Green’s Dictionary of Slang

bodice-ripper n.

[the period costumes and their fate]

a historical novel (or film), with a greater than usual emphasis on sex, esp. the seduction or even rape of the heroine.

[US]Chicago Trib. 8 Feb. 16/1: Publishers call them hot historicals as opposed to the virginal variety [...] or to the bodice rippers.
(ref. to 1970s) M.A. Jensen Love’s $weet Return 66: The gothic [novel] gave way to the predominantly American-authored ‘bodice-ripper’ in the 1970s. The name [...] was derived from the frequent rapes and sexual assaults that the heroines experienced.
[UK]Indep. 30 Oct. n.p.: Prototype bodice-ripper with 17th-century wild child Lorna [...] falling for her clan’s avowed enemy.
[UK]M. Manning Get Your Cock Out 84: ‘I want to savour your body like wine’. Dandy didn’t know where the fuck that little piece of poetry had come from, probably one of her mother’s bodice rippers.
[UK](ref. to mid-1970s) T. Cardamone Lost Library 34: Around 1975, a college friend lent me his copy of Gordon Merrick’s 1970 man-on-man bodice-ripper, The Lord Won’t Mind [Simes:DLSS].
[US]J. Ellroy Widespread Panic 305: ‘I’m not calling them smut, but I’d call them “bodice-rippers,” with lots of skin and some pretty smutty scenes’.