I have thoughts. Typically I keep them to myself, but lately I have seen so much regressive speech and attitudes on social media that these thoughts irk me something fierce.
Social progress is a frightfully slow thing and it back-steps all the time, and there’s much to worry about, so I just take tiny little bites and try to chew on one piece of it at a time just to know where I stand at least. My little spiel is about one of those tiny chunks, certainly not the whole of everything that really worries me right now.
Partially due to the success of romance authors like Katee Robert (and many others) BDSM has flooded the main stream, in romance/horror/+, both in fanfic and trad publishing. This can be both immensely positive and have its own issues as some authors do various levels of research into BDSM/kink and may share ideas and perspectives that clash with their audience in many ways. I am certainly (and quite clearly) no expert on BDSM, so I’m not going to go into and particular detail about it. My own frustration is more about how (despite how sex and queer/Trans positive we might become in the romance novel world, even as the real world becomes more soul crushingly phobic) we can still be horrifically heteronormative.
Almost every romance novel I read, no matter who the characters are, the writers stay true to heteronormativity. Feminine characters are nearly always sexually —sometimes utterly— submissive and male/masc characters are almost always dominant— unless they sub to each other. Very few writers outside of Katee Robert bother making characters submit to women or femmes or more perceivably delicate/short mascs. And I just really, really hate this. It’s often not even discussed in the book.
Some writers like Clio Evans will bother to actually have characters talk about their preferences, which seems a lot healthier even if to some people it is “boring” or “takes the sexiness out of it”. I, however, really appreciate it when characters can discuss their preferences openly because to me— communication is very, very hot.
After reading so many books of many genres were there just happens to kind of be a streak of BDSM/kink through the story, I am so disappointed to see such heteronormativity or the performance of gender norms in sexual relationships, even in stories about queer characters. I wonder how often people really try to peel back their own layers of prejudice as they write to examine if they think that there is some “natural/biological imperative” to perceivably or presumably feminine or smaller, more delicate people being submissive? To which I vociferously declare there absolutely is freaking not. Like have any of you MET a smaller person?
Now there’s a probably a great deal of Western ideology of what gender, power, and sexuality is to me as a US based person embedded in all this that can just make this subject spiral outward forever as we analyze it to bits without any real catharsis. And of course there is nothing wrong with being submissive so long as one trusts who they’re submitting to, but it begins to be concerning when all female/femme characters are subs ALL OF THE TIME, especially as it is rarely discussed between the characters. It’s just assumed to be a given.
So I just pose some questions lightly to any writers who do use BDSM or anything similar in their stories: do you write dommes? Do you consider how you represent gender in your stories? Do you consider how women/femmes are often cultured into being submissive and so maybe they should get to play with power more so they do not have to stay embedded in those teachings?
Do you consider writing submission as not something ppl embody at all times but something they can choose to do under very specific circumstances? Do you know any professional dommes who might reveal just how many men come to submit to them and why? Might be worth the consideration.
