George Tyndale: Mills and Boon is bad for your sex life

Jul 10 2011 by Richard McComb, Sunday Mercury

WARNING: reading Mills & Boon novels can seriously damage your marriage – and your sexual health.

Far from offering romantic escapism, the housewife’s favourite boddice-rippers encourage casual sex and infidelity, according to a shrink.

Relationship psychologist Susan Quilliam, writing in the ever-popular Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, says Mills & Boon-style fiction is the cause of a “huge amount” of problems encountered by practitioners at family planning clinics.

Titles such as Hot Nights in Halesowen, My Achy Breaky Heart and The Meat-Packer’s Bride stand accused of encouraging women to “suspend rationality” in pursuit of rampant romance.

Quilliam and her chums are concerned that readers are not being sent the right messages about the need for safe sex and contraception.

How many times does a half-naked shepherd don a condom in a Mills & Boon pulse-racer before ravishing a divorcee on a rain-lashed Yorkshire hillside?

It just doesn’t happen.

The next thing you know is the heroine’s got a dose of chlamydia and a bun in the oven.

Mills & Boon has a case to answer.