yes, no, maybe so

thinking differently about consent, sex, and violence in romance

Up top, would really appreciate if y’all could take a second to donate or share the donation links for legal aid for Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts PhD student who was abducted by ICE.

This is true of every newsletter i’ve published this year but especially this one— the fingerprints of my friends’ thoughts are all over this. Thank you Emma and Chels in particular for being incredibly smart and cool and for writing about much of this before me and better <3 go read their work, which I also link throughout the essay.

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Nosferatu (2024)

A couple of months ago I talked about themes of monstrousness and border violation in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) over on TikTok. The film is a remake of a long line of Nosferatu and Dracula interpretations, with a decidedly romantic feel to it. The film begins with Lily Rose-Depp as the protagonist Ellen Hutter, kneeling in a soft white shift dress. She clasps her hands together, turns her elfin eyes to the sky, and prays, “Come to me. Come to me: A guardian angel, a spirit of comfort – spirit of any celestial sphere – anything – hear my call.” The prayer summons Count Orlok, who observes Ellen from behind a gauzy curtain and says, reverently, “You are not for the living. You are not for human kind,” then, “And shall you be one with me evereternally. Do you swear it?” Ellen agrees to this, and their embrace, the script says, produces a “powerful, unknown bliss,” in her.

The exchange, which took place when she was just a teenager, changes Ellen forever. For years afterwards, she experiences seizures that both wrack her with pleasure and pain. Count Orlok terrorizes her psyche until she meets and weds Thomas Hutter, played by Nicholas Hoult, her sweet and devoted husband. The film then follows Count Orlok’s journey to reclaim Ellen in Wisburg, where he launches a battle against the town, its people, and Ellen’s dearest friends until she agrees of her own volition to join him once more.

I commented on how Ellen’s actions as a teenager reveal something of the “generative power of sexuality,” a reference to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty¹. It was her changeling power alone, the depth of her despair, yearning, and loneliness, that could animate this centuries-old monster into being. It is her agreement that binds them together. In this interpretation, Ellen is both his creator and his victim, a complex duality to say the least. Of course, I say this with acknowledgement of the fact that she was a child and he was a monster. She agrees to something and then doesn’t quite realize what she’s gotten herself into until she seizes in the gardens outside her home.

The first wave of discourse on Nosferatu (2024) centered on the characterization of Ellen and Count Orlok as a romantic relationship versus a predatory one. People made videos about the irresponsibility of characterizing Ellen and Count Orlok’s relationship as romantic or erotic given his rape of her as an adolescent and her own statements as an adult (“I abhor you!”) about his pursuit of her as a child. On the flip side, people pointed out the explicitly erotic themes of the movie and Ellen’s own inability to resist Count Orlok when confronted with him in the (rotting) flesh. The script makes no mistake of cluing us in on her fraught desire: “His breath is lustful. So is hers. She disgusts herself by how drawn she is to him. ORLOK grips her more tightly.”

As with most internet discourse, I found myself sort of bored by the polarization at play. Abhorrence and earnest desire are easily enmeshed for me. That Orlok is a violent predator and the thing she craves most in the world, didn’t feel narratively incompatible at all. In fact, those things felt entirely complimentary. His abjection revealed the abjection she perceived, and felt profound shame about, in herself. It was too intimate, too close to the core of her being. She could never escape this relentless, feral appetite. Certainly not when it was an appetite of her own making.

ellen hutter summoning her tormentor

Romance Reasons

I’ve been thinking about Nosferatu in the context of romance² because of growing preoccupation in the romance community with the language of consent in a post-#MeToo world³. My time spent in the online romance community suggests that the consensus opinion is: romance novels should strive for representation of ethical, consensual sex wherever possible, and should be clearly marketed and sold as Dark Romance if probing concepts like consensual nonconsent, dubious consent, or nonconsent⁴. Experimentation with nonconsent is okay, but only in a very specific sliver of the genre, fenced in on all sides to avoid polluting its neighbors. There’s a little bit of therapy-speak in here too: dark romance is a safe place for survivors of violence to explore hard things, get catharsis, safely work through capital-T Trauma⁵.

