Writing Unapologetically Smutty Romance in a Conservative Era

Or, Why Respectability Won’t Save You

I think we can all agree we’ve entered a rather conservative era. It’s been a while coming, the first rumblings of it emerging fifteen years ago now. It gained momentum after the 2016 US election and snowballed from there. The pandemic threw fuel on the fire, and, well, here we are. Neo-fascists and alt-right parties are gaining support across the globe. We can look anywhere from the US to Italy to India to Russia. Even states that haven’t yet put these parties in power are seeing a growing movement, as the far right rides a wave of popularity and success that has emboldened them.

At the core of this is fear. Much of it is backlash against the last thirty or so years of more progressive politics. Since the end of the 1990s, we’ve been living in a relatively “progressive” state. Globalization has taken off. The welfare state expanded again after the 1990s. And civil rights, such as gay marriage, have pushed forward. The internet is a big part of this. It has allowed people to congregate with like-minded people, disseminate knowledge and information, organize boycotts and demonstrations, and much more.

The move away from progressive politics has come as conservative movements have pushed more into online spaces. Gamergate is a watershed moment in this, but these forces have been in play for longer than that.

Why do I, as a romance writer, care about this? Well, there are quite a few reasons. Romance nowadays may seem much freer—we can truly embrace the phrase “these aren’t your grandma’s romance novels”—but there is no guarantee things will remain this way.

Watching a Demolition in Slow-Motion

People now may feel the current administration in the US is “moving fast.” Indeed, the president has issued more than 150 executive orders, even though he’s only been in office since January. Many of these sweeping EOs will be challenged in court or written out of law by Congress, although we can expect many of them to be upheld and enforced, especially with the current arrangement of Congress.

Yet this moment has been a long time coming. Anyone who is feeling whiplash hasn’t been paying attention. This started long before the president took office, long before the 2016 election. It started even before Gamergate, which was 2013-2014. It started in the early 2010s, with people infiltrating queer spaces and doing things like arguing you can’t be trans and be a lesbian. Other operations—like anti-shipping in fandom spaces—seem even less consequential, but they tie into this conservative tide. Take, for example, the popularity of various m/m ships in the Kingdom Hearts fandom. Prior to the early 2010s, Roxas and Axel were an incredibly popular ship. Post-2010, discourse shifted to frame this ship as being pedophilic. Since we don’t know Axel’s age, he’s preying on Roxas.

Caring More about Fictional Characters Than Real People

This rhetoric can be incredibly convincing. I myself have been convinced of things like this before—such as a romance featuring a thirty-something male coach falling for his teenage sports protege being an abuse of power. I maintain power dynamics are incredibly important when we look at romances where there is a serious imbalance.

Yet, in recent years, this has revealed itself as a “slippery slope” argument. While shipping Axel and Roxas together might be something of a gray area because we don’t actually know Axel’s age, anti-shippers tend to argue that anything involving them is pedophilia. The same logic is used to power arguments about celebrity relationships being “pedophilic”—even when they involve a woman in her thirties or forties.

This isn’t so much about the issue of actual pedophilia as it is about controlling what people can and cannot do. There is nothing inherently wrong with the Axel/Roxas ship. If one is uncomfortable about potential age dynamics, one can seek out fics (or write fics) where the characters are “age-appropriate” for each other.

Further to this: they’re fictional characters. Even if the relationship features an underage character, it’s fiction. No one is truly being hurt by this—except those who are actually being hurt by real-life situations involving pedophilia, which this argument does nothing about. If anything, this argument hurts those people more by creating a taboo around discussing or even showing these kinds of relationships and how problematic they can be.

Which is precisely what is desired here: silence. The goal is to force this kind of stuff back under the rug, so true victims of human trafficking or pedophilia cannot talk about it.

Queerness and Sexuality Are Also on the Chopping Block

I want to be careful here, not to malign queerness and sexuality. A favorite conservative argument is that queer people are accepting pedophiles into their ranks, that the “P” in LGBTQIA+ stands for “pedophile” and so on. This is patently untrue, and the idea harks back to harmful stereotypes about gay men and women. In the mid-twentieth century, it was commonly believed that queer people could “turn” children gay. There was a stereotype about male teachers trying to lure young boys to become gay, and so on.

You’ve probably heard something similar in current rhetoric: drag queens are turning young people trans, simply by proximity. That’s why drag queen storytime at the library has to be banned—because drag queens want to corrupt the children.

