Romance novels, and romance stories are a hugely popular venue for women. They really serve as the substitute for traditional erotic stories for men. The male version of the erotic stories usually dwells more heavily on the actual sexual details of the story whereas, the female's "romantic story" takes the same couple into the same bedroom but let's the woman's imagination fill in more of the details. Both genres stop short of dwelling purposefully on the sexual portion of the story for the single purpose of arousal, however, or they will be seen as pornography. The romantic novel just doesn't seem to require the amount of detail and is much less often tainted with even the labels such as erotic stories, erotic fiction or the like. It is a shame to think that the term erotic has changed so much in such a short time.

Interestingly, there are great and prolific male writers of romance stories and novels and there are likewise female writers of men's erotic stories if perhaps less often. What these days serves as the appropriate descriptive terms for men's erotic stories are quite confusing mostly due to the confusion brought on by the negative connotation found in the term, erotic. Erotic stories are by definition non-pornographic, however since the adult industry fell in love with the term erotic, anything employing the word erotic, such as erotic stories is now considered to mean pornographic by a large percent of the population. This is quite inaccurate.

So depending upon your linguistic knowledge and inclinations, your overall knowledge of words in general, your willingness to allow words to take on new meanings as a result of use rather than derivation, you may read male erotic stories in any number of ways. Certain puritanical segments of our population label everything with the word sex in it as pornography.

For our purposes here, romance novels, and romance stories are to women what the "real" original definition of erotic stories are to men, and neither of these are pornographic. It seems only fair that both sexes should have their own way of arriving at a romantic juncture in a story which conveys a healthy enthusiasm for sex without any kind of a more prurient intent or even inclination.

We would propose to reinstate the original definition for the term erotic, going forward and creating a prurient version of the word for use by the adult industry and pornography in general. As far as the word is concerned, we nominate exrotic, meaning prurient and erotic. It might allow for degrees as well such as exxrotic meaning very prurient and erotic and exxxrotic meaning purely prurient and erotic.