This Creative Writing thesis, Things I’m Thinking About Sex (in Romance), is comprised of a rom-com novel titled To Paris, with Love, and a supporting exegesis which examines representations of sexual intimacy in the popular romance novel. As a young woman who has come of age in a world where porn is ubiquitous (Srinivisan) and sexual subjectification is framed as empowering (Gill), I constantly grapple with how to write about sex. The popular romance genre is a space that can address the anxieties and tensions of being a woman under patriarchy (Roach 14), allowing authors to explore “thoughts and fantasies that run contrary to patriarchal scripts of feminine docility, submissiveness, and sexual passivity” (McCann & Roach 421).
When novelists like me put pen to paper, do we actually provide a representation of sex that is egalitarian and challenges patriarchal sexual scripts? How can we, in the romance genre, use our novels to facilitate sexual education and imagination? I will employ the works of scholars such as Emily Nagoski, Rosalind Gill, bell hooks and Katherine Angel to interrogate my own work alongside case studies from contemporary rom-com novelists such as Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry, Elle Kennedy and Christina Lauren. Critical of sex-positive feminism and considerate of the inegalitarian messages characteristic of porn, I explore questions such as how might romance novelists challenge, expand and enrich the sexual imagination while being conscious of the inequalities evident in representations of sexual intimacy? Romance has the expansive potential to create, encourage and inspire the egalitarian possibilities of sex, and To Paris, with Love is my exploration of how a novel can serve as a “twenty-first [century] basis for romance” (Pearce 521) and purposefully make room for modes of female sexuality.
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It didn’t feel as though the romance novels I read were the same as pornography. If anything, romance novels aided my understanding of female pleasure. Might it be a kind of “woman-oriented feminist porn,” as Roach suggests (101)? Or more like the erotica Steinem defines in her article Erotica and Pornography: A Clear and Present Difference, characterised as a “mutually pleasurable, sexual expression” (37)? Or, more broadly, a representation of sex that highlights women’s sexual pleasure, and the politics of producing this pleasure (Roach 94)? (9)
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Chapter 1 will focus on the objective truths and biological myths perpetrated, or reframed and challenged, within romance novels. Using Emily Nagoski’s Come as You Are as a guiding text, alongside support from the work of Laurie Mintz and other sex educators, I’ll conduct a close reading of the mechanics of certain sex scenes, from wetness to penetration, with the intent to challenge stereotypical and false norms of female sexual response.
Chapter 2 will focus on sexual subjectivity and how the presence of sex-positive feminist rhetoric has infiltrated the romance genre. Considering ideas such as the naked versus the nude (Berger; Allan) and Rosalind Gill’s proposed feminine object versus subject, this chapter will ask how romance writers present the sexual identities of their main female characters, in and outside of the bedroom.
Chapter 3 considers the effects of hookup dating culture on the writing of sexual relationships in romance. Comparing testimony from Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape and Laura Sessions Steps’ Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both with the narrative context of contemporary romance novels, I’ll consider how a reparative representation of casualness is utilised in the genre.
Chapter 4 will combine the vulnerability ethos from Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again with the love ethic from bell hooks’ work All About Love: New Visions to consider how romance authors can create representations of egalitarian, mutually pleasurable sex amongst the pages of their romance novels.
At the end of each chapter, I make the connection between the creative and the analytical. In each ‘In Practice’ sub-section, I explore how I approached applying theory to practice, asking how achievable it is for a romance author to challenge stereotypical norms of female sexuality within the generic structure of a romance. (15)
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My reading of Mintz and Nagoski’s texts identified three main tenets of sex that, like Eaton suggests of inegalitarian pornography, are characteristic of gender inequality (675): prioritising of penetration, arousal concordance, and genital size. (18)
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How responsible is it, in a genre known for its unashamed writing of sex, that prioritises female pleasure (McCann & Roach 418, 421), to rely on and resort to representing a penetrative fantasy? Separating acts of manual or oral stimulation from ‘sex’ make the modes which women reach orgasm from most reliably (Kerner 58; Mintz 21) seem unimportant, with foreplay operating as a stopgap before supposedly more legitimate sexual activity. (20)
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In the romance novels I’d read, when a FMC was aroused it was also highly likely it would mention how wet she was. I had, because of my ravenous reading of romance novels, formed an association between arousal and wetness. If a woman is aroused, they must be wet; if they are wet, they must be aroused. Wetness, Nagoski was telling me, is not necessarily typical or indicative of female sexual arousal, and yet I—and, I’m sure, other romance readers like myself—had come to believe it was. (25)
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the myth that good sex is dependent upon size for success. Penises are big. Vaginas are tight. These things fit perfectly together, and greater sense of pleasure, despite their diametrically opposed sizing. Placing an emphasis on the size—or lack thereof—of a main character’s genitals inaccurately tells the reader: pleasure is not only dependent on your partner’s physiology, but also on your own. (28)
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There is, according to Eaton, an “erotic appeal” to aspects of gender inequality, with signs of dominance and strength in men and softness and submissiveness in women serving as “markers of sexiness” (678). Eroticising norms of gender inequality, Eaton outlines in reference to inegalitarian porn, is a particularly effective method for promoting and sustaining it (679). Hazelwood’s frequent representations of the ‘big’ man and the ‘small’ woman in an eroticised romance format renders these markers of inequality “not just tolerable and easy to accept, but also desirable and highly enjoyable” (Eaton 679). (30)
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Romance novelists likely rely on penetrative sex scenes because it’s a convenient way to show that by the characters being physically close—literally inside one another—the couple are now emotionally close. (33)
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We can’t expect romance authors to completely challenge the prevalence, and, oftentimes, empowerment that comes from contemporary feminism’s emphasis on choice and self-subjectification. We can’t expect the (mainly) female authors to decide what authentic sexuality and femininity is when there may not be such a thing (Maguire 63-64).
