(This post first appeared on Substack: Writing Magick with Maggie Sunseri. Click to subscribe.)
Maggie Update
It’s release week!! WOOOOOOOO! The Discovered is now live on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google Play. The early reviews have genuinely brought me to tears. They’re just so lovely and exactly what I hoped people would get out of these books.
Kinky witches, spirituality and magick, romance, mystery, and twists and turns… it’s a wild ride of a series, and I am so ecstatic it’s finally out there and selling. The sales are above and beyond what I was even expecting from the first couple days! So grateful for all the love and support. I truly started from nothing, and I’m already beginning to see an audience growing, slowly but surely. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted. Little eight-year-old me said she was going to be an author one day, and through it all, I’ve held fast to the faith that we are drawn to our life paths for a reason. My soul just knew what it came here to do, and now I finally get to embody that deep, subconscious knowledge.
On that note, remember when I explained my Wheel of the Year tarot card spread? And I said that I hoped to every god and goddess that my deck wouldn’t spit out The Devil or, god forbid, The Tower? Guess what my January card was…
The FREAKING DEVIL! Rude! So rude. But my current interpretation is that the Universe is warning me that this month is going to be hard, and I need to spend some extra time on my sobriety work. So I guess I’m thankful for the heads up, and I’m definitely going to watch out for any cravings or signs that I’m in any kind of Sobriety Danger Zone.
But…. guess what I got for my main card of 2022? Drum roll…
The World is widely considered to be the best card in the deck. It’s the card of ultimate harmony between our inner and outer worlds, our subconscious and our conscious minds, our intentions and our manifestations… It’s the last card in the Major Arcana, representing the completion of grand cycles and the mark of ultimate success after the journey of the soul through all the major lessons and archetypes on our journey. So, no biggie. Just the card of cosmic destiny and perfect balance or whatever.
I’m taking it as a sign that everything is going to work out, no matter how many breakdowns and fuck-ups inevitably arise on my journey this year. I’ve been working so damn hard on this career launch and my own health and wellbeing, laying the groundwork brick by brick, and it’s finally paying off. I said it last week, and I’ll say it again: I cannot wait to see what 2022 brings.
BDSM and The Patriarchy – Take 2
Read Part 1 here. There I discussed the topic on more of a broad level, as well as the role of sex and kink in my own books. For this post, I thought I’d go a little more in depth on the trends I’m seeing in the reading and writing world specifically.
Hence my subtitle: Women attacking women for writing books for women that supposedly hurt… women.
Let’s break this down. There’s an extremely bizarre brand of discourse that’s been happening for quite some time in which romance and erotica authors are being told that their books are problematic for engaging in anything kinky, dark, or “traditional” in regards to romantic and sexual scripts or gender roles. Authors are torn apart for writing anything from common romance tropes like jealousy, possessiveness, alphas/traditional masculinity, rough sex, or consensual BDSM to dark romance themes like non-consensual sex, kidnapping, trafficking, and evil wilder shit. Basically anything on the spectrum of male dominance and female submission, from the dark and twisted to the “safe, sane, and consensual.” But it’s important to note that even romance I would consider tame and vanilla can be caught in the cross-fire, and I see this happening more and more.
And here’s why I think this is bizarre. Generally the argument is that these books are glorifying and promoting abuse and violence against women. And yet, the romance and erotica genres are by and large written by women… for women. To purport that books by and for women are promoting gendered violence is a strange argument to make considering men are largely responsible for said violence. Are these critics saying that women are bringing violence upon themselves for reading kinky smut? Are they saying that there’s some kind of broader patriarchal conspiracy behind all of these books to prop up rape culture?
Or are they saying that women have no agency over their own sexual fantasies and desires? That the only reason a woman could possibly be into male-dominated power exchange in the bedroom is because the romance/erotica genre subconsciously wired her to be? Again, this entire argument assumes that women are gullible and impressionable and only like things because other people convince them to. It assumes that romantic and sexual scripts are never innate or authentically desired, but only manufactured. And that women are indoctrinated into, and therefore somehow responsible for, gendered violence because of the books they read.
