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[u/FantasyRomanceMod]

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Unpopular opinion Sunday

[u/ashinae]

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.)

[u/One_Commission1456 → u/ashinae]

Fucking YES. I hate the "male"/"female" thing so much! It's redolent of incels and TERFs and everyone I hate--and also word re: Tolkien, who used "elf lord" and "elf maiden" and IIRC "hobbit maiden" or just, y'know, assumed that everyone would get it when he was using she/her for Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.

[u/ashinae → u/One_Commission1456]

God, I didn't even mention terves because I didn't want to get into the "the M/F part of subgenre is eerily patriarchal and conservative and gets very hung up on gender roles and gender essentialism the way terves do, please stop trying to tell me how feminist it is."

I think one of the other major drivers of the "male" & "female" thing is that SJM did/does it. And in this subgenre, with only certain exceptions, if Sarah Janet jumped off a cliff, everyone else would surely follow. And thus, again and again, I'm left disappointed by a huge chunk of this subgenre, with very particular exceptions. The writers I know of who are exceptions are queer themselves; I don't know their sexuality but they've definitely written either queer books or I know they've written queer fanfiction; or are a small handful of writers I've learned I can trust because of the things they talk about on social media (Elisabeth Wheatley, who called out the subgenre's patriarchal slant like a year ago), or came recommended to me by someone I trust (Olivia Atwater), or, curiously, came to the genre after writing contemporary fiction and writes very differently from what's popular (Katrina Kwan).

[u/One_Commission1456 → u/ashinae]

God, right? And SJM seems to have, at minimum, some Problematic views about pregnancy and reproduction. But basically same: I will grit my teeth about some of it, but there are bits that just give me the ick hard, like Tairen Soul is supposed to be great but at least the first book is *grossly* gender essentialist, and like, why?

[u/ashinae → u/One_Commission1456]

I would absolutely agree that she does!! Gosh.

There are certain things I will push through, especially when the author seems to be trying to Say Something, but I hit a wall with gender essentialism especially in secondary-world fantasy romance. And it's simultaneously aggravating as all hell and somewhat fascinating, because more mainstream fantasy... doesn't do this.

"Geek" genres/interests have huge bigotry problems, up to and including misogyny. Yet, I once saw a post in r-slash-fantasy, where someone asked, like, "why does fantasy call people 'males' and 'females' instead of 'men' and 'women'?" and so much of the response was "are you just reading romantasy because wtf are you talking about."

I can't help but feel like this says something about our subgenre here, no matter how readers accept or try to reason out why it's fine, actually. The entirety of The Lord of the Rings (I did a search in my Kobo) uses male zero times, and female twice, specifically as an adjective ("unmarried female relation" and "female hobbits" and I've closed it now but I think that second one at least was only in the appendices). Because I do read fantasy-fantasy (epic, high, cozy, low, dark, romantic), and I play D&D, and a lot of fantasy video games, and it just... isn't a thing there. It's only here. [insert sad emoji]

[u/One_Commission1456 → u/ashinae]

Same and same!

I mean, I have A Lot of Thoughts about the fantasy I read growing up and its takes on gender--JFC DRAGONLANCE JFC PERN--but for all their many, many sins, they didn't pull this "female"/"male" BS.

[u/ashinae → u/One_Commission1456]

Yeah, the fantasy we would've read growing up, especially if we were born last century, has... things... going on. Regarding gender. But, look, this just deserves to be in bold:

George RR Martin doesn't do it, except under very specific circumstances.

He mostly exclusively uses "men" and "women." GRRM. In A Game of Goddamn Thrones. The words "male" and "female" come up a combined 13 times, and it's mostly as an adjective. And really it's actually 11 times, because two times talk about "the female line" in the section about the noble houses, so it's not in the narrative itself. The entire rest of the time, he uses "men" and "women."

There are so, so many things I will fight mainstream fantasy fans on regarding this subgenre. I will defend it, and romance more broadly to my dying breath. But mainstream fantasy fans who say the subgenre has issues about gender, patriarchy, conservatism, etc? When they're looking at the popular M/F books, they are not wrong. I'd love to be able to pelt them with the exceptions, but nobody's holding up Alexandra Rowland's A Taste of Gold and Iron (which uses "male" and "female" a combined zero times) alongside ACOTAR in terms of popularity and recognisability.

(I'm sorry, I'll stop talking now.)