“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” y!e!s! and it’s why I’m so bored with new stuff coming out.
I swear nearly every romance book recently has a nice character who meets a nice character and they have nice sex and a nice (if existent at all) breakup and a nice reconciliation with no real grovel bc there’s no reason to grovel bc everything and everyone is so NICE 😭😭😭
Sorry in advance for the long comment, this topic is so interesting to me I kinda got too into it.
I was following the post with great interest, as I’m always looking for well thought-out takes on non/consent in romance and what it can do for the characters, for the story and for the narration in itself. I also read Sexuality Beyond Consent a while ago. I picked it up right after finishing Gender Without Identity by the same author and Ann Pellegrini, which I found extremely interesting because Saketopoulou and Pellegrini posit that trauma has an impact in the formation of both cis and trans identities, so when we talk about trans people being “made trans” because of traumatic personal history we’re actually ignoring the fact that if that’s true, than it is just as true that traumatic personal history is also what makes cis people cis. I’d 100% recommend reading Gender Without Identity also, because like Sexuality Beyond Consent it asks the reader to leave assumptions about clear-cut explanations and definitions at the door to understand what we can do and what we can be if we actually allow ourselves (or in this case, if we allow our characters and plots) to make a mess of sex, gender, pleasure, and identity.
So I got stuck for a bit when I read this footnote:
“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.”
I have also left Sexuality Beyond Consent unsettled, but I think that’s actually what the book asks of the reader. To sit with that discomfort, to investigate why it exists in the first place, even more so if you went into the book with an open mind and you’re suddenly forced to admit that openness has reached a blockage. And what do you do with that? Ironically, by explaining the concept of limit consent, the book is also making you experience it in a way that isn’t necessarily comfortable or even pleasurable.
But it feels to me that there are implications in calling “freak stuff” the experiences of the Black and queer people who are being quite literally exposed in the pages of Sexuality Beyond Consent. Regarding race play, a huge chunk of the book is a literary and psychoanalytical analysis of Slave Play, a play written by Jeremy O. Harris. Harris is a queer Black man who uses theater to explore what can only be defined as extremely visceral emotions regarding the traumatic history of black slavery and how it informs the way Black people interact and explore sexual and romantic relationships.
In a way, Slave Play (and thus Sexuality Beyond Consent, as its literary analysis) is actually directly related to this comment you make at the end:
“In part, I wonder if the expectations of good, uncomplicated sexual behavior affect non-white characters differently. … 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.)”
Queer and BIPOC characters ARE held up to higher standards. Even when we are conscious of that, a queer exploration of non-white trauma and its possibly messy, possibly ugly, possibly still pleasurable consequences makes us uncomfortable to the point of calling them freak stuff. And I think in some way it’s correct to call them that. They are freak stuff because they don’t really give us pretty and clear answers. We are left with more questions and nothing to help us unravel our feelings. In a sense, THEY are freak stuff because they make US feel like freaks for even considering looking into them.
This is no accusation, by the way, but I think it helps us understand why there is such a backlash against dark romance and noncon/dubcon scenes in romances in general. Everyone of us has a different I-feel-like-a-freak limit, and not everyone is willing to poke at it or into it. Even better, everyone of us has different, MULTIPLE I-feel-like-a-freek limits, and some of them we are willing to explore, others not so much.
Back to the topic at hand, though, I have been a romance reader since my teen. I have read more queer books than cishet ones, which I always found a tiny bit more free (in the sense that queer books are allowed to explore concepts that cishet books usually aren’t, especially when it comes to sex—with the caveat that queer romances aren’t exempt from the usual cissexism, racism and the like), but lately I’ve been asking myself whether the romance genre as we know might not be the best place to explore the full depth of ambiguities that come with consent, sex and relationships. That’s mostly because the mandatory happy ending that is so necessary to us romance readers requires some level of closure that doesn’t really go well with Glissant’s concept of opacity.
Like, is it really a happy ending if one of the characters is still ambivalent about their relationship started nonconsensually?
