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Some of the first responses impugned Schone's motives and sincerity: "I don't care what you want to put in your book," one "Irritated Beyond Belief" reader wrote. "But don't stand on a pedestal and declare it art. Don't whine about creativity and your right to write what you want ... Get real. It's publicity, and your books will probably fly off the shelf because of it." The next message agreed: "This chick is merely after sales figures, nothing more."

The question of the commercial appeal of sexual content is a vexed one in the romance community. Everyone denies that there is any overt editorial pressure on writers one way or another, but one author -- who preferred to remain anonymous because of concern about repercussions from readers and publishers -- nevertheless admits that other writers' successes have made her consider including more love scenes and putting them earlier in her books. So far she has resisted that particular siren song, but she says, "I wonder constantly, if I wrote more 'sexy' books, would I be higher up the ladder?"

Author Sabrina Jeffries denies that there is any general pressure toward more frequent or more unusual sex scenes: "Several new lines have opened up at publishers in the past three years that cater to readers who like no sex in their books," she says. "I think that the trend is not so much toward more sex, but toward more diversity. Publishers are finally realizing one size does not fit all -- no pun intended."

Gold agrees, pointing out that more than 70 percent of the books her site has reviewed were given sensuality ratings of merely "Warm" or less, and only 1 percent were rated as "Burning," like Schone's recent full-length novel, "The Lady's Tutor." A recent upsurge of interest in "PG-rated" romance has even prompted Gold to compile a special list of recommended books with minimal sexual content, called One Foot on the Floor -- a tongue-in-cheek reference to the infamous Hays Commission standard of film censorship. (To comply with the Hays code, the makers of studio-system Hollywood movies only included love scenes in which one of the actors' feet remained on the floor.)

Schone knows she's bucking a disapproving tide. But, she insists, beyond the necessity for a happy-ever-after ending, there shouldn't be limits on what is considered "suitable" in the genre: "Love cannot be contained or defined by moral conditioning," she wrote in her AAR essay. "Surely there is room for erotica as well as inspirational. For drama as well as lighthearted comedies. For reality as well as fantasy. Masturbation. Oral sex. Anal sex. Sex acts that are not always performed with body parts. These are great tools to advance a plot and develop character."

"Somewhere in that last bit of commentary, she loses me," publisher Gold confesses. "Silk scarves and feathers I can handle, but electrical devices and the insertion of foodstuffs or sex toys cross my line in the sand." Gold isn't the only one with concerns about dildos and anal sex as literary devices. Florida reader Lena Diaz was outraged: "If this is the future of romance novels, I'm going to go to the bookstore immediately and purchase everything on the romance shelves, before this new era of smut is unleashed!"

But it's not "a new era," romance veterans insist. The genre's already been there, done that -- and changed the batteries: "Bertrice Small, Rosemary Rogers and the like exploded the romance genre in the '70s by having all kinds of explicit sex," says Jeffries. "No bestiality, but just about everything else from rape to S/M to whatever they could throw in." Those were the days when the term "bodice-rippers" came into vogue.

An enormous backlash followed, fueled in part by feminism, and when writers began making their heroes more heroic and less violent, "readers pounced on those books with a vengeance," Jeffries says. "I think they had enjoyed the earlier books because they talked about sex, and that had been missing in popular literature for women, but what they really wanted was the focus on emotion and building of the relationship along with good sex. When they got that, they were ecstatic." And that, most aficionados agree, was when the genre really took off.

In a community that prides itself on its public civility and smiley mutual enthusiasm -- even if it is sometimes undertaken with secretly clenched teeth -- many participants found the open anger that the sexuality issue provoked on the All About Romance board made them uncomfortable. "Talking about sex is a little like talking politics or religion," says romance writer Michelle Jerott. "People can get pretty touchy about it." It's not surprising, then, that when religion entered the dispute, the heat flared exponentially.

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