I was aware that Casey McQuiston’s debut novel was the wildly popular Red, White, and Royal Blue (published in 2019), a romance between the First Son of the US and the Prince of England. I didn’t read it until recently, as I have less interest in consuming romance between men (not to say that m/m romances aren’t important! But I can really only make myself care when there’s at least one woman involved. It’s a self-insert thing). But I went into it with high expectations, given how much I loved One Last Stop and how big of a reputation Red, White, and Royal Blue has for being sexy. I was slightly disappointed, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why.

One Last Stop is spicy. August and Jane, the love interests, have undeniable chemistry and the added frustration of not being able to be as physical as they would like, given that the only time they see each other is on the Q train. The tension is present in spades, and when they discover that making out helps Jane remember her past (and the many girls she made out with), there’s an excitement in getting to be sexual while trying and failing to deny their romantic feelings. It makes for a swoon-worthy read, and when August and Jane finally do have sex, on an empty train car in the middle of the night, it’s literally electric. The author isn’t as explicit as some others, but the book is certainly not closed-door, either. What I love about these scenes is that, instead of focusing on the purely physical and the anatomy of what’s happening, we are focused on the characters’ emotions. 

Red, White, and Royal Blue doesn’t have quite the same impact. Alex and Henry, the love interests, are charming and gorgeous and absolutely adorable together, but the sex scenes don’t hit quite as hard. It could be that there’s less tension – yes, their romance is secret, but being that both of them have access to near-infinite resources, it’s easy for them to meet in Paris for a night, or for one of them to find an excuse to be on the other’s side of the Atlantic. And once they get going, they stay going, with a good number of sex scenes in the first half of the book alone. Now, I am never going to complain about a higher-than-average number of sex scenes, but without the tension present in One Last Stop, these scenes feel slightly outside of the plot. McQuiston uses the same technique in Red, White, and Royal Blue in which she doesn’t describe the sex act so much as leads us into it and assumes we can figure out what’s going on while describing Alex and Henry’s big, emotional moments. It doesn’t work quite as well, and sometimes her description is vague and circuitous enough that I wasn’t actually sure what exactly was happening – there were orgasms and there was love, both of which are wonderful, but sometimes it’s nice to know what happens in the lead up to those things.

There’s a few different things to consider here, for why one works so much better than the other. One is certainly personal preference: I enjoy reading women’s stories more than men’s. Additionally, I’ve always felt that it’s easier to care about a smaller-scale problem – you have to save the world? Yawn. You have to save your neighborhood? I’m interested. The emotional stakes are high and compelling in both books, but, plot-wise, I’m less emotionally invested in whether two of the world’s strongest institutions (the American presidency and the British monarchy) are going to be able to work out their differences than I am in whether a scrappy Brooklyn girl is going to be able to get her girlfriend off a train. I also think that we’re watching  McQuiston grow as a writer. They incorporate sex into the plot much more in One Last Stop, and the emotional descriptions are much more impactful during those scenes. I’m definitely looking forward to their next one.

Marina is a West Coast native living in Washington, DC. She loves writing anything, from sci-fi to creative non-fiction to romance, often drawing inspiration from the frequent travel required by her day job. Her work has appeared in such literary magazines as DistrictLit and Corner Bar Magazine. When she’s not writing, you can find her hosting bar trivia, baking something involving peaches, or bothering her extremely patient dog, Daisy. You can read more of her work at marinabarakatt.com and find pictures of Daisy at @marinabarakatt.

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That slope slid right through paranormal sexy detectives and into Ice Planet Barbarians. This speculative romance series, written by Ruby Dixon, is about a group of women crash landing on an Ice Planet populated by, you guessed it, Barbarians. The mostly male barbarians are humanoid except they are giant and blue with tails, horns, and ridges all over their body (all over). 

At first recommendation, I thought that no way was this series for me. But I soon caved and spent the better part of two months absolutely devouring ten to fifteen books out of the twenty-something book series (not to mention other series’ with other creatures in the same universe).

The Premise of Ice Planet Barbarians

The first book begins on a spaceship. A number of young women have been abducted from Earth with the intention of being sold into slavery, sexual or otherwise. Very luckily, before the ship can reach its destination, it crash lands onto a planet covered in snow and ice populated by the afore-mentioned aliens, known as sa-khui. 

Each book follows one of the girls and her big blue love interest, and along the way other human women find their way to the planet. The main plot device of the books is the khui, a parasite that each sa-khui and human must be implanted with in order to survive. 

The khui helps them stay warm in the constant snow and easily heal from whatever harm they might encounter on the dangerous planet. But, most importantly, the khuis know when two people would make perfect mates and are ready to make a baby — and tells their hosts so by vibrating in their chest.

