Romantic fiction is my literary chocolate. I feel faintly ashamed by my dependence on it, and if I consume too much I feel nauseous but I love it anyway. I'd heard good things about The Real Deal on the internet and, being the sort of wide-eyed gullible who believes everything she reads, when I spotted a copy in Borders I grabbed it eagerly. Lulled by its charmingly 1950s looking cover and its (completely erroneous!) billing as a Doris Day / Cary Grant style romp, I took it home in anticipation of campy "shut up and kiss me" fun.

The plot, such as it is, centres on Amanda, a high powered, career-focused lady, attempting to negotiate a successful merger between her (as we later discover Totally Eeeevil) company, Extant, and Brand Computers, a family-held "we care about our employees" competitor. For reasons not entirely explained, the reclusive genius researcher, Simon Brant, gets muddled up in the negotiations and Amanda, again, for reasons not entirely explained, ends up staying over in his place in order to convince him. As the blurb explains: "Squaring off against the sexy, brilliant, sexy, obstinate, sexy, eccentric, not to mention sexy Simon is completely frustrating - and a total turn-on..." Hookay.

However, despite its fluffy surface and its veneer of charm, The Real Deal actually managed to offend me. I don't read romantic fiction for political correctness -- although thankfully the days of raping-the-heroine-til-she-gets-to-like-it are over -- but I don't expect to come away with, if you'll excuse the wording (this is a reference to the chocolate analogy, not a blow job joke), a bad taste in my mouth when I finish.

Essentially The Real Deal is about two rather odd and lonely people finding happiness (and really fantastic sex -- lucky bastards) with each other. Simon, the male lead, is meant to be this reclusive genius type. I think he's actually billed as a geek hero ... and written, I think, by someone who's never met a geek in her life. I date geeks, I am a geek and this man is no geek. He's clever and almost obsessively absorbed in his work, but his only remotely antisocial habit is disappearing into his lab in order to be a genius for days at a time. He's not particularly adept at joining the dots of irrational female behaviour but, then, who is? And he'll always ask questions whereas, when confronted with something emotional they don't understand, the average geek will go back to his computer game.

And the other thing about him ... of course ... is that's he's unbelievably attractive and in a sort of working-out-every-day Baywatch way. His only vague pretension to eccentric geeky genius is that he has a thin black pony tail. And I find the amazing body payoff faintly, I don't know, distasteful. Almost as if his intellectual and social idiosyncrasies (which are, in my opinion, slight) have to be rendered palatable or somehow normalised by situating them in an absolutely middle of the road mainstream female fantasy. Maybe it's just me and my lack of attraction to some six-packed symbol of athletic masculinity.

And, err, the other thing about him. I don't know how to put this politely but the man has an enormous schlong. Its actual dimensions are not specified in the text but it's so mind- bogglingly enormous that women swoon at the sight of it. Well, not exactly, but it inspires female awe and terror to such an extent that he tries not to show it to them lest they be overcome by his mighty love spear. I'm not quite sure what to do with the enormous schlong. I mean, intellectually. Am I, as a woman, meant to be more attracted to him because of it? Am I meant to be leaping round the room in glee going "Hurrah! Enormous Schlong!" The fact of the matter is, real world knowledge of schlongs of all shapes and sizes have left me quite convinced that enormous schlongs have little place outside of pornography and certainly no place in my vicinity. Therefore, am I meant to sympathise with him for having what is, essentially, a bit of a problem? "If I don't drive women away with my geeky genius, I scare them with my enormous schlong." That's not a direct quote. Is it meant, like Othello's race, to be a physical manifestation of his "difference" to the rest of the world? Somehow I just can't see it: "Haply, for I have an enormous schlong... and have not those soft parts of conversation..."

Things like this make me wonder what, exactly, the author is trying to say, or what she wants us to think. In fact, although they might seem like fairly trivial issues, I do believe they're symptomatic of a text that despises anything that differs from the conventional status quo. I don't have a raging - or indeed even a tepid - feminist agenda here. But romance novels, like any form of writing dominated by women, have never been about reinforcing the status quo. Sure, they're about wish-fulfilment and mighty love spears as well, but they're also about exploring the possible relationships between men and women as controlled and prescribed by the society in which they move. Some of the early Mills and Boon are quite shocking for the times in which they were written. In the pre-first world war era, several writers have heroines who explicitly support the suffrage movement, throughout the 1950s, despite the prevailing ideology of mother at home and father at work, authors were exploring the possibility of working mothers and depicting strong women working for their living, novels of the 1980s explore themes like drug abuse and addiction. Romantic fiction is not a genre of complacency and convention. Although there's a fair quantity of overpowering masculinity and quivering femininity going on 'twixt the pages, and men may get jealous and sexually violent, and the women may weep and tremble, the overall outcome tends to be about the satisfaction of female desires, rather than male demands. Even if you say romantic fiction is simply female wish fulfilment fantasy, that's still so entirely for and about women to count as feminism to me.

And, in the light of this, the heroine of The Real Deal disturbs me horribly. First of all the hero's pet name for her is "baby" and not just because it's an endearment so common as to be almost meaningless but because he is attracted to her fragility and her dependence up on his validation and approbation. He explicitly ponders (patronisingly) to himself that baby suits her because she is "so tiny. So vulnerable." Furthermore, her response to the name is fairly unambiguous - "Don't call me baby" - but he does anyway and she never complains again. Now, does this mean she was snapping for the sake of sisterhood but, secretly, she likes to be reduced to the status of a child by her protective lover? Or does it mean that she genuinely wanted him to stop calling her baby and yet felt powerless to enforce it, or perhaps was afraid to in case she lost his affection?

