Raven asks, “Are romance novels considered porn?”

Read more to find out what sex therapist Josh Spurlock has to say about sexually graphic romance novels.

CASSIE

Welcome to My Counselor Online. I’m Cassie and this is My Counselor Says. My Counselor Says is where you submit a question, either for yourself, or for a friend,  and one of our incredible therapists takes their time and answers your personal question. So let’s go find out what My Counselor Says.

JOSH SPURLOCK ON DIFFERENT KINDS OF ROMANCE NOVELS

Well, it really depends on what we’re talking about. There’s all sorts of different kinds of romantic novels out there. Some are historical-type fiction, and that’s going to be pretty benign in nature. Then there’s other kinds of what would be considered romance novels that are really sexually graphic and explicit.

THE DANGER OF SEXUALLY GRAPHIC CONTENT

I’m going to assume that we’re talking about the sexually graphic and explicit kind, and say that we generally define ‘porn’ as anything that’s going to conjure up sexual urges or desires, and that are going depict sexual content of one nature or another, whether that’s images, videos, audio, or written story format that’s geared towards eliciting erotic sexuality, and becomes a source for kind of distracting ourselves or losing ourselves or medicating things in our life through the sexual pathway that God’s designed into our body as something to enjoy and to share with our spouse.

And so, depending on what it is that you’re talking about, if we’re talking about explicit sexual erotica or writing material, that’s generally something that we would consider to be porn.

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