December 10, 2024

Female Arousal, Patriarchy, & Fantasy Romance

In which I talk through my thoughts on the smelling & sensing of female "arousal" in Romantasy and Fantasy Romance

Hello everyone, I am having thoughts about a very specific topic that is unfortunately near but not at all dear to my heart, and that is the scenting or smelling and sensing of female arousal in fantasy romance and romantasy.

Content warning: I am going to be talking about sex, sexual assault, and rape culture. Please take care.

This is something that seems to be somewhat of a trending thing at the moment in romantasy and fantasy romance, particularly in books where gender and bioessentialist worldbuilding is used. That is, for example, the use of terms such as “Male” and “Female” to refer to men and women, and where the people using these terms to refer to men and women are not actually human but are some form of supernatural being. Throughout this essay I will be using the terms “Male” and “Female” as well as “man” and “woman” quite interchangeably, because these are the terms that are most often used in conjunction with this narrative device. I promise I’m not trying to be weird about gender!

I did actually make a video essay reading this script, so if you prefer video or audio, have at it!

Otherwise, read on. This is just over 4,000 words, so strap in.

Side note: This is focusing on depictions of straight, hetero romances, so I do not go into any depth about the depiction of this in queer F/F or M/M books.

One of the reasons I have been fixating on this topic recently is because I personally, as an individual with subjective thoughts, feelings, and opinions, do not understand the appeal, and I unfortunately have the kind of autistic brain that makes me ruminate on the things. I am interested in this topic also because it is so heavily gendered, not only in the ways it is depicted, but in who is depicting it.

Romantasy is the subgenre of romance-driven fantasy or fantasy with strong romance plots, and it is predominantly written by women, for women. In fantasy, you can imagine virtually anything, and so I’m interested in the choice to depict this thing both in general but also because I think it elicits a few specific feelings in me, for example, discomfort, mortification, and a feeling of unsafety or concern for the female character’s wellbeing.

So to begin, this is showing up in a lot of Male/Female romance pairing books in romantic fantasy at the moment, as I mentioned. I want to briefly explore different ideological relations in regards to textual traditions in romance, because there is one thing that I am thinking about quite often in regards to romance and it's subgenres, and that is:

The "eroticization of dominance and submission".

“Dominance” in this context refers to the functional asymmetry between characters, and “submission” refers to the act of ceding control or authority to another.

This isn't always depicted quite as explicitly or obviously as some might think – I'm sure we're all familiar with the ways a particular brand of "feminism" is being portrayed in romantasy these days (the woman submits to nobody; she is strong; she is sassy; she is equal to men.) Surely that’s not a dominance/submission narrative? Well, what I'm referring to here is something that I think is a little more subtle, perhaps, and that has to do with the power imbalances often depicted in relationships wherein this scenting or sensing of arousal shows up.

Unfortunately, it is my supreme displeasure to mention that there is a peer-reviewed study from the University of Kent which found that suggests men can indeed, in some ways through smell, sense arousal in women1. Quote:

So, this does have some basis in reality, as we currently understand it. Wish it weren’t true, but we are animals, so this isn’t exactly shocking. I would also like to note that the study was only done on straight men, and women involved did not need to declare their sexuality, so, as my friend Henry beautifully paraphrased, “some lesbians may have been smelled”. Do with that what you will.

Historical Contexts of Romance

I think I would be remiss if I didn’t at least briefly talk about the way rape and sexual assault has been used and depicted by female authors historically, as a way of engaging with narratives around gendered expectations, sex, and female desire. Some romance scholars even claim that the depiction of rape in older romance is in some ways feminist—for example, it is a way for female characters to experience sex without the guilt and shame associated with wanting it2. If we look at debates surrounding rape taking place in the media in the 1970s, we can also view some depictions of rape and sexual assault as responses to these debates, speaking to a social context which encouraged the exploration and depiction of such events which offer us a better understanding off both the novels and the society from which they came from. I think the same can be said for romance indeed all books of today, since nothing is created in a vacuum.

