Fighting Toxic Masculinity, One Spicy Romance Novel at a Time
When toxic masculinity is at an all time high, we need examples of what healthy masculinity looks like and the best place to find it is in the pages of sexy romance novels
Quick note before we start: I am writing about sex today and specifically, open door romance — explicit sex scenes written on the pages of novels about relationships. I am writing specifically about hetero sex because I think that’s where more of the conflict lives, especially when we’re talking about gendered beliefs around sex, pleasure, and masculinity. Please know that it is not my intention to leave anyone who doesn’t identify as female out of this conversation.
Also, I recognize that many people of all genders have had unpleasant, painful, or even violent sexual experiences — myself included. Reclaiming a healthy, positive experience of sex is not easy or perhaps possible for everyone who has experienced sexual assault. While this is not the focus of what I am writing today, please know that I think it is an essential part of the conversation when it comes to discussions about sex.
Lastly, if you think open, honest conversations about sex are important, please consider supporting my work. If you’re not subscribed, please do. If you're able to upgrade to a paid subscription, thank you for helping me pay the bills and save for my kids future. If you can’t afford to do that, but still want to help me out, like this article and share it widely. Sharing my work makes a huge difference in terms of visibility.
A few days ago, I was driving with my oldest kid in the car and I ended up explaining what a clitoris is to her. I thought she knew what a clitoris is and where it is, largely because when all of my kids were little, I made sure to teach them all of the parts of their own anatomy with accurate names.
No pee-pees or coochies or other weird nicknames for their genitalia. My son learned that he has a penis and testicles. My daughters learned that their vulva is on the outside and the vagina is on the inside. I taught them about their labia and their clitoris, too.
My youngest even turned those names into a little jingle and would often burst into song in the grocery store about her vulva, vagina, labia, and clitoris. I was delighted every time, mostly because of the evident discomfort of the other shoppers at the store..
But back to the present, my oldest couldn’t tell me where her clitoris is or what it’s purpose is, so I explained in super simple terms:
The clitoris is a very small nub located in the vulva, up near the front and it’s full of thousands of nerve endings. So when you touch it, usually it feels really good. The whole point of the clitoris is to feel pleasure.
I didn’t give any info beyond that and she didn’t ask, so I left it there.
My daughter will be 13 in less than a week and this is not the first conversation we’ve had about sex.
It’s not even the first time that I’ve mentioned that sex or that the parts of our body we use when we’re having sex are for pleasure, not just making babies.
I think learning about pleasure is super important. It’s not typically something taught in sex-ed classes – at least not in any of the ones I took as a kid – and it’s not something we talk about broadly or publicly. We’re still pretty weird about sex, culturally in America and especially right now in a time of tradwives and toxic masculinity.
The first time I learned about pleasure, I was a little younger than my daughter, but it didn’t come from my mom or a friend. I read about pleasure in a book. My 6th grade teacher, Mrs. Labelle, had a very eclectic lending library in her classroom which was deeply appreciated and very well used.
I stumbled upon this book the weekend that the entire 6th grade was doing outdoor ed. I needed reading material for the bus ride, so I grabbed a random book from the shelf.
I didn’t know it was a sexy book until I started reading a scene in which a bodice was actually ripped, rather than unlaced. When I found other scenes like that in the book, I dog-eared each scene and shared them with the other kids on the bus.
I was very popular on that particular field trip.
I don’t remember much about the sex scenes from that book, other than the ripped bodice and that at least one scene took place in horse stables. Beyond that, I don’t recall details of what kind of sex the 2 leads had or if it even followed the rules of modern romance novels – the woman always comes first and her pleasure is prioritized.
I do remember that everyone had a good time – I mean both the characters in the book and all of the 6th graders reading about their sexual escapades during the French Revolution.
I hadn’t even had my first kiss yet and I read a story suggesting that sex wasn’t just for making babies but for pleasure and connection. There was something about reading a sex scene, even before I fully understood what any of it meant or had any experience with it, that was powerful – largely because the idea of pleasure was centered.
There are a lot of reasons why open door romance is so important, but I think this is the biggest one.
Open door romance shows what sex can feel like when men center women’s pleasure, prioritize consent, and actually know how to get a woman to orgasm, often multiple times.
While there are those who will correctly say that some open door romance is unrealistic and places too much importance on BDE (big dick energy), in my experience, those are simply poorly written sex scenes and not representative of the high quality that truly exists in many romance novels written in the past 10-20 years.
And yet, according to Sarah MacLean and Jen Prokop, hosts of the excellent Fated Mates podcast, these types of books featuring sex written explicitly on the page, are a little harder to find these days. In a recent episode, they suggested that romance is trending more toward “closed door” romance, especially when it comes to conventionally published novels.
