Wondering about a Love Literacy (2024)

TikTok has been credited with encouraging young readers to #booklove through its BookTok community. However, the BookTok “trend for ‘spicy’ (i.e. sexy) books has led to fears children may be reading titles with adult content” (Knight). To ascertain the tenor of the adult content in these sexy books, we analyse a popular BookTok novel known for its spicy sex scenes: A Court of Mist and Fury (ACOMAF), a novel by Sarah J. Maas, the “reigning queen of romantasy” (Grady) and “mortal queen of faerie smut” (VanArendonk).

Positively, Maas’s novel includes extended erotic scenes that both represent and invite female arousal and desire. By depicting the female protagonist's body responding enthusiastically to her lover's touch, these scenes counter concerns about problematic gender ideologies contained in mainstream p*rnography and challenge how female sexual desire and agency have been minimised historically.

Problematically, however, the novel reinforces a heterosexual romance script that says once a woman finds her soul mate, she has no need to tell her lover how she wants to be touched because he knows exactly how to please her sexually. We argue that while the female protagonist expresses her desire and experiences sexual pleasure without shame, the articulation of this desire occurs as internal narration rather than external articulation to her lover in the storyworld, which weakens the potential for the novel to model a love literacy that highlights self-agency as part of self-love and sexual desire.

Love literacy includes learning how to make distinctions between eros, romance, and p*rnography. Akin to sexologists who advocate for p*rn literacy for young people (Woodley et al.), our concept of love literacy is part of a much-needed expansion of our understandings of what has often been assumed or implicit: a view of love and sexual relationships as being natural, rather than socially constructed (we’ll know the right person / the right time / they’ll know what I want and need, and so on). Making such distinctions lies in understanding that our moral imaginations create and are created by the texts we read (Boyd). This understanding includes, rather than excludes, a recognition of the felt sense that is unique to every individual, a reading through the body that includes the awakening and recognition of desire.

The distinction between art and p*rn can be fine (Bray, The Question). One distinction that has long been drawn is between visual art and p*rnography – currently contested in manifestations of #MeToo protests, with millennial feminist activists at the Louvre covering female nudes with #MeToo graffiti (France24).

Another distinction lies in definitions of what is erotica and/or what is p*rnography, and their connection to writings about love. The origin of the word p*rnography stems from writing about prostitution, while the word erotica comes from eros/love. Romance refers historically to stories written in the romanz language originally connected to fairy tales, also called wonder tales and often told by women; it now denotes love and/or erotic stories. The word fantasy comes from the Greek phantasia – an image or perception that includes picturing oneself. Euphemisms like “sensual”, “steamy”, “hot”, and “spicy” have long been used in the romance genre. Today, lines are even more blurred by the emergence of a new genre, a hybrid of romance-focussed fantasy novels and a new word that appears to have emerged via TikTok hashtags: romantasy.

In her book Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski proposes that while young people think they know a lot about sex, what they know a lot about is what their culture believes about sex, rather than sex itself. Despite the deconstruction of sexual interactions that has taken place in the last decades, messages concerning sexual desire remain outdated and most adults and teenagers still absorb their content. Nagoski suggests three powerful messages, all exhibiting double standards for men and women: 1) the moral message; 2) the medical message; and 3) the media message.

The moral message, still the most powerful for women, depicts the paradox between treasuring virginity (safe keeping your body for the man who will love you) yet being desirable, an impossible standard because “if you are sexually desirable, you are, by definition, unlovable” (Nagoski 159). Texts depicting this so-called “ideal” position of female desire have influenced Western thought since at least the Victorian period and may be summarised in William Acton's infamous words: “women, if ‘well brought up,’ are, and should be, absolutely ignorant of all matters concerning [sex] … ‘the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’” (Acton in Everaerd et al. 103).

A more recent medical message – that women's desire, arousal, and org*sm are biologically analogous to men’s – derives from the work of researchers in sexuality in the last century, many of whom want to recognise and offer parity between the sexual man and woman. However, if a woman’s sexual response or quantifiable sexual desire does not follow men’s, then she is seen as dysfunctional, leading women into another double bind.

Enter message number three to the rescue: the newer, media message, which presents sexuality for all genders as unlimited. If one is not engaged in multiple org*sms, uncountable sexual positions, volatile and explosive sexual responses, engrossed in p*rnography, or sexually interacting with gendered and non-gendered others, then one is atypical or is missing out!

Mixed messages internalised by society vis-à-vis female sexual desire remain evident in the most current form of explicit portrayals of sex, namely p*rn. Complicating cultural messages of sex are the visual differences between men and women’s sexuality: “whereas male sexuality is very visible, external, inserting, female sexuality is largely hidden, internal, inserted into” (Zachary 91). In representations of sexual interactions, female protagonists perform their sexual responses as a part of their gender being objectified. Objectification, the viewing and consideration of an other for use in sexual interactions, may be particularly harmful for women as they self-objectify by internalising judgments and considering themselves as bodies first and foremost (Kellie et al.), bodies to be done things to.

