Consent & Condoms: Writing Feminist Romance

by Marina Barakatt
published in Writing

First, a statement that is not a confession: I love romance. I always have. But I didn’t embrace it until relatively recently. There are several reasons for this, but suffice it to say that I’m an elder millennial and after a childhood in which the media told me that the best thing to be was traditionally girly, demure, and attractive to men, my post-college feminist self swung too hard in the other direction. I was a serious, independent, non-pink-wearing woman who didn’t read romance. How could I read romance? Romance is for silly women who care too much about what men think.

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.

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