Thus, my questions about this topic are: why this and why now? Why is this period of fantasy romance so interested in depicting this narrative device, at this precise point in time? The answer lies, I think at least partly, in what is taking place in society right now: we are living in a time where women’s rights to bodily autonomy and abortion in the USA are being taken away, facism is on the rise, time and time again we are seeing that victims of sexual assault are not getting justice, while the perpetrators of these crimes are being granted parental rights, being voted into presidency, are keeping their jobs, and are often more supported in the public eye than the people theyv’e harmed, etcetera etcetera.

Furthermore, a popular perception among fantasy romance readers, at least in so far as I have seen online namely on booktok most recently (especially in the aftermath of the recent US election) is that romance and fantasy novels are an space for escapism, purely, with some even going to far as to say we shouldn’t “talk about politics” or “bring politics into book spaces”.

To that I say, romance and fantasy are also places of political interrogation, and they also give us reasons or vessels through which to explore what’s being depicted, what we’re being impacted by today, and to think about why. I believe that romance and fantasy books are not just reactions to discussions and movements; I think they also directly engage with and even initiate discussions and movements, sometimes in productive and destructive ways.

Further, in the bookish spaces of the internet, there is a big trend in literature and a big portion of the reading community that is extremely interested in stories about “morally dubious”, “morally grey”, or just outright dangerous and “bad” men, with some even going so far as to say they voted for Trump, a known sex-offender and acknowledged felon, because they “thought we all agreed we liked morally grey men 🤷‍♀️”. Woof.

There is a plethora of fantasy romance at the moment that features quite sexual themes and content, and I’m interested in exploring how all of this both informs the scenting and sensing of women’s arousal, and how this narrative device might go on to have real-world implications.

1. Power

First, I want to begin by talking through some thoughts about how this narrative device relations to power, or more specifically, power imbalances.

I think this trope tips the power balance in the man’s favour more often than not, and the reason I think this is because the male character often smells the female’s arousal but she can’t smell his; this is usually because the male character is supernatural in some way, while the woman is human. But there are a few more reasons the balance of power skews in his favour:

1. an aspect of privacy is stripped away. The woman doesn’t have the ability to hide the state of her arousal when the people around her can smell it on her. There is a level of undeniability about it because it’s there in the open as something she can neither control nor obscure without great effort—and more often than not, she doesn’t even know how to begin doing that.

A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire3 (Jennifer L Armentrout):

Casteel could sense arousal?

Heat swept over every inch of my body, and I knew I had to be as red as the leaves within the Blood Forest. Oh, gods. That explained how he seemed to know exactly when I was lying about being attracted to him. But could he sense that from a distance? I doubted that. “How is that even possible?”

“Each person has a unique scent. At certain times, the scent is stronger. Especially when someone is aroused.”

2. The male is portrayed as “suffering” because her scent turns him on, but he’s also framed as such a good man for resisting the urge to f*ck her into oblivion. In many ways, the choice to depict it this way makes him a character who is implicitly strong and powerful for resisting his urges—his strength, self control, mental fortitude, and respect for women is reinforced. Furthermore, sometimes I feel that it makes him a little sympathetic because he’s experiencing pain or discomfort in pursuit of not pressuring her into anything, and ultimately it functions as another reason to desire him—making him oh-so-appealing to the female character and readers alike.

3. The male character can and often does laud the fact of the woman’s arousal response over her. For example in enemies or rivals or dislike to lovers, the male character will have some sort of cocky dialogue exchange where he exploits this knowledge, with lines such as “you hate me, but you want me”, or “you hate me, but I turn you on.” His appearance and proximity has an effect on her body that she can’t control, and about which he can [and does] boast.

