Smut-stack

Notes on romantasy, "men written by women," and bestial pairings

The highest compliment a woman can give her male partner, so I’m told, is to assert that he is “written by a woman.” I came across this phrase in June while reading a Wall Street Journal article on the rise of the romantasy genre—books like Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing, and Carissa Broadbent’s The Serpent and the Wings of the Night.

“Men written by women are the best men out there,” said a 31-year-old social-media consultant interviewed for the piece. It was unclear whether she was referring to real men or male characters in the aforementioned books. A man “written by a woman,” according to TikTok, is the Platonic ideal of his gender: sensitive, empathetic, chivalrous, thoughtful, domestically capable, smart. But what is so appealing about such a figure, real or fictional, is his seeming lack of character, if we define character as “a set of moral and mental qualities and beliefs that make up a person.”

Personally, I would not want my husband to be written by anyone except God. And if not God, then maybe a woman like Edith Wharton or Joy Williams.

I have no interest in reading romantasy, but I am interested in its literary and cultural implications. I pride myself on reading “good” literature, but I do occasionally wonder: Does it do readers and writers any good when we speak loftily of litfic as its own superior, stratified genre, separate from the rest of the publishing marketplace? This, of course, is never made explicit, but it’s nevertheless implied in how the industry and critics talk about, assess, and market these books.

From an Esquire deep dive published last week about the inner workings of celebrity book clubs:

“Gen Z is more focused on genre, and Reese doesn’t do genre,” said [Karah Preiss, co-founder of the Belletrist book club]. “Romantasy and romance are really the future of books. I love literary fiction, [but] to what extent are you actually talking to readers? To what extent are you asking readers, ‘What the fuck are you reading?’ They’re reading Taylor Jenkins Reid. People are reading Colleen Hoover.”

Critics (myself included) love to contemplate the contemporary novel’s discursive decline, but let’s be real, irony and “internet writing” should be the least of litfic proponents’ concerns when major publishers are banking (and bankrolling) their future on romantasy. “Every publisher I’ve spoken to in the last few months has said they have launched, are launching or will launch a romantasy line,” Lorraine Shanley, president of the publishing consultants Market Partners International, told the WSJ.

Writers should care because we are not exempt from market forces, and I distrust anyone who acts as if they are not privy to them, though good art can be made (or wrangled out) in an artist’s attempt to transcend the marketplace. Writers, editors, critics, and publishers shouldn’t have to cave to the marketplace’s demands but at the very least, we should investigate them, and use certain data points and demographic assumptions to better position and market old and new titles.

I also think the “Gen Z is more focused on genre” comment is an excuse for pandering to the lowest common denominator. It does a disservice to the minority/plurality of younger readers who are interested in challenging, worldly literature. And I’m a reader who came quite late to litfic. I mostly read YA in high school and into my early 20s. But reading habits are highly adaptive. Just look at the “thought daughter” content on TikTok. And if a bleak Japanese modernist novel can break through on BookTok, contemporary litfic certainly can.

The most interesting data point I gleaned from the WSJ report is that the top-selling (female) romantasy authors are rapidly outselling (male) household names like James Patterson, Stephen King, and John Grisham: Maas, Yarros, and Ross sold nearly 20 million copies last year, whereas the latter camp sold only six million, according to BookScan.

This, according to one bookseller, is a testament to female readers’ desire for “plot-driven romance from a female perspective.” The disrespect on Austen, Bronte, Wharton, etc! In other pieces examining the romantasy phenomenon, I’ve noticed a similarly bizarre tone of neoliberal triumph used to explain the genre’s breakthrough. Sure, perhaps this means that, for the first time in publishing history, more men are written by women than women written by men. But such a cultural milestone is not radical or groundbreaking, despite its deceptively feminist posture, when the genre is keen on perpetuating dated tropes that verge on the pornographic, wherein hapless female protagonists are inexplicably seized by desire and other magical forces, bonding them to a “possessive,” “alpha” male partner.

Some readers insist that certain books/series have more “worldbuilding” and “plot development” than others, but I’m going to link Emily Gould’s piece on monster smut in The Cut without comment because I simply cannot bring myself to explain the phenomenon further. To be clear, I am not above “monster smut” because, over the past year, I’ve read two extremely good books where a woman has sex with a non-human creature: In Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban (1974), a housewife in a stagnant, childless marriage falls in love with an amphibious frog-man named Larry. And in Marian Engels’ Bear (1976), an archivist travels to Northern Ontario to stay on an estate with a bear; she eventually bonds with it, but learns the limits of the human-animal connection.

