I'm not a woman, but I am an avid reader of adult romance genre fiction. So I can't give my perspective as a woman, but I can give my perspective as a reader. I think that the idea that romance fiction is the female analogue to porn vids is erroneous.
Romance is a literary genre, like Crime or Gothic. Porn videos (taken as a whole) are not intertextual, there is no complex textuality in them, they are produced purely to excite. Once a porn vid has satisfied sexually, the viewer presses stop and puts it away - this is not the way that romance novels are consumed.
Romance novels can include explicit representations of sex acts, and they usually do. But then again, the amount of explicit depictions of sexuality that they include varies greatly. Some are all like "he put his XXXXX in her XXXXX and she XXXXX" while in others, sex is barely described, or not there at all. In a novel of 100,000 words, there is a lot more going on than just sex. Adult romance genre fictions are actually a specific development of a long generic literary tradition that began with medieval French courtly poetry. They're about society, wealth, class, occupations, beliefs, and many other things that are involved in negotiating adult relationship exchanges. From the perspective of this tradition, it happens that this development of the genre has evolved to include naturalistic depictions of sex, but this is not all that the genre is about. The things that define the genre are that the dramatic conflict is centered on an intimate relationship, and that there is almost always a happy ending - not that there is a certain amount of sex that is explicitly described.
I think that for most readers, the release provided by these fictions is emotional, not sexual. They want a time out from a busy life that asks much and provides little in the way of care, affection, or appreciation. A closer analogue to pornographic films would be erotic fiction.
I mention these things because I think that there are important problems involved in comparing pornographic films with adult romance genre fiction. Saying "romance books are porn films for women" implies that "porn films are romance novels for men" which is absolutely not the same thing at all, and which eclipses the problems that are not involved in the production of romance fiction, but are inherent to the production of pornographic films. Such as - is it ethical to purchase porn? How are condoms used in porn? What are the working conditions of porn performers, and what are the standards by which their pay is determined? What are the other activities of pornographic production studios? The comparison makes it seem like those problems aren't even there, it dismisses them, prevents them from being discussed properly.
La Sagna described very well some other problems with this.
The other thing is that some men read romance fiction too. They read for the plot and the characters. And why shouldn't they?
Sent from my GT-I9195T using Tapatalk