The author says that she’s recently been pondering the possibility that she’s setting her female readers up for disappointment, given the proliferation of lackluster and unwelcome sexual encounters. “The sex in my books has always been different from the sex in my personal experience, but it didn’t always bother me as much as it does now. By writing about sex that’s hot and fun and always welcome, am I setting my readers up to have expectations that the men they date can’t or won’t meet?”
Christopher goes on to describe a situation in which she had sex with a date purely to get him to leave her apartment. While such an encounter is a far cry from sexual assault, this sort of dalliance still feels like a power imbalance and a disregard for female pleasure — one which has recently been explored in Babe.net’s Aziz Ansari article and The New Yorker’s “Cat Person” story.
“I’m not saying the sex wasn’t consensual, and I’m not saying that I couldn’t have said no. However, in that moment, it was much easier to just give him what he wanted—a hole to stick his dick into—than to tell him to get the fuck out of my apartment,” she writes.
Christopher says that the commonplace nature of these icky, reticent sexual encounters are what make romance novels a necessity for many women — because the reality of sex with men is so frequently disappointing and unsatisfying, and their sexual agency is so often undercut. The author says that, in this age of reawakening, it’s important to remind women that they deserve to give enthusiastic consent, and they deserve to have their sexual desires prioritized.
“I’m not letting women down with too-high expectations. I’m showing what I wish we, myself included, had been demanding all along.”