4. In some ways this ability positions the male character as a kind of authority on her body and experience. He knows her better than she knows herself—she just needs to let her mind catch up with her “molten core”. In a lot of these books, her body’s arousal response is used to excuse boundary-crossing behaviours of which she is most often the victim. Her arousal is proof she wants him, whether she will admit it to him or herself or not.

5. Lastly, there is a kind of predator and prey aspect to his depiction. Oftentimes it’s explicit, so the man is not a human man but is a fae or something, and he’s described with verbs such as pounced, stalked, claimed, even sometimes with the word “predator” or being metaphorised with predator animals such as wolves. Meanwhile the woman is described as a prey animal, like a hare or a deer, and she is sometimes submissive in her actions, backing up, making herself small, and or being overpowered physically by the man in question.

ACOTAR4 (Sara J Maas):

He chuckled bitterly. The moonlight turned his eyes to the color of leaves in shadow. More—I wanted the hardness of his body crushing against mine; I wanted his mouth and teeth and tongue on my bare skin, on my breasts, between my legs. Everywhere—I wanted him everywhere. I was drowning in that need.

His nostrils flared as he scented me—scented every burning, raging thought that was pounding through my body, my senses. The breath rushed from him in a mighty whoosh. He growled once, low and frustrated and vicious, before prowling away.

The Potential Appeal

In trying to present and have a more well-rounded view of this trope/narrative device, I came up with some reasons why it might be appealing to some writers and readers alike. I think these might be partial reasons, and I’m super curious to know if this resonates at all with anyone. If it does, or if it doesn’t, I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments!

The first thing I thought of what that the scenting and or sensing of arousal removes an obstacle to bringing up the matter of attraction and sexual desire—if he knows she’s turned on around him, that is often treated as a reason or way they can communicate less in regards to who they want and when. It is often treated as a door that opens and implicitly suggests a willingness for a sexual encounter.

Cutting corners on the need to communicate is a thing that I see a lot in the romance genre and subgenres, like for example, male characters anticipating and predicting the woman’s needs in ways that are unrealistic or that don’t make sense given the scope of what we know he knows about her, or he’ll be so good at sex that he knows exactly what to do with little to no direction from her. So in that vein, I wonder if this is one of those things.

The High Mountain Court5 (A.K. Mulford):

Hale’s nostrils flared, smelling her arousal. The scent made his entire body shudder. Remy vibrated in anticipation. The promise held in those wild gray eyes set her aflame.

The second thing I considered is how this acts as shorthand: it provides a strong clue as to what is to come in the novel, once readers have recognised the man arousing her is likely the love interest. In fact, more often than not, you absolutely can identify who the love interest is based on the affect of his appearance and physical proximity on her physiologically—more specifically, her arousal response.

(I have a lot of thoughts about the overuse and conflation of sexual desire and romance in a lot of fantasy romance books, and this device feels like a good illustration of that; by its very existence, readers are primed to expect a romantic relationship to eventuate—and this is not inherently problematic, but I do think it’s worth critically thinking about, especially in stories where little romantic and personal intimacy is built outside of their sexual compatibility and activities but the story is explicitly presented as “Romance”. The romance heavily centres sexual desire and fulfilment, sometimes even going so far as to have characters think that previous relationships which they thought were love must not have been actual love, because the sex wasn’t as good, and they weren’t experiencing this level of arousal. But that’s for another essay, I think.)

My third and final thought to this point is something to do with how rape and sexual assault was used in older romances, specifically in ways that both allowed writers to depict sexual content and allowed female characters to enjoy sex without the guilt associated with breaking social norms and rules6. I wonder if this trope is used at least in part for reasons that are similar. I see it sometimes used in conjunction with narratives that attempt to depict female empowerment through acceptance of their sexual desires—thus, quite explicitly, the issue of their arousal being somewhat public knowledge is but a turn of the wheel on her journey to expressing herself sexually without shame. In books where this is not being depicted, I am not really sure how relevant this point is, but I do think it does something for the romantic narrative in a way that alleviates some of the unknowing—that is, when the male can scent or sense her arousal, he is almost always receptive to that in some way, even in dynamics where the two characters involved don’t seem to like each other.

