Green’s Dictionary of Slang

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

1978		Chicago Trib. 8 Feb. 16/1: Publishers call them hot historicals as opposed to the virginal variety [...] or to the bodice rippers.
1984		(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.
1990		Indep. 30 Oct. n.p.: Prototype bodice-ripper with 17th-century wild child Lorna [...] falling for her clan’s avowed enemy.
2000		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.
2010		(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].
2021		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’.