Like I’ve said before, I love the romance and erotica genres. I grew up on them and still love them. But, yeah, they are products of their time. As society changes, so do our stories.
So MUST our stories.
Particularly in a genre so often written by and for and consumed primarily by women, we should see more feminism in our stories. Because romance and feminism, love and feminism, can and should coexist together. And we need more examples of them doing so. We need it to become the new narrative.
As a genre, romance and erotica are still trying to find our footing between the magic and romance of fantasy and the necessary realities of consent. Because while the conversation around consent "has flared up in recent years, there still seems to be a gap in our conventional wisdom surrounding the subject."
I don't think we've cracked it.
I certainly don't always get it right.
But I see the strides we're, as part of this great genre, making and the effort we're putting in to try.
And, for me, there's romance and magic in that effort. Consent can be sexy and, lord knows, consent makes sex and play sexier. We just need to learn to tell those stories better. And tell those stories more often.
In the same way the genre used to think condoms and birth control would ruin the romance or the sexiness before it became the normal vocabulary of the genre, we need to get consent and negotiation there too.
Consent is a vital part of our everyday lives; it needs to be a vital and celebrated part of our stories too.
Take F*ck Yes, this beautiful youtube series that I hope continues for a long time:
Please check out F*ck Yes’s youtube channel, share the videos, and help fund it. We need more sexy stories filled with enthusiastic consent and they are helping to make that possible.
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