The Plot

This “resonance” makes up the main conflict of most books. Whether the two newly resonating mates already hate each other, or two non-resonating lovers desperately wish to resonate already, there are a whole lot of half-human, half-sa-khui babies running around by the middle of the series.

Wait, you’re thinking, this sounds very heterosexual. And does each book end with babies? Well, yes on both counts. The romances almost always occur between a male sa-khui and female human, with a few male/female sa-khui stories to spice things up. There has so far not been a hint of same sex relationships, and every human woman who ends up on the planet is happy to only mate with males (I would actually love to see Ruby Dixon write a same-sex barbarian and/or human love stories). 

And yes, the khui’s goal is to make people make babies, which is particularly important to the sa-khui because a terrible disease wiped out most of their women several years back, leaving many horny, single men excited to welcome the human women.

The Verdict

So if extreme heteronormativity is your thing, or if you don’t mind it in your otherwise funny, well thought out, and super steamy romances, this series is for you. What I particularly appreciate is the books’ approach to consent. At first, the sa-khui don’t understand the humans’ hesitation to mate with them — their khuis are resonating, which means they must mate.

But the human women explain why consent is important (and, later, why slavery is bad) in clear terms that I think would be helpful for many human males, and even though the sa-khui don’t understand it, they do respect it. Even when they are resonating so hard they can hardly see straight, the sa-khui respect the word no.

And when consent is given — well. Female pleasure is prioritized, and the human women are able to introduce a number of sex acts to the sa-khui, including, extremely charmingly, kissing. It’s a nice change up of the archetypes to have a big strong protective man relinquish the sexual lead to the woman so fully. And the women are not afraid to take their pleasure.

My Takeaway from Ice Planet Barbarians

I was similarly pleasantly surprised at the characterization of the human women throughout the series. Even if they are nearly all thin, white, 20-something Americans with no one back home to miss them, they are all full, distinct characters. Some are more scared than others, some are excited to brave the snow and make a new life, some are solitary and prefer to hunt rather than stay close to the community.

As the series matures, more diversity begins to appear in race, body type, and ability (all the sa-khui learn sign language!), but there is not any in depth discussion of, for example, how a Black woman might feel about being kidnapped for slavery versus a white woman. 

There are certainly critiques to be made of this series, similar to critiques that could be made of a book in any other genre. But in a society that loves to see men overpower women physically and mentally in the name of romance and eroticism, Ice Planet Barbarian shows how consent can be extremely sexy.

Marina is a West Coast native living in Washington, DC. She loves writing anything, from sci-fi to creative non-fiction to romance, often drawing inspiration from the frequent travel required by her day job. Her work has appeared in such literary magazines as DistrictLit and Corner Bar Magazine. When she’s not writing, you can find her hosting bar trivia, baking something involving peaches, or bothering her extremely patient dog, Daisy. You can read more of her work at marinabarakatt.com and find pictures of Daisy at @marinabarakatt.

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Now, in my mid-30s, I’ve finally accepted my love for romance as part of who I am. I love plenty of other genres, but I’m going to like a hard sci-fi trilogy even more if it has a slow-burn romance threading through it. And I LOVE a steamy rom-com. Romance takes the most fun part of life—falling in love, butterflies in your stomach, first sexual encounters and lying in bed the whole next day, giggling and kissing—and distills it into a book that lasts almost exactly as long as a cross country flight. And so, after tearing through a number of popular romance books, I began to write it myself. And I love it! 

But as I started to write, my childhood programming began to kick in. And so I had to ask myself: how do you write a good, steamy, sexy, feminist romance? Is it possible?

Of course, it’s possible! But I had to really think about my most formative childhood media, break it down, and re-teach myself what sexy meant.

To give you some examples of what I was working with: my favorite Disney movie was Beauty and the Beast because Belle was brunette and loved to read and I was brunette and loved to read. She was feisty and didn’t hesitate to speak her mind, but at the end of the day, she fell in love with a guy who kidnapped her because…she entered his property? And he never really apologized, he just gave her a library? Sure, when juxtaposed against Gaston, he’s a right gentleman, but Belle, raise your standards.

And then there’s The Phantom of the Opera. I thought it was so romantic, how much he loved Christine, how he couldn’t live without her, how he wrote her an opera, and stole her to his lair. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to be with him! Raoul was so boring, how could she choose him? Obviously now, I recognize that a man who will kidnap you and threaten to kill everyone you love if you won’t be with him is not an ideal partner (I still think Raoul is boring).

You see where I’m going with this. I had been inundated with so many messages that if a man tries to hurt you, it’s because he loves you so much, that when I sat down to start writing sex and romance, this is what came out. It has been a long road of making sure that my male love interests aren’t being abusive or controlling or emotionally manipulative, especially during sex scenes.

