One of the things I like about the M/M genre is that it provides a place to shed some of the double standards we have about sex— our celebration of sexiness but our disdain for people who have too much or the wrong kind. Sexy ads are good for sales, but heaven forbid we teach our kids about it in positive ways. Those who watch strippers are normal— heck, we do it ritually before weddings— but the performers who strip are slutty. Of course, part of the reason M/M does it better is because many of those double standards apply much more heavily to women than to men. M/F romance staggers under the weight of these.
You know the ones. A woman should know how to please a man in bed, but only sleep with the man she’s going to marry. Men who have been with twenty women are virile, women who sleep with twenty men are used goods. A woman who seeks sex without any attempt at or desire for a relationship is sleazy – the heroine must at some level be looking for more than just pleasure. Despite recent progress, these attitudes pervade M/F romance novels.
M/M romance manages to have a healthier attitude to sex, piggybacked on the fact that our two (or more) main characters are male. So, for a big fraction of readers, they can have had a hundred previous sex partners, they can be strippers, porn stars, or even escorts or rent boys, without losing the right to be a sympathetic romance lead. Sex on the page doesn’t have to be about romance, even in a romance novel that is not billed as erotica. The first interactions between our guys can be purely physical heat and desire, even paid for, with no expectation of affection. And they still get to have a romantic HEA. (Occasionally even an open relationship one, though acceptance of that’s a work in progress.)
We also see toys and lube for fun without shame, discussions of who wants what, non-penetrative sex that satisfies both partners. (Although even M/M is still far more hung up on penetrative sex than real gay guys are. Sometimes I wonder how much of that is due to the way we, particularly women, have been taught that only penetrative sex is real sex and “third base” doesn’t count.) In M/M, we do see frotting or hand jobs that are the sum total of a sex scene and enjoyed with no regret afterward for not getting to “the real thing.”
IMO, a small part of what drives female readers to M/M is the fact that orgasm is difficult to fake for men. (Not that it can’t be done, in a position where someone’s dick is out of sight, but an ejaculation is proof of at least some kind of pleasure gained.) Around 80% of women have faked orgasm during sex, and as many as 25% say they fake it much of the time. So many of us women read M/F with a bit of a cynical eye to the sex scenes. Those women get off really easily every time, and we roll our eyes sometimes, just like we do at the loud exclamations of female pleasure in M/F porn. There’s disbelief in the pleasure component of the sex. In M/M, we can believe that, through all the variety and whatever issues arise, we know when both guys are walking away with an orgasm. It feels consensual, satisfying, and therefore hot and not exploitative. M/M sex isn’t valuable mainly as a tool for emotional bonding. (If we cling to that belief about M/F, then sharing it widely would in fact be a questionable choice.)
It’s a hope of mine that reading M/M will help us see those positive attitudes to sex— as first and foremost mutual pleasure— generalized more, to women and M/F (and F/F and any other pairings and trios, although I don’t read enough of that to know if female sex workers are allowed a shame-free HEA in F/F?)
Women are still part of our own self-censoring. It’s not just men who see a male sex worker as edgy and experienced, and a woman sex worker as used goods, (often with even worse attitudes to trans sex workers.) I think it would be good for us, as women readers, to pause occasionally as we read a favorite M/M and replace the male sex worker or playboy or the guy who had the college fuck-a-thon when he came out, with a woman in our minds. To ask ourselves if our attitude toward the character would change. And if so, why?
I’m a firm believer in the power of fiction to change minds and hearts. Usually with M/M I’m hoping to increase empathy and understanding for LGBTQ people and relationships. But in this one area, I think that M/M can have something to teach us about the lens we use to look at sex, pleasure, shame, and gender. And maybe to push us further toward equality and a healthy attitude toward sex inside of and outside all kinds of relationships.
– Kaje Harper
May 2019
I learn so much from you, thank you!!
I’m glad if something I said was useful to you. 🙂 Thanks.
Awesome & thoughtful! Thank you for sharing this with us. Many hugs, Z.
<3 Thanks
As always a thoughtful blog I have learned so much from you. And love your books.
Thanks Denise – I learn a lot from all the articles you find for us too.
Well said!
<3 Eden
I love this, Kaje! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, they’re brilliant as ever! I really love the look at non-penetrative sex representation!
