I write... what?

     The good came with the bad when the miraculous, and I do mean miraculous, popularity of the erotic romance Fifty Shades of Gray burst onto every bestseller list the world had to offer. Those of us who write in the genre had the glimmer of hope that with the uber-success this trilogy, we could now join our mainstream romance writer peers for our time in the sun. One of “our own” made it onto many bestseller lists!

Women, from young to old, embraced the novel. They talked about it in public and passed it along to all of their friends to read. It was a literary grass roots movement. It gave all of us who write the genre the hope that our novels too would be embrace by the public. More than that, it gave some women the vehicle to embrace and affirm they too can be confident in their own sexuality.

Then the other shoe dropped, someone in advertising (sorry but probably a man) or publicity coined the phrase, “Mommy porn” to describe the erotic romance genre. This one moniker not only is insulting to the genre but I feel to the entire population of women. It’s really not a term meant to support women at all but actually to lower them.

Immediately, when I hear the word porn, this is what runs through my mind. Bow-chicka-bow-wow! The incredibly cheesy music always associated with these types of films. It’s the punch line of many, many jokes. Porn is also something that polite society chooses to hide. When I worked at Major Video in college, there was “the back room” where men would try to enter when they thought no one was looking. They didn’t want people seeing them enter and they certainly didn’t want the twenty-year old college co-ed checking out their selections. Hence, the reason why there was also a male counterpart working the computers to spare the male customers any embarrassment. Porn has nothing to do with romance. It’s all about the sex, random hook-ups, an extremely simple “storyline” but ultimately it’s about sex.

When someone attached the term “mommy porn” to a genre, it certainly sends a message and not a good one at that! Writing erotic romance has nothing in common with pornography. The characters in my book, and all of my peers, develop a deep relationship with each other before they ever think about taking it to the next level. Real women need romance and a connection with their partner before they can have a successful relationship between the sheets. The only difference between erotic romance and its mainstream counterpart is in the details. Our details are more explicit, that’s all.

So my name is Dufour, Marie Rose Dufour, and I proudly write erotic romance. Stories for women who love romance and are not afraid to embrace it, not porn and certainly not “mommy porn”; no friends, just romance, wickedly hot romance, where it’s so good to be a bit bad.