“We think about romance and genre in general as holding up a mirror,” MacLean explains. Lately, she says, “there’s a significant lack of the golden rule of sex and romance, which was always that she (the female main character) comes first. She comes first and she comes twice for every time he comes once. That rule seems to be out the window in a lot of books now.”
She adds that there’s less oral sex for women, while oral sex for men is more frequent than it used to be. “We’re seeing more focus on blowjobs than we are on cunilingus. We’re seeing that there are trends that are very clear in (contemporary) romance.”
MacLean and Prokop suggest that this shift from open door to closed door romance is related to what’s happening in the world around us.
I agree with them.
We have never really been a country or a culture that celebrates pleasure or talks openly about sex. And men have always gotten away with treating women as sexual conquests rather than human beings who deserve to not only experience pleasure during sex but the choice of who to have sex with.
But in the past 10 years, we’ve seen a distinct shift – not so much in how women are treated but how men can easily ascend to power, even when it’s become clear that they are sexual predators.
Instead of punishing men who sexually assault women, we elect them to the highest offices in government.
Instead of listening to women, men’s voices and preferences are centered. These men don’t respect women’s bodies or care about their pleasure. They are men who brag about assaulting women, who boast about getting their wives pregnant, and quite honestly prefer that women stay home, raise kids, and keep their mouths shut.
This is Trump bragging about grabbing women by the pussy.
It’s Andrew Tate suggesting that women are the property of their boyfriends or husbands and that “Women are sex workers. Their primary job now is to find one customer, called a boyfriend, to pay for their entire lives in return for pussy.”
This is Pete Hegseth, serial cheater and abuser, bringing his favorite pastor, Doug Wilson, to the Pentagon to lead a prayer service. 1
This is Kash Patel partying with the US men’s hockey team after they won gold, but fully ignoring the same accomplishment by the women’s team. It’s Trump, calling the men’s team and making a disparaging comment about the women’s team. It’s every man in that locker room laughing at Trump’s joke, unapologetically.
Ilya Rozonov would never.
It’s JD Vance, boasting to the crowd at the March for Life rally in January, not that he makes his wife happy or gives her pleasure, but that he knocked her up.
Now listen, I get what you’re thinking: it would be a little creepy and weird and maybe a massive overshare if he’d actually said, “I find my 40 year old wife and the mother of my children super hot, especially with her silver-streaked hair. She’s way smarter than me and that turns me on. Simply sharing a life with her is a gift I can honestly never repay. But I try really hard to repay the gift of her amazingness by giving her spectacular orgasms as often as she’ll let me. Oh and how cool that one of those sexy-times got her pregnant again, am I right?”
On the other hand, bragging about your super sperm to a crowd full of people who don’t believe women should have bodily autonomy, has serious “grabbed them by the pussy”, locker-room vibes. It’s bravado, not respect.
So what does all of this have to do with open door romance and why we need more visible sex scenes in romance novels?
Because the heroes of these books are not modeled after the JD Vances of the world. And the relationships don’t conform to the gendered family structure preferred by the people who wrote Project 2025.
JD Vance, Andrew Tate, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr, and Trump all tout their impressive masculinity and adherence to “traditional gender roles”, but none of them would make a good romance novel hero.
Interestingly, many of the male main characters (MMC’s) in open door romance are of the highly stereotypical masculine variety. They are big guys with broad shoulders. They have muscles on top of muscles. They have chiseled jawlines and abs that look as though they were sculpted by an artist. They have thighs like tree trunks and can easily lift their woman off of the ground. They nearly always have an impressively sized penis.
We can talk another time about how these physical characteristics can be just as problematic as the beauty standards for women, but noting these is relevant for this conversation because it is directly related to what is expected of men in and by this administration.
Setting aside these physical characteristics, these MMC’s do some stereotypically masculine stuff. Sometimes they ride motorcycles. Often, they enjoy sportsball of all kinds – some of them are former football players. Or hockey players. Depending on their age, some are still playing professional sports. Regardless of their age, they usually workout. A lot.
They never shy away from a fight and are happy to throw several punches, either to defend someone’s honor or to protect them from bad men. They own guns. They drink beer. Or very expensive whiskey.
And yet, these men also buck what traditional gendered behavior looks like. Romance men are confident and dominant without being rude or offensive. They are protective and possessive without being creepy or restrictive.
They might be shit at sharing their feelings but they try. They might talk tough but they are also tender with the woman they love.
Importantly, they deeply respect her rather than require her to follow his headship (sounds a lot hornier than it really is, FYI).2
And when it comes to sex, they ask their partner what they want. What they like. What feels good. Their entire goal is PLEASURE for their partner.
