Let’s Talk About Sex(y Books)

Moral panic over the interests of girls and women is nothing new under the sun. Often interacting with other panics about (in no particular order) the interests and activities of young people, queerness, and the purpose of the arts, scrutiny over What the Ladies Are Up To has been a hallmark of the modern Western world.¹

Folk tales are generally accepted to have been sources of moral instruction and reflections of community ethics. The “fairy tales” that evolved from that, such as “Beauty and the Beast,” often became more explicit commentaries on How Things Ought To Be.² 

But there were always stories that slipped past those moral frameworks, that broke the existing rules, that seem to have been told for pleasure rather than purpose. And as storytelling evolved, more of those rule-breaking stories came to the fore.

Enter romance. I’m not going to go into the history of romance in great detail (the New York Public Library has you covered), but I will take a minute to talk about the backlash. There were worries about how books might change us from the earliest evolution of the novel, and stories about love and romance had a harder hill to climb almost from the start. Austen’s work–often cited nowadays as the “good” and acceptable kind of romance–got treated as the kind of shameless frivolity we dismiss in the mass market today. 

By the time I got to school, people were stressed out about the Sweet Valley High books. It just never stopped. The Twilight backlash led to the Fifty Shades of Grey backlash, which led to the Colleen Hoover backlash, and now we seem to be deep into the romantasy backlash.

Now I’m not saying all, or even most, of these books are good. They are not, as the kids say, my cuppa, for the most part. But it’s to a certain extent irrelevant, because the point is that whatever a significant number of women are reading, someone, somewhere’s gonna complain about it, and usually frame it as a symptom of moral decay. It’s treating bad behavior as sexy. It’s giving readers unrealistic expectations about relationships. It’s teaching too many girls about sex and sexuality (an especially popular choice for queer books, but even ‘the sex scenes only happen between a heterosexual married couple with the door closed’ can get hit by it from time to time). The message is inescapable: Women, young women in particular, are horribly malleable and vulnerable to social pressure, especially those presented by sexy books.³

Even outside the mainstream this nonsense is pervasive. If you really hate yourself, search Twitter for ‘fujioshi’ and see how fast the firehose of misogyny hits you in the face. Fujioshi, often shortened to “fujos,” is a Japanese word created as an insult for women who enjoyed m/m romance, got reclaimed by some of the fujioshi themselves, and gets alternately used as an in-group term and out-group insult on the Western internet.⁴ It’s just another fun way to get angry about what women enjoy!

The Bourne Identity was published by Robert Ludlum in 1980. It is the story of a man with retrograde amnesia who has to discover his own identity while escaping from multiple groups trying to kill him. Along the way, he takes a beautiful woman as a hostage, who he later rescues from a rape attempt. Grateful to him for risking his own life for her safety, she helps him, and they fall in love. He manages to clear his name and gain safety for them both, survives an encounter with the real-life Carlos the Jackal, and turns out to be part of an elite and secret special espionage unit. You may recognize this story, as it spawned several sequels, a TV movie, and a blockbuster series of movies starring Matt Damon. 

Friends. 

Do you think this is a realistic novel?

Do you think young men got realistic expectations about relationships, their own skills, or life from this fucking novel? Of course not. But guns went bang bang and things went boom, so it was fine. It was aimed at men, so it was normal.⁵ From the jiggle physics in modern video games to the wish fulfillment fantasies of superhero films, we are stuck again and again in “men normal, everyone else a weirdo.”

Friends. I am tired.

Now, I should be clear. I do think fiction has the power to influence how we think about things. I just sent you all over to the Geena Davis Institute in my last Intersectional Femivision essay, and one of their most famous findings is that we look at a crowd scene that is 17% women and think it’s 50-50. What we see and read influences our perceptions. (And some of the nonsense that BookTok has been up to is really not okay.)

But these problems rise from systemic and societal challenges, long-term and long-running patterns. They’re about what gets published and produced, how we treat entertaiers, and about what readers and viewers grow up with, not whether or not your best pal can stop talking about The Untamed. And they’re also about what the boys are reading, what they aren’t reading, and what dumb shit Andrew Tate said last week. The continued rending of garments over What The Girls Are Reading is missing the forest in favor of looking at a small mushroom growing on a single tree.

And this is and has always been a problem, of course, but at this moment – right now – it’s overlapping with a second moral panic: What the Kids Are Up To Online (sex-negative variant). The Girls Are Reading books that tell them it’s okay to be queer, and maybe to not even be a girl at all. The Girls Are Reading books that tell them they have a right to their own bodies and – more dangerously yet – their own pleasure. Book challenges are up. Age verification laws are eroding our privacy rights under cover of protecting children from “adult content,” a slope that isn’t slippery so much as it is a Super Slide. These attacks aren’t just on queerness or weirdness or even on anyone who isn’t a cis white man; they are on imagination itself, on any kind of escape we can give ourselves that isn’t just fast-forwarding to the last scene of Brazil.

So the next time you see someone scoring points against fujos, or read a headline about the Netflix Twilight show, maybe take a breath before you join in or roll your eyes. And maybe check out one of those romance novels before you decide to call them “pornographic” or insist they’re part of the ruin of society as we know it. Try Beverly Jenkins or Alyssa Cole, or the Gothic romances of Daphne Du Maurier if you’d like something more time-tested. Librarian and scholar Steve Ammidown has an amazing website about the history of contemporary romance and how it often reflects our current interests and fears. You never know, you might have fun.

The YouTuber FunkyFrogBait has a pretty fun video about the Discourse over BookTok and what gets called “spicy books.” Honestly, they cover most of this essay, only more in-depth and funnier, and there’s a great interview with a sex historian. (I watched it after finishing the first draft of this essay and got more of a ‘ah, why did I bother?’ feeling as the video continued. But by then I’d done all this work…)

ContraPoints also has a great video on Twilight.

1. A good deal more than that, of course, but we haven’t got all day. ↩︎
2. Fairy tales have a single source (though they may have been told-and retold-from that origin point); folk tales are older and have been told and retold so often it’s impossible to identify the original source. ↩︎
3. Like I mentioned in the Intersectional Femivision essay, these panics extend well beyond women, even though a lot of the narrative often focuses on Vulnerable Cis White Women. ↩︎
4. This is a huge, huge oversimplification, but again, we ain’t got all day. ↩︎
5. The novel is actually pretty damn good, aside from the whole sexual assault thing that did not need to be there. Sigh. (Hey, I told you I didn’t enjoy everything, didn’t I?) ↩︎