I’m thinking specifically about Docile by K.M. Szpara here, or many dark romances where either the plot itself or the author’s craft aren’t really able to “redeem” the MC. The fact that the MC has to be redeemed in the first place already tells me that the general consensus is, not really. The happy ending has to be unambiguous, otherwise it’s either a happy for now (which only satisfies when it’s followed by a more clear-cut HEA book) or isn’t happy at all.
Are you familiar with Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy? Consent (and the lack thereof) is at the core of the books, and the reason why it works so well is because all the human characters are always in a perpetual state of ambivalence—even when they are happy, even when they get what they have been wanting forever. The very ending of the first book has all the ingredients of a happy ending (Lilith ends up pregnant with her lover’s baby) but they’re mixed together in the worst possible way (she is pregnant against her conscious will—she did want the baby, but she did not want it THIS way; she also did not get to choose her will, it was chosen for her even if she DID want it). It's honestly so painfully complicated and that's what makes it such a gorgeous book.
I 100% agree with you that romance can and should be a place to explore consent in more messy ways, but I think the romance makes it hard to explore consent in its messiest expressions and complications because, as a marketing genre first and foremost, readers buy it with their money and get into it with specific expectations. And those expectations create some limits in what can or cannot be fully explored.
This isn't to say that romance as a genre is limiting, not am I pushing towards changing the definition of romance. But it's interesting to me that fanfiction, amateur original fiction or even certain “underground” self-published books (like some of the darker/taboo romances sold on Itch.io) can be a lot more freeing for both the characters and the author/audience when it comes to exploring potentially messy topics. I guess that because fanfic, origfic and indie-selfs can be both romance AND not-romance at the same time. Maybe because these are format where the reader’s approval has less of an impact on the author’s choices of stories? I wonder.
Have you perhaps ever read Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent by Milena Popova? It’s an exploration of consent in M/M fanfiction. If not, I highly recommend it, it definitely fits with what you talked about in this post.
Gahhhhhh yes yes yes. Thank you for this! I read It Happened One Autumn after the re-release, and had no idea about the edits made by Kleypas/her team until somewhat recently, after stumbling upon the discourse on Reddit. The removal of that scene (and I would argue the non consensual kiss in Secrets of a Summer Night), firmly change characterizations for our MMCs that just fell sort of flat for me in a way I couldn’t sort out. Things were clearer after reading the original versions.
I believe you’re exactly onto it all, as usual. I remember finishing Shadowheart and knowing that there were friends I could not recommend it to, because of how that first scene between our FMC and MMC would be perceived, regardless of the way they were experiencing it in the moment, or the way it shapes them from there.
NGL, the idea of limit consent finally made something click in my head about my own sexual experiences so kudos for bringing the concept to my attention. Can't wait to be made uncomfortable af reading about race play to just read further into that concept in Saketopoulou's book now.
“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.”
Incredible and thought provoking. And it’s coming from both political parties which is even more alarming.
Another banger of an essay. Even when it comes to contemporaries with enthusiastic consent, I do not like this trend of needing a check-in every time someone moves an inch. I need everybody to zip their lips and unzip their pants!
If I could like this 1000 times, I would. I started reading romance a long time ago and never encountered the idea that the genre must always make us feel good or act as an instruction manual for intimacy until a few years ago. I think it's great to have these conversations about the broader work that happens in fiction (beyond a moral education) and how making room for that work in romance is good for the genre.
FINALLY nosferatu came to theatres where i live and so i could FINALLY read this
This slaps! (as always)
I find im also getting pretty tired of people arguing that media has to perform perfectly unproblematic people or else it’s Bad. That it has to be uncomplicated-ly good or else it’s promoting Bad
I swear it’s like you know exactly how to formulate some of the thoughts I’ve been having but difficulty putting to word around how people treat the issue of consent in romance fiction and the place transgressive ideas and fiction in general have. Your footnotes led me on a rabbit hole of reading the other Substack blog posts mentioned and now a handful of theory I want to trudge through and learn from.
sOooOoOooOooOoOoo good !! came here form Catherine Chiang on IG who shared your post 💖 I love how serious the psych and philosophical analysis was here! As someone who’s read a lot of romance/romantasy/fanfiction that depicts these themes, this was spot on 🫡🌟
“The thing that feels real is this: sometimes pleasure doesn’t feel good, it feels like an annihilation.” bish yes !!!