Additionally, Amanda has a disastrous marriage in her past. Her previous husband was controlling and emotionally abusive. She's presented as a curvaceous woman and he, essentially, denied her her femininity as defined by her power to attract a man by making her feel unattractive and refusing to sleep with her. Although a shocking scene! (more on this later) inspired her to divorce him, she starts off the novel convinced she is deeply and irredeemably unattractive to men. This is, of course not the truth at all. To be generous, I suspect that is meant to work as a parallel to Simon's enormous schlong ... physical attributes symbolising a general emotional and intellectual inability to conform to and be happy with the rest of society.

But, with Amanda, it's not that simple. Firstly, it begins with the presupposition that femininity and feeling like a "real" woman (the real deal??) are entirely, or at least mainly, defined by one's ability to attract men. Ouch. Just ouch. Yes, that's a part of it but by glorifying it to the extent that it does, the book essentially buys into ancient and dangerous assumptions i.e. that a woman is only a woman as defined by a man. Furthermore, it means that everything about Amanda comes down to her appearance. Sure, Simon respects her mind and her ambition and the rest of it but mainly he's lusting after her lush female curves.

For Amanda, one of the main triumphs of the book is when she feels confident enough to wear a dress that reveals and emphasises her fuller figure ... I find this deeply dissatisfying. To recognise and be confident in one's own beauty is an important part of being happy in one's own skin and, therefore, an important personal lesson for Amanda but the repeated emphasis upon the physical aspects of her femininity serve a reductive purpose. For all Amanda is a liberated, modern woman she is defined and dominated solely by responses to her appearance ... her husband's negative one, and Simon's positive one.

It must also be noted that Amanda only turns to her career when denied, by her husband, the more traditional outlet of being a wife and/or mother. Essentially she has become a career woman, because she feels she cannot be a real woman. And, although for a large portion of the book everything she has worked to achieve in a professional capacity is of primary importance to her, she abandons it readily enough to live on Simon's island, eating delicious deserts, bonking him at unsociable hours and giving him babies. This whole issue is conveniently done away with in the cheapest possible way by having Extant Corporation turn out to be Eeeevil anyway ... so she never really has to choose between domesticity and the career she had worked so hard to establish. Essentially there is no choice at all. Lucky, huh?

But, nevertheless, throughout the book Amanda's career is portrayed as the lesser or the second choice, an amoral masculine world in which a woman can, by hard work, excel as long as she has abandoned, or had stripped from her, her femininity. Is this 2006 or 1956? This in turn leads to the polarisation of masculinity and femininity. There is nothing more damaging to women than the assumption of a standard of "natural femininity" arising in contrast to and harmony with an equally natural masculinity. In the 17th and 18th centuries the moral philosophers used the prevailing aesthetic, scientific and theological ideologies of an ordered and harmonious universe to enforce a natural place within that universe (and the microcosmic universe of society) for women, and a natural set of feminine behaviours to which they were expected to subscribe. Thus Simon becomes associated with strength, genius, action, wealth, power and even moral righteousness (for he fights the merger on the grounds that it will lead to the loss of jobs for his workers), whereas Amanda increasingly comes to embody sensuality and vulnerability and systematically has power taken from her by the various men in the novel ... and graciously returned to her by Simon in a gesture of trust that would be touching had she not just been outmanoeuvred by every man in the book.

Although she loses material power, Amanda gains sexual power. Is this meant to be a fair exchange? Or compensation? Can't she be allowed to have both? Empowered by Simon's enormous schlong, Amanda re-discovers what it is to be a woman and although the sex scenes tend to be significantly less risible than those catastrophically attempted by D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterly's Lover there is nevertheless a sinister ideological similarity. Amanda is drawn to the submissive, passive roles, partially because of her own sexual uncertainty, and Simon's enormous schlong echoes Lawrence's powerful and mighty phallos which "could alone could explore [Lady Chatterly] ... at the bottom of her soul she had needed this phallic hunting out, she had secretly wanted it." I like a good rogering as much as the next woman but, in the harsh light of day, the cock is an absurd object and certainly is not the key to unlocking my femininity; I rather resent the implication that it is. Possibly it seems absurd to equate The Real Deal with Lady Chatterly, but Amanda is so inexperienced in sexual pleasure as to be almost virginal, and the power is all Simon's, the transformation all Amanda's.

The final unpleasant side-effect of the glorification of ideals of masculinity and femininity, is the demonisation of those who do not uphold them. Romance novels, are by their very nature, heterocentric but although there's absolutely nothing wrong with placing the primary emphasis on relationships between men and women, it is regrettably easy for this to fall into homophobia. Amanda's ex-husband is horrible enough on his own account. Emotionally abusing, undermining and manipulating your wife: these are bad behaviours. Having an affair when you're married: also bad. Having an affair with a member of your mistreated wife's family: getting badder all the time. Does he really have to be bisexual as well? From the way the story gradually emerges, it is hard to tell whether the betrayal or the bisexuality is worse for Amanda. Essentially, it is not so much Lance's behaviour (which is unacceptable on its own terms) that seems to put him beyond the pale, but his failure to fall into the correct sphere of masculine or feminine sexual behaviour. Simon's response to Amanda's revelation is particularly revealing. He is shocked and outraged, naturally, but his main observation is this: "you're lucky you didn't end up with some disease!" Ye Gods! Again, is this 2006 or 1986? Homosexuals spread diseases and eat household pets, y'all know that right?