bodice-ripping

plural bodice-rippings · alternative bodice ripping

1. uncountableusuallyA lustful scene of seduction and violent or forcefully initiated sex.

   We had a long debate about the ethics of bodice-ripping—who was allowed to rip and who got ripped.

   1989, Alice Thomas Ellis, Home Life Four - Volume 4, page 72

   3 more examples

   The Dutch sado-masochism, represented first by the Vroom women's attempts at seducing Mason (through multiple bodice-rippings and invitations to spank) for the purpose of reproducing slaves, is further accentuated in a similarly contrived orgy -- described as ritualistic opportunity to transcend societal norms and delineations -- where "Lust is schedul'd, splashing outside the Church-drawn boundaries of marriage, as across racial lines."

   2009, Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, The Multiple Worlds of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, page 156

   All unknowing, innocent as the heroine of a Barbara Cartland Regency romance (at least for the first fifteen pages before the initial bodice-ripping), I came to Hollywood in 1962 with a few published books to my credit and the ingenuous naivete that led me to believe that merely by being the best writer the medium had ever seen, I could raise the level of what went out across the coaxial cable.

   2012, Harlan Ellison, Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

   Naomi Klein is right to call Atlas Shrugged 'pulp' – there is plenty of bodice-ripping in its romantic sections, and, very significantly, there are never any babies produced.

   2014, Mike King, Quakernomics: An Ethical Capitalism, page 204

   Synonyms: bodice-rippery

comparative more bodice-ripping · superlative most bodice-ripping · alternative bodice ripping

1. Characteristic of a bodice ripper.

   There was, nearly always, ecstasy at the moment of entry. Jesus. What a cheap, bodice-ripping insult of a word.

   1997, Joanna M. Glass, If We are Women, page 33

   3 more examples

   If you're going to be selling workshops on how to write a winning romance novel to romance writers' groups, you know every would-be bodice-ripping author in five states.

   2006, Entrepreneur Press, Start Your Own Seminar Production Business, page 48

   His realist twenty-first century marital rape pays literal homage to the bodice-ripping violence of popular historical romances: He backhanded her again, much harder, and threw her backwards across the bed.

   2010, Gay Lynch, Apocryphal and Literary Influences on Galway Diasporic History

   Polselli seemed to have been deeply a›ected by the British Hammer vampire movies, for his two early productions are steeped in nice-looking atmospheric sets and cast with busty, bodice-ripping actresses.

   2015, Louis Paul, Italian Horror Film Directors, page 304