I feel myself resisting this somewhat, but then I think about one of my favorite books The Valley of Amazement which (spoiler)****** ends with the main character in a relationship with essentially her child rapist (was “purchased” by him at 15 while a courtesan). The two have this strange tender relationship in their 40s and 50s that felt totally impossible when she was in her teens. It’s not the true love story of the novel, but I think it did provide the main character solace. Is that “okay”? Probably not. Does it speak to where both of the characters are in life, who they both are? I think so. I think what tends to bother me about dark romance is the unabashed lusting after fictional predatory men. It makes me uncomfortable, admittedly, but I’ve enjoyed my share of literary fiction with complicated power dynamics to say the least. Perhaps literary fiction doesn’t require the sort of endorsement and love for its morally ambiguous or bankrupt men that I sometimes feel romance compels us to feel. I think your friend hit the nail on the head with our problem about thinking about romance as self-interest. Women are reading the men as men that they would like to be in relationships with, rather than men of the story in their own context interacting with the women of the story in their own context. And that just doubles the power dynamics present when we’re washing away the individuality of the fmc in our self-insert readings, so the whole thing can feel icky. I think literary fiction usually has the tone I’m looking for, I suppose, and doesn’t feel shoehorned to the definitional “happy ending.” But I think an intelligent romance narrative can navigate dubious or non consent well; you would just have to remove the expectation to feel unequivocally good about the relationship.
“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” y!e!s! and it’s why I’m so bored with new stuff coming out.
I swear nearly every romance book recently has a nice character who meets a nice character and they have nice sex and a nice (if existent at all) breakup and a nice reconciliation with no real grovel bc there’s no reason to grovel bc everything and everyone is so NICE 😭😭😭
romance novels require teeth!!!! where is the bite!
But also nobody’s baby but mine >>>>>>
Sorry in advance for the long comment, this topic is so interesting to me I kinda got too into it.
I was following the post with great interest, as I’m always looking for well thought-out takes on non/consent in romance and what it can do for the characters, for the story and for the narration in itself. I also read Sexuality Beyond Consent a while ago. I picked it up right after finishing Gender Without Identity by the same author and Ann Pellegrini, which I found extremely interesting because Saketopoulou and Pellegrini posit that trauma has an impact in the formation of both cis and trans identities, so when we talk about trans people being “made trans” because of traumatic personal history we’re actually ignoring the fact that if that’s true, than it is just as true that traumatic personal history is also what makes cis people cis. I’d 100% recommend reading Gender Without Identity also, because like Sexuality Beyond Consent it asks the reader to leave assumptions about clear-cut explanations and definitions at the door to understand what we can do and what we can be if we actually allow ourselves (or in this case, if we allow our characters and plots) to make a mess of sex, gender, pleasure, and identity.
So I got stuck for a bit when I read this footnote:
“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.”
I have also left Sexuality Beyond Consent unsettled, but I think that’s actually what the book asks of the reader. To sit with that discomfort, to investigate why it exists in the first place, even more so if you went into the book with an open mind and you’re suddenly forced to admit that openness has reached a blockage. And what do you do with that? Ironically, by explaining the concept of limit consent, the book is also making you experience it in a way that isn’t necessarily comfortable or even pleasurable.
But it feels to me that there are implications in calling “freak stuff” the experiences of the Black and queer people who are being quite literally exposed in the pages of Sexuality Beyond Consent. Regarding race play, a huge chunk of the book is a literary and psychoanalytical analysis of Slave Play, a play written by Jeremy O. Harris. Harris is a queer Black man who uses theater to explore what can only be defined as extremely visceral emotions regarding the traumatic history of black slavery and how it informs the way Black people interact and explore sexual and romantic relationships.
