Elyse: I recently DNF’d a slew of books due to totally repulsive behavior on the hero’s part, so of course I ranted at Sarah about it.
Sarah: And I’m always here for ranting about books. Squeeing, too, but also ranting.
Elyse: I’m so tired of the sex-entitled hero who sees every person to whom he might be attracted as a potential location for his peen.
You know the guy I’m talking about, right?
Sarah: Yup.
Elyse: He sees the heroine and the first thing he can think about is how his penis would feel inside her.
His dick is hard so he must find an outlet for it right now.
Sarah: I’ve read that guy. I really hate that guy. His interest in her is not about her as a person, but as a potential sexual object.
Elyse: Congrats on your circulatory system working, dude, but nobody cares about your stupid boner.
Sarah: And it’s surprising to me when I think about how common it was, and is.
Elyse: The plot might be led by the hero’s erection. He has one. He needs to do something with it. We have conflict.
Enter the heroine. She’s the best boner solution ever and now he haz a feeling. A feeling and a boner at the same time.
Sarah: Wait, he might also be mad about the feeling, because she caused it, and it is all her fault!
The only punishment is MORE BONER.
Elyse: The end.
I’m so fucking sick of heroes behaving badly and then not taking accountability for it.
Sarah: Agreed. I am very tired of Boner Led Heroes.
Elyse: YES.
Sarah: It’s either, “I have a boner, I’m not in control of it, and I’m mad at you about it” or “I have a boner so you must service it.”
I’m way tired of that kind of heroic arc. It’s not much of an arc, really. More of a slant.
Elyse: Your inability to manage your own erection is upsetting and gross.
Sarah: But it’s not cause for a plot for an entire fucking book.
Elyse: It’s reductive and misogynist and just plain gross.
Sarah: To quote Amanda’s shirt: NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR STUPID BONER. Having one doesn’t give you special rights or opportunities.
Elyse: I read a tweet that said, basically, “There are men who put their penises in trees. In sheep. Having a guy want to stick his dick in you is NOT a compliment”
Sarah: You have hands, lotion, maybe a Fleshlight? Your boner is your problem. (Also, I’d read The Duke’s Fleshlight.)
Does the plot revolve around boner rage or boner expectations, or does it focus on emotional connection?
If it’s a Boner Led Hero plot, then no, thanks. In terms of book plots, “I have met a person and I want to stick my dick in that person” as a foundation is not interesting to me.
But “I really like this person, and I really want to figure out how to make this person feel happy, safe, and also orgasmic” is VERY interesting to me.
Elyse: YES
I’ve been on a celebrity/royal romance kick lately (I WONDER WHY?) and there seems to be a plague of boner-led heroes in this sub-sub genre.
Take the hero I read who wakes up from a drunken night with one of his fans, and is trying to extricate himself from her presence. She is confused why he doesn’t want her to blow him as she’d been planning to.
As for the hero, his DICK feels puzzled, too! His dick argues with him!
He then describes his dick as being dumb, and as having a mind of its own.
No, your dick does not have a mind of its own. It isn’t sentient. It is a part of your body for which you are entirely accountable.
Suggesting otherwise is a common way to justify things like sexual harassment and assault.
Sarah: Yeah, that is…not a character I would enjoy.
I know some books that have handled sexual attraction and emotion as two separate challenges to be wrestled with by both characters and handled that conflict well. Pants-feelings*-to-real-feelings is a totally workable sequence of events.
*™ Captain Awkward
And I get the idea of the personification of desire. I’ve read many a female character’s sexual interest as being identified by a “tingle” or a “zing” in their “lady parts,” and I’ve read about “lady boners.” None of that bothers me, I think in part because it’s still subversive for women to own their own desire.
But I don’t remember reading a vagina as having a mind of its own, nor reading one that calls the shots or speaks or argues with the character, so to speak. So the dick-as-sentient-being thing doesn’t work for me.
I understand why it exists. And I will absolutely admit upon self examination and a look at my tattered keeper copies that I’m slightly more tolerant of Boner Led Heroes in books published 20+ years ago or more than I am of heroes published right now, especially in contemporaries.
