For the last 10 months I’ve been a freelance book reviewer. Most of what I’ve been reading and passing judgment on is erotica, which in itself is a category more widely varied than you might think. There’s contemporary and historical erotica, paranormal erotica, erotic suspense, and so on. Just like your basic porn movies — if something can be written involving a lot of sex (vanilla, kinky, BDSM, BDSM-lite, menage, group, and holy hell the spam comments on this post are going to be legendary), it will be written.
Erotica shares some themes with mainstream romance fiction, your typical Harlequins and such. It’s easily classified as literary porn, but whereas your basic porn movies just throw a lot of sex at the camera, erotica tends to have plot and characterization and, for some reason, a conventional romantic ending in which hero and heroine plan to marry. They don’t always, but the majority of erotic fiction I’ve read does. And you might argue that the romantic endings cater to the predominantly female audience, and you might be right. And while I don’t have a problem with that per se, even as it works to somehow deny the notion that some women might just want to f*** and run, I do have a problem with what I have come to learn is a prominent theme in erotic fiction.
And that is this: all too often the stories I read involve a central female character who doesn’t or can’t own her sexual desires until the right man comes along. (That right man is nearly always more than an entire foot taller than she is, which boggles my mind. If she’s 5’1″ and he’s 6’4″, just . . . that can’t be comfortable.) It’s usually that she can’t. She’s too timid, too unsure, or too repulsed by what she thinks is supposed to be disgusting or degrading — until our hero asks, cajoles, coerces, or otherwise commands her to perform for him. This is a hair’s breadth away from “she wanted it, even if she said she didn’t.” (Some books tread far too close to that line for my personal comfort.)
And, you know, whatever gets you through the night. I get the appeal of seduction, and I even get on an abstract level that rape fantasies of varying levels of violence work for some women. I do not, however, understand it, and I do have a big problem with literature that perpetuates the idea that women are somehow unable to act on their sexual desires, or even admit that they have sexual desires, on their own. I have read stories in which women are only able to have mindblowing sex if they first take some sort of aphrodisiac; I have even read a story or two in which these women had unknowingly taken a pleasure-enhancing drug. I have read stories in which women are talked into bondage scenarios that they wind up enjoying in spite of themselves. In every single BDSM-themed story I’ve read, the men are Doms and women submissive. I have read a few stories featuring dominatrices, but they are minor characters. Of the handful of stories I’ve read featuring a female protagonist with dominant leanings, they are characterized as longing for the right dominant man to literally whip them into submission.
I’m not disparaging anyone’s sexual preferences. We all have our kinks and urges and god bless us, everyone. And again, not all books are like this. Some authors write kick-ass female characters who give as good as they get both in and out of the bedroom, and I’ve read a few BDSM-themed books in which the submissive-dominant relationship is richly drawn (yes, richly) and three-dimensional. Maybe these are the authors who are comfortable with different kinds of sexual expression, but there need to be more books like that, and that I have to make a plea for female authors to get on board with female sexual empowerment (for lack of a better term) in two thousand and ten is wrong.
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