Sorry, I was falling asleep while writing the last comment and didn't finish.

Eh, I don't know about that. I read a lot of rapey romance novels and none of them had a villain raping the woman.

My references were based out of a set of fairly popular tropes; The Socially Acceptable Reasons Not to Be a Virgin When You Meet True Love. There are two across the board, three if you add in a lot of new and contemporary, or period romance based in cultures that were okay with divorce. Maybe four for very specific circumstances, but two standard: widowhood and rape.

Under rape culture, it's very hard not to give consent, and when I say that, I mean, you have to prove a lack of consent because everything is consent, right up to walking in the room with a rapist. So when it's written, it's signaled heavily both textually and subtextually because she has to cover all the bases--every base--for the heroine herself (author as unimpeachable, unbreakable witness) since women don't get benefit of the doubt so the author will shove it down the reader's throat. Hard. But for a very good reason.

Again, speaking in genre, the victim of rape walks down dark alleys, goes alone into rooms, does all the things she shouldn't and is told not to do. It sometimes reads really--overkill (like, does her shining goodness need to shine that much beneath his filthy hands?)--but I mentioned the author as witness for victim? She's also witnessing for the reader, for whom being raped for doing the 'wrong' thing will never not be a possibility. The author just spent however many pages following the victim before she was a victim who made all those mistakes that get you raped (room! man! existing!) and clarifying over and over and over she didn't want this.

[This formula also applies to spousal rape, btw, and Romance acknowledges spouses can rape.]

So you have slogged through all of that, including a carefully annotated version of This Is Really Really Rape, because you're trying to get the audience to that one place where they get exactly what they came here for, and because the audience is women, we honestly to god believe we have to hurt ourselves to get it:

Even the healing cock theory of rape recovery that's so popular in romance doesn't involve much actual cock or penetration; the "healing" is in the foreplay, focused exclusively on the female body, often with a metric ton of soliloquy on how beautiful, wonderful, amazing, gorgeous, not your fault, you're not dirty, I want to help, not just things to reassure the victim, but things women say to each other.

And now you get fifteen pages of wish fulfillment.

I mean, think about this one. We have an entire trope set, and not one of these tropes by itself is uncommon, soldered together so the author can tell women it wasn't their fault they were raped, and that it was horrible, and that one day, it'll be better, and it's okay to recover. But we don't have three to five years, we have a few pages of a book and this is supposed to be allegorical and make you feel good--healing sex, metaphor for "being a victim doesn't mean you can't one day feel better." Rape doesn't ruin you.

Having said that, I do not say this is always done well, but that's not the point anyway. What works here is the message, and that part is what has to get through.

Whoo. Sorry about that. Anyway, thanks for commenting and pointing out I didn't clarify my subject. I hope this somewhat clarifies what I was talking about.