With the influx of conversation about romance as a “feminist” genre, consent discourse seems to be particularly interested in disaffiliating romance from its earlier seminal works; works like Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower prominently feature rape between the MMC and FMC, as do a slew of other works collectively identified by the label bodice ripper.⁶ These disaffiliations are interesting to me because nonconsent and rape are, of course, still a part of romance. Even prior to the popularization of self-pub dark romance, noncon existed in romance in various forms well into the 2010s.

There seem to be particular anxieties about how depictions of rape within a romance novel amount to an implicit or explicit endorsement of rape as an act. If a man can rape a woman and still end the book “happily ever after,” isn’t that equivalent to manufacturing consent for patriarchal violence? Such depictions might be a tragic part of romance’s past, but we’ve moved beyond that, now. What kind of people are we, if we read books like this and enjoy them? In a post-#MeToo world, shouldn’t we “do better”?

It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas is maybe the easiest example of the shift in attitudes I’ve seen. It’s a historical romance, and while Kleypas got her start in bodice rippers, it isn’t really a bodice ripper itself. The story follows new-money American heiress Lillian Bowman and the very old-money Earl Marcus, Lord Westcliff. The two are enemies from the start. She’s a playful, ill-behaved hoyden and he’s stern, bound by honor, and badly in need of someone who will remind him that he’s a flesh-and-blood person. They bicker and fight their way into falling in love, held apart by the fact that he should be seeking a more “proper,” candidate for Lady Westcliff than the heiress to a soap fortune. Eventually, Westcliff stumbles across Lillian getting absolutely piss-drunk off pear brandy in his personal library. Besotted and undefended against her, Westcliff capitulates to his own desires and takes Lillian to bed.

Westcliff is fully aware of the ethical problems with his actions. In the library, he thinks to himself:

His beleaguered sense of honor protested that he was not the kind of man who would take an inebriated woman to bed. She was helpless. She was a virgin. He would never forgive himself if he took advantage of her in this condition–

It doesn’t stop him, however. They have sex, then she wakes up the next day, fully compromised and hungover, with Westcliff apologizing for how dishonorably he acted by promising to make it up to her with a betrothal.

In 2021, a version of this novel was released without the pivotal chapter where Lillian and Westcliff consummate their relationship. The book moves from the library scene, where Westcliff fights with his sense of honor and his intense desire, to the scene where wakes up with her safely ensconced in his bed. She’s still ruined, for being in a bachelor’s bedroom in a state of undress, but she hasn’t had sex. Their first sex scene, which also existed in the original text, takes place later that day in Marcus’ study, after Marcus has formally asked her father to court her and when Lillian is fully sober and in control. While the publisher nor author offer commentary on why these changes were made⁷ it’s hard not to feel like It Happened One Autumn was modified in response to evolving expectations around consent from romance readers.

doing better

One of the more perplexing parts of the push for more explicit and enthusiastic consent in romance novels is the implicit assumption that consent is settled law. Where #MeToo produced, for a small handful of people, a level of clarity about the ubiquity of sexual violence and harassment in the film industry, for most people who think about and do this work, it was far more demonstrative of the failings of an affirmative consent model and its liberal feminist underpinnings, not to mention indicative of the way that white feminist celebrities were able to neatly extract a restorative-justice initiative spearheaded by a Black community organizer, for young Black girls experiencing sexual violence, and repurpose it for carceral feminist aims.⁸

Truthfully, consent is still a hotly contested conceptual territory. Among the articles and academic works I read for this essay, consent was defined differently in every single one. One paper borrowed RAINN’s guidelines: “a) Did the person express overt actions or words indicating agreement for sexual acts? b) Was the consent offered of the person’s own free will, without being induced by fraud, coercion, violence, or threat of violence? c) Did the individual have the capacity, or legal ability, to consent?” In a piece in BookRiot, the author suggests that consent in romance ”specifically is two (or more) people agreeing to be physically intimate with each other at every step. Body language and enthusiasm can be consent. Explicit consent is agreeing with words. Ideally, both are involved.” An article from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, cited sex educator Emily Nagoski’s definition: “Everyone is glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences.”⁹

