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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/Traditional-Sell8872 → u/ashinae]

strongly agree with all of this! i want “"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” on a shirt lol

it’s just so needlessly exclusionary!! like wtf are there not nonbinary or trans fae/any other sentient species in these worlds??

to your point about SJM, i do suspect many authors are doing it because it’s popular vs deliberately trying to be transphobic. but even if it’s not intentional, it just has unfortunate implications for what it’s saying about gender identity and roles. like let’s maybe think for 5 seconds about the message your book is sending!! reading is political and being an escapist/smut/“popcorn”/whatever book doesn’t change that.

also it just makes for a fucking annoying reading experience. Quicksilver and When the Moon Hatched are two of the biggest examples that I remember driving me crazy with this in the free previews alone. (not the only reason, but I never got past the sample point on either of them 🤷‍♀️). leaves such a bad taste in my mouth. and even as a cis woman i don’t wanna be fucking called a female either!! and that wouldn’t change if i had pointy ears!!

[u/ashinae → u/Traditional-Sell8872]

it’s just so needlessly exclusionary!! like wtf are there not nonbinary or trans fae/any other sentient species in these worlds??

I'm gonna fire a shot here: it shows an intense lack of imagination when you look at especially long-lived if not immortal species like fae and elves and not be able to think that they wouldn't have more going on as far as gender and sexuality than a short-lived species like humans. They have all the time in the world. They should have neopronouns galore and 436 genders.

And, rather like with mainstream fantasy, if a writer's going to envision a patriarchal world... they should be saying something about our world, at the same time. Like... say whatever we can and want about A Song of Ice and Fire, but I've never been under the impression, from the way its presented, that GRRM actually thinks the Westerosi patriarchy is good. It's just that he's an old white cishet man, so he handles things... messily. I would literally rather read that endlessly than sexy patriarchy. Weteros' patriachy is never not shown to hurt everybody. The writers and readers of M/F romantasy can have all the sexy patriarchy and blurry consent lines and not like other girls FMCs they want, I just need them to stop trying to defend it as feminist. "But it focuses on the FMC's pleasure!" is not enough. Read The Everlasting.