Sex is hard to write. You want it to feel spontaneous—but does that mean there’s no discussion of consent? Does that mean your characters aren’t using condoms? Some argue that having to put consent and condoms (Hey! That’s the name of the column!) on the page ruins the flow of the scene and ruins the spontaneity. I disagree. You just have to know how to do it right.

When I started writing romance, I knew I had to read extensively in the genre if I wanted to be part of the genre. I’ve read tons of currently popular novelists and some of the older godmothers of the genre. I’ve read sci-fi romance, I’ve read paranormal detective romance, I’ve read fantasy erotica. And through it all, what tips me into loving a book is how an author can create a sexy, exciting feeling while still keeping her heroine safe and respected.

Over the next series of articles, I’m going to be exploring how some of my favorite authors do this. Of course, this applies primarily to heterosexual romance. I don’t exclusively read (or write) hetero romance, but the power dynamics that I’ve been speaking to exist between, for the most part, cis men and cis women. The harmful media I consumed as a child was exclusively hetero romance, so that’s what I’ll be critiquing.

I can’t wait to dive into this—the world of romance is so much bigger than many people think, and I’m proud to call myself a fan and a citizen.

Marina is a West Coast native living in Washington, DC. She loves writing anything, from sci-fi to creative non-fiction to romance, often drawing inspiration from the frequent travel required by her day job. Her work has appeared in such literary magazines as DistrictLit and Corner Bar Magazine. When she’s not writing, you can find her hosting bar trivia, baking something involving peaches, or bothering her extremely patient dog, Daisy. You can read more of her work at marinabarakatt.com and find pictures of Daisy at @marinabarakatt.

The post Consent & Condoms: Writing Feminist Romance appeared first on DIY MFA.

Setting the Scene

The book is set in the 1950s with an art style to match. The girls settle their scores in impossibly high heels and impossibly tight skirts – normally I’m the first to be annoyed when an action heroine is forced to run around in impractical clothes, but these women seem like they’re making a real stylistic choice, and I respect it.

They drink liquor out of bottles with skulls and crossbones on the label, they brandish clubs and old-fashioned rifles, and their dialogue is full of mid-century insults and obscenity. Their names are Sweets, Wanda, Wendy, Pinky, Blackie, and McQualude. They’ve got tattoos, weapons, and perfect pincurls. They know who they are and what they need to do to live in a world determined to keep them down.

The Story So Far…

The plot of this stand-alone book is pretty straightforward: after the police attack their clubhouse, the Mean Girls Club decides it’s time for action and hijacks the radio to let the townspeople know that the Short Wave New Wave Crime Wave (SWNWCW) is on, and they need recruits.

Antagonists of the book include the corrupt, fat cat mayor and his police lackeys as well as the leaders of the church-run orphanage, who are getting girls ready for a lifetime of subservience. 

The main character arc follows Roxy, a down-on-her-luck mechanic taking care of her sick grandfather. In need of money, she agrees to infiltrate the Mean Girls Club on orders from the Mayor. You can probably guess where the story goes from there, but the journey is just as enjoyable when you know the destination. We also get to learn the girls’ backstories and how each of them was found, saved, and cared for by another member of the group.

An Eye for Detail

The more time you spend with the pages, the more you see. The drawings are filled with minimalist color – just white and shades of black and pink – which draws the eye to the details. 

As you would expect in a 50s romp, not much is subtle: the bad guy is so evil that he keeps hungry pigs (guess how that turns out for him in the end). People’s faces turn bright pink when they get bad news. Thought bubbles of dollar signs pop up when discussing money. In response to the SWNWCW, the Mayor establishes ROT: Reclaim Our Town, and posters in support of this effort include “Wives not Knives,” and “Keen Girls Club.” 

In Conclusion

This book is nothing but fun, and doesn’t take itself too seriously: the girls all look like pinups, and even when one turns into a giant monster, she still looks great. There’s not a lot of body diversity or diversity of any other sort, and the point of view is not interested in a more nuanced discussion about sexism or gender roles. But sometimes you don’t want that. Sometimes, you’re angry at the world. You’re angry at the people who are supposed to protect the interests of women, but you can’t go smash up city hall because you have to go to work tomorrow so you can pay rent. When the anger gets to be too much, turn to the Mean Girls Club. They’ve got your back.

Marina is a West Coast native living in Washington, DC. She loves writing anything, from sci-fi to creative non-fiction to romance, often drawing inspiration from the frequent travel required by her day job. Her work has appeared in such literary magazines as DistrictLit and Corner Bar Magazine. When she’s not writing, you can find her hosting bar trivia, baking something involving peaches, or bothering her extremely patient dog, Daisy. You can read more of her work on her website and find pictures of Daisy on her Twitter.

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