I like how enthusiastically you express enjoyment of the stuff you're into now. I feel like I've spent most of my fandom life draping layers of analysis and dry explanations of narrative structure and thematic storytelling and whatever over things I like, like romance, to avoid being dismissed. So it's refreshing to see shameless cries for more romance! more dark husbands! and such.
Thank you! What I’m doing is deliberate and comes after years of thought, so I know what you mean!
This is generalizing, but we have this reality where women’s interests (and narratives that generally appeal to women) are devalued and ignored. The urge is to legitimize those interests/narratives by lifting them up or polishing them to a more valuable sheen, to show why everyone should or can like them, but that implies that these interests must be changed or re-contextualized in order to be seen as valuable or worthy.
But in reality, they are worthy simply being as they are. Women’s stories don’t need to be proven to be worth our time. They are all valuable by being women’s stories.
The primordial story of the man who conquers his father/monsters/death is seen as a universal story everyone can relate to, while the primordial story of the woman who conquers monsters through love and self-knowledge is seen as a lesser story. But they both have LITERALLY the same history, mythological weight and gravitas. It’s misogyny that causes devaluation of women’s stories - because women are devalued, and no academic essay will ever change that.
The only way to change this is to, as in Star Wars, tell stories that deliberately abandon generally masculine myths and change them to prioritize generally feminine myths. We need media that tells feminine narratives in the same ‘this should appeal to everyone’ way that we’ve for millennia unquestioningly valued the story about the young untrained man-Hero who somehow saves the day.
So me saying “this monster husband story is hot to me” or “this story is appealing to me, and generally appeals to other women, and so it is The Greatest” or “romance novels are incredibly valuable” is most of what I will say now.
It’s tempting to say, “x is good because of this, this and this intellectual artistic reason” and that can be fun to analyze (if it’s fun!) but the moment you feel you can only admit or prove your love of these stories by changing the context to a more “masculine, intellectual, worthy” one - that’s the moment when you’ve entered emotional labor territory.
Bad people will never value or listen to women’s stories no matter how you frame or talk about them, and good people will already be willing to question their taught biases, as we all should. They should be able to sit with their knee-jerk reaction “but that is trash for women!” and work out internally why they have that reaction (internalized misogyny). But their reaction is not something that we can control, except to continue to value these stories and tell them to general audiences.
So I will just continue to say, “this is inherently valuable because it is something I like a lot, this is hot and exciting.” And that is all I need to do, ever. My job is to just be enthusiastic.
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