I’m slowly puttering my way through a first draft for what will hopefully be book 2 in Treading the Boards (look at me, not jinxing things!), and I ended up wandering around some sites on the romance blogosphere reading bits and pieces about queer romances and what works. The general understanding seems to be that F/F doesn’t sell, because the primary readers of romance are women (91% was the stat I saw), the bulk of whom are by nature straight, and they prefer to have men in their smut as lust objects.
I’ve heard the other argument side as well, that women’s rejection of F/F fiction is because of internalized misogyny – that we’ve been programmed to think that a story or a romance isn’t real unless it centers on a man, that women’s genitals are somehow lesser, or that we still hang on to the Victorian conception that women aren’t sexual beings until and unless they’ve been awakened into their urges by the power of cock.
I love navigating the sticky waters of expectations when it comes to romances and menages, so She Whom I Love was always going to be a poly bi triad, but I’m curious about what you think. Do you read F/F, in fic or in original fiction? If you’re a straight woman, what intrigues you about it? Can you empathize with the characters enough to enjoy their eroticism, even if a scene doesn’t include your preferred objects of desire?
