Abstract: The current study investigated the phenomenon of faking orgasms, including the reasons why people stop faking orgasms, sociodemographic predictors of faking orgasms, its association with sex toy use, and its association with sexual, relationship, and life satisfaction. A cross-country convenience sample of 11,541 respondents from six European countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, and the UK) was collected in May and June 2022 through respondent panels by Cint, a market research software platform. Participants completed an online self-report survey. The study’s main findings showed that around 51% of men and women in the study had never faked orgasms, around 28% had faked orgasms but stopped faking and around 13% currently faked orgasms. Further, the reasons for men and women to stop faking orgasms included becoming more comfortable with not having an orgasm, improving sexual communication with their sexual partner, and the partner paying more attention to the respondents’ desires and preferences. Finally, it was shown that faking orgasms was associated with lower sexual, relationship, and life satisfaction. The current study represents one of the few research projects focusing on the phenomenon of stopping faking orgasms and reasons for it, with the added strength of including a large male sample.

Abstract: The emergence of the romance novel over the last roughly three hundred years has garnered much debate about the literary value of both the writing and content. However, the dismissal of the genre as “low brow” has much to do with the vast number of women writers and readers, reinforcing the misconception that only work by, about, and for men is worthy of literary study. In this article, I examine the new adult and adult fantasy romance novels of Sarah J. Maas as a potential vehicle for changing attitudes about gender norms, rape culture, and consent. Directed at an audience of younger women, Maas’s work offers safe spaces for women to explore their sexuality and unlearn harmful sexual and gender scripts. The audience benefits from these fictional examples as they reflect changing values regarding the traditional expectations of women, especially those that reinforce their position as passive objects. While these novels are often described as “trash” or “smut,” I suggest that popular romances, like Maas’s, provide spaces of radical and widespread reform due to their large readership. Maas offers narratives that push back against hegemonic masculinity and dominant rape myths in favor of developing a culture of consent, especially for her new adult readership.

Abstract: Northrop Frye states that a literary experience can be found in every work of literature, even when it comes from a popular core. This premise underpins this article, romance fiction being a literary experience, one which is a reflection of an idealized world. Public libraries are also idealized worlds, often considered democratic places providing social capital in order to facilitate equal access to information including fictional reading. However, the choice of shelving and floor locations, and the separation of fiction collections according to genre, can challenge this notion of equality. So as to understand how librarians establish and engage with their library collections, this article uses “dalliance” as a metaphor, alongside Pamela Regis’s “eight elements of romance fiction” as a conceptual framework. Both the metaphor and the framework act as Bourdieu’s "thinking tools”, allowing for a conceptualisation of the physical locations of romance fiction collections in the public library. These “thinking tools” reveal how romance fiction is “othered” in the library, evidenced by the varied practices of shelving and floor placements, their relationship to catalogue records, and further supported with interview data from public librarians. These practices impact the creation and visibility of cultural capital and the legitimisation of popular romance fiction. The practices show how decisions made about the placement of books in a library can create systems of exclusion, removing the equality among fiction books that is afforded through the use of alphabetical ordering.