No, actually, there isn't anything wrong with reading dark romance.

Content Warning: This post mentions (though not explicitly) violence, child murder, sexual assault, CSA, noncon

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a licensed counselor of any kind. If you have been a victim of sexual, emotional, or physical violence in your relationships, please seek help immediately. If you need support for past abuse, please seek help immediately.

This post was largely inspired by an ongoing conversation that I’ve been having with the historical DR author and scholar-in-training, Mariam Al-Masri, about the function of and the need for dark romance. She wrote her own post on the subject of historical dark romance, on her fascinating blog Women Along The Silk Road that I would highly recommend you read here. I consider this post “in conversation” with her post.

I’ve been face first in true crime lately, and I’ve been pondering some things.

To be perfectly honest with you, I’ve always been interested in true crime. My mother was always watching the lurid 20/20 talking head TV documentaries during my childhood. The first one I remember watching was about the Marilyn Sheppard murder. I was so shocked that people did things like that. Because of movies I’d seen before that point, I knew that people killed people. I knew people killed people because of jealousy, ambition, politics, and beliefs. But savage, random murder with sexual motives was never on my bingo card. Maybe a year or two later, I also discovered a book about serial killers when we went to visit my mother’s cousin. I found it on a shelf in her house early one morning when everyone was still in bed. I can’t recall why I picked it up. Probably those Dateline episodes lingering the back of my mind. The stories that left me cold and shaking were the details of two separate cases, whose victims were both children. One name I cannot remember for life of me. But the other one, Alison Parrott--her name has stayed with me for over twenty years.

I dip in and out of true crime. I find it extremely stressful to consume on a regular basis, to be perfectly honest. It’s grim, it’s grisly. I think when I was younger, I had an easier time laughing at it. Nothing seems as heavy when you’re a child. It’s also a lot easier to be a giant dick. It didn’t occur to me for a moment that my lurid obsession with serial killers and the depravity of their crimes and my ghoulish desire to make light of all of it was shockingly insensitive to the victims and their families. When I look back on the true crime media that was popular in the 90s and early 2000s, it’s shocking to me how sensationalist it was. How much of an emphasis was placed on the gruesome details of the crimes and the killers and the victims were more or less treated like props in the story, with some lip service to their family and friends with the intention of squeezing a few tears out of the audience.

I definitely approve of the shift in tone when it comes to true crime, with victim focused narratives taking the floor.

But I ponder at times: why is there such a deep line in the sand between fiction and fact? I think it’s something important to articulate to oneself. Why does real life violence against women make my stomach turn, but I actively seek out stories that feature such violence in novels, but it must be violence that ends with a HEA? On the one hand, I find true crime to be stressful. Triggering. I have nightmares and I wake up in the middle of the night at the smallest sounds. On the other hand, I read Dark Romance to decompress, to get the feel goods, to feel hope and cathartic release.

I also, of course, write Dark Romance. And to be clear, though the Romance community seems to be struggling to define exactly what Dark Romance is right now, my definition is this: there is emotional, physical, or sexual violence in the relationship between the MCs.

Another reason I’ve put a great deal of thought into this is that I am adamantly opposed to censorship. But to a certain point. And that’s where the matter gets sticky for me. It’s impossible in the realm of morality to operate in black and white (as much as extremists and fundamentalists would like to believe otherwise). We can find exceptions and gray areas anywhere we look.

But for me, personally, when I’m looking at fictional subject matter, where do I draw the line? There are the obvious things, like pedophilia, bestiality, and hate speech.

But why is noncon, for instance, not among them? How do I justify the differences? I actively seek out books that depict it. Having been a victim of sexual assault, myself, I’ve pondered deeply why this is. I read a post recently on Reddit that was talking about a book written by a man whose description really upset me. A book that was basically just torture porn, a book about a man doing the most disgusting things to women and it made me so furious. So I had to go away and think about why I wasn't okay with a man writing that but I'm okay with a woman writing it and reading it (not that I would read it, because while I seek out DR, I do not enjoy torture porn). Especially an AFAB person like me, who can cringe in absolutely horror and devastation for victims of real crimes, but actively seeks out depictions of violence between MCs in romance novels, because it’s emotionally gratifying for me in the safe context of fiction.

I think my opinion on the matter is this: it's the same reason I would be furious if a white woman wrote a romance with a white supremacist character. If you are presently in the role of the oppressor/aggressor, you do not get to write or engage in fantasies about that oppression. If you are in the role of the oppressed/victim, you DO get to write and engage in fantasies about that oppression/victimization because it is your prerogative to reclaim that narrative. Same reason I have a big ick about characters grooming young girls/boys and waiting for them to turn 18. The authors are adults writing these things. In my view, you don't get to have fantasies that involve children because you are in the role of the oppressor/predator as the adult when you are writing that fantasy.

In the safe context of fiction, readers (many of whom have been victims of physical, emotional, or sexual violence at some point in their lives, themselves) have a safe entry point with which to engage with those traumas and, as I stated above, reclaim that narrative. I’ve done some digging to see what the research is on the subject is in academic circles, and there has been an interest in rape fantasies. Quite a number of studies and papers written. Here’s one study done that examined a relationship between CSA and “rape fantasies” as adults. Interestingly (and upsettingly), they found a huge correlation between CSA and said fantasies. In men, this manifested as fantasies about being the aggressor. In women, this manifested as fantasies about being the victim. Obviously I am not suggesting that all readers who enjoy noncon were victims of SA as children, but what I am saying is that it seems to be a common element, and therefore we should take it seriously for what it is: a tool for reclaiming personal sexual narrative. I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers rose dramatically if SA experienced as an adult was also added to the pool of participants. Here is the abstract of another article from 2008 that suggests that currently between 1/3 and ½ of adult women have noncon fantasies. For all the pearl clutching on the subject, that is an awful lot of the adult female population.