All of these definitions, while beautifully simple and satisfyingly devoid of moral ambiguity, barely hold up to an additional layer of scrutiny. I’m thinking about Katherine Angel’s book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2022), which devotes the entire first half to challenging affirmative consent models. By Angel’s estimation, affirmative consent models fail women because they:

• Operate on the basis of a consenter’s self-knowledge (“That we must say what we want, and indeed know what we want, has become a truism it is hard to disagree with if one takes seriously women’s autonomy and pleasure in sex.”)

• Fail to account adequately for asymmetrical power dynamics (“Pleasure, and the right to it, are not equally distributed”)

• Don’t realize that saying “Yes!” is also difficult, and does not guarantee pleasure. (“Are consent, saying yes, and expressing desire a guarantor of pleasure? Do they preclude men’s instrumentalization of women? Of course not.”)

• Don’t account for how saying “Yes!” is also difficult because women are punished for expressing desire (“A woman’s sexual appetite is often the very means through which male violence is exonerated.”)

• frame “women’s role in sex primarily as one of refusal.”

Other criticisms cite the juridicism of affirmative consent, or the way that consent becomes, predominantly, a legal issue in the ethical life of our society. Obtaining affirmative, enthusiastic consent becomes a matter of mitigating legal risk within a sexual encounter, rather than investing in the pleasure of a partner. Desire, pleasure, consent, and risk are frequently conflictual forces.¹⁰

The psychoanalyst and writer Avgi Saketopoulou expands on such criticisms in her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Race, Risk, and Traumatophilia (2024)¹¹. She writes that affirmative consent is “insufficiently nuanced,” and that it “problematically imagines desire to be autonomous, unconstrained, and possible to separate from social inequalities that, in fact, condition who gets to withhold consent and who does not.” Saketopoulou’s notes that affirmative consent inadequately addresses the vulnerability and risk inherent to a sexual encounter, and asks our desires to be legible to both us and our partners. All of this is to say: new consent paradigms are desperately needed, in real life and in our examination of it within fiction.

It’s in this context that she offers a discussion of opacity, a concept developed by the writer Édouard Glissant to capture that which cannot be translated, excavated, or understood. In his own words, the opaque is “that which cannot be reduced.”¹² Saketopoulou uses opacity to express that not all desires are readily communicable, many desires are discovered during or after a sexual encounter, and seeking an ultimate cause or source of desire can be extractive and unhelpful. She presents, instead, “limit consent,” or an exchange wherein partners offer a tentative surrender to the unknowability of what comes next in a sexual encounter. “What they are implicitly agreeing to in this negotiation,” she writes, “is to be subjected to something unforeseeable, to being vulnerable, and to being surprised.”

Limit consent should sound quite familiar to romance readers. When I first read about it, I thought about the first sex scene in Lisa Kleypas’ Devil in Winter, when the accomplished rake Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, takes his wallflower bride-of-convenience Evangeline Jenner to bed. The scene begins when she wakes up in an inn after the anvil wedding, only to find him already halfway through foreplay. The sex scene that follows is choreographed by Sebastian, but doesn’t go quite how he intends for it to. In the last lines of the chapter, as both characters reach a climax, Kleypas writes:

Gasping, St. Vincent lifted his head to stare at her as if she were a variety of creature he had never seen before. “Good Lord,” he whispered, his expression not one of gratification, but of something close to alarm.

When Sebastian leaves their bed, after, he’s dazed, uncertain, on unsteady legs, fumbling. He describes it as madness, observing that “all the physical riches of Evangeline Jenner could not account for her extraordinary effect on him.” Sebastian sets out to have exactly the kind of sex that he enjoys and is skilled at, but becomes subject to something unforeseeable, something exposing, something that makes contact with an opaque, impenetrable part of him that never goes “explained” or reduced by the text. The experience frightens him enough that he spends much of the rest of the book pretending to avoid his wife altogether.

