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🕊️'s avatar

do you ever get tired of putting out banger after banger ?!

just to add to the discussion, i think as someone who’s bisexual, a lot of the jokes about hating men were liberatory for me when i was just coming to understand my queerness as a teenager.

as an adult now, i find them deeply uncomfortable because i’ve done a lot of thinking about my attraction to men to understand my sexuality. it also feels like another small marker of difference between me and the few straight women that i have as friends; i can’t join in on this social bonding moment. i try to subtly push back, but that’s also fraught with not wanting to come off as the ~slutty bisexual.~ which, as i type it, makes me wonder if the initial disparagement of sex with men can be a way for women who want to talk about their own desires to distance themselves from both feeling like and being perceived as promiscuous or deviant.

the comment is ramble-y, but please take it as evidence that your writing always gets me to think about these topics!

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Samantha Rose's avatar

This whole essay brought me back vividly to an experience I had at a writers group a few weeks ago, when I was shared the first chapter of my second novel (which is a fantasy romance.) When the group read the FMC’s yearning description of her love interest upon first meeting, there were several echoing comments to the effect of “I hope the rest of this book isn’t just going to be her pining for this guy.” To be fair to my writers group, I am the lone romance novelist there, so they were never gonna have totally calibrated genre expectations. But I just burst out laughing because immediately a slideshow went through my head of my beloved FMC being absolutely relentlessly obsessed with this boy, while every other character in the novel begs her to think about literally anything else, for 300 pages. I felt myself get defensive of my character’s awareness of her desire and her determination to fulfill it, something that the group implied was anti-feminist because the thing that she desired was a boy. To me, that pursuit of desire feels like one of the most affirming aspects of reading and writing romance. Heteropessimism is a helpful framework for understanding their reaction.

P.S. I’m obsessed with the phrase yearnmaxxing.

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