Ironically, the people doing the most harm to children are those who are arguing against drag queen storytime. Time and again, it comes out that pastors, politicians, and other prominent figures in the alt-right movement are abusing children. In short, the pedophiles are on the other side, accusing queer people of the very behavior they themselves are engaged in, and seeking to silence anyone who might talk about it.

This is where we see the overlap: the shut down of information sharing. Those in the alt-right movement don’t want victims of rape, incest, pedophilia, or trafficking to speak out, so they seek to suppress any information or discussion of those situations. This is in order to hide their own behavior. They also seek to suppress queerness, although not to hide their own behavior, but to control other people’s. Thus they seek to silence queer people generally, to stop the flow of information.

Where Does Romance Fit into This?

Queer romance is on the chopping block, most obviously, for being queer. Yet we’ve also seen conservative moves against “smutty” novels like SJM’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series. One lawsuit tried to make it so private enterprises like Barnes & Noble couldn’t stock or sell the book to private buyers.

So, we can see both queerness and smut are on the chopping block here. Queerness, obviously, is something the conservative moment wants to shove back into the closet. That maintains the myth that the majority of people are straight as an arrow. That, in turn, is necessary to support the goal of as many babies as possible.

Female sexuality and female sexual pleasure are also targets, because they go outside the conservative stricture on sex being strictly for reproductive purposes only. Women should derive little to no pleasure from sex—romance novels, with their smutty scenes, often say otherwise. Acts like fingering are big no-nos, since they’re not reproductive. The sex act with a condom or other birth control in play are also problems. And heavens forbid if someone discusses abortion.

So, why can’t reproductive sex be on page? One, it’s often between an unmarried couple (sin!), and two, it might titillate the reader, who might then be tempted to carry out non-reproductive sex acts themself.

Publishing Clean Romance Won’t Save You

So, we can see there’s a war on all things romance, from simply being queer to being smutty, and all the places those things variously intersect.

Yet I want to point out that writing “clean” romance isn’t necessarily going to save you. That’s a hilariously bad take I saw from a publisher recently. They were touting that their romance novels are all squeaky clean.

The conservative moment does not care if your romances are smutty, fade-to-black or closed-door, or clean. This is a lesson a lot of people have had to learn very harshly, but it’s quite simply divide and conquer politics.

A Fractured Community Is Easier to Conquer

We’ve seen it within the queer community over the last ten years. Gay men, lesbians, and bisexual people have argued against the inclusion of trans people. The queer community has done a lot of bickering about who is and isn’t queer—with the end result that there is a fracturing within the community. That, in turn, makes it easier to conquer—the community is divided, so the conservative movement can take out each fragment one by one.

This is true where gay men have argued against trans people, exactly along the lines the alt-right has used. In turn, the Republican Party has blocked gay men from attending certain functions, even when they’re card-carrying members of the party. Lawmakers have attacked the court cases that uphold gay marriage in the US, with the result that gay marriage may be repealed. Make no mistake: gay men siding with the conservative movement to denounce trans people made no difference. The conservative movement will not spare them. It will simply ask that they either give up being gay or kindly roll over and die to prove their loyalty.

The same will be true of romance. It won’t matter if you write clean romance or anything else. The movement will lump you in with the rest of us, even as you beg and plead that your romance novels aren’t the same, that they’re morally superior.

It won’t matter. Romance novels are bad, all of them, and you will be condemned.

Choosing to Write Smutty Romance

I’ve always written smut. From my first fanfics to my latest novel, I write smut. I am a product of that twenty- or thirty-year period of more progressive politics, so that freedom is what I know. And it’s what I believe in. I fall back on an old fandom maxim: “Don’t like, don’t read.”

It really is that simple. A reader should always have the power to choose what they wish to read. They also have the power to avoid what they don’t want to read.

That doesn’t meant they should have the power to dictate what people are writing or what other people can read. Conservatives love to argue against the “nanny state,” but banning books and information is far more “nannying” than, say, making sure people can access healthcare when they’re ill.

So, I’m going to stick to my values and continue to write unapologetic smut. I’m always going to write smut. It may get banned, I may not be able to sell it, but I will not stop and I will not curtail what I write to bow unto someone else’s idea of “respectability.”

Because I will be branded any which way, and if that’s true, then I might as well wear the brand with defiance and pride.