As a reader, limit consent offers me a means of understanding the work of a sex scene differently and more richly. When characters are not “glad to be there,” or “in agreement,” or “enthusiastic,” limit consent expresses something of the enigmatic possibility of sex beyond the development of a contract. Sex, read this way, is not about enthusiasm and joy so much as it is about transformation.

One of the books that comes up often when I talk about consent is A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, the first in her iconic paranormal romance series Immortals After Dark. The story follows Lachlain, king of werewolves, and Emmaline, a half-vampire, half-valkyrie with more physical weaknesses than strengths. Lachlain begins the novel chained to an eternally glowing fire by the vampire faction of the paranormal world. He’s been tortured¹³ and held captive for 150 years beneath the city of Paris until he scents his mate, Emmaline, for the first time and quite literally gnaws his leg off (iconic) to escape his chains and find her. He hunts Emmaline, seeming more beast than man, until he captures her in the streets and tears their clothes off so he can press her to his bare skin. He kisses her face with a tenderness that makes her think she’s lost her mind.

More than a few friends have talked about how newcomers to paranormal romance are better suited to start with later books in the series, which feature fewer scenes with ambiguously consensual sexual circumstances. Lachlain is feral in a very literal sense. He’s angry to be mated to a member of the species that held him captive and simultaneously desperate for her:

“I need you. No matter what you are. And I’ll wait no longer.”

At his baffling words, her body inexplicably softened, relaxing. Her claws curled as if to clutch him to her, and her fangs receded to ready for his kiss. Frantic, she rapped her nails against the wall behind her and tapped her tongue against her left fang. Her defenses remained dormant. She was terrified of him. Why wasn’t her body?

The exchange that follows moves between fear and pleasure. She kisses him on his demand, out of fear of pain, but she also finds herself begrudgingly enjoying the experience. He slices the silk of her clothes away with a sharp claw and feels her up in the shower together. Emmaline, horrified, thinks to herself, “She was embarrassed that this stranger saw her like this, but she was also intrigued by his body. She strove not to peek at his huge erection as he bent and moved, but it was… eye-catching.”

For a seventy-year-old ¹⁴ vampkyrie-princess who hasn’t so much as held a man’s hand, Lachlain is a loose cannon who shatters her fragile self-containment and loneliness and ushers in the existence of Emmaline’s sexual self by force. The experience is confusing, disorienting: “She should be terrified. Was she so desperate for touch—any touch—that she would submit to this?” Later, when Lachlain attempts to wake her up with an orgasm from oral sex, she kicks him across the room. She reflects on the experience in a way that captures the same confusion:

She’d struck out at him with such violence because she’d been confused and frightened. Yet she’d also been nearer to orgasm than she had in her entire life. She was a weak woman, because for a second, the temptation to lie there docile and let her knees fall open to accept his fierce kiss had been nearly overwhelming. Even now she found herself wet. For him. Her response bewildered her.

The straightforward, literal reading of these scenes likely amounts to assault. It’s not a reading I begrudge anyone at all. But I also think that limit consent acknowledges the possibility that more is at work. In these early chapters, Emmaline is encountering something beyond translation or even reason within herself, a thing that provokes bewilderment, intrigue, desperation, bafflement. Lachlain is not merely a beast who threatens her autonomy and agency, he is also someone who produces feelings in her that are so foreign, so frightening, so exposing that she doesn’t know what to do with them. Such vulnerability likely feels dangerous, and even unsafe, but profound vulnerability was never supposed to be comfortable to begin with. It was, and is, the impetus for transformation.

reading differently

In part, the shift in attitudes towards nonconsent in romance feels like it is predicated on the idea that a romance novel can’t make a reader feel bad. We can’t have rape scenes in romance novels because a romance novel is contractually obligated to make a reader feel happy, and rape doesn’t feel good. But what if feeling bad is the point?

