Miltantly Romantic

With this one, I figured I'd try and stretch my comfort zone a bit to do erotica, but stay in historical.  I also was willing to allow for the kink element because it's F/m.  I'm glad I took the chance, because my main issues with this are the same issues that I have with novellas at large, which is that the author doesn't really have time to flesh things out the way she needs to.  I know that writing with brevity is a skill, but it's not so much that Davidson doesn't have skill, it's that this story needs more time.  It just does.

This story starts sort of...mid-action in a way.  It's the second in a series, and Eliza, our female protag, married Dev, our male protag, in the previous book.  In their courtship, Dev, who's sexually submissive, liked that Eliza was aggressive instinctively.  However, Eliza was raised by a mother who runs a finishing academy and who is constantly emotionally abusing Eliza into believing she should be more deferential.

Let me get this out of the way: so much of this could have been solved by a basic conversation, in which Eliza said, "Does it bother you, my forwardness?" and Dev said, "Are you kidding, that's what I married you for," but then we wouldn't have a book.  Anyway, Dev is so disappointed in his suddenly-not-aggressive bride that he sends her off to one of his estates (he's been disowned but he's doing well in business as a club owner, because everyone knows BDSM clubs were not only super simple to zone but also highly lucrative in the Regency) where she has been for a while.

At the beginning of this book, Eliza is invited to the wedding of one of Dev's business partners, and she has no intention of going.  She's still in love with Dev, still hurt by his apparent rejection.  Now, look, I don't care about villains, okay?  I don't care if they're layered, I'm not going to be interested.  That said, villains who are just...bad people because they are bad people that have no redeeming values?  Always feel a little bizarre to me.  Because those people are really rare.  And usually psychopaths.  Eliza's mom is written as one of them.  And it's kind of hard to imagine how she's even built a business because she's such the stereotypical "only cares what society thinks, has no moral compass" that it's weird to think even society would trust her.  But whatever.  The point is, mom has stolen from her own school and now needs Eliza to get money from Dev so that her parents won't go to debtor's prison, and Eliza loves her dad who seems basically harmless, if also useless, so, yeah, she goes.

Dev is not thrilled to see her.  He still misses the woman he thinks he married and doesn't understand where she went, exactly.  However, in fairness to Eliza, Dev's not helping himself.  And yes, Dev has issues, he has been harmed and disowned by his father when his preferences were discovered.  But also: she's your wife.  Adults talk.  And this is where my novella problem comes in.  These two characters have a good push-pull chemistry, and as she slowly figures out what Dev wants, and whether she wants to give that to him, Eliza is able to seek out advice from the professional f-Dom in the club, able to discover her own D-voice.  In return, Dev pulls his head out of his bum and starts figuring out where Eliza's damage comes from and helping her to own herself in front of her mother, which allows for her to build confidence in herself.

The problem is, as I think is clear, is I feel like the set-up of this is pretty clumsy, and because of the length of the piece, the parts that are the strongest (outside of the sex, which is well-written, so, in terms of erotica, you're set), are rushed.  It's unfortunate, because histroms with female dominant-male submissive dynamics are exceedingly rare and while there were a number of things about the way they fumble their way toward it that bothered me as a practitioner, it worked for two people who would not have a lot of language to discuss what they were doing and might feel uncertain about discussing it.  Also, both characters had potential in terms of not just the relationship, but their own stories of growth.

I guess, at the end of the day, I'm left hoping Davidson will return to writing this dynamic, but give herself more space to let it breathe.

AKA, the entry where I talk about my feelings about BDSM in popular media.  Had to happen sooner or later.

(As a side note, today is Bookstore Romance Day, I've already been to an awesome panel with Scarlett Peckham  and Vanessa Riley, both of whom have upcoming reviews, and have two more panels to go to before this evening.  Which is basically to say, right now there's a boatload of online romance programming with a wide swath of very good authors that you should definitely check into if interested.)

Right.  First of all, this book is so far out of my lane it's kind of on another planet.  It's a post-apocalyptic erotica romance.  I'm iffy on post-apocalyptic stuff--I accept it in romance because of the HEA/HFN rule--and as I've mentioned before, sex in romance isn't really a thing for me, so I avoid erotica altogether.  And even if both of those things weren't true, I DEFINITELY avoid nearly anything with a whiff of BDSM, D/s, or kink in it.  However, this book has bootleggers in it, which I needed for a square on my Romance Bingo, and while you can't spread your arms in the historical romance genre without hitting smugglers, bootleggers are actually a bit of a challenge.  (I'm going for a blackout, because I am constitutionally incapable of anything else.)

Anyhoodle, there's good buzz on Rocha, and I do like futuristic stuff and I thought "challenge thy self, self."

Before I get into how I felt about the book, though, I'm going to talk about why I avoid BDSM like my life depends on it.

It's pretty much accepted that the advent of BDSM in popular culture was Fifty Shades.  The part of the scene that I care about, so the feminist, LGBTQIA+ inclusive part, tends to be torn in their feelings on this, wavering between "it's a terrible, pathologizing description" and "but it normalized BDSM."

My problem is that I disagree.  It didn't normalize BDSM.  It normalized what my part of the scene is constantly fighting against, which is the predatory and abusive persons (mostly men, but sometimes women, enbies or genderqueers) who use the scene as a cover for the fact that they are...what's that word?  Oh, right, abusive.

