A Rant: From the Author turned Reader

If you haven’t been keeping up with my other site, I have a book review site called Books in the Cottage going where I’m starting back into reviewing books. It’s been quite lovely to get back into reading and studying other people’s thought processes and expressions of observation.

Today, I wanted to find a book on my Libby app to read because holding a physical book was going to kill my wrist (surgeries last year helped a lot, but there’s still a level of tenderness). So, scrolling, found an m/m romance novel. Not something I expected to find on my library’s listing, but quite happy to see it. I had noticed one on there last Thursday, but I’m not much of one for the modern-day drama and that seemed to be the plot, so I left that one alone.

For me, I read quite a bit of het-rom, yuri, yaoi, and bl. So, this didn’t feel out of place for me to read.

I hit the spice scene and I am just livid.

There’s this thing that goes off on male authors writing women and it coming across as ‘she proudly bounced boobily down the stairs’ just mentioning stuff that women wouldn’t write, but men would fixate on. There’s also this gatekeeping bit about gay men hating on women writing m/m romance because it reads like fetishizing.

I’m a transguy/non-binary (still working on which label I want to claim) so I’m one to talk, right?

This. This book. Specifically this spicy scene I ran into. It was that.

It made me mad.

I have a soap box and this is directed at romance novelists.

If you are going to write spice, you need to understand that you may be a reader’s first introduction to explicit content. You may be the reader’s first understanding on how that anatomy fits together. You might be their first introduction to how to orgasm. I have hardcore opinions on women writers writing het-romance and perpetuating myths of how an orgasm works because they themselves haven’t had one by way of a partner. It sets up impressionable young women with little experience to think they should get off like these characters and end up starting to feel terrible about themselves because they can’t get off the way the book says.

This m/m book set me off because if some poor young guy read this and tried what was written, they could get hurt. At least find anal scary after the fact.

Romance Novelists need to understand their responsibility in presenting explicit content and who may have access to it.

When I write my scenes, I try really hard to make the positions make sense, to be realistic in safety measures, lubricants, and cleanup. These are just components that some authors will wave away. I put it in there because I recognize that if someone read it and tried it, I don’t want to be partially responsible for someone potentially getting injured.

In Polaris Skies, there is lube involved. The shibari is constructed with precautions. The breath play is presented in a light of displeasure by Cashia who specifies that it is stupid and dangerous because if you don’t know what you are doing, and even if you do, it is dangerous. That scene I worked out for the better part of two years off and on because it was essential for me to show the character being desperate to try to get control of his PTSD, but also making sure that the reader understood that this is not a method for fixing issues.

My firm belief is that if you are going to write explicit content romance, “Do not harm the reader”. If someone reads it and goes ‘let me try that’, you do not want to be the reason they visit the ER that night.

I’m not sure if this rant has made sense. I know not a lot of people even read my explicit scenes, but I hope for those who do, that I do not do them a disservice. Not to the level I felt from this book I tried to read for a review.