I’m not going to sit here and say that everyone who’s into kinky sex was born with it encoded into their DNA. (Though that isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. Many people genuinely believe that they were born with their predilections.) What I will point out, like I did in my last post, is that we don’t actually know where all of our sexual desires and impulses come from. We just know that they are complex, and likely a unique mixture of environmental and innate traits on the psychological, biological, and sociological levels. Not only that, but just like sexuality and gender, sexual interests fall across all manner of spectrums. Heterosexual fantasies are not the only ones being marketed and sold in the romance and erotica genres. I myself write characters that occupy all manner of identity combinations, from dominant women to bisexual sadists to vanilla lesbians… and even characters that would identify as asexual. How would these characters fit into the argument surrounding sexuality and the patriarchy?
As I conclude in every single post ever, we’re all really just a bunch of freaky weirdos. We like what we like, and there isn’t usually a clearcut answer as to why. Stories often do overlap with reality, but I would argue that much of what we see in the dark romance and erotica categories lean far more toward pure fantasy. Women don’t want non-consensual sex and violence in real life. I can’t speak for everyone, but my theory is that what these female readers truly want is fiction that exists completely independently of the male gaze. I would go as far as to say that even the women who read the darkest of erotic books would probably feel very differently about them if they were written by men.
There are male characters in these books, that is for sure, but the male gaze—the process by which men construct women as objects of pleasure for the exploitative heteropatriarchy—is absent. The men in these stories are written by women and for women. While there may be dark sexual themes that broadly fall under male dominance, they aren’t actually constructed from a male perspective. This is what makes these genres feel safe. It puts them firmly in the impossible and unreal category. The men of these books don’t exist in our world. They can’t exist. They were created by women, consumed by women, and cater exclusively to female heterosexual fantasies. (Talking about the most popular here, obviously not the books that contain female dominance or LGBTQ characters.)
I also wonder if they offer a means by which women can actually gain a sense of control and agency over their own desires. Perhaps some women find it easier to embody their sexual selves if they consume fantasies that involve non-consensual themes. The common trope of he wanted me so badly he just couldn’t help himself might offer sexually-repressed women a way to combat feelings of shame and to feel like they aren’t breaking sexual taboos—because these fictional men are taking choice out of the equation. Dark erotica could also represent the desire that all people have to be wanted, sought-after, and radically accepted, manifesting in the most extreme of ways.
Or maybe for some women, dark fantasies and BDSM are a way to take the power back after trauma or to cope with the threat of trauma in our society. Fictitious men might be “in control” in these fantasies on the surface level, but in reality women are the only ones steering the ship. We have complete agency in our own fantasies—in our own minds—and in the books that allow us the space to explore them. The power exchange and violence of romance and erotica is something we choose, something that serves us not them, and therefore creates a safe space in which to engage in our sexualities without the real threat of abuse or exploitation.
No matter the why of romance and erotica tropes, what I can say for sure is that women tearing down fellow women for creating or enjoying certain books doesn’t seem very feminist. The very tropes that get the problematic label are often the selling points of best-sellers. Twilight wouldn’t have been Twilight if not for Edward being a possessive asshole with sexy parts made of marble and designed to kill or whatever. Fifty Shades simply wouldn’t have existed without kink. This is not to say that the problematic parts of either of these books shouldn’t be criticized, of course, because there was definitely some sketchy shit in both that I wouldn’t condone in real life. But hating on women for liking those tropes is surely not the girl-power move we need. Furthermore, I think we as a society have definitely lost the ability to discern between “I don’t like this” and “no one should like this and here is a manifesto detailing why you’re a piece of shit if you do.” There are plenty of books that get torn to bits for things I wouldn’t even consider a feminist issue; they usually just contain themes that aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But just because I don’t understand their appeal doesn’t mean I have to shame everyone who does.
If kinky sex, or any subject matter at all, makes you uncomfy, you are fully entitled to that preference and allowed to avoid any books in the respective category. What I don’t like seeing is women going after each other in women-dominated spaces and insinuating that our art somehow is to blame for gendered violence. I can promise you that no man read Twilight and then promptly decided to engage in emotional abuse as a direct result. Nor do I believe that any woman who reads dark smut actually wants dark things to happen to her. We must find a way to engage in constructive dialogue that both recognizes the power of books to impact the real world and also honors the humanity of writers and readers who see stories as far more fantasy than reality. There is always a middle ground—a compassionate, nuanced, and holistic ground—and I hope we can always dig through the anger, antagonism, and divisiveness to find it, together.
(This post first appeared on Substack: Writing Magick with Maggie Sunseri. Click to subscribe, like, or leave a comment. This newsletter is currently 100% free, but if you want a way to support me you could always share my posts with your friends or Buy Me a Coffee. Or you could buy my kinky witch books!)