Further, romance feels like a comfort genre, in a way. It’s a genre that has some pretty strict rules about what can and should happen, such as including a happily for now or happily ever after ending. The promise of the premise of romance is that there will be a romantic pairing at the end, and I think this narrative device helps make that promise not only clear, but acts as like titillation and teasing of sexual content to come.

Arousal Non-concordance

Yes, this is the part where I talk about the fact that the arousal being depicted in this way is a bodily response and isn’t actually indicative of desire, for all that it is treated that way.

Arousal Non-concordance is when a woman experiences lubrication, the situations this happens in can be uncomfortable, but they are simply a physiological reaction, not an inherent indicator of sexual arousal or actually being “in the mood”.

“Arousal non-concordance is the well-established phenomenon of a lack of overlap between how much blood is flowing to a person’s genitals and how ‘turned on they feel’.”7 — Emily Nagoski (sex educator)

However… all of the books that I’ve read with this trope in it do not treat the arousal response this way, nor is this even considered as a possibility even when the female character is explicitly saying or thinking “no”. Arousal non-concordance is essentially a non-concept; The smell of the woman’s arousal is often an indicator that she does actually want the man—and even when she is thinking she doesn’t, which would indicate or be arousal disconcordance, the narrative treats it as genuine sexual arousal and also as a sign that them having sex is an inevitability that her mind just needs to catch up with. This is the whole “her mind or mouth said no, but her body said yes” thing.

It’s never really treated as something that is legitimately uncomfortable, at least not uncomfortable for much longer than the moment of discovery that the man can smell her arousal. Additionally, there is very little meaningful conflict within the female character about the mismatch between her body’s reaction and her mind’s reaction—and that’s to say nothing of the man, who is most often depicted as being readily desirous of fulfilling his sexual urges, but holding back, somewhat, out of lack of consent. (This is not always immediately clear; oftentimes we will learn, retrospectively, that the man did in fact want to act on his sexual desires from the beginning.)

For all that the woman can be pinned on the ground, holding a knife to his gut and telling him to get away from her, her body is reacting with arousal, and readers are not ever really asked to see that for the complex and uncomfortable thing it can be, because neither are the characters. It’s merely a small obstacle to be overcome; it’s a nuisance, and barely an inconvenience.

Rape Culture

I’m afraid we couldn’t talk about this topic without talking about rape culture. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, and I fear that rape culture is a pretty big ingredient that often lacks consideration in regards to this subject, both in discourse and in depiction.

So, rape culture is “a culture where sexual violence and abuse is normalised and played down. Where it is accepted, excused, laughed off or not challenged enough by society as a whole”.8 It is a culture that “turns sexual assault, rape and other forms of violence against women into entertainment or altogether ignores or trivialize these crimes”9.

In a society where rape culture is so prevalent, the blame for any sexual crimes and harm is usually placed on women, ie. the demographic that is statistically more likely to be victims. There are a lot of sentiments that I grew up hearing in real life and seeing online, such as but not limited to: “It’s not rape if you like it” / “she was asking for it” / “What was she wearing?” / “No woman can be raped against her will” / “She led him on”.

And in thinking about the issue of scenting or sensing women’s arousal to the degree it can be scented or sensed in fantasy romance, I had a big, confronting question:

In a world where people can scent your arousal, in what ways would that be used against you?

Today, victims of rape and sexual assault often expect to be disbelieved by the very people tasked with protecting us. Many victims have stated that they felt that police officers and people in general often display “a disbelieving or insensitive attitude” about the assault being reported or shared, and indeed online we can see a lot of public discourse around stories of sexual violence being met with extreme scepticism and victim-blaming.