In a way, Slave Play (and thus Sexuality Beyond Consent, as its literary analysis) is actually directly related to this comment you make at the end:
“In part, I wonder if the expectations of good, uncomplicated sexual behavior affect non-white characters differently. … 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.)”
Queer and BIPOC characters ARE held up to higher standards. Even when we are conscious of that, a queer exploration of non-white trauma and its possibly messy, possibly ugly, possibly still pleasurable consequences makes us uncomfortable to the point of calling them freak stuff. And I think in some way it’s correct to call them that. They are freak stuff because they don’t really give us pretty and clear answers. We are left with more questions and nothing to help us unravel our feelings. In a sense, THEY are freak stuff because they make US feel like freaks for even considering looking into them.
This is no accusation, by the way, but I think it helps us understand why there is such a backlash against dark romance and noncon/dubcon scenes in romances in general. Everyone of us has a different I-feel-like-a-freak limit, and not everyone is willing to poke at it or into it. Even better, everyone of us has different, MULTIPLE I-feel-like-a-freek limits, and some of them we are willing to explore, others not so much.
Back to the topic at hand, though, I have been a romance reader since my teen. I have read more queer books than cishet ones, which I always found a tiny bit more free (in the sense that queer books are allowed to explore concepts that cishet books usually aren’t, especially when it comes to sex—with the caveat that queer romances aren’t exempt from the usual cissexism, racism and the like), but lately I’ve been asking myself whether the romance genre as we know might not be the best place to explore the full depth of ambiguities that come with consent, sex and relationships. That’s mostly because the mandatory happy ending that is so necessary to us romance readers requires some level of closure that doesn’t really go well with Glissant’s concept of opacity.
Like, is it really a happy ending if one of the characters is still ambivalent about their relationship started nonconsensually?
I’m thinking specifically about Docile by K.M. Szpara here, or many dark romances where either the plot itself or the author’s craft aren’t really able to “redeem” the MC. The fact that the MC has to be redeemed in the first place already tells me that the general consensus is, not really. The happy ending has to be unambiguous, otherwise it’s either a happy for now (which only satisfies when it’s followed by a more clear-cut HEA book) or isn’t happy at all.
Are you familiar with Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy? Consent (and the lack thereof) is at the core of the books, and the reason why it works so well is because all the human characters are always in a perpetual state of ambivalence—even when they are happy, even when they get what they have been wanting forever. The very ending of the first book has all the ingredients of a happy ending (Lilith ends up pregnant with her lover’s baby) but they’re mixed together in the worst possible way (she is pregnant against her conscious will—she did want the baby, but she did not want it THIS way; she also did not get to choose her will, it was chosen for her even if she DID want it). It's honestly so painfully complicated and that's what makes it such a gorgeous book.
I 100% agree with you that romance can and should be a place to explore consent in more messy ways, but I think the romance makes it hard to explore consent in its messiest expressions and complications because, as a marketing genre first and foremost, readers buy it with their money and get into it with specific expectations. And those expectations create some limits in what can or cannot be fully explored.
This isn't to say that romance as a genre is limiting, not am I pushing towards changing the definition of romance. But it's interesting to me that fanfiction, amateur original fiction or even certain “underground” self-published books (like some of the darker/taboo romances sold on Itch.io) can be a lot more freeing for both the characters and the author/audience when it comes to exploring potentially messy topics. I guess that because fanfic, origfic and indie-selfs can be both romance AND not-romance at the same time. Maybe because these are format where the reader’s approval has less of an impact on the author’s choices of stories? I wonder.
Have you perhaps ever read Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent by Milena Popova? It’s an exploration of consent in M/M fanfiction. If not, I highly recommend it, it definitely fits with what you talked about in this post.
