Okay, I have some general thoughts and nothing better to do at the moment.

First of all, Romance and Erotica are two different genres. To put it simplistically, Romance is about a love story, focused on the characters. Erotica is, as the name suggests, focused on erotica. Erotica is the genre that is essentially literary porn. Which isn't to say that Romance genre has no sex scenes, but it's not ALL sex scenes. You pull the sex scenes out of Romance and you still have a story. You pull the sex scenes out of erotica and you have a pamphlet. So this:
90% of the time Romance Novels are just porn, but it is porn geared towards women and hiding under the 'Romance' label so that women feel classy because they do not want to accept that they are looking at porn.
I disagree with.
1. Women look at porn. I don't mean an erotica novel, either. I mean actual porn. It's not an issue only men face.
2. Women who want to feel classy don't read Romance. I'll admit, I enjoy a romance novel every now and again (flame away, I know my truth!

), but if I want to feel
classy, it's not what I'm reaching for.
But this:
In any case, I find novels like this to be detrimental to women because it gives them an unrealistic standard of what their relationship should be like and their expectations for their man become way too high.
I can get behind. Probably not the case for every reader of romance, but I can definitely see how the potential is there.
As for the OP, and 50 Shades of Grey specifically: After all the hullabaloo, curiosity killed this cat and I downloaded the first chapter for free on my Kindle app. I figured the raunchy-ness would definitely not be in the first chapter where we would be merely meeting the characters. The buzz on these books is so big, so I wanted to know what the fuss was about, and if the story was compelling.
No. Just, no. The writing is atrocious. I mean, seriously. Ten minutes of my life I can never get back. I found out after the fact that it started as Twilight fan fiction, but I literally Googled the author because I seriously thought (based on the quality of writing) it was written by a 14 year old. So, that's all I got on that. I haven't read the book(s), and after reading the first chapter I have no desire to. I would not give this woman a dime for her horrible abuse of literature when there are other authors who can string three words together coherently that are struggling to get published.