Representing authentic female sexual pleasure in p*rn is problematic. Women have been so surrounded by taboo, ambivalence, and ambiguity – and so socialised to be a certain way sexually – that finding their own voice may be near impossible. Spectatoring during sexual interactions, more common in females than males, is having a critical and anxious internal dialogue about what one should be doing, about the right way to be seen, and about how to respond (Mintz, Stop). How a woman should respond to sex or represent sexual pleasure are dominant themes in p*rn. In heterosexual sexual interactions, males do things to women’s bodies, and women respond in a highly choreographed way.

Negotiating self-agency and the ability to consent genuinely can only occur when one is aware of one’s feelings in relation to self and other. This negotiation is dependent on a love of self, which includes self-care, and, like relationships, is dynamic. Access to self-love, the love of self beyond and inclusive of the body, has not been historically available to women, yet studies demonstrate that “feeling entitled to pleasure increases a woman’s agency in telling partners what they want sexually and their agency in protecting themselves sexually” (Mintz, The org*sm).

p*rn scripts dominate the knowledge of sexual culture. In thinking about McKee et al.'s definition of p*rnography as “sexually explicit materials intended to arouse” and a “concept … to control the circulation of knowledge and culture” (34), one comes face to face with a double bind for women. Much of the p*rn available follows the heteronormative (and often violent) script where men do things to passive, silent women, in line with outdated messages such as,

in women … especially in those who live a natural and healthy life, sexual excitement also tends to occur spontaneously but by no means so frequently as in men … . In a very large number of women the sexual impulses remain latent until aroused by a lover’s caresses. The youth spontaneously becomes a man: but the maiden – as it has been said – ‘must be kissed into a woman’. (Ellis in Everaerd et al. 102)

The idea that he will know and give her what she needs, desires, and wants elevates him to a power position. It’s in sexual interactions that the heteronormative script exists because the passive position of receiver (the internal vagin*l receiver) abdicates her from full responsibility of articulating her desires because passivity keeps women’s dialogue internal. Thus, the powerful penetrator (phallus as external and all-knowing) assumes that responsibility.

And yet, women consume p*rn and are aroused by it, with women aged 18 to 25 engaging with p*rn more than older women. In their study into why people use p*rn, Smith at al. found that women used p*rn fiction sites at almost double the rate that men did and that “men use p*rn simply to express their arousal, but women are more likely to use p*rnography as a means to arousal” (284). Many women recognise the felt sense of their desire and arousal, but given the fraught messages embedded in female sexual desire and pleasure, explicitly sounding these desires out to a male other may still form part of the inherited and socially constructed idea.

Known for its steamy sex scenes, A Court of Mist and Fury serves as an exemplar for other romantasy novels, such as Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing. These novels challenge Nagoski's moral message and feature strong, complex female protagonists, whose sexual desire is represented as a healthy, normalised aspect of their identities. Sex, and diverse sexualities, are commonplace in both storyworlds, and, in line with a medical message, women and men are depicted as having equally high libido levels. Maas's and Yarros's novels positively challenge gendered sexual scripts that represent men as active initiators and women as passive recipients of sexual touch. Upon closer analysis of the erotic scenes between the female protagonist and her lover in both novels, however, a more problematic dynamic becomes apparent: in each sex scene, the aroused female does not verbalise how she wants to be touched. Vocalised in the first person, she makes her physical arousal known through her narration, but she never articulates explicit desires to her lover.

Although we do not have the space to consider both novels in detail, the following example from Fourth Wing shows the representation of female sexual desire as internal narration rather than external expression, a dynamic we analyse in A Court of Mist and Fury in more detail. In this scene from Yarros’s Fourth Wing, Violet expresses her yearning for Xaden and also articulates how he seems to know exactly how she wants to be touched: “one second he’s out of reach and the next his mouth is on mine, hot and insistent. Gods, yes. This is exactly what I need. … Closer. I need him closer. As though he can hear my thoughts, he kisses me harder, claiming every line and curve of my mouth with a reckless edge that makes my body sing” (363). The emphasis on yes and closer implies the strength of her desire and need, even as Xaden occupies the active subject position in most of this moment.

This juxtaposition between celebrating “the heroines’ sexual agency” while critiquing “the compulsory heterosexuality that privileges male power and experience” has been articulated by Elizabeth Little and Kristine Moruzi in their chapter on Maas’s fiction (82), and we build on their work in this next section. A Court of Mist and Fury develops the romantic and sexual relationship between human turned fae Feyre and High Lord of the Court of Night Rhysand/Rhys. The first novel in the A Court of Thorns and Roses – commonly shortened to ACOTAR – series sets up Feyre and Rhys as enemies, but this second novel utilises the enemies-to-lovers trope to create sexual tension between them. Their attraction for each other is depicted in three main episodes, with each one building upon the last.