I have read a lot of “My Boner Has Led Me to Understand There May Also Perhaps Be Feelings in Other Parts of Me Well Crap Now What Do I Do” romances, but I’m really done with them now. But I’ve said for awhile, I like emotionally fluent characters.
Elyse: It was a popular theme for a long time, but I think it’s more than past time for me to avoid all the Boner Led Heroes.
Sarah: Agreed.
What about you? Met any boner-led heroes? Or have you found a few that worked for you? We’d like to know what you think!
So much yes here! And I may have read a few of the royals books you mentioned. I can handle a hero who thinks “she has an interesting competency/ability/point of view.” And also has a little boner. But really, does the whole book have to be about the boner?
Also, sometimes it gives me just a little trigger for certain times when certain men felt that, because they had a boner in my presence, I should do something about it. Much less acceptable in real life!
“But I don’t remember reading a vagina as having a mind of its own, nor reading one that calls the shots or speaks or argues with the character, so to speak.”
I agree absolutely with the boner rant. However, I’m equally bothered by the scenes in which the woman’s body “betrays” her brain by responding to the hero. This is so common in Harlequin Presents, for example. The heroine has a perfectly rational reason to say no to the hero’s advances/commands/alphahole-ness, and her “no” should be accepted as “no”. However, it is not, because the dude thinks he knows better than her, and/or her body is magnetically drawn to the dude, a sharp rebuke to her rational brain’s reasons to say no. Sheesh.
I have read way too many romances where the hero meets the heroine and over the course of a conversation, usually an argument, all he can think about is his boner and how he wants to ‘plunge’ it into her. Especially as it’s never that he feels particularly attracted to her in any way, he just wants to satisfy himself and no thank you to that kind of thing!
From a purely biological point of view, the “I have a boner and I can’t control it” thing is actually kind of realistic… if the male protagonist is sixteen or younger. That’s a thing that legitimately happens to teenage boys, and which they can’t really do a whole lot about a lot of the time, and feeling like it has a mind of its own and is actively trying to make you look stupid out of spite is a common emotional response. (More men than are willing to admit it have been reduced shouting at their own penis to knock it off at least once.)
But if your characters are all (theoretically) mature adults who have completed puberty, it’s both utterly ridiculous and thoroughly creepy. And even going through adolesence doesn’t actually excuse alphahole behaviour.
@Jenny This trope upsets me and I’ve put books down because of it before – modern books, too. I feel like I’m being told that being unable to consent is sexy, and that is terrifying to me. It’s often not even ‘no no no no yes’ (still problematic); she just stops saying no. It’s such a pervasive and damaging fantasy that when she’s saying no she’s meaning yes all along, and even if we see that exact thing play out in her internal dialogue, all the dude hears is her saying no and he carries right on. It’s not seductive and it’s not sexy – it’s a problem.
See also: boner-led heroes in historicals who ‘claim their rights’ while a woman is a) asleep, b) terrified, or c) actively fighting him off. Those are rape scenes. I have read all three several times in novels written in the last 10 years and I can recollect at least one instance of c) where the hero says her ‘wildness’ turns him on. If I’m reading a historical romance where a non-existent duke has just returned from a secret spy mission and the heroine is an urchin/governess/Regency woman who speaks like a modern American, I am not concerned with the historical accuracy of a marriage of convenience. Stop with the problematic sex before your HEAs.
I’m going out on a limb here to ask: aren’t the majority of romance novels, including those with led-by-boner heroes, written by women? Does that mean, then, that we see men this way or we think men think this way? Or that we use this character to show how almighty love can tame the mighty wang (you should see what autocorrect did with that last part) and thereby prove the strength, validity and power of the magic vagina?
I am seriously uncomfortable with descriptions of body parts sitting up to take notice of another, and that includes nipples that tighten. I don’t think I’m an outlier when I say my reaction to a picture of an astoundingly attractive man is akin to the green aliens in TOYSTORY: ooooooh. Maybe pants feelings ™, but nothing if mine is leaking or clenched or … gah.
