Our theme for the month of March is “I was wrong about.”
BookTok celebrates now as a golden age of erotic fiction. The sexual revolution has hit the bookshelves and is being sold en masse. The swell of romantasy in the last decade, led by authors Sarah J Mass and Rebecca Yarrow, has been hard to miss, yet some find the dominant tropes hard to swallow.
I admit that I was among them. I found that while the narratives did have a strong female lead, something sorely lacking in fantasy, they too often let male desire control the plot. I worry that that tendency reinforces our culture’s flavor of masculinity as something meant to control femininity.
Another critique I hear is that romantasy is too escapist. It gets dismissed as just another hatch people can use to leave their own realities, finding respite from the hellscape that is our waking existence in a harmful way. This escapism carries two problems for our society:
-
- It accuses the consumer of neglecting their duties as a citizen in favor of their own pleasure.
- It implies that the publisher is extracting enormous profit off of this vice while distracting the general public from the “important work.”
Misogynistic tropes and escapism are critiques that hold up, generally. Here’s where I was wrong. Emotional (and physical) goods can exist alongside these glaring issues.
As much as the heroes of the typical romantasy may enforce an implicit kind of misogyny, and as much as anyone can overuse an escape, there’s something I’ve come to worry about much more—a culture of weaponized shame.
The word ‘smut’ comes from German schmutz, meaning dirt or to make dirty. It also carries a connotation of being stained or marked. It cannot be a coincidence that a word in our modern language which carries profound weight in our sexual lives has roots in being unclean.
As for the escapist critique, it can be a real problem in people’s lives. However, it is often used to shame women for indulging in their own sexual fantasy. Women are accused of not leaving room for vanilla sex after reading their ultimate sexual fantasy. Why are we shaming women for exploring in writing what sex can do for them while we have an entire video porn industry that caters to male desire in unhealthy ways?
While we have made remarkable progress in the way of women’s rights, we have taken more than one step backward in recent years. Weaponizing the literary preferences of some women against other women to keep them from exploring their sexuality may just be the latest in a long line of clever ways to keep the historic power dynamic between genders in place. Romantasy builds an avenue that lifts women’s sexuality out of the shadows. With that rise, other kinds of marginalized people can start to see themselves in erotic literature.
Shaming women out of reading erotic fiction removes something vital for everyone. A safe, healthy, and measured place where people can explore their emotional life and sexuality. The medium of the novel, or any written story, is vastly different from consuming other kinds of porn. Reading is not addictive and it keeps the fantasy contained to your own imagination. Erotic fiction also comes with an exploration of emotional capacities, and the intertwined nature of our physical and emotional wellbeing.
This is why we shouldn’t judge romantasy by its cover. It reframes our conception of smut to align it with a kind of imagining that is socially acceptable: fantastic worldbuilding.
It also gives a platform to other forms or romance that may have had a harder time being published. When one of the biggest authors of a genre is selling seventy-five million copies of her books, that kind of attention must give publishers more room to print other versions of the same kind of story. Sure, the dominant book being sold is a reflection of the dominant type of consumer, yet when the demand for underrepresented people in the same kind of story comes, we will be all the more ready to receive that book.
Ultimately, having a broader range of human experiences printed in books is a good thing. We’ve always used the human capacity for imagination to push societal boundaries outward. The latest embodiment of such boundary pushing looks like fantasy worlds that don’t shy away from that which gets the blood flowing.
From oppression to obsession, giving people the agency, and dignity, to explore their own sexuality at their own pace in their own places of comfort is something we should celebrate.
Clint Wilson (‘23) graduated from Calvin with an official degree in philosophy and unofficial degree in outdoor rec. They currently live in Denver and are working remotely for an LSAT prep company. You’ll likely find them slowly jogging a trail, belaying their wife up some rocks, or reading beneath a heap of blankets.