Rather, we might see authors follow Henry’s example and have our FMCs grasp the potential of their own subjecthood. An FMC who acknowledges her self-subjectification can be the stepping stone to an FMC who can break free from it; a reader who sees a FMC acknowledge the artificiality of her femininity might consider the artificiality of their own. (45)
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The self-awareness of these FMCs might be a convenience, so that the authors can reveal a character’s outfit or body type. A character prone to detailed exposition is endlessly helpful in a romance novel. It may also be reflective of a larger cultural habit in which women “survey, like men, their own femininity” and “do to themselves what men do to them” and make themselves an object (Berger 47). (46)
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In a culture where hooking up—i.e. having sex before there is an intimate connection—is the norm (as explored in Chapter 2.5), communicating to your readers that casual sex can still action a love ethic shows that it is not impossible to expect your partner for the next few minutes, few hours, few nights, to treat you with care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment and trust. These qualities are not exclusively actionable with an intimate connection; they are qualities which can underly any sexual encounter. (81)
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After each supervision meeting, it became clear first to my supervisor, and then myself, that my passion lay [...] with the impact of a hypersexualised culture on young women’s understanding of their sexuality, and the romance genre’s part in this.
Across the course of my thesis, I wanted to develop an understanding of how feminist philosophies surrounding sexuality found their way into the pages of romance novels, including my own. I wanted to find, and understand, the “thoughts and fantasies that run contrary to patriarchal scripts for feminine docility, submissiveness, and sexual passivity” that romance authors supposedly dare to explore (McCann & Roach 421).
This meant beginning with the nuts and bolts of physiological sex acts: the fucking, the fingering, the fellatio, and more. I wanted to ask: is how we do it how we all like it? Is how we write it how we experience it? Should the way we write it be how we experience it? Taking the writings of Nagoski and Mintz, I explored how the familiar tropes of sex—of penetration, lubrication and tightness—fulfil a cultural sexual script that is informed by a patriarchal, male-centric understanding of pleasure. Even with romance’s advocacy for female pleasure, it seemed popular romance texts favoured presenting a reparative fantasy where male-centred modes of pleasure were made equitably enjoyable for the female characters and gendered power relations were not dissipated but reiterated. The disservice of writing a pleasurable fantasy, as opposed to presenting an aspirational could-be-reality, is that patriarchal misconceptions of sex (that penetration is the privileged way for women to achieve orgasm, that genital response should always be concordant to arousal, that size is somehow reflective of femininity or masculinity) continue to define the way we understand, and have, sex. (93)
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If hookups are, reportedly, unenjoyable and unrewarding for the women engaging in them, why were we always writing them into what is a female sphere of imaginative relationship solace? Rather than replacing the cultural narrative of casualness, romance novels revert to giving hookups a reparative arc and resolving the tensions of hookups in individual novel contexts.
My final chapter tries to find ways to represent the egalitarian possibilities of female sexuality amongst the pages of a romance novel. There seemed little point in wondering about the writing of male-centric sex, or self-sexualising FMCs, if I couldn’t suggest an antidotal approach to writing these things in romance. (94)
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It is in establishing vulnerability between her characters that Hazelwood can write of Rue’s journey to pleasurable penetrative sex with Eli; it is in Henry’s stylistic approach to describing sex scenes that gender dichotomies are less decipherable; it is in understanding trust as the foundation to intimacy that Kennedy can write a sexual context where her FMC is comfortable enough to experience an orgasm. (94-95)
Here's the abstract:
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