What's the most taboo subject in taboo books?
“No OW, please!” or a variation of this comment is probably the most popular request under Facebook posts alerting the readers of new books in the OBSESSIVE, POSSESSIVE STALKERS, AND OVER THE TOP JEALOUS group. As you imagine the books are not your average sexy romances; they deal with subjects that most people would find very taboo, and all of them come with lists of trigger warnings. Before I get to what “OW” means, I’m going to tell you about these books. I became interested in them after coming across an article in the New York Times, titled A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question, and read a few. I know that self-published romance/ erotica has a bad rep and I should never admit to enjoying it—being a literary-fiction writer and supposedly a connoisseur of good literature—”supposedly” because that’s what you’d expect of someone who produces literary fiction—but I do enjoy them. I don’t like to apologize for my low-brow tastes and for reading smut. I love smut. Good, bad, barely literary, I like it because it turns me on. And it’s a fantasy. And sometimes we need to escape situations that are nothing like a fantasy.
I’ve read a few of those books, especially during the pandemic when, like everyone else, I threw myself into a new hobby, mine being immersing myself in the world of sexy fanfiction, Omegaverse, mafia romance and even high-school bully romances (yup). Every story is an enemies-to-lovers, and it usually goes like this: boy is mean, girl hates boy (but everyone is always hot so they’re still attracted to each other), boy makes girl come, girl hates-likes boy, girl runs away, girl likes boy, happy ever after. Eventually the repetitiveness got to me but I am a happy owner of at least a dozen of those reads. There is a lot of dubcon and in some allegedly even noncon. Dubcon stands for dubious consent (when the submissive is forced to experience an orgasm) and noncon is non-consent, which is the sort of stuff that gets some of those books banned from Kodo or Kindle.
If you think that’s bonkers, there’s more and it gets even worse. Forced pregnancy, kidnapping, full-on stalking, and so on. But the readers of those books are crazy about them, posting in their groups constantly, constantly asking for recommendations and listing what they’d like to read: **** and forced ******* and *** and ******* and even ****. Most posts say something along the lines of “I’ve no triggers!” The scenarios in those books are not the sort of thing you’d want to play out in real life (probably not even during roleplay). The point is, this is some gnarly, insanely controversial stuff. But the one thing—the one absolute NO and truly, the only truly taboo subject in those books—that, for example, think nothing about having a hero instal spy cams on the object of his affection—is… cheating. “OW” stands for Other Woman. If there’s even a trace of the main male character straying, the readers who tolerate pretty much anything else: Don’t. Want. It.
I’ve been thinking about infidelity lately. I recently wrote a new novel and needed a murder motivation for my female character. What’s the one thing that it is insidious but seemingly forgivable and common but also very, very painful, something that could destabilize someone so badly she would want to exact revenge? Cheating, of course. People think that cheating is mostly about sex or intimacy and that it’s a betrayal of commitment in a monogamous relationship (I’m not going near “ethically” non-monogamous folks here), but cheating is about a lot more. I think cheating is about shame. Or more accurately humiliation. I was trying to remember how I felt about the women I knew had been cheated on—an aunt, a friend, another friend, a celebrity—and I realized that one of the feelings I had was pity. And also, terribly, there was a question that said: “What’s wrong with them?” My first instinct was not to think about the guy/ girl who cheated. My instinct was to look at the victim of cheating first and wonder about her shortcomings.
These days I’m 180 about this and always wonder what the hell is wrong with the cheater, but that’s only because I’m older and maybe because it happened to me and I was the woman everyone thought something was wrong with—clearly, because I couldn’t keep her man around. Or something like that, Boomer. And when it happened to me, I learned it had little to do with sex or intimacy but everything to do with shame. It wasn’t about fucking; it was about lying and break of trust—but not just between me and the cheater. Between me and the world. I went around for years not knowing—or worse suspecting and feeling like I was going mental, paranoid—and then once I knew, I went around for years discovering and feeling more and more disconnected from the world in general. To me, cheating (I am talking about a chronic, on-going situation) was so damaging that like those kooky readers of dubcon, I’d much rather focus my fantasies on something completely inappropriate, rather than a mundane, violent and common crime of being fucked around on.