Boy, I have no idea where all this is coming from, but scratch the surface and my rant machine lights up.
tl;dr: I’m tired of boner-led heroes, too. Thank you for making my morning.
I lost my chill about this, among other things, back in February.
http://renbenton.com/2018/02/18/reading-angst/
I would like romance novels to be a safe haven from the swarm of cockroaches rampaging through real life, and they’re NOT as often as you’d think books written primarily by women and primarily for women would be.
Particularly in traditional publishing, a book goes through a hell of a lot of people before publication (author, crit group, agent, editor, copyeditor, beta readers), most of whom are women, and for none of them to say “ewwwwww, no” spotlights how normalized this “men are uncontrollable beasts but ya gotta love ’em” mindset really is.
OF mine, nothing OF mine. Jesus wept.
This was an excellent, delightful rant, and wonderfully indicative of a larger cultural shift. Just as Sarah pointed out that she once had more tolerance for this kind of behavior, the wider world once had more tolerance for it as well. As we stand up and push back–at work, at home, in fiction, in media–the rallying cry could well be We Are Not Here for Boner-Led Heroes. We are not here for your misogyny couched as flattery, for you to negate your own responsibility and call it love. No one cares about your stupid boner.
I throw books that regurgitate dusty abuse-as-love tropes in the trash. When I meet these men in real life, I teach them if they can be taught, and if they’re too far gone I pity them and walk away. The world is fast spinning to the day when these romances won’t sell at all. The coming generations will be women molded from the iron of their mothers and grandmothers, an unbreakable sisterhood who will not tolerate being treated as anything less than fully human. They will raise men who understand respect, and compassion, and real love. And those men who can’t adapt will be reduced to a footnote in history.
“The Sentient Dick” sounds like it should be on a terrifying episode of Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits.
I see this a lot and I’m sick of it. There *has* to be a more nuanced way to express “I’m attracted to you and it’s inconvenient that I’m attracted to you” than “whoops, tripped over my enormous sentient dong.”
I laughed out loud when I read this!! I just DNF’d one of those boner led books. You hit the nail on the head (or boner on the head). Who finds this interesting? Give me a hero who can keep his boner to himself until he gets to know the heroine, stuff happens and they both still like each other- then give me the boner!
That song “Detachable Penis” is stuck in my head now.
What Rose says above sums up my feelings. I really do think this might be something of a generational shift. You can tell by my name that I’m old (and, even if you can’t, I’ll tell you: I’m old). I cut my teeth on gothics and old-skool bodice rippers filled with “unknowable heroes” or (worse) rapist heroes. I’ve watched the entire arc of romance novels undergo massive changes over the past four decades (yikes—I’m not joking…I AM old!). Romances have transitioned from rape to nebulous consent (“no, no, no, yes”) to emphatic consent, and now another shift is taking place: we want men (in fiction and in life) to stop thinking with and/or blaming their questionable behavior on their dicks. But it takes time for popular culture to catch up with the reality of what is happening in women’s lives. So I’m expecting more “I have a boner so all I can think about is taking care of it” heroes for a while. Just as we’re still getting romance heroes who use their workplace authority to get close to a heroine, even in light of #MeToo. Take it from me, there’s always gonna be some lag time.
Yup, this has never been my favorite, but I’m just going to say it, after “Pussygate” (ugh, yuck, sorry, but you know what I’m talking about), my feelings about this have really crystallized and come into focus. And #metoo just made me feel even more strongly about it.
Before, there was often a vague “I’m not sure I like this” feeling, but now if the hero meets the heroine and is immediately fantasizing about “having his way with her” or in contemporaries how to manipulate their work situation (yikes!) to seduce her, nope, nope, nope. DNF.
There’s nothing wrong with meeting or seeing a new person and thinking they’re attractive, but if you somehow immediately think you need/deserve/have to/ have sex with that person, that’s not appealing. At all.