In Sexuality Beyond Consent, Saketopoulou, writing to psychologists, suggests that a clinician must be traumatophilic. That is, we must love the trauma of our clients, because it isn’t a thing to be resolved, erased, or fixed. There is no point at which we return to our pre-trauma state. There is only after, and that after is fundamentally formed by the trauma. In her words, “a traumatophilic lens is interested in the way trauma is not purged, but lived through, though on different terms from those that originally inflicted the injury. Through this reanimating, the visitation of trauma may become an ever-renewable source of inspiration, acting on us in potentially transforming ways.” It’s a radical idea in contemporary psychotherapy, which is often preoccupied with self-optimization and self-regulation in deeply capitalistic ways, but it resonates. She notes that the ego, the self, is deeply invested in its own stability and resistant to novelty. A tremendous force is required to override an ego’s own defenses and fortifications.

Whether or not you buy psychoanalysis in a therapeutic setting (and, believe me, you should be deeply skeptical for many reasons), this framing is really striking for me as a reader. We must love our characters, who often have viciously self-protective egos, and we must love the tremendous force that succeeds in ultimately altering them. Characters must experience difficult things, must be challenged, must be pushed. It is that push, challenge, difficulty, and yes, trauma, that makes them. A character cannot emerge from a narrative unscathed, untouched, untested if an author hopes to make the case that a character has fundamentally changed.

But why does that character-forming trauma have to be rape? Well, it isn’t always rape. Actually, it is rarely rape, even in romance. But it sometimes is rape and other kinds of sexual violence because romance is a genre about sex, intimacy, gender, and power. Few actions exist at the nexus of those things the way that nonconsensual sexual acts do. Put another way, and with consideration for the role of sexual violence in narrative, “this interimplication of pleasure/pain can leave the subject ‘momentarily undone’ (1986, p. 100). This unraveling of the self ‘disrupt[s] the ego's coherence and dissolve[s] its boundaries’ (Bersani, 1986, p. 101), an experience that Bersani famously described as the self's shattering,” (emphasis my own).

Most scholarship about rape within romance attends to the reader experience of encountering it within text, much of which I find to be unsatisfying and some of which I’ve sort of explored above, but there’s also some deeply interesting work on the narrative function of such scenes. Toscano (2012), posits three ways that heroes perceive and appropriate heroine identity, resulting in the rape scene: “Rape of Mistaken Identity, the Rape of possession, and the Rape of Coercion or ‘Forced Seduction,’” each elaborated upon below:

• Mistaken Identity: usually at the beginning of the narrative, “a device intended to create an immediate intimacy and bond between the two protagonists while simultaneously placing an obstacle in the path of any future relationship between them. The heroine cannot but distrust and even hate the hero for his actions, while the hero cannot but distrust his own reliance on appearances.”

• Possession: produces circumstances wherein the hero realizes “the recognition that the body alone can never fulfill the hero’s desire for the heroine; that mere possession of the heroine whether it is through marriage, contract, or rape fails to create reciprocity.”

• Coercion or Forced Seduction: this device “is not simply the moment at which the story seems to be veering towards tragedy or the separation of the lovers, but rather the rape, both physical and verbal, becomes the ritual through which the identities of both heroine and hero die in order to be reborn.”

Toscano is smart (smarter than me, certainly) to forgo sociological and psychological explanations in favor of a textual one. The reality is that such scenes do work for a narrative and for characters. It does work in A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, in Shadowheart by Laura Kinsale, and in Kiss an Angel or Nobody’s Baby but Mine by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, all books that are extremely beloved by romance readers. Violence can be extremely textually generative.

During the rape scene in Christina Dodd’s A Well Pleasured Lady,¹⁵ the prim, cold housekeeper-turned-heiress Guinevere Mary, who regards her own attraction to Sebastian, Lord Whitfield,¹⁶ as a liability and an aberration, has the realization that, even more than the physical violation, it was the emotional intensity that was intrusive to her.

She didn’t want him to see her crying, but there was no place to run, no place to hide… Damn him, damn him, how did he know that she hated the loss of privacy almost as much as she hated the turbulent emotions?