Gahhhhhh yes yes yes. Thank you for this! I read It Happened One Autumn after the re-release, and had no idea about the edits made by Kleypas/her team until somewhat recently, after stumbling upon the discourse on Reddit. The removal of that scene (and I would argue the non consensual kiss in Secrets of a Summer Night), firmly change characterizations for our MMCs that just fell sort of flat for me in a way I couldn’t sort out. Things were clearer after reading the original versions.
I believe you’re exactly onto it all, as usual. I remember finishing Shadowheart and knowing that there were friends I could not recommend it to, because of how that first scene between our FMC and MMC would be perceived, regardless of the way they were experiencing it in the moment, or the way it shapes them from there.
NGL, the idea of limit consent finally made something click in my head about my own sexual experiences so kudos for bringing the concept to my attention. Can't wait to be made uncomfortable af reading about race play to just read further into that concept in Saketopoulou's book now.
“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.”
Incredible and thought provoking. And it’s coming from both political parties which is even more alarming.
thank you so much!!
Another banger of an essay. Even when it comes to contemporaries with enthusiastic consent, I do not like this trend of needing a check-in every time someone moves an inch. I need everybody to zip their lips and unzip their pants!
Keep fighting the good fight 🫡
If I could like this 1000 times, I would. I started reading romance a long time ago and never encountered the idea that the genre must always make us feel good or act as an instruction manual for intimacy until a few years ago. I think it's great to have these conversations about the broader work that happens in fiction (beyond a moral education) and how making room for that work in romance is good for the genre.
FINALLY nosferatu came to theatres where i live and so i could FINALLY read this
This slaps! (as always)
I find im also getting pretty tired of people arguing that media has to perform perfectly unproblematic people or else it’s Bad. That it has to be uncomplicated-ly good or else it’s promoting Bad
This was fantastic, thank you.
I swear it’s like you know exactly how to formulate some of the thoughts I’ve been having but difficulty putting to word around how people treat the issue of consent in romance fiction and the place transgressive ideas and fiction in general have. Your footnotes led me on a rabbit hole of reading the other Substack blog posts mentioned and now a handful of theory I want to trudge through and learn from.
Thank you as always!
sOooOoOooOooOoOoo good !! came here form Catherine Chiang on IG who shared your post 💖 I love how serious the psych and philosophical analysis was here! As someone who’s read a lot of romance/romantasy/fanfiction that depicts these themes, this was spot on 🫡🌟
“The thing that feels real is this: sometimes pleasure doesn’t feel good, it feels like an annihilation.” bish yes !!!
thank you so much for reading!
I feel myself resisting this somewhat, but then I think about one of my favorite books The Valley of Amazement which (spoiler)****** ends with the main character in a relationship with essentially her child rapist (was “purchased” by him at 15 while a courtesan). The two have this strange tender relationship in their 40s and 50s that felt totally impossible when she was in her teens. It’s not the true love story of the novel, but I think it did provide the main character solace. Is that “okay”? Probably not. Does it speak to where both of the characters are in life, who they both are? I think so. I think what tends to bother me about dark romance is the unabashed lusting after fictional predatory men. It makes me uncomfortable, admittedly, but I’ve enjoyed my share of literary fiction with complicated power dynamics to say the least. Perhaps literary fiction doesn’t require the sort of endorsement and love for its morally ambiguous or bankrupt men that I sometimes feel romance compels us to feel. I think your friend hit the nail on the head with our problem about thinking about romance as self-interest. Women are reading the men as men that they would like to be in relationships with, rather than men of the story in their own context interacting with the women of the story in their own context. And that just doubles the power dynamics present when we’re washing away the individuality of the fmc in our self-insert readings, so the whole thing can feel icky. I think literary fiction usually has the tone I’m looking for, I suppose, and doesn’t feel shoehorned to the definitional “happy ending.” But I think an intelligent romance narrative can navigate dubious or non consent well; you would just have to remove the expectation to feel unequivocally good about the relationship.
hi! the link to the legal aid fund doesn't work
oh man!! sorry about that, please see here: https://chuffed.org/project/justice-for-rumeysa-ozturk