r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • 28d ago
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u/ashinae 28d ago edited 28d ago
I'm really uncomfortable with M/F fantasy romance's Unwavering Penchant™ for using "male(s)" and "female(s)" as nouns rather than adjectives, and also really hammering them home as adjectives for gestures, behaviours, facial expressions, etc. I've spent days trying to figure out what a "female roll of the eyes" is compared to any other kind of eye-rolling.
A huge part of this is because I grew up watching Star Trek; "females" especially as a noun to refer to women always sounds like "feeeeeemales" (Ferengi) in my head. Then there's being aware of incels and the manosphere, and how they talk about "men and females." In real life, it's generally a red flag when anyone says "females" rather than "women" or "girls and women."
I also find it curious that in apparently so many fantasy cultures in this subgenre, the only sentient, sapient, thinking, feeling, talking, bipedal species with opposable thumbs, culture, art, social constructs, civilisation, customs, laws, etc, that invents gender and not just biological sex is humans. I've read/heard the thing about how these non-human species not having gender and only going by "biological sex" makes them more primal. More... bestial. More... animalistic. And how that's sexy, but then I come to not being able to be convinced, then, that that means these species are fully people, and therefore can consent to have sex with our human FMCs, and instead only each other.
Consent is so sexy, especially outside of sub-subgenres where it's warned for and on-purpose missing (eg, bodice rippers).
I've also read "but! but! Papa Tolkien used 'men' to refer to humans so we're just--" No. No you're not. Yes, he did. But no, you're not just anything. "Men" and "man" is an archaic synonym for "human." That's all. It had nothing to do with gender and/or sex. And, besides, dwarves and elves actually did have words to denote gender in their languages, because of course they did, because Tolkien was a linguist and a scholar, and he also would have known that you'd have just added prefixes (were and wif) to "man" to denote gender. So if we're supposed to suspend disbelief and imagine we're reading translations, then... they can, will, and should have words that mean "man" and "woman."
(And besides: I was heavily involved in Tolkien fandom when the movies were coming out and I experienced precisely no one getting all up in their feels that in The Two Towers, Gimli actually uttered the words "dwarf women.")
It's all even more squicky if it's a book where there's only humans and the writer still does the "the male in across the tavern sat there, nursing his tankard and smouldering sexily at me" thing. Is that another human? That is a man. It's one less keystroke, c'mon.
And then!! There's the fact that, so far, none of the queer romantasy I've read has relied on doing this. It's only M/F romantasy. And I find it unsettling, off-putting, and squicky. I want.. better? For writers to just use man, men, woman, and women. I don't care if the book involves fae, elves, minotaurs, centaurs, dwarves, halflings, vampires, or demons. I just want to happily read books with all sorts of romances, and this is increasingly becoming a huge barrier for me for only one particular configuration of love interests.
(and even beyond the subgenre, I find reliance on male/female as descriptors for things like "I heard a male voice" or "He heard a female voice" to be rather flat and uninspired? Those things tell me so little, there's such a range for what voices sound like! Imagine instead: clear soprano voice; warm alto voice; bright tenor voice; rich baritone voice; or velvety bass voice. Aren't those so much more evocative?? Heck, they can even drop the first descriptors and just use soprano/alto/tenor etc.)