I also hate the variation of this where the heroine is attracted to him but says no for valid reasons, then he uses that attraction as an excuse to keep pressing her. It’s as if desiring something means you should automatically have it. Why does she have to be the adult when he is acting like a two-year-old?
I regularly DNF these books, and I’m not just annoyed about the boner showing up as soon as the hero meets the heroine. I’m sick of reading all about what his cock is up to throughout the book, whether it’s twitching, stirring, making his pants tight, hard as steel, I don’t want to constantly hear about it.
There are tears rolling down my face from reading this post. lolol
Somehow, I’ve gotten on lists from a few of these authors, and there’s always an excerpt of these situations. What’s even more amazing is this stuff sells.
I was hoping the comments would include more references to specific titles. I appreciate that people don’t want to provide advertising for this…erm, is it a trope? But without context, I honestly don’t know where to position myself in the debate. I know I’m not completely tone deaf to the issue, since I see it A LOT in Harlequin Presents and just roll my eyes (the extraocular muscles get a lot of exercise when reading HP). It sounds like the entitled dick is prevalent outside of category romance as well, but I’m either very forgiving or reading different books.
Bring out your dead?
Someone once commented that men name their penises because they don’t want so many of their important decisions being made by a stranger.
@denise, yes, this sort of thing sells,and the reason it sells is that a goodly portion of the women in this country are not emotionally educated enough to understand what makes it problematic. They have been trained to think that lust is the male equivalent of love because men are physical creatures without real emotions. We need to teach them, at the same time we’re teaching their men, that pants feelings and real feelings are two different things, and it’s better to have the latter before the former.
Boner Led Heroes are a deal-breaker for me, in reading and irl.
” yes, this sort of thing sells,and the reason it sells is that a goodly portion of the women in this country are not emotionally educated enough to understand what makes it problematic. ”
*shakes head* I just….what? Plenty of people (women included) are emotionally educated enough to recognize the problematic nature of boner led heroes and still enjoy them. http://urge.org/its-okay-to-like-problematic-things/
I get what Elyse and Sarah are saying and don’t personally enjoy boner or vag led anything, but there’s a market for this trope for a reason and I’m not comfortable putting it down to uneducated women.
Now I’m imagining a t-shirt reading “NOT HERE FOR BONER-LED HEROES”, maybe with an image of a wire mesh wastebasket full of books.
I did like one book I read recently in which the hero realized he was becoming aroused and immediately started admonishing himself: “You’re a grown adult, stop acting like a teen who gets stiff every time the wind changes direction and pay attention to what she’s saying.”
I believe the tweet about how men will stick their penis in a tree was quoting a Victoria Dahl book…the one with the sex advice virgin heroine and the hot librarian nicknamed Cunnilingus Gabe!
I also think it is a generational shift. Like DiscoDollyDeb, I started reading romance in the bodice ripper/adventurous women days and have carried on reading as standards/tropes have changed. To me, it seems that, with some exceptions, historical authors appear to be moving away from Dukes With Boners faster than contemporary authors are from Dudes With Boners. I’ve DNF’d a number of contemporaries over the past few years because of those “gotta poke her” inner conversations as well as those “what a big manly chest” inner conversations where the heroine has to text her squad before she submits to the hero’s manly desires. I never in my life asked a BFF “should I do it?”
@ Deborah – I immediately thought of The Duke Who Knew Too Much by Grace Callaway as I read through these posts. Took over half the book before the Duke started using his brain instead of his groin to react any time he was near the heroine.
The Royal Romances by Molly Jameson series (I’m a fan) features heroes who are fascinated by the female lead being smart/quirky/funny and not just I HAZ PENIS LET’S BANG (some of said heroes are betas, btw, book two and book six).
If you’re into royals (thank you Prince Harry), try those.
Also congratulations on your circulatory system–best line of the day.
I Need to add a DNBM shelf (Do Not Boner Me) on Goodreads. I have returned Kindle books with Heroes with the “I love my boner and you will too” romance b.s.
I imagine that “I have met a person and I want to stick my dick in that person” is a lot easier to write than emotionally fluent characters.
