bodice-ripping

English

Alternative forms

• bodice ripping

Etymology

From bodice ripper.

Noun

bodice-ripping (usually uncountable, plural bodice-rippings)

1. A lustful scene of seduction and violent or forcefully initiated sex.
   • 1989, Alice Thomas Ellis, Home Life Four - Volume 4, page 72:

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

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

     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."

   • 2012, Harlan Ellison, Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed:

     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.

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

     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.

Synonyms

• bodice-rippery

Adjective

bodice-ripping (comparative more bodice-ripping, superlative most bodice-ripping)

1. Characteristic of a bodice ripper.
   • 1997, Joanna M. Glass, If We are Women, page 33:

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

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

     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.

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

     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.

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

     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.