The Straights Can Pry Omegaverse from My Cold, Dead Hands

I was over on one of the social media sites (you know the one), and it started advertising some white woman’s book at me. And like, good on the algorithm for figuring out I love omegaverse stuff? But bad algo, ignoring the fact I’m queer af and I don’t fuck with cishet M/F (“straight”) romance anymore.

And this ad. Whew, this ad.

This ad just proved to me that there is a reason I don’t fuck with straight romance anymore.

It’s Just Sparkling Misogyny

Apparently someone thought this excerpt was going to get people excited to read this book? All it did was make me want to gag (and not in a fun way).

In this excerpt, I was told about a (stone cold) alpha, who is maybe also a mafia boss? At any rate, he was totally rich, because his credit card company called him up and was like, “Ummm, sir? Someone just tried putting $80 grand on your card, is this fraud?”

And he was like, “What were the stores?”

The agent lists of some “high-end” stores. The alpha considers. “Oh, it’s fine,” he says, “it’s just my omega having a temper tantrum.”

All I could think of was Betty Rubble and Wilma Flinstone: Charrrrrrrge it!

Why Settle for Regular Misogyny? Make Your Woman an Omega Too!

I’ll say I have yet to read a queer omegaverse story that includes an omega going on a shopping spree because they’re “having a temper tantrum.” That’s what really made my gut churn when I saw this ad.

“Omega” here is just code for “woman.” It’s an extra layer of storytelling icing that isn’t needed when we’re dealing with straight romance novels. The misogyny in those is already baked right in.

We can test this by simply replacing the word “omega” with “wife” or “girlfriend.” “Oh, it’s fine, it’s just my wife having a temper tantrum.”

“Omega” here is synonymous with “woman.” And then we’ve taken some of the worst tropes about women—that they’re moody, irrational, over-emotional shopaholics—and slapped it into “omegaverse.”

The question is … why?

What Is “Straight” Omegaverse Adding?

That’s the question I have to ask every time I see straight OV: why. Why does this exist? What purpose is there in making your female lead “an omega”?

In queer OV (which, I remind you, is where OV started), omegas are femme-coded, absolutely. But in so many, many stories, omegas are femme-coded men. Depending on the story and the writer, omegas may or may not be able to get pregnant and give birth. Some writers absolutely use (and abuse) omegaverse as an mpreg trope. Other writers take most of the trappings of OV and leave out the mpreg part. They may or may not have “female omegas” as well, but the story is often focused on male omegas. In some stories, we only ever see male omegas, which might imply there’s no such thing as a female omega.

I’ve talked before about how OV is an incredibly flexible world building trope. The existence of male and female omegas is up to the writer. The existence of omegas more generally, though, points to the existence of trans people.

You Can’t Separate Omegaverse from Its Queer Roots

This brings me to a point I’ve been harping on for ages: OV is intrinsically a queer trope. The second we start talking about “male omegas,” we have entered trans territory. Omegas can be read as trans men! It’s really as simple as that. And other writers can argue, but the fact of the matter is you’re going to turn yourself into a pretzel trying to argue why a reader cannot simply say “omegas are trans men, got it.” (I understand that OV and mpreg readers may prefer to imagine their male omegas as cisgender men, but my point is that if any given reader wants to interpret any given omegaverse story as having a bunch of trans men running around calling themselves omegas, there is very little that really debunks that argument, aside from “word of God.”)

Once we assume male omegas are trans men, then we can also assume female omegas are simply women. (This works for alphas as well: female alphas would be trans women, while male alphas are people we could call men.)

This linguistic trickery allows us to read trans stories without really realizing we’re reading trans stories. This is where “straight” OV starts to fall apart.

There is no such thing as straight OV. It’s all fucking queer, all the way down, folks.

Queer Omegaverse Isn’t Doing This

Okay, but people are trying to write “straight” OV. And that’s where it’s falling on its face. They’re taking this fairly queer trope and trying to force it back into the cishet mold.

Which is why “straight OV” is an oxymoron.

That excerpt? Was a horrible dose of misogyny. It’s 1950s flavoured—that’s why it reminds me of Betty and Wilma at the store, with their husbands’ credit cards, looking at each other gleefully and shouting, “Charge it!”

The Flintstones is a 1960s production; Betty and Wilma are largely 1950s housewives. Credit cards had been introduced in the late 1950s, and they were still new-fangled. Here’s the catch, though. Women couldn’t have a credit card in their own name, much like they couldn’t have a bank account in their own name, in the 1950s. So the “joke” here is that Betty and Wilma are being irresponsible with their husbands’ money. They’re infantile; they’re capricious. They cannot be trusted.

So this alpha assuming that his “omega” is just “having a temper tantrum” echoes all of these terrible mid-twentieth century assumptions about women. They’re materialistic, they’re irresponsible with money, they’re capricious and irrational. Even the fact that he simply “okays” the use of the card echoes this paternalistic tendency. He laughs, as though the omega’s $80,000 “temper tantrum” is just immaturity. He allows the omega to act out, because Father Knows Best, after all.

While this moment is likely meant to showcase how rich this alpha is, what it does is put on display some pretty gross attitudes towards women—oops, I mean “omegas.”

What Queer Omegaverse Is Doing Instead

What’s interesting is that I have yet to see queer OV send its omegas on a “temper tantrum” induced shopping spree. Maybe some writer somewhere has done that, but on the whole, I find queer omega does one of two things:

1. Normalize tender, caring relationships between the “omega” and the “alpha,” where alphas may be “paternalistic,” but they want to take care of their omegas, and omegas wish to please their alphas.
2. Examine oppression and power imbalances inherent in one “sex” dominating the other.

In the latter form, omegas absolutely take on “feminine” traits. They’re often depicted as moody or irrational, materialistic or shallow. Yet, on the whole, when queer OV starts doing this, it is doing it with an eye to debunking these “myths.” We meet an omega who seems overly emotional or irrational, and all the alphas around them joke that their heat must be getting close or some such. Our “hero,” however, soon realizes there’s more to it than that. The omega is maybe depressed or otherwise justifiably raging at a world that doesn’t see them as a whole person, but as a pawn to be controlled and owned.

Those omegas are fucking furious, but I haven’t seen one pick up the alpha’s credit card and book themselves a luxury vacation to Tahiti or storm down to the mall and rack up $80,000 in designer clothing yet.

Queer OV Is Sympathetic to Feminism

And here’s the rub: queer works are often more sympathetic to the oppression of women than straight women themselves are. Queer OV works, on the whole, are using the existence of “male omegas” to examine oppression and power dynamics. “Straight” OV is over here like “lol, silly women, good thing there are alphas to keep them in line, haha!”

It’s the tradwife version of OV, and it makes me want to puke, to be quite blunt.

That’s not what OV is about.

And sure, we can argue it’s just a worldbuilding trope with a built-in mechanism for a lot of depraved “spice,” but even that is complicated in queer works.