The language of the scene is incredibly evocative: “Mary burned. This entanglement was calamity.” And Sebastian doesn’t escape without burns, either: “he might have started this out of fury, but he was involved now. He’d laid claim on her, but she’d returned the favor, and now they were so tangled she didn’t know how to escape.” And maybe most striking of all: “pressure grew as irresistible force met immovable object. Then the immovable object snapped.” It’s a scene that unhinges its jaw and swallows both characters whole. It is not happy, it is not enthusiastic, it is not comfortable, but it is doing work.

Maybe so?

To be clear, I don’t have any interest in telling people how they should navigate consent in their life and relationships. Those negotiations are deeply intimate and beyond the scope of this Substack. I do, however, think we do ourselves a disservice by insisting romance novels model good, wholesome, ethical, affirmative consent, whatever that might look like. By insisting on “yes!” consent in romance, we continue to relegate romance to the realm of the real (as in literal), didactic, and optimistic. There’s an anesthetizing quality to that optimism, something that robs romance of its complexity and intensity.

It strikes me, too, as a rejection of the concept of fiction itself, to insist upon the presentation of good, ethical models of sex and sexuality in romance fiction for fear that we may communicate a tacit acceptance of sexual violence otherwise. I just don’t believe that it is a romance novel’s chief objective to make real-world sexual harms legible to us.¹⁷ And still, as I was talking about this essay with my sister, she suggested that I make my stance clear: rape is unequivocally bad. It’s a suggestion that struck me as ridiculous, first because that is so obviously true. Second, because it makes my point all the more clear: in discussing the narrative function of fictional harms, there is perennially a fear that we implicate ourselves as complacent or ignorant in the face of real harms.

Such rejection of fiction obfuscates the extent to which authors make tactical decisions about their story to provoke certain reactions from their readers– disgust, fear, confusion, catharsis, despair. Rape does not simply happen to a character within a narrative the way it can happen to people in the real world. An author has made a choice about how rape or nonconsent, broadly, illustrates something about the characters involved and the world of the novel, both for perpetrator and victim. Whether you find that case persuasive or meaningful is up to the discernment of the reader.¹⁸

I know I'm always talking about conservatism and fascism on here, and that will probably never stop. Increasingly I am understanding fascism to be, at least psychologically, about the collapsing of possibility— in narrative, in art, in life. That fewer and fewer ambivalences, discomforts, and ambiguities are permissible or even written within romance genre fiction speaks volumes to me about where the American collective consciousness lives.

#MeToo exposed a profound structural and cultural rot, a kind of casual cruelty and violence that festered for decades without recognition or restitution. Such rot can also be vertiginous, disorienting, frightening, and I wonder often if the call for moral clarity within romance is a response to that meaning vertigo.¹⁹ Sexual relations are more fraught than ever in the real world, can romance novels give me the simplicity and clarity and satisfaction I don’t see in the world around me? And if romance must explore themes of nonconsent, can we receive a neon, glowing sign in the form of “dark romance,” to make it clear that we all know sexual violence is bad?

Such asks masquerade as progressive, and yet they reinforce broader concerns for me about how we’re taught to engage with media. There are endless circular debates about how what we read has an impact on how we live our lives, an endless tally of bad media that we are bad people for enjoying. What about how we read? The growing inability to exercise discernment, evaluate choices made in a text, cultivate taste, experience discomfort, encounter friction in media and move through it?

if there’s one thing i’m gonna do, it’s discuss concepts with Cat

Ultimately, for me, consent in romance novels isn’t a moral issue, it’s a craft issue. In the case of It Happened One Autumn, the removal of the nonconsensual scene between Marcus and Lillian comes with costs to character work in the novel. In a novel about a starchy hero who places his responsibilities to the Earldom above all else in his life, his choice to seduce Lillian in far more wholesome circumstances doesn’t do sufficient work to illustrate how his personal mythology is unmade so absolutely and thoroughly by Lillian. The reader doesn’t encounter the discomfort of knowing that Marcus is capable of being selfish, irresponsible, dishonorable, and hedonistic. He’s just a man who took a drunk woman to his room and let her sleep it off, a perfectly kind and respectable thing had it not been Regency-era England.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most historical romance readers I know agree that the re-release is not as successful as the original text. In prioritizing moral comfort, the story loses much-needed teeth. Funnily enough, the thing in Kleypas’ work that absolutely did need revising or acknowledgement– her fetishistic, tone deaf, and orientalist portrayal of Romani people in the Hathaways series– remains unmodified.

