I just read this really interesting post over at Dear Author. And it made me think – about men, women, sexuality, romance and double standards.

Female sexuality has, in a Western historical context, always been a problem. Traditionally, women may have been associated with home and hearth but that has in no way meant that they have been viewed as less ’sexual’ than men, or possessing less sexual drive. In fact, Western society has perpetually pictured women as a dichotomy – destined for purity, motherhood and virtue, while burdened with a sinister, bubbling undercurrent of dangerous sexuality.

Female sexuality has not been so much denied in the past as feared. Women need to hold on to modesty and virtue and not give in to their true, baser nature.  Doing that would turn them into monsters, entirely driven by their needs (as illustrated by a whole sleuth of Victorian novels, especially of the Goth variety). Being the virgin and not the whore has not been seen as coming naturally to women. It has rather been seen as her battling her low nature and achieving the higher purpose she was given in Creation (insert the Hallelujah Choir here). Meanwhile, uncontrolled, aggressive female sexuality has been condemned to the point where it was used as one of the trademarks of evil – see the notion of orgies at witch sabbaths. The fact that women thus needs to be protected from their own nature is really an underlying rationalization for the traditional Western way of dealing with female sexuality.

By comparison, male sexuality is considered pretty harmless – at least unless it contaminates ‘pure’ females. Male sexuality directed at already fallen women has not been a problem at all – oh, yes it’s not been encouraged always perhaps, but it has been tolerated. Men, it seems, can exercise their sexuality without endangering either themselves or anyone else.

So why is this? Well, in a world without paternity tests, whoever controls women’s fertility, controls the offspring and therefore, the future and survival of our society. Thus, women’s fertility is a key resource in our society’s survival. As such, it needs to belong to society rather than the individual woman. It needs to be controlled, and the only way to do that is to control women’s sexuality.

Therefore, unlike male sexuality, female sexuality is subversive. It’s a barely contained revolution. It’s Madame Guillotine waiting to happen, right there in our wombs. Men, well, as long as they stick with the women we know are lost to the cause already, they cannot do that much harm. But touch our society’s future, our pure women, and we *will* have your private parts slowly grilled over a smoldering fire. Trust me.

However, dirtying a pure woman isn’t the end of a man. He isn’t ruined, he’s merely harmed the common resource base. He’s a thief. He’s done something bad. The woman on the other hand, is another matter. She’s a whore. She is something bad. She’s ‘compromised’ as a resource and cannot play the part that was intended for her. Her only use will be to direct male sexuality towards her and away from the pure women – unless the man marries her of course. Then her use to society is restored and she’s somewhat redeemed.

Seen like that, yes, female sexuality becomes a currency that does not exist independently, for women themselves. It becomes an almost magic resource base. It’s always lurking, like a monster under the bed, threatening to rise up and potentially kill us all. Sort of like Tiamat, emerging from the primordial sea, threatening our whole world with the coming of the Flood. It is not to be tinkered with, certainly not by women for their own pleasure. Geez. It’d be like handing a five-year-old a loaded gun, right, because you know women aren’t really that much smarter. At least that has been the generally acknowledged truth for ages.

Funnily, in a way, historical romances are subversive in this regard. What a romance heroine often does is tell society that ‘no, my sexuality is not a resource to be used for the good of society. It’s mine to do with what I want’ by making her own choice. In that way, she is somewhat regaining control over her own sexuality. In the past, it has been expected that she proves she can handle the gun – she mustn’t go shooting all over the place, so to speak. Romantic marksmanship has been expected in heroines. But that is changing and I’m glad for it.

Generally, to me, it’s not about the need for more promiscuous heroines, or fewer virginal ones. Both belong, as do women with sexual traumas and women who are blithely just toddering along. What I think we need to do is to broaden the scope and to problemize female sexuality to a lesser degree than we might do in romance at the moment. Because unless the genre (not individual books but the genre as a whole) can address the female experience in terms that allow a wide scope of women to enjoy the books, we (as in writers and publishers and anyone else with a stake in the genre) are shooting ourselves in the foot. In my humble opinion.

For me, as a writer of historical romance, my characters must, unless they are to be complete anachronisms, to a certain point embrace the traditional ideas of female sexuality outlined above. On the other hand, unless they are to be complete assholes, they cannot embrace them fully. Because frankly, either a man or a woman who thinks women’s value is intrinsically connected to their sexual status is pretty offensive to me as a 21st century woman. I hate reading about them, and I’d hate writing about them.  Yeah, it’s a challenge, but one I’ll certainly enjoy.

So, I’ll just add “how do you handle female sexuality?” to my ‘list of things to evaluate about project’, just next to “never make villain effeminate or overweight because it’s an offensive trope.”