I Hate Romance
We feel our worth when we feel pleasure.
What to expect: I’ll start personal and angry and end philosophically and angry.
Posted in response to the KTHT February sexuality prompt.
As I consumed mainstream culture growing up, I had to change the genders to see myself in adventure and romance stories. I didn’t imagine myself as the object of desire like my girl friends did. I imagined myself as the cishet male hero.
Because I desired.
I hate romance.
I hate queer romance most of all.
I hate that the infinite variety queer once promised has become another same-sex couple in the ‘burbs or two queens on the throne of the Kingdom of Magic and Fire. I hate that the world now believes gay and straight are different only in the bedroom.
Because I rather thought it was the reverse.
My first orgy was with three other women after a day spent on the beach. I was in college. I’m pretty sure we all had our first orgy in college, right?
Debbie had square shoulders and long raven hair that couldn’t hide the sullen watchfulness of feral eyes. Many women seem to feel their work is done once they’re naked, but Debbie had an agenda, as if she had been planning maneuvers for weeks.
She desired.
Her eager lips nipped at me, and her hands explored my thighs. I drew her strong fingers deep before she mounted me, setting her lovely wetness onto my face while another woman tasted me. There are few moments as transcendent as tasting a woman while reaching orgasm by another. You might call it a spiritual experience, but you would be wrong.
Separating the body and the spirit never made sense to me.
Plato wasn’t describing reality when he burdened us with Dualism. He was encoding culture, valuing one set to the detriment of another. His intellectual voodoo exiled existential nomads like me by mapping social reality onto savannas fenced by sex and gender.
After wandering that terrain of patriarchal hallucinations for most of my life, I realized there’s no spiritual bastion from which to gain perspective. I simply have to steal back that lost territory of queerness one story at a time.
My reclaimed territory transfigures tasting wet lips into the revelation of life’s purpose. Kneading warm bread dough is an erotic epiphany superior to any description of tits. And, mostly, the cathartic release of human desire cleanses as no confessional can.
We feel our worth when we feel pleasure.
Over half-a-century ago, the surrealistic philosopher Georges Bataille said the desire of the senses is to be consumed, that eroticism is a refusal to limit ourselves to separateness. Abandoning thought and self to an erotic union is a sovereign act.
In fact, it is the only sovereign act.
Eroticism subverts for the same reason romance conforms. Romance is servility, a means to an end, a living for a future not for the moment.
Desire is not merely soft contours and wet flesh, heat, musk, and immersion into pleasure. Forget this dualism of body and soul because there is no hierarchy. Passion is supposed to be painful and compulsive, an act that cleaves deep.
I write about mature women who act with strength and desire. They aren’t interested in pleasing. They aren’t interested in the future. They aren’t interested in much besides the moment. This kind of fiction appeals to few readers.
Because it’s truly queer.
I’ve anachronized history to make the point that romance is itself a construct (Historical Fiction List).
I’ve given life to erotic monsters that dominate not by the culturally encoded nature of their gender but by the power of their desire (Science Fiction & Horror List).
Much LGBTQ fiction has embraced the same tropes and absorbed the same patriarchal structure as mainstream, but traditional social roles have no value in my worlds (Erotic Fiction List)
In any case, I quit a career so I could spend afternoons writing and illustrating erotic sapphic genre fiction told from a dominant woman’s point-of-view with relationship anarchy.
When I wrote code, rather than fiction, I made six-figures, and all six were in front of the decimal point. These days, that decimal point has shifted three spaces (four after the Medium changes this summer). I don’t even make as much as I did when I worked fast food in the 1980s. Instead, I spend sweaty hours fighting with words followed by criticism or — worse — crickets.
I get it.
Most of us want fiction that lies to us, but do you even know which part is the lie?
If you enjoy my work then please consider buying me a coffee by clicking the button below:
Bravo 👏👏👏I love that “we feel our worth when we feel pleasure.” I absolutely agree with you. I am so glad and relieved that you are so open about sexuality. I was about to submit an essay to respond to the same prompt but had my reservation. Thanks to your essay, I feel I can be understood.
"Personal and angry and end philosophically and angry." I recently remember reading that there is much to explore and gain when we embrace and write what makes us angry. I appreciate how you have done precisely that, from highlighting a perspective of romance (you don't see many romantic thinking animals, and when you look at the history of most modern civilisations, well..) to encouraging us to think of the broader perspective of desire. A delight to read, Teresa, intriguing and thought-provoking.