In the first instance, to distract from their friends' actions, Feyre pretends to be the “High Lord's whor*” (409), which draws explicitly on the etymology of the word p*rnography. Despite it being a public performance, Feyre and Rhys's bodies respond to each other after months during which they had “danced around and teased and taunted each other” (415). Immediately afterwards, Feyre reflects on her feelings and narrates, “my focus half remained on the High Lord whose hands and mouth and body had suddenly made me feel awake – burning … alive. Made me feel as if I'd been asleep for a year, slumbering inside a glass coffin, and he had just shattered through it and shaken me to consciousness” (418). Drawing on a fairy tale metaphor, Feyre equates herself to Sleeping Beauty or Snow White kissed awake by a prince after a long sleep. Although the scene positively represents both Feyre and Rhys's arousal – her wetness and his hardness – the narration with which Feyre ends the chapter problematically echoes Ellis's message that the male kisses the maiden into being a woman.

The second steamy scene is also framed as a distraction, rather than as an explicit articulation of Feyre's desire. Feyre and Rhys take shelter in a room in an inn that, predictably, contains only one small bed. While lying curled against each other, Rhys twice asks Feyre what she wants. Her first response occurs as an internal narration: “more, more, more, I almost begged him as his fingers traveled down the slope of my breasts … heading toward the low band of my pants and the building ache beneath it” (471). Feyre internalises her desire for more of his caresses, rather than telling him to touch her where her ache builds. Feyre's repetition of more, more, more yearns to break from her mouth rather than to remain screaming inside her head. Readers are positioned to hear Feyre's knowledge of her own desires and to feel her body aching for more touch, but unfortunately, she does not express them aloud to her lover.

Feyre justifies her silence as power. When Rhys asks her again what she wants, Feyre narrates her actual desires, but lies to Rhys about them:

arching fully against him, as if I could get that hand to slip exactly to where I wanted it. I knew what he wanted me to say. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of it. Not yet.
So I said, “I want a distraction”. It was breathless. “I want – fun”.
His body again tensed behind mine.
And I wondered if he somehow didn't see it for the lie it was; if he thought … if he thought that was all I indeed wanted.
But his hands resumed their roaming. “Then allow me the pleasure of distracting you”. (471)

This exchange distinguishes between Feyre's body speaking its desire while her voice refuses to do so. Feyre claims her silence is to withhold providing Rhys what he wants to hear, what he wants her to say, but Feyre's knowledge of what Rhys wants and what she herself wants is left unspoken and unknowable. Despite this withholding, Feyre hopes that Rhys somehow sees her lie, somehow knows exactly what she wants, regardless of her refusal to speak it. Instead, pleasure shifts to him, even as he pleasures her.

Feyre and Rhysand finally have explicit penetrative sex after it is revealed they are mates, a bond more than lovers or spouses. The fated mating bond in the ACOTAR storyworld roughly equates to finding a soul mate. Although some mating bonds are not reciprocated, the one between Feyre and Rhys's bond is “rare, cherished” (492). We highlight this connection because it fortifies a fairy-tale fantasy that one's “true love”, the prince who will awaken you with a kiss, need not be told one's desires because the two become one:

I moved my hips in time with his. He kissed me over and over, and both of our faces turned damp. Every inch of me burned and tightened, and my control slipped entirely as he whispered, “I love you”.
Release tore through my body, and he pounded into me, hard and fast, drawing out my pleasure until I felt and saw and smelled that bond between us, until our scents merged, and I was his and he was mine, and we were the beginning and middle and end. We were a song that had been sung from the very first ember of light in the world. (533)

Over the three pages leading to this climax, Feyre slides her arms around Rhys, opens her mouth to him, groans into his mouth, wraps her legs around him, arches, plunges, snarls “a silent order” (530), bucks her hips, and has multiple org*sms without saying a word, all before Rhys has his pants unbuttoned. “Play later” and “you're mine” are the only words Feyre utters before the “I love you” in the above-quoted scene, in which she moves with him, and it is his penetrative phallus that draws out her pleasure, as they merge into a single timeless song that transcends their bodies – a fantasy indeed.

Romance, erotica, and p*rnography amplify desire, yet they do not fully articulate it, especially for women and diverse sexual orientations. However, they all offer recognition of not being alone with our desires, that others share them. Maas’s romantasy, for example, as shown here, connects the reader with an experience of desire: an imaginal space to wonder about sexual relationships without being watched.

It is not so long ago – and if Bookban has its way, it soon will be again – for some desires to be deemed unspeakable. Learning to speak openly of desire is where a love literacy begins. This literacy includes making distinctions between p*rnography – with its heritage of silencing and enslavement – and romantasy, in which one might wonder about the self and the other, and finally love, which attachment theory tells us is empowered by close attention to self and other, to observing, speaking, and listening. Where giving power to silenced erotic voices will take us, we can – and must – wonder.

References

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