So it’s important to see these mind-blowing, life-altering, sexual experiences on page because it shows a version of masculinity that doesn’t dehumanize women and instead celebrates them.
Are some of these scenes wildly aspirational? Sure. But that’s also part of the fun.
What’s great about seeing sex on the page is that it normalizes something that is actually very normal but that we don’t often get to see outside of our own life experience. And our own experiences might be limited.
Plus, these scenes, as bonkers as some of them might be, can also help destigmatize certain sexual preferences or behaviors – not just kinks, but basic things like dirty talk, moaning, touching certain places, sexual positions, asking for what you want, using lube, using condoms, using sex toys. And also, aftercare – which, if you’re unaware, refers to how your partner cares for you after sex.
You’re also likely to see that women need more stimulation than just penis penetration. You’ll read about superbly gifted fingers and magical tongues and I’m not just talking about romantasy. You’ll read about men loving the taste of their female partners, loving their smell – a far cry from what I heard as a teenager and young adult.
And yes, not all open door romance is like this. There are plenty of poorly written sex scenes that involve missionary position sex and a lot of thrusting and both characters orgasming at exactly the same time and all I can think is, “wow, she must have a magical vagina because that doesn’t happen in real life.”
When open door romance is done well, what you see written on the page is that consent is required, HER pleasure is prioritized, and that men really enjoy making their partners feel good.
While this has never been a popular mainstream perspective, it’s especially threatening to the fragile male egos of the men currently in power.
As romance author Kennedy Ryan said in a 2024 podcast interview, so much of the mockery leveled at romance has its roots in the forces currently guiding the power structure of this country. “Most of the people writing (romance) are women. It’s from our perspective, through our lens. Anything that centers women’s pleasure, women’s agency – patriarchy and misogyny are going to find a way to deride it.”
She adds, “patriarchy and misogyny are not just living inside of men. It’s insidious and because it’s part of our culture, it makes its way inside all of us. And we have to systematically root it out.”
It’s not difficult to guess that Ryan believes that romance novels and centering women’s pleasure is one of the ways we root it out, both in ourselves and in others.
Men like Vance and Daniel Neeleman3 see the demonstration of their masculinity, not as the pleasure they give their wives but the pregnancies they are responsible for. Their version of masculinity does not involve worshipping women’s bodies during sex. They want power over women rather than pleasure for women. Their version of masculinity is not about a partnership built on mutual respect and instead all about their individual successes, as man and head of the household.
Open door romance upends ALL OF THIS.
That’s why rather than dismissing these types of novels as unimportant and smut feels like it’s dismissing the value of female-centered stories, as well as shaming people who read them.
If we keep thinking of sex as “dirty” or base, rather than an expression of care and intimacy in relationship, we’ll continue to view sex as shameful, especially for women.
There is power in pleasure. Open door romance shows us that, especially when it’s done well. And in most open door romance, women have equal power with their partner when it comes to sex.
It can feel more comfortable to close the door on sex.
Because of our own personal experiences with sex combined with the cultural stigma of sex as degrading, seeing sex on the page can feel awkward and embarrassing. Or it can be a reminder of how our own sex lives are nothing like what we’re reading.
Or it can be a jumping off point for conversations with your partner, if you’re partnered, and perhaps some exploration and discovery. Maybe even some pleasure in new, unexpected ways.
Sex is intimate and personal and messy and vulnerable.
Sex can also be super hot, sometimes playful, sometimes intense, wildly satisfying, and deeply pleasurable.
That’s the kind of sex I want everyone to have.
That’s the kind of sex I want other women to know is possible.
That’s the kind of sex I want my daughter to “accidentally discover” in book that she borrows, if not from her own classroom library then from the library she has access to at home.
*****
To help you find some truly wonderful open door romance, here’s a list of some of my favorites. If you have favorites that are not on this list, add them in the comments!
Can’t Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan
Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch by Sarah Hawley
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams
Tastes Like Shakkar by Nisha Sharma
You, Again by Kate Goldbeck
Drunk on Love by Jasmine Guillory
Into the Woods by Jenny Holiday
Losing Sight by Tati Richardson
Light it Up by Evie Blum
The Fastest Way to Fall and How to Fail at Flirting both by Denise Williams
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
The Knockemout Series by Lucy Score (linked the first book in the series)
The Christmas Notch Series by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone (linked the first book in the series)
(note: all of the links you see in the book review section are affiliate links at Bookshop.org and if you’re thinking about buying any of these, please consider using my links instead of using amazon. For one, I get a tiny commission when you use my links. But also important, bookshop.org directly supports small bookstores, which is of great value to me.)