I don’t get insta-lust in general because of my demisexuality. And my sensorily-altered synesthetic (?) sensuality (my emotions colour EVERYTHING – and resize people Alice in Wonderland-style).
I’m cautious on this topic because there is considerable ground between what is not to my taste and what is not right. You see the difficulty for literary criticism.
On the other hand, where realism is concerned, I did recently read Don Hennessy’s “How He Gets into Her Head: The Mind of the Male Intimate Abuser”, and the self-serving philosophy of the abusive men – or ‘psychephiles’, as Hennessy calls them – is eerily similar to the points raised in the rant: The sense of sexual entitlement based on desire, not joint decision-making. The sense of entitlement to emotional caretaking, unreciprocated.
Another disturbing element in real life is that abusers hold back stories of childhood trauma until they needed them, to cash in, effectively, to win forgiveness from the target for partner abuse as an adult. Writers tend to hold back those details till pretty late too, only for dramatic purposes.
All round, it’s hard lines on the majority of survivors – who are transcenders, not perpetuators of the cycle.
(TW: The case studies are not lengthy, but they are horrific. Also, the basis of ‘tangential’ child abuse was well described – ‘it’s the abusive man who is truly difficult, but he twists things around and drains so much of his partner’s energy she believes the CHILDREN are difficult’ – but also downplayed.
btw Just that word, ‘difficult’, made me vibrate with rage. Even though, now I’m a self-aware acon, I have other words for people peddling that kind of kid-scapegoating at my fingertips. But Hennessy never says ‘narcissistic family’ or ‘enabler’.)
I don’t understand insta-lust at all, but that could be because I’m asexual.
I *have* noticed that consent isn’t always explicit, especially in paranormal romances, and that’s made me DNF more than one book. When there’s a scene of “no, we can’t do that,” or “I’m not sure if I want to sleep with you,” and they have sex anyway, I’m sitting there feeling more than a little gross.
@Zyva: Thank you so much for exposing me to the term “demisexual.” Five minutes of investigation showed it covered so many things that have been attributed to my anxiety disorder, my INTJ-ness, my abuse history, or (per a friend) my Venus being in Aquarius. It never occurred to me “het but zero interest in physical contact until I’ve dissected your soul and found it to my liking, which will probably be never and I’m fine with that” might be categorized on the sexuality spectrum.
This is as liberating as the first time I heard about secular humanism. “Yes! That’s it! My thing is a thing other people know about! It’s not just me!”
So on the whole “her body betrayed her” thing.
******* TRIGGER WARNING ******
Without going into the whole story (which involved a lot of emotional blackmail), I once was in a situation in which a male friend decided to put his fingers in my vagina despite the fact that I had indicated I did not want to do sexytimes with him. And… I froze. I froze because my body was going ‘oh yay sex things!’ while my brain went ‘NO NO NO NO NO NO NO’ and despite how loudly my brain was screaming NO, and believe me it was VERY LOUD, I could not get it to come out, and I also couldn’t push him off because there were too many conflicting signals crossing and my body felt physically paralysed. The only thing I could manage to do was start babbling about random things in hopes that it would distract him and he would stop. For some reason this actually worked.
He left. I told myself that I was asexual (I’m not), decided never to let a man touch me again, and spent multiple months being traumatised and making more terrible decisions, many of which involved men touching me.
(I’m fine now.)
I’m sharing this because, like… the body betraying you thing? That actually happens. This wasn’t even the only time something like that has happened to me, just by far the worst. I wasn’t even attracted to that guy. My body just really likes having men touch it.
Those scenes are very upsetting for me to read because I have been there and it was not sexy. It was scarring.
But it’s also upsetting for me to read people saying “oh bodies don’t betray you,” because it feels like victim-blaming even though I know that is absolutely not what is meant by it. This does happen to people — I do not for a second believe my experience to be unique — and it’s horrible, and the psychology of it is the worst part.
I’m sorry if posting this was inappropriate. I just… people don’t talk about this, and I think we need to.
