Romance and disappointing men: When hetero relationships fail to hit the spot, women turn to feverish fiction

One month after the finale of Heated Rivalry, Rebecca* had already watched the whole series all the way through three times.

Like many heterosexual women who ravenously devoured the Canadian series about two gay hockey players, Rebecca was obsessed. More than that, she had a serious crush. She felt stirred, she felt flushed, and she wanted to spend all her spare time watching, thinking and reading about Heated Rivalry.

It’s not that she had a crush on one of the characters, it’s that she had a crush on how the show made her feel.

It was the romance – and the sex, obviously – of these two men, relative equals in their power dynamic, tender in their behaviour, sensitive in their thoughts, libidinous in the bedroom, that were so far removed from her personal experience of men and dating.

That feeling it evoked – optimism, enchantment and carnal desire — prompted her to reactivate her profile on the dating apps. She lasted all of three days, turned off by the blatant requests for hook-ups without even the pretence of courtship and foreplay.

As a genre, romance never completely went away, but it does seem to be roaring back with a fierce and declarative vengeance. It’s everywhere.

It’s in the swoons in any movie session of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, as scores of women squeal at even the sight of Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff, usually wet from rain.

It’s in the watch parties that sprung up around The Summer I Turned Pretty, as young female audiences debated which Fisher brother Belly should pick.

It’s in the rainbow-coloured book covers of Emily Henry’s novels, each a bestseller for their semi-relatable stories about love and meet-cutes. It’s in the sub-genre of “fairy smut” that BookTok made mainstream.

It’s in the internet vertical micro-dramas that promise soap opera romance in 90-second bites. It’s in all those sexually charged encounters in Bridgerton. And it’s very much in those hot, stolen moments in Heated Rivalry.

Women – coupled, single or anything in between – could vicariously yearn, crush and love through pop culture, and many are perfectly happy for that to be their fix, along with a great vibrator, instead of contending with the unsatisfying state of heterosexual romance.

Is it a coincidence that this resurgence in fictional love is happening in parallel with a moment when terms such as heteropessimism, heterofatalism and mankeeping gain traction among women exhausted by men?

Men who are emotionally unavailable or emotionally illiterate, men who are commitment-phobic, and men who don’t pull their weight in domestic or social labour (yeah, yeah, #notallmen but #toomanymen).

NO SHAME

Dr Lauren Rosewarne, an associate professor in the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences who has written extensively on the intersection of pop culture and sex, pointed out that steamy romances are a new phenomenon. What has changed is that there is less shame about being into them.

“Historically, things that girls and women like have been culturally devalued, and that’s still happening but there is a recognition that this stuff pushes the economy and with that sort of realisation that there’s so much money in these sectors, people feel comfortable to own their interest in this guilty pleasure.

“It’s still disproportionately women who are talking about it, and women who are content creators making stuff that’s de-shaming it.”

Even though economic power brings “respectability”, it’s still unlikely that romances, whether on screen or on the page, will earn the same prestigious accolades as other genres.

That’s even the case when it’s a combination of two genres that have been niche-d in the past – fantasy and romance. Books such as those in the Fourth Wing and A Court of Thorns and Roses series, by Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J. Maas, have sold tens of millions of copies thanks in significant part to the emergence of BookTok.

Often described as “romantasy” or “fairy smut”, those stories have provoked readers into wild fantasies, which are then shared on social media, within book clubs or on Good Reads. They’re proper best-sellers, read primarily by women.

“BookTok introduced that genre to a whole lot of people who wouldn’t have ever had any exposure to it before,” Rosewarne said. “There’s always been a bubbling kind of audience, not only for romance but for fantasy. So, the combining of the two would always have an audience but if that audience felt a little bit shameful about it, BookTok brought it out of the shadows.”

The share=ability of those experiences thanks to social media and even good, old-fashioned in-person word-of-mouth has been key to those commercial successes.

It’s women telling other women, women talking to women.

The phenomenon of Heated Rivalry also owes a not-inconsiderable debt to fan fiction, and especially slash fiction, a sub-genre in which consumers of pop culture re-imagined existing characters and narrative canon by re-casting characters in romantic scenarios.

It’s widely accepted that slash fiction had its origins in the late 1960s when a woman named Jennifer Guttridge wrote a Star Trek story that re-framed the relationship between Captain Kirk and Spock as inherently romantic and sexual.

Slash fiction (other popular pairings include Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy, Buffy’s Spike/Angel and Sherlock Holmes/John Watson) also leaned towards male/male couplings and were largely written by women.

WHAT’s BEHIND HEATED RIVALRY PHENOMENON?

The ground for Heated Rivalry’s fevered love among heterosexual women were seeded long ago.