I like seeing fiction represent real life. We still urgently need more books in M/M as well, where penetrative sex isn’t the endpoint that means the couple’s sex life is complete, where it may never happen and there’s still an HEA. At least we have some, and many where it doesn’t have to happen every encounter to be satisfying. Hopefully some M/F romance is moving that way too – I just haven’t seen much evidence of it yet.
Beautifully said. Hoorah!
<3 Thank you.
I read every subgenre of MF romance there is, and I can tell you that healthier attitude toward sex – inclusion of escorts in romance without shaming, women with active sex life before meeting the hero, anal, toys, lube, non-penetrative sex (basically everything that you mentioned) is present throughout the MF genre for a while now…long before JR Ward wrote Lover at Last, when MM genre really started getting traction.
And about that faking orgasm thing…You imply that all MM writers know how to get fictional character off, and that the sex is valid because we can see the product of it. Lol, no…There are some really bad erotic scene writers here. The fact that MC ejaculated, doesn’t validate the act that led to it.
I get what you’re trying to say, but MM genre has a loooooong way to go, and giving it credit when it’s not due is not a way to go about it. You talk about healthier attitude toward sex, but this whole article is really about double standards women have toward heroine in MF and heroes in MM, i.e you are turning something negative into something positive. As I said, long way to go.
Oh I agree. Absolutely the sex in M/M is far, far from always realistic. What I am saying is that for women, the sex in M/M is potentially more believably erotic and mutual, because there is the perception that orgasm has provably happened for both characters, and that each can be confident they got the other off. In fact, of course, not only can the scene be written badly or unbelievably, but ejaculation doesn’t always equate with pleasure (since you can even get a male to ejaculate via electric stimulation to the prostate.)
But if you look at real life M/F sex from the female point of view, there is a lot of it happening that is neither focused on nor successful at eliciting female orgasm. Studies suggest 60-75% of women can’t reliably orgasm from simple vaginal penetrative sex without additional stimulation. And yet, the vast majority of popular M/F romance (and I’m glad if you are reading exceptions to that) have the vast majority of sex scenes as vaginal penetration without a big effort at additional stimulation for the woman, (maybe ten seconds of manual stimulation) and yet she climaxes.
So when women read M/M versus M/F, at least from the lens of a het female perspective, M/M is far more focused on sex that would have a good chance of successfully getting orgasm from both participants. And the act of ejaculation serves as a marker of that success. Women are all familiar with faking orgasm to end a sexual encounter that isn’t going well. So, at least from my perspective, reading traditional M/F sex scenes makes me skeptical, even beyond the level of gloss that any sex in books always has over sex in real life.
And Lover at Last was not the moment that M/M began getting traction, although it definitely helped increase audience. It was written in 2013, at a time when the M/M Romance group on Goodreads already had over 10,000 members and was already one of the top ten groups on there. You might point at Suzanne Brockmann’s “Hot Target” in 2004 as the first big (NY Times Bestseller) boost to the genre, although it had already been gaining some traction before then. “Brokeback Mountain” in 2005 (the movie) was another big boost to the genre. There was strong momentum long before Ward got her book out.
M/M definitely benefits from the double standard, though. And that’s one thing I am trying to point out. But additionally, I believe it moves beyond it to a degree. Because there is less M/F romance (as opposed to erotica) where the male lead is a sex worker or porn star, and where things like getting an STD/HIV test is a non-blameworthy part of the relationship process. The men in M/F benefit from their position in the gender disparity, but not to the degree of openness and acceptance that we see in M/M romance.
But you’re absolutely right we have a long way to go in M/M, not just in erasing the double standard. I can still count on my fingers the number of M/M books I’ve read where the guys like sex, but are never going to have penetrative sex. And similar numbers for books with asexual MCs, although we’re making big strides there lately.
If you have suggestions for M/F romance (not just erotica) where there is no sex-shaming, particularly of a female sex worker allowed to have a romantic HEA, and where female pleasure is well represented I’d love to have those suggestions. I’ve been reading a sampling of the genre bestsellers and not finding much of it. We should be supporting the romance books that get that right.
…and back all the way To Pretty Woman…
I don’t remember the movie well enough to recall if Vivian is allowed to be unashamed of chosing sex work or if it has the Cinderella component where love will rescue her from an undesirable fate as an escort. At least I do remember her holding her head up better than many.
[…] Author, Kaje Harper, has an interesting and thought-provoking article about attitudes to sex in novels: Sex Positivity and M/M here. […]