On boners, arousal, and “Body betrayal”:
TL; DR: Arousal (want, desire) and genital response(boner, wetness) are SEPARATE things. The appearance of one does not imply the other.
Long rant version:
Say the magic words with me: AROUSAL NONCONCORDANCE. It’s a thing, it’s been recognized by scientist since the 60s, and you NEED to know about it.
In case link doesn’t show up: https://medium.com/@enagoski/everyone-is-lying-about-the-vaginas-77038767238d
Warning: You will rage at nearly all novels from here on. Learning about arousal nonconcordance is like learning where the hymen is. Your reading, particularly romance, will never be the same.
In exchange, you’ll gain freedom to learn the language of your body.
For men:
Boners? Hero could have a boner because he is attracted. Or just because clevage.
Lack of boner? Hero might not want heroine. Or might do.
For women:
Heroine’s genitalia is wet? Her genitalia thinks someone might be touching it soon. In a culture where “people take what they want”, that could be any time, any place, any person.
This piece of data alone does not tell the reader anything about heroine’s desires in the matter of touching her genitalia.
Heroine’s genitalia is dry? Her genitalia doesn’t think there is any touching coming.
This data does not tell us anything about heroine’s desires.
So, since I know there are quite a few romance authors and editors who read this blog, STOP EQUATING GENITAL RESPONSE TO DESIRE!
You’re hurting people.
@Maite — thank you. <3
@Anonymous
We got a refresher in Australia recently on freeze response because of Saxon Mullins telling her story.
Very triggering. But we are talking about it. Somewhere. Sorry, it’s probably far from home for you.
The police also have investigative protocols like “whole story” , and “crime of relationship”. Not mainstream parlance though.
@Ren Benton
No worries 🙂
In my time, I was thankful to Agnès Jaoui and co. For the tragedian actress character in Le Goût des Autres who said she just couldn’t casually hook up as her circle suggested. “I have to be a bit in love. It has to mean something, or I can’t manage it.”
I nearly barked out loud “HEAR, HEAR!” in the middle of class.
@CatG – a million likes/hearts to you.
First, yes it is ok to like problematic things.
Second, to me what makes or breaks a romance – to me at least and I seem to be in the minority here although based on what sells in general in romance it suggests my views are shared by many -The hero being intensely sexually attracted to the heroine – instantly OR over time – can be very hot. So if a book is written about the hero THINKING about having sex with the heroine or wanting to have sex with the heroine – a lot – no problem for me. Or if the heroine thinks it all the time about the hero or they both do.
I have also stated in another post that I think romance can push the boundaries because we know the hero is the “good” guy and there will be a HEA. Just like I don’t want to live in a cutesy small town where murder happens on a regular basis, but I still read and love cozy mysteries – I too may read and enjoy “problematic” romances without actually wanting any such thing in real life.
I think we should be very careful about saying things like women aren’t emotionally educated enough to understand that something is problematic, but might (or might not!) still enjoy it. It is not that far away from so much of the long heard criticism of romance that it’s readers are unhappy desperate housewives that lack the emotional sophistication or understanding to read “real” literature and have to “escape” to romance instead. We know better about the emotional and intellectual levels of romance readers.
So if it’s not your thing, it’s not your thing and you certainly don’t have to like the trope and you have every right to rant about how you don’t like it, but I think we need to be really careful about judging someone else for what they read and enjoy.
After thinking about this some more, I’ve realized that one of the reasons I like the first two Lucy Parker books so much (haven’t read the third) is because the characters, particularly the heroes, have no romantic interest in each other until they get to know each other. They’re all physically attractive but the protagonists don’t look at each other and go “You’re so pretty! I want you!” The relationships and the books are stronger because they aren’t based on physical attraction that can change or fade. I can really believe in those HEAs.
BTW, (maybe put a trigger warning here),
“Body betrayal” is a big problem in child sexual abuse. The child knows it is wrong, it feels creepy, and the body still finds some pleasure in it; The abuser then takes that pleasure and tells the child that they wanted this and that this was their fault.