This article explores the changing relationship of women to erotic meaning and subjecthood. It is hard to deny that in the past men have been the principal producers and consumers of pornography. Now, according to many commentators, this changing. While the attempt in the early 1990s to establish sex-magazines for women failed, evidence for this hypothesis can be found in the success of the Black Lace erotic novels. But what kind of eroticism do these books represent? And what kind of erotic subjectivity do they help to produce in their readers? These questions are addressed here by a comparison of Black Lace texts with conventional pornography and with reference to evidence about reader's fantasies.
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