Honestly I think my perspective on kink was permanently reset when I engaged a bunch with the romance/erotica community in the late 2000s. At the time the shift to consensual plot lines was still somewhat new, in the sense that the shift had started in the late 80s/early 90s but the MAJORITY of plots being consensual was maybe within the past 5 years or so. And there were still plenty of fans of the âold schoolâ romances around to talk about why theyâd liked them.
And yeah it was exactly this: enjoying the sex was ok because you hadnât asked for it and didnât feel shameful desires. (In fact, âshameful desiresâ as a shorthand for lust and sexual desire remained a romance genre euphemism for much longer than I cared for. Like, girl you have been in a situationship with this dude for half a book at this point, I donât think itâs all that scandalous you want to jump him.)
In a lot of books there was an added attraction that after the noncon scene, or a similar serious breach of trust, the male love interest would realize he had wronged the heroine and apologize profusely and make it up to her. This was such a feature that ânot enough grovelingâ or âgood grovelingâ were common comments by old school romance fans, and some older fans were aghast that there were books that came WITHOUT groveling. (These fans were often also upset at the absence of rape, explicitly because that was what made the sexual pleasure ok.) I was talking to my girlfriend about this recently and she was like, âOh, so thereâs also the fantasy of a man apologizing to youâ and honestly yeah I think sheâs got it.
You spend a little time in a community where the same little old ladies whoâd poison your abusive husband without batting an eye are also upset that their romance novels donât have enough noncon in them, and I think it starts to become really obvious that peopleâs fantasy lives are not really about their day-to-day lives at all, and that indeed, thatâs the principle point of having a fantasy life to begin with.