The thing that often feels most real (real as in truthful, not real as in literal) to me in depictions of rape in romance is a thing that Nosferatu, captures in its last scene. Count Orlok has just asked Ellen, “You accept this, of your own will?” and Ellen, dressed in bridal attire, replies, “I do.” He announces, “As our spirits are one, so too shall be our flesh. You are mine,” and she takes him into her bed, where he drinks from her breast. As he drinks, the sun begins to rise, and for just a moment Ellen acknowledges her victory over him with a look. He may be able to drink her to death, but the act will destroy him.

The thing that feels real is this: sometimes pleasure doesn’t feel good, it feels like an annihilation.

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It probably isn’t lost on you that the cases I talk through in this Substack are exclusively white and cishet. In part, this probably reflects biases in my reading, which certainly exist. I haven’t read books like Gaywyck, for example, which might have been apt for inclusion in this essay. In part, I wonder if the expectations of good, uncomplicated sexual behavior affect non-white characters differently. For many readers, white people wear both villainy and victimhood with a light touch, able to cast the skin of it off more readily than non-white, especially Black, characters. The ways novels about queer and BIPOC characters are sold to me often favor a kind of didactic tone (I’m thinking of the pressures of “good representation,” here.) Perhaps, also, the way I’ve presented rape relies on a particularly heterosexual, patriarchal formulation of interpersonal violence, though many of the sources I cite include cases across gender, race, and sexuality. I’m still noodling on this part, and welcome thoughts if folks have them!

1. Salamon, G. (2010). Assuming a body: Transgender and rhetorics of materiality. Columbia University Press.

2. Emma did this first, here!

3. well. romance has always been interested in consent. these conversations are inevitably cyclical, but I feel that the existence of the #MeToo movement has offered them new shape, which I elaborate on.

4. I use many terms somewhat interchangeably because I am a little bit of a sloppy thinker. Nonconsensual sexual activity, sexual violence, and nonconsent are all used. When I mean rape, I say rape.

5. I don’t necessarily disagree with that claim, (well, maybe I do) though I am always dubious of medicalized explanations for ordinary media consumption.

6. For more on bodice rippers and violence, please do yourself a favor and read Chels’ Substack about the infamous Stormfire by Christine Monson, which is soooo good.

7. Actually, technically speaking, I’m not sure that the rerelease has been formally acknowledged at all.

8. For more on carceral feminism, read The Right to Sex (2021) by Amia Srinivasan.

9. I would cite these, but they all sucked so bad. Google Bookriot consent if you’re really curious lol

10. Loick, D. (2020). “… as if it were a thing.” A feminist critique of consent. Constellations, 27(3), 412–422. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12421

11. I need to warn you before you pick this up that psychoanalysts are crazy and the entire second half is kind of (?) a defense of race play that unsettled me to my very bones. Unfortunately they are also so clever and interesting, so I am forced to have sympathy for their ideas. But this book has some real freak stuff in it just FYA.

12. Poetics of Relation (1997) by Edouard Glissant

13. They made him burn to death, but he’s immortal, so he just kept resurrecting. Gruesome stuff, Kresley!

14. I’m being facetious, she’s 70 years old and looks like she’s in her early 20s

15. Read this on Chels’ recommendation of the book plus this banger of an essay from Judith Ivory on the book

16. I’m calling a moratorium on the name Sebastian in romance. I can’t keep them all straight. Why is Sebastian a Hero Name???

17. Makes me think about Emma’s series on marital rape and romance, which everyone should be reading.

18. language partially informed by a tumblr post my friend Emma P. sent me about Severance <3

19. Melo Lopes, F. (2019). Perpetuating the patriarchy: Misogyny and (post-)feminist backlash. Philosophical Studies, 176(9), 2517–2538. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1138-z