My tumblr followers voted for this as a blog post topic and I kinda wish they hadn't.
Let's start with a flowchart.
Tangentially related argument I could not fit into this image: People keep reading M/M romances written by straight white women and claiming they’re supporting the queer community but then turn around and call sapphic fiction “gross” (yes, that’s a thing that happened on Threads recently) and don’t buy M/M books actually written by queer men.
Here’s the thing. In my opinion, all of these arguments are true to some degree. I’m not out here to convince anyone they are wrong actually and it is totally A-OK for straight white women to write M/M romance without taking the time to consider and work through this debate. I’m also not out here to say straight white women ought to never ever write anything of the sort. For one, it would be pretty hypocritical as I am a white woman who is not comfortably disclosing her sexuality online but living in an outwardly heterosexual marriage and I write M/M romances.
I also don’t think I have a lot to add to some aspects of this debate. There are some aspects where the voices of queer men and people of color are more important than whatever I have to say. This reddit post is a great starting point for various opinions on the matter.
When thinking about this blog post, there are only two things I think are worthwhile for me to talk about because I can actually add something to the discussion. One is general and one is deeply personal.
The general point: Desire is political.
There’s an interview with Hozier floating around on the internet where he talks about how everything is political, even a child’s drawing of a house because it reveals what a child thinks a house should be even if they live in an apartment building or a tent or some other kind of abode. I believe strongly that the stance “everything is political” must also apply to desire.
Why is that important here? Well, it’s not value-neutral that most of these books feature white men. It’s not value-neutral that the body types most often presented are “built athlete”, “motorcycle daddy” or “skinny nerd”. It’s definitely not value-neutral that the types of representation (race, culture, body type, mental illness…) in the book are often part of the “trope sheet” used to advertise the book (see this blog post about that phenomenon). The popular books in the genre define what is desirable in it, and what is desirable is, well, a buff white hockey player, apparently. But only if he still has all his teeth. No, seriously, I’ve read about a hundred hockey romances in the last year and in only one was a main character attracted to his love interest’s tooth gap.
If we accept the stance that straight white women writing about queer men is appropriative and fetishistic, we accept that straight white women cornering the market on m/m romances is a political act and that their defining of what counts as desirable is forcing a hegemonic straight vision on queer desire.
This dovetails into the “m/m romance by women is het porn in a clown disguise” argument, which, again, I don’t necessarily think is wrong. It’s certainly not true of all M/M romance, I wouldn’t still be reading and writing so much of it if I thought it was always true, but I have read a non-zero amount of books that veered into “if I think traditional gender roles are ~sexy~ it’s okay to write them with no further reflection”.
In my opinion, which, in case I haven’t made that clear enough, is an OPINION and not the be-all end-all, a lot of this stuff can and often is grounded in writers reflecting on where they’re coming from and why they’re writing what they’re writing. Like I said, there are a lot of M/M romance writers I really like, for recs look at my other blog posts or my goodreads.
The issues begin when writers AND readers come into the genre with the stance “oh I just happen to only like books with white athlete protagonists” or “oh I only like omegaverse books where the omega needs to be taken care of all the time” or “oh I only like age gap books where the younger MC is a virgin” etc etc and do not take the time to reflect on that desire being inherently political. I’m not saying it’s wrong to like any of those things and I’m not judging anyone for reading any of the above—what I am saying is that enjoying those things specifically is a result of the culture we (the English-speaking readership driving amazon’s top 100 list) live in and what it teaches us should be desirable, specifically in a way that sidelines bodies of color, fat bodies, queer bodies that LOOK queer.
I genuinely think most writers and readers of M/M romance come into it with pretty healthy attitudes about these things; I see a lot of posts asking for less commonly seen dynamics and body types, I see a lot of critical discussion about these topics. I have also read several books in the genre that struck me as racist, sexist and homophobic. Writers of M/M romance, even straight white women, are not a monolith.
The personal point: why do I write M/M romance?
Like I said, I am very much part of the problem here. So why do I still write M/M romance?
Well, again, it has to do with desire. Specifically, It has to do with my relationship to desire and my own body and my own history. As you can probably tell from the everything about me, I’ve been involved in online communities and fanfiction since I was a pretty young teenager (I made my fanfiction.net account when I was eleven and I felt like such a rebel because the TOS said I had to wait until I was thirteen).
I then went on to have what was probably a pretty normal experience of being a teenage girl. I hated my body. I was fat (I am again, there was a brief phase where I wasn’t in between, which weirdly was the time when I wasn’t online so much and also had a lot more anxiety and several retrospectively horrifying sexual encounters). I thought my vagina was weird. A male friend made fun of me for having arm hair, so I thought it was normal to shave it off. I had a crush on a classmate and everyone found out and made fun of me for it. My parents had an awful divorce and I compensated by eating my feelings, a strategy I still haven’t figured out how to grow out of.
You know. Being a teenager, inhabiting a body. It was gross and terrible and I hated it.
And at the same time, I was discovering desire.
Having had completely unfiltered access to all of fanfiction.net and then livejournal, I knew a lot about sex and sexuality by the time I was fourteen or so and the hormones were really kicking in. I saw the original Supernatural kink meme. I read a lot of explicit fanfiction. I started toying with the idea of writing my own.
From the start I was pretty open-minded about what I read, but I didn’t like to admit it to myself. I enjoyed reading het stuff, and F/F, but I felt safest reading and writing M/M. I didn’t want to deal with unpacking my sexuality, which I had kind of always known was not going to end up being completely straight (still not interested in talking about it in more detail online). I especially didn’t want to deal with having to think about my body, the body I found so hateful and undesirable, as an object of desire. How could I? I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting me. Reading about women I found attractive having sex was kind of torturous because, well, that would never be me. Write what you know? Okay, I may not know what it’s like to be a queer man but I sure knew what it was like to hate myself, I could easily put myself in Dean Winchester’s shoes and feel a lot safer about it. (Yes, the sixteen-year-old angst was strong, yes, the fic is still out there, no, I will not link it. You can do the legwork and find it yourself).
I didn’t stay an angsty teen forever. I went on to experience being desired, to start feeling more at home in my body, to find someone I loved and get married. But I still find writing M/M an easier way to delve into my own thoughts, experiences and understanding of desire. Part of that is habit, a habit I could probably break if I tried hard enough. Part of that is the simple, boring explanation that I am attracted to men. Part of that is that it remains to me the safest way to explore queer identity.
Finally I will leave you with this. It is fully your prerogative to say I am part of the problem. I will even agree with you. Just from a writing perspective, though – one thing I have always loved about writing identities I am not is finding the one kernel of shared experience I have with a character who is a different person from me and spinning that kernel out into an understanding of what it means to be human.
*If you want me to talk about top/bottom discourse I will need a strong drink and a deep dive into my 2020 fandom tumblr account. Not today, Satan.
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