An excerpt from an essay I wrote recently that talked a little about this:
[There is a] concerning trend in specific Romance Media to excise women from narratives as something progressive and feminist, a means of avoiding misogyny in storytelling rather than challenging taboos around womenâs desire and sexuality, interrogating and deconstructing tropes, or unseating archetypes. The way to combat misogyny through storytelling is to include, develop, and blend women into more varied stories, not to minimize their roles to the point of invisibility, because a lack of women in a story is a product of misogyny, not a challenge to it. This strategy does not remove women from exposure to misogyny but perpetuates it, [even exacerbates it]...
I have explained this before, but it bears repeating. Romance tropes â from âthereâs only one bedâ to âforced proximityâ â are responses to the sex-negativity and purity culture norms imposed on gender and sexual minorities. These tropes offer a workaround for these norms but never a direct challenge. We still have stringent rules around who can touch whom and under what circumstances. So a trope like âthereâs only one bedâ gives characters a justification for their intimacy without directly challenging why it is taboo. We are creating intricate justification rituals for why these two people, specifically, can touch. Tropes often âtameâ characters into additional social boxes, adding another set of conventions to the existing ones. So the modern M/M romance may be popular among many because it provides a âworkaroundâ to challenging, revolutionizing the narrative around womenâs desire and pleasure in romance. In this case, the genre would be popular as a means of avoiding interrogating and deconstructing misogynistic tropes or unseating archetypes. Under this argument, the genreâs intention is to avoid uncomfortably questioning or rethinking the gender hierarchy or gendered roles in romance, and to avoid women (especially their bodies) entirely. The idea is that a relationship featuring only men means no woman has to confront social taboos around womenâs bodies and sexualities, no woman has to have her heart broken, and no woman has to risk anything. They can supposedly tell themselves that this genre of story allows them to avoid the reminder that current gender and sexual social values are designed for the benefit of (cis het) men at the expense of womenâs comfort, pleasure, and safety. They can supposedly watch without rethinking how they construct their own bodies and actions to conform to social forces like the cissexual or heterosexual pretense, because it isnât a woman being âfolded into a pretzel and fucked.â But this would be a lie.
The simpler explanation, the one that doesnât require pseudo-feminist (but actually misogynistic) think pieces, is that many of the women who enjoy watching M/M romance are attracted to men and the romance genre, while others enjoy the content for its queer representation. Itâs not that complicated. Otherwise, youâre forced to reconcile the argument that women like the M/M romance genre because it avoids misogyny with the fact that [the women in these stories] are not written to have [their] own desires. [They still] must be ever-sacrificing, performing emotional labor for [men] who previously refused to interrogate who [they are]... [T]hese women do not exist as people with desires beyond the men theyâve committed to. [These] women [still] exist to devote, but never, ever experience emotional reciprocity... [These] women do not have an outsized role within the narrative or impact on it compared to men. In [these stories], a woman [often] still lacks agency under a social system mired in strict heteronormative gender roles [and gendered violence]... So, the idea that M/M romance provides âspectatorshipâ is a convenient lie.
But there is another insidious implication ... to argue that an M/M pairing is the only chance a woman has to see a sociopolitically âequalâ partnership, devoid of violence or power dynamics, is to flatten and make M/M relationships one-dimensional by ignoring that queer relationships also have complex sociopolitical dynamics and can include violence. M>F is not the sole sociopolitical dynamic in interpersonal relationships. A queer romance should also uncomfortably question and rethink the gender hierarchy and gendered roles; you cannot and should not be able to escape this when watching a story about two men falling in love, something that inherently questions gender. Additionally, to believe that this genre allows women to avoid the taboo ignores that queerness is still taboo. The story types people claim women find refuge in are full of tragedies that devastate queer people. Having to hide a relationship is a tragedy. Being inadvertently outed is a tragedy. Homophobia is a fucking tragedy. To argue that the women watching this feel a bystander effect or an anthropological-like removal from the narrative is to argue that the women watching cannot identify with or sympathize with stories about queerness, stories that may bring up very real traumas (especially for queer women, who will be affected by the reminders of queer trauma, homophobia, and taboo).Â