The author of the Heated Rivalry books, Rachel Reid, had re-skinned her first tome in the series as Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes (Marvel’s Captain America and Winter Soldier) fan fiction to elicit feedback on online forums, before she changed it back and submitted the manuscript to a publisher.

Which is not to say that heterosexual women’s predilection for writing and engaging with male/male romances is without criticism.

Heated Rivalry (Reid is a heterosexual woman but its TV creator, Jacob Tierney, is a gay man) has seen some pushback from gay men, including actor Jordan Crossman, who said that it doesn’t realistically reflect their experiences.

But there’s no doubt that there’s something there that straight women find very seductive, emotionally and sexually. It’s worth noting that Casey McQuiston, the author of Red, White and Royal Blue, another romance between two men, adapted into a film and with an upcoming sequel, is non-binary.

“Heterosexuals and heterosexual dynamics are just laden with scripts in terms of all those things that go unspoken in terms of how relationships play out,” Rosewarne explained.

“If you are heterosexual, your dissatisfaction with, or the struggles you may have had holding down any kind of relationship, particularly if you’re a feminist, is partly because you’re dealing with these social constructs which are so embedded.

“So, I can imagine for lots of women, particularly heterosexual women, they will look at queer content and think, ‘hang on, what would life be like?’, not only not under patriarchy, but not under having to operate within these sexual scripts, be it complying with them or fighting against them, which is actually exhausting as well.”

For decades, the screen industry has been chasing the male dollar, twisting itself backwards to convince boys and men to buy movie tickets or press play.

The assumption was women would turn up anyway, but you had to work to capture the men. With cinema attendance down in key markets across the world, there’s more of a recognition that you can no longer take female audiences for granted.

We’ve seen huge marketing campaigns whose goals were to entice women, including the two mega tours for Barbie and Wuthering Heights.

Margot Robbie, star of both, is also a producer on both films and has an innate, commercially driven understanding of what women will respond to.

The commitment to marketing and making cultural events out of these films is one of the reasons Robbie and Fennell turned down a reported $US150 million from Netflix in favour of a smaller upfront payday and a promise of a big campaign.

Netflix has had a lot of success with its TV series but when it comes to movies, outside of KPop Demon Hunters which it did know would become as big as it did and caught on organically, it has failed to elevate its film slate to the same cultural level as a cinema release.

The exposure of a Wuthering Heights-style is significant because it places those stories firmly in the mainstream conversation. All anyone sees walking down the street or on social media are images that are undeniably coded for women.

The fact Wuthering Heights was sold as “the greatest love story ever told” was a deliberate strategy.

As was the Blake Lively film It Ends With Us, which was framed as a fun night out with the girls or for a date, marginalising the story’s weightier themes of domestic abuse and family violence.

In selling it, It Ends With Us wanted the romance to be number one because that’s how you create a moment.

Now, arguably, that eventually backfired, and the ramifications of that is still playing out in the courts between Lively and her co-star and director Justin Baldoni. But initially, that film grossed $US351 million worldwide from a production budget of $US25 million.

“There’s an acknowledgement now that maybe you don’t have to only focus on men. In fact, if we double down on girls and women, maybe we can actually make a motza that way. If you think of the juggernaut success of shows like Bridgerton, it highlights the fact that investing lots of money actually has pay-off,” Rosewarne said.

“If you can bring out a really passionate audience, you don’t necessarily always need to be worrying about bringing men into the cinema.”

Amid the panic about male loneliness epidemics, there’s something to be said about the fact women more likely to have strong friendship networks, and are often actively engaged in hobbies and interests that have social elements.

That gives them plenty of opportunities to become evangelists for these movies, TV shows and books that spin a fantasy more romantic than real life.

Hook-up culture, supercharged by dating apps, hasn’t been to the benefit of many women. “Because they don’t get the tenderness, the romance and all the stuff that’s essential for them to have an orgasm,” Rosewarne said.

“So, does it really surprise anyone that they’re outsourcing both arousal and pleasure to popular culture? It doesn’t surprise me out all.

“You’ve got to be constantly swiping, you’ve got to be putting yourself out there. And I can just imagine that this idea of going through all that to only, again, find yourself in a dynamic that isn’t pleasurable for you.

“You can imagine women are just doing the maths and saying to themselves that their energy is better spent elsewhere. We’ve all got other sh-t to do.”

Things like watching the new season of Bridgerton, which leans heavily on the Cinderella myth. Things like devouring all the romance novels on the market, or anticipating the screen adaptations of Fourth Wing and A Court of Thorns and Roses.

Rebecca definitely had other things to do. Rather than spend any more time rolling her eyes at the clumsy messages she was getting on dating apps, she took herself along to a Heated Rivalry watch party.

There were DJs, drinks, the hottest moments from the show playing on a big screen. And there were women, other women like her, who found themselves crushing on a romance too good to be real, pleasurable nonetheless and never disappointing.

*Name changed