Anti-Catholic...erotica? (Or not.)

Hanna Rosin's book review in the NYT mentions what she calls the "sanctioned soft porn" of some Christian sex manuals.  The "soft porn" issue has often arisen in relationship to Victorian anti-Catholic propaganda, which has been known to rely heavily on things like pregnant nuns, oversexed priests, and the like.   Most notorious in this connection is The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk--in fact, my first copy of Maria Monk was a twentieth-century paperback reprint that was clearly packaged and marketed as erotica, complete with a bewimpled but otherwise naked nun on the cover.[1]  (I agree that that was probably not a good sign, all things considered.)  John Wolffe has suggested that "Maria Monk represented a cultural milieu which, in the area of sexuality, had some points of contact with evangelicalism but had a fundamentally different focus, owing more to pornography and a popular fascination with mystery and violent crime than to religion[.]" [2] While "mystery" and  "violent crime" certainly apply here, I can't help noticing that while MM indeed "discloses" any number of appalling things, it doesn't disclose much in the way of sex.   That is, it certainly makes obvious references to sexual shenanigans, like the "criminal and shameful" behavior of a priest to a young girl (19), and, more bluntly, the "practice of criminal intercourse" (47) that Maria Monk must carry on with the supposedly celibate priests next door.  But the sex isn't just inexplicit; it's not even a particularly important part of the book's sensationalism, quantitatively speaking.   There's more about the poor murdered babies than there is about the sex that (presumably) produces them.   MM is much more obsessed with the general corruption of anyone who looks like a monastic, the tedium of monastic life, the usual run of misunderstood Catholic religious practices, and the occasional horrific murder.  When MM gets explicit about anything, it's about punishment, as in this instance (the nun has refused to practice infanticide).    Again, you could possibly make a case for this as sadomasochistic erotica--although I must say that the erotic part seems to be missing--but there still isn't enough of it to merit the book its reputation.  Influenced by pornography, quite possibly, but pornography itself...not really.    Perhaps readers only remember the nunnery's collection of gags (seriously, what was with the authors' obsession with women and gags?  Do I actually want to know the answer to that question? Probably not...) and not the bizarre accounts of Catholic ritual and monastic discipline that occupy most of the narrative.      

[1] No, not this cover.
[2] John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829-1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 125-26.