romance genre. Yet for three decades, when I watched or read a romance in which two vastly different people quarrel their way to True Love, I didn’t buy it. I laughed, I enjoyed, but I rarely believed the happily-ever-after would last long. Even one of the most famous plays in the English language—Much Ado About Nothing—didn’t move me.
Testimony: When I was young, I loved the Cinderella story.
What’s not to love? Poor, hardworking, warmhearted girl beaten down by life gets rich, handsome, powerful guy, and—bonus!—gets to thumb her nose at the mean girls. As sanitized by Disney, with the addition of adorable mice, it’s pure charm.
Then I went to college and became Aware.
Class. Race. Gender. I barely knew the words before I started studying history, literature, civil rights, and government at the university level. And I certainly didn’t know how I’d learned to swallow the insanity of inequality embedded in the fabric of this Great Nation—and in its every industry—without ever questioning it, especially the inequality of the sexes.
Penis.
(I do have a point here.)
Sometimes when I’m grading a student’s paper and I find a misused word, I circle it and write “Word Choice.”
There is, of course, a lot more to choosing the right word than dictionary definitions. Especially when it comes to sex.
I write historical romance novels that include sexually explicit love scenes. Nevertheless, the first time I said aloud to a group of people the words for male genitalia was not at a reading of one of my novels. Standing at a podium at my university, I enunciated “penis” to my students. Not a single lash in the room twitched. The topic of the course, after all, was sexuality in the Middle Ages.