The BDSM scene, even if you filter out all of the guys who have managed to stumble on it and think it's a fast way to meet "easy" women (it's not), and the people who are genuinely trying to feel out if it's for them or not, is insanely cishetnormative.  There are far more cismale Doms and cisfemale subs who desire playing with each other than any other combination out there.  The reason pro-Dommes exist is because cishet males often have humiliation kinks or masochistic tendencies, and Dominant women are far less common than those men who which to bottom.  I use the term bottom specifically, because many cishet men who want to be humiliated or hurt do not want to SUBMIT.  That is something wholly different.  They are paying a professional to enact a scene that is to their exact needs.  When actual D/s plays out, while the sub might have the power to stop the scene, the Dominant's desires are actually what is controlling. 

Which is all to say: truly submissive men are exceedingly rare, Dominant women are in and of themselves rare and become more rare if you want edge-play, such as intense degradation, or serious pain.  And finding wlw play without men involved is like seeking out a Pegasus.

Now, we can sit here and talk about how this has to do with patriarchal, hegemonic societies, rape culture, et al., until the end of time.  It doesn't matter because for the moment, at this point in time, this is what the non-cismale gay BDSM community looks like.  (The cismale gay BDSM community operates almost entirely separately from every other element of the BDSM community and rarely chooses to interact.)

This means that, if there is a "norm" within the scene--and I argue that seeing it that way is a faulty rubric--it is cismale Dom/cisfemale sub.  Furthermore, for the purposes of respectability, it is that group of D/s players who like what are seen as the non-edge kinks, so, for example, rope, spanking, certain low levels of impact, mildly rough sex.

As with any group of outsiders, it's always easy to take a group that appears just-slightly-off-of-center, and argue that "hey, this is what defines this community, all those other people, they're freaks."

Which is how we get a) almost all representations of BDSM in the media, b) SSC culture, and c) a complete lack of knowledge that actually, kink and sex, power exchange and sex, are wholly, entirely separate things, and never have to touch each other.

Focusing on point B for a hot second, SSC, or "safe, sane, and consensual" has become the by-word for "why BDSM is okay."  I don't know a single practitioner who uses or believes in SSC.  It's naive, and anyone who plays thinking that what s/he/they are doing is safe is kidding him/her/themselves.  Example: people often start with rope, because they figure, seems simple enough.  Rope is insanely complicated, and there are a million things that can go wrong with it.  Well, okay, what about power exchange or name-calling?  Sure, I guess that's safe until you accidentally trigger someone with something they forgot to tell you about or just plain didn't know until it happened.  BDSM is like sky-diving.  You take precautions, but at no point is doing it safe or particularly sane, for that matter.  Any practitioner worth their salt is going to have a RACK/PRICK approach (risk-aware-consensual kink/personally responsible informed consensual kink).  Which means that anyone who knows anything is going to recognize that BDSM is inherently dangerous, which is why enthusiastic and informed consent is so central.

You're probably asking who this hurts.  It hurts everyone who falls outside this tiny little box of BDSM and doesn't have a support network to let them know they're not bad or wrong or inherently flawed.  We never see things that don't look like pleasure, such as subs who have suffering fetishes, that is, their enjoyment comes FROM suffering.  So many of those subs, often women, end up in abusive relationships, because they think they deserve it, after all, they want to be made miserable, right?  We never see scenes where barriers are genuinely pushed but in wholly consensual ways, which means that Dominant persons who get off on that tension spend a lot of time just thinking they're psychotic.  How about the ace person who wants rough body play or intense rope, but doesn't want to be touched or approached in a sexual manner at all?  If I listed all the people who implicitly get told their desires are wrong by the way media has decided to frame "proper" BDSM, I would literally be here for the next two years.   

Given this, like I said, I avoid it.

Now, to give credit where it's due, Rocha's a solid writer, her world-building is fun if not extensive.  It leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but also, it's something like a nine book series, so I'm willing to believe that's intentional in the first book.  Several of the characters are interesting, and the heroine in this book is engaging, if not super unusual or memorable.  There's a found-family vibe that I'm all over, and tattoo fetishizing that I am here for.

The main male lead finds her consent important, and even better, he finds her informed consent important.  Aside from the fact that Rocha really takes absolutely no risks in terms of set up, that is, her cismale is Dominant, her cisfemale is submissive, the two of them basically want to play with some clamps and impact and have kinda-rough sex, there's nothing innately wrong with anything here.  It's boring to me, but that's not really a crime, it just means it's not to my taste.

What bothers me is Rocha's weird handling of the female protag's humiliation kink.  Rocha sets it up as a genuine sexual need--which, okay, that would be interesting.  I can't think of a place in mainstream media where humiliation is treated with the complexity it deserves.  Mostly, it's just ignored.  What Rocha does bothers me more: she suggests that it's not a kink but something the protag, Noelle, has been socialized into.  Now, that might be true.  But she doesn't do the work of teasing out how they are different, how they might intersect, if, in the end, it really matters, so long as it's not harming Noelle.

The other thing that bothered me with this book was the suggestion that poly and kink are entirely intertwined, or, at the very least, open relationships and kink.  Don't get me wrong, there are a number of poly people in the kink community.  And of those people, I am willing to be every one of them would define poly as something different, from "I have two full-time partners, and we are in a closed relationship," to "my primary and I sleep with other people, but don't form emotional connections with them" to everything in between.  The poly element of the book does not, in and of itself bother me.  It's the completely unexplored element of the fact that these are two separate pieces of a person's sexual orientation.

Basically, for people who are into mainstream kink, I actually would recommend this book, possibly series.  There's some political intrigue, the setting is fun, the characters are enjoyable, and there's nothing that even borders on lacking consent, and all those things are great.  If, like me, you're someone who's seeking something in a different category of kink, unless you're super into futuristic bootlegging biker gangs, or orgies, I'd skip this one.