In a world where you have a physiological response that is automatically taken—to some degree—as genuine desire and even eagerness for sexual activity, what power do you have in seeking justice for being touched or acted upon inappropriately?

In these books, the man or “male” is seen and framed as something of a good egg precisely because he doesn’t engage in penetrative sexual acts with the woman unless she verbally consents, however, I have two points to make here.

Firstly, that really doesn’t feel like something we should be holding up so highly; not assaulting someone is in fact the bare minimum.

Secondly, sometimes these men are still perpetrating forms of assault, the narrative just doesn’t treat these actions as such – when the male pins the woman to a wall, and there is friction going on because for some reason he has thrust his leg or his manhood against her coochie, that’s uncomfortable. When he bites her, licks her, or otherwise violates physical boundaries, that is still assault, and that is not a safe man to be around. Just because he doesn’t rape, doesn’t mean he’s innocent—but the narrative often treats his actions with less scrutiny, because even though “her mind was saying no, her body was saying yes”, and, remember, this is romance! (I say, sarcastically).

In my opinion, these exchanges or encounters demonstrate some problematic dynamics of consent: the woman’s physiological arousal response is often treated as though the woman has given unspoken, implied, and indicated permission for the male to view her body in a hyper-sexualised way and to make the assumption—often not exactly incorrect—that she really does desire him and is open to his advances in some capacity. He never really faces consequences or takes accountability for touching her inappropriately; in fact, these touches are often brought up in sequences wherein the female character is growing aroused or desirous again, just at the memory. In this vein, the violation of boundaries and inappropriate touch, to me, often feels like it is presented as a love -interest-perpetrated act that can be easily excused, presenting the act or acts as excusable if only they are committed by the “right” person.

Romance: A heavy-lifting label

I have a lot of thoughts about how much heavy lifting the label of “romance” does for some people. I think that because of the promise inherent to the genre, of a happy for now or happily ever after, of people falling into a romantic relationship, there is a level of dissonance in the depiction of some things. I think from what I’ve talked about that it’s clear problematic stuff is sometimes unquestioningly depicted in romance in ways where it just isn’t ever really acknowledged as being potentially bad, harmful, or traumatic.

When it’s the love interest scenting the arousal and acting on it, it’s kind of hot, it’s flirting, it’s not really a danger, it’s a precursor to eventual sex. When it is anyone else, it’s kind of uncomfortable and is used to make both the female character and the readers understand her vulnerability in that situation. What is the difference, really?

Even in situations that feel extremely questionable—and this is something I read in a romantasy in 2023—for example, waking up to someone you’ve never expressed desire to be with sexually with their hand between your legs, who then realises you’re awake and rolls on top of you to pin you under them without actual communication, the danger of being a woman in that situation—or anyone!—is rarely ever addressed. Any fear that one would reasonably feel is often not present, or if it is, it’s very fleeting because arousal supercedes it.

Readers, and the object of the male character’s desire, give the male character the benefit of the doubt that this will not turn into a traumatic situation—ignoring the fact that for many, the very fact of being that vulnerable without consent in a situation like that is pretty traumatising in and of itself. The arousal response often feels like something of an implicit “yes”, so we’re often working from a place of almost pre-supposed or assumed consent.

Especially in these fictional worlds where patriarchy and violence against women is an explicit part of the worldbuilding, often something directly confronted and called out in various ways—like the hashtag Gilrboss feminism of it all—it feels very odd to me, personally, that a narrative device like this is treated with such little import, weight, or complexity. It’s also odd to me that these men are given so much grace for acting the way they do in relation to this scenting or sensing of women’s arousal.

Anyway…

I think those were all of my thoughts on this harrowing topic. I am very curious to know what everyone else thinks and why you think it. Is it appealing to you – why or why not? Do ou have any critical thoughts about it? Have I missed a huge factor or perspective? I’m genuinely very interested in hearing more opinions on this.

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And now I’m going to go and try and wash my brain in the sink.