I've Got No Use For Innocence

[redbrunja]

(It was hard picking which ~provocative~ icon to use for this post, let me tell you.)

The combination of a conversation I was having with fairest1 and reading the first Psy-Changling book (Slave to Sensation, which I’d heard raves about and is not living up to the hype) reminded me that a lot of fandom and the larger cultural context (especially with romance novels) seems to think it’s just so. damn. sexy. to have a virgin heroine. And I am just 100% not on board with this trope. Just… no. It’s almost 2014, can we please, please, please stop with this.

I’m not even going to go into how virginity is a bullshit patriarchal and heteronormative construction (but it totally is, and the more you learn about how and why it was constructed and the very real consequences of that, the more horrifying it is), I am going to stick with the fact that I JUST DON’T FIND VIRGINITY SEXY.

I come to fandom and romance novels for entertaining, titillating fiction, and do you know what I find sexy? People who know what the fuck to do in bed. People who have previous sexual experiences (good and bad) that inform how they interact and what they feel about their current partner.

I am so not down with the whole virgin protag that I don’t even like the male subversion where he’s the virgin and she’s more experienced (those two Steve/Darcy fics, excluded, you know the ones what I’m talking about).

Comments

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

The authors want to have it both ways - get their virginity fetish on and then once that element's dispensed with, these chicks are raring to go and blindsiding the hero with their seductive techniques and even a little kinky and...not that I'm against this at all, obv, but it's so disingenuous to have the heroine go from zero to a hundred in a heartbeat.

Agreed with this so damn hard.

Like, god forbid her lips have touched another man's prior to Lord One-and-Only, Earl of True Love, entering her life, but once they've connected, then BAM, she instantly has all these years of entirely natural sexual needs that she's only now allowed to explore and the experience that would normally occur through previous romantic encounters

Errrr, I hate this. It's so frustrating how dudes have TONS of sexual experience but freaking just forget it if you're a girl. No past relationships for you!