Certainly, the circumstances of Mrs. Caliban and Bear seem to be imported straight out of a romantasy novel, but there’s little sense of the mechanics of a romance plot at play. Part of it, perhaps, is due to the strangeness of the overall situation. Mrs. Dorothy Caliban’s world is very much like our own, except one day, “a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house” and into Dorothy’s kitchen to ask her for shelter. Larry had escaped from captivity, where he was tortured by humans.

Shape of Water (2017) owes a lot to Mrs. Caliban.

I’d thought Dorothy and Larry consummated their affection much later in the book, but it occurs only a few pages in after their first meet. Sex is described as an experiment for the two of them, and before it happens, Larry undresses her to examine her body out of curiosity. “I’ve never seen,” he says. “Men, but not someone like you.” There are no gratuitous sex scenes. Ingalls writes, rather clinically, “They made love in the living room floor and on the dining room sofa and sitting in the kitchen chairs and upstairs in the bathtub.” The reader is not meant to marvel at Larry or to fantasize themselves into Dorothy’s shoes. Yet, one can’t help but be moved by the tenderness of their unexpected connection, which reveals just how desolate and bereft of optimism Dorothy’s life was before Larry, after the death of her first child and a miscarriage that upended her marriage.

Bear introduces us to Lou, a 27-year-old archivist in Toronto who leads a quiet, unfulfilled life. A project from her employer, the Heritage Institute, takes her to Cary’s Island where she’ll spend the summer alone. As she’s being dropped off at the house in a motorboat, the man tasked with transporting her to the island asks Lou, “Did anyone tell you about the bear?” The bear in question is chained on the property, and Lou acquaints herself with it day by day. She is at first shy, even scared. Then, she takes it for walks by the river to bathe before eventually letting it enter her residence. But Lou’s bear is less the object of her desire, and more like a mirror for her emotional projections: “She had discovered she could paint any face on him that she wanted, while his actual range of expression was a mystery.”

When Lou consummates with Bear, she misinterprets the animal’s reciprocity as evidence of an emotional intimacy, a bond that’s emerged between the two. Lou is soon confronted with the limits of this physical “connection.” Unlike Larry, an anthropomorphized frog-man, Bear cannot be “humanized,” and when Lou attempts to adopt “an animal posture” in front of Bear, he reacts violently. Frightened, she retreats to her room, and realizes that something has shifted in their relationship. Bear’s behavior the next day was not out of the ordinary; the violence shocked Lou because it severed the fairytale she imagined for her future with Bear, one where she will “make herself strange garments out of fur in order to stay with [it] in the winter.”

In the afterword to the novella, Aritha van Hark writes, “One cannot love satisfactorily without first loving oneself. And the bear, for all its physical bearishness, is a mirror to the woman, Lou, just as she, in her animal humanness, is a mirror to the bear… Lou’s exploration of eroticism, that secret territory forbidden to women, is carried out with the bear in her head as a guide. Their bestial exchange is slow and erotic and unexploitative.”

This, in theory, is what the romantasy genre purports to fulfill, but in their pitch towards the fantastically illicit, authors are attuned to upping the stakes of their plot (hence the books’ serialized nature) in lieu of grappling with the emotional risks and realities of their characters. “The thing I love about romantasy is that the romance can have these world-ending stakes that you just can’t get with an office romcom,” according to one author interviewed by The Guardian. “I love the whole ‘he murdered your whole family, but now you’re going to fall in love’—something which you can really only create in a fantasy world.” Perhaps my frustration is misguided, and most readers want to be spoonfed predictable stories that play it safe while proclaiming to indulge in people’s escapist desires. But my sense is that the formula will start to fizzle out, as a subset of readers begin to set higher expectations for what they’re reading.

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• I finished All Fours a few weeks ago. RAFTM Akosua Adasi wrote a good capsule review of the novel, and I agreed with Charlotte Shane’s analysis of AF in the latest BookForum.

• I liked what Brandon Taylor wrote about the late Alice Munro.

  • Andrea Skinner, Munro’s daughter, published an essay in the Toronto Star detailing the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather. Years later, when Skinner summoned up the courage to tell Munro, her mother chose to stand by her abuser.

• It’s very silly that the literary community loses their mind every time a “best X books of X” list drops. These lists seem to be made for that very reason!

• Recently obsessed with space master, a LA-based trance DJ. Shoutout to RAFTM Phuc Pham for inundating me with Soundcloud links.

• My latest review in The Believer is on Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin. I had a strict word count so I couldn’t go on for as long as I’d like. Between now and August, paid subscribers will get a newsletter with my Complete Thoughts.

• Heat hack: I’ve been carrying around a silk scarf that doubles as a sweat handkerchief. Also a chic neck/bag/hair accessory! I hate looking sweaty.

Stay cool!