Poetry Slams, Not Body Slams

Sometimes, I style myself an intrepid explorer, an adventurer who boldly goes where no queer reader has gone before. Sometimes... I even download books from authors unknown to me. 

Case in point: I recently finished a straight paranormal romance and started another, both by authors unknown to me. Woot! I want to impress you with my bravery and perseverance, but, well, I’m not sure I’m going to move beyond 14% of the second novel. After abstaining from straight romances for a while, I found myself startled to remember some straight paranormal romance sheroes find it perfectly acceptable for their manly love interests to perpetrate against their womanly selves kidnapping, sneering, condescension, and, my personal favorite, body slams against otherwise-innocuous walls.

The worst part? Despite being (taking a deep breath) kidnapped, sneered at, condescended to, and slammed against walls, these sheroes just can’t help but notice how tautly their kidnappers’ pants hug their muscular thighs and how sexily that vein rage-throbs in their Grecian brow.

A button I created for an
anti-IPV campaign

I’m not kink shaming. You dig rough foreplay? Like vanilla only in your ice cream? Go to town, my friends. But these violent romance conventions aren’t foreplay, at least not explicitly. They’re non-consensual physical and emotional domination, and for some reason, we readers are supposed to find this super hot. Frustrating, maddening, and a handy excuse for our shero to sharpen her verbal knives, sure, but still mega steamy.

Here’s an actual example of a shero battling not against her kidnapper or the literal cage she’s in, but her own libido.

          “Do you want to go home?”

             No. Yes. Ugh. Her lady parts needed a slap in the face.

For the record, she’s recovering from mockery, kidnapping, and the BOGO body slam. Instead of lecturing him on boundaries or, better yet, kneeing him in the groin, our shero feels an all-too-familiar fluttering south of her navel.

Really, straight-romance authors? Really?

I get the gendered cultural baggage. I comprehend the Beauty and the Beast-esque appeal of finding a snarling, violent, feral specimen of masculinity and being The One to Find the Good Within© and eventually, after much patience and witty verbal repartee, snapping a glittering leash around his “titanium” neck. (This was an actual word used to describe the face of the kidnapper who’d set the shero’s loins aflame. Facepalm.) Still, maybe not, you know, turn violence against women into something sexy? Maybe?

Yep. I designed this button, too.

You know what we call a man slamming women around, abducting them, and verbally degrading them? Abuse. You know what we call it when it ends with the couple’s undying love for one another? Scintillating romance. Beauty taming the beast. Redemption. (I call it Stockholm Syndrome, but whatevs.)

I don’t ask for much as a reader. I would just like for romances to feature people who have roughly equal amounts of power and maybe go the entire book without kidnapping, slamming, slapping, or haranguing one another.

So, what did I do after stopping my last book at 14%? I closed it with a sigh and instantly downloaded three lesbian paranormal romances. We queer authors aren’t perfect, god knows, but there’s something reassuring about starting a story without worrying too much about how the author will wrestle with patriarchal power dynamics that equate non-consensual violence with sexiness.