It is never my intention to persuade readers to engage with materials that they find upsetting or gruesome to them. I would never want someone to read something that wasn’t exciting to them. But what grinds my gears is the avalanche of vitriolic shame that is directed at women/AFAB people because of their interest in noncon fantasies, among other things. There are accusations from conservative and left leaning pearl clutchers alike, accusing these readers of perpetuating rape culture. A wild claim, considering that there is something insidiously victim blaming about these accusations. As if reading books somehow turns women/AFAB people into willing victims. We cannot suggest that these books are perpetuating rape culture by instructing the perpetrators of rape culture, either. The toxic attitudes that feed into those behaviors in men have existed since the dawn on time. Moreover, men are a tiny of fraction of the demographic who consume romance books in the first place. These books exist as a counter to those experiences that so many women/AFAB people have found unavoidable and life-altering in the most traumatic way imaginable: a devastating trauma that can end with a happily ever after. Because we know that doesn't happen in real life.

And that, of course, leads us into how anti-feminist and anti-intellectual it is to denigrate romance readers for their tastes. The common argument goes something like this: “You’re perpetuating rape culture! You’re romanticizing abuse!”  The implication is strongly, then, that readers who consume Dark Romance cannot distinguish fact from fiction. They will read these books and think, “Ah yes! I will use this fictional book as a guide for my real world relationships, because that’s what romance is! An accurate, real-world depiction of relationships and realistic expectations!”

Ah, yes, such realistic expectations. I expect any minute now that a pirate with powerful thighs and a swollen, turgid member encased in buckskin will kick down my door and whisk me away on his journey to go undercover as a CIA operative on the run from a corrupt government and his four friends that he met in culinary school ten years ago come with us in our hot air balloon, and we all end up having a mad orgy comprised of many turgid members and a moist cleft, and they’re all billionaire werewolves, and we all have five thousand orgasms, and we fly to the moon and live happily ever after, and I will accept nothing else.

Romance novels have given me very realistic expectations, indeed.

I think you can see where my argument is going. I hope you can see the validity in where my argument is going. No adult who is capable of critical thinking (the vast majority of the adult population, I would hope) would rely on romance novels to instruct them on realistic expectations for relationships. Is that not the point of fiction, and especially romance? To defy realistic expectations and escape for a time into fantasy that does not resemble reality?

But in one way or another, women’s hysterical diminished intellectual capacity has been used against them for years in order to control what they’re reading, writing, thinking, doing. It actively hurts me when women who claim to be feminists attack other women/AFAB people for reading things like Dark Romance. The internalized misogyny is astonishing. Just a little bit of critical thinking (if you’re of the vast majority of the adult population) allows you to look a little deeper. On the surface, sure: women are reading stories that contain rape for titillation. That seems shocking to you. That seems like gender traitor shit to you. But perhaps we ought to step back and examine the whole picture, like how important it is not to question a woman/AFAB person's ability to distinguish fact from fiction, not to police their fantasies, to appreciate that many DR readers are CSA/SA survivors trying to find some catharsis, that choosing to engage in fantasy in the safe context of fiction is in and of itself a form of consent. If you cannot comprehend those things, maybe it’s time to examine why you feel the way you do. Why you think that women reading romance cannot distinguish fact from fiction, but you don’t blink an eye at people reading and writing gruesome splatterpunk horror, or thrillers with lurid, terrible sexual crimes against women. You don’t question these things because these genres are not overwhelmingly. written for and by women/AFAB people. It’s just one more way to police the pleasure and fantasy of women/AFAB people, and you might want to take a really hard look at why that’s something you’re supporting.

I think the world would be a much nicer place if we all spent way less time worrying about and policing what other consenting, law abiding adults (especially women/AFAB people) were doing with their time and energy and sexual fantasies and genitals. I support readers in their fantasies (subject to the restrictions I have outlined about). I support readers to have the right to read what they want to read. I support writers to have the right to write what they want to write. I think the world is dark and terrible right now and a lot of people are hurting in so many ways. So even if we don’t understand it, we should be supporting each other in the happy places we find our way to.

Let us, for the love of fucking god and all that is unholy, stop policing what women/AFAB people read. Okay, friend babes? Okay?

THINGS I'VE BEEN ENJOYING

I haven't been reading much lately, but I just relistened to Season One of the Serial podcast for the first time in ten years. Really interesting to see how my opinions have changed. For the record, I think Jay did it. This Reddit post perfectly articulates my feelings on the subject (though I wasn't the brilliant human who wrote it). Come at me, I'm ready to fight.

I've been back on my Enya shit lately with this playlist, in particular. On repeat. All day. Oops, my neurospicy is showing. I am absolute trash and basically, anything that a crystal witchy 90s yoga mom would have listened to/watched in the 80s/90s/early 2000s is my shit.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels will never get old (problematic elements not withstanding). It will simply never happen. Every time I watch that movie, I despair that I will ever write anything so clever. Frank Oz is a fucking genius. The performances are beyond remarkable. I was raised on this movie and I know it by heart and I still enjoy it as much now as I did the first time I saw it. Maybe more. We just watched it against last night while I was at my mother's house, visiting, and it was such a treat. Sometimes I wonder if all that time I spent screaming Oklahoma! as a kid because of that movie ended up manifesting the future where I ended up moving here.

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Take care, darlings.

xoxo,

Madz