Dragonflight's Kinky Dragon Sex (and also liking men)
[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]
Kinky Dragon Sex
Like everyone else raised in liberal America, I was stunned by Aella’s revelation that women disproportionately prefer violent/rough porn (over men). I’d known that demand for doms greatly outstrips supply, but I’d never thought about what that means. I’d only recently come into an awareness that in the erotic content most consumed by women and produced almost solely by women — romance novels — revealed preference of readers shows that consent is the opposite of hot.
An interesting historical aspect of this is that before progressivism really took hold, it wasn’t taboo to not completely deny this. In 1968 it was totally acceptable for the heroine of a fantasy novel to have a predator/prey kink that gets to be fulfilled literally via complete psychic connection to mating dragons.
As said in my review, I was surprised at how hot it was. It didn’t go that long, but the description of the chase, the exhilaration of victory, the mistake of getting too confident and careless (or was it a “mistake”…?), and then being seized and penetrated as the duo is plunging out of the air… it was quite good!
The thing that really shocked me, though, was when the R-Word was dropped later in the book. When the romantic interest is brooding about his sex life with Lessa, he comments about how unenthusiastic she is about sex when it isn’t right after experiencing dragon primal pursuit sex via psychic bond. He says “it might as well be rape.”
I had to put the book down for a bit. Because he is the good guy in this novel. He’s overly emotional and impulsive, but he’s very clearly presented as someone that is fundamentally good. Is this another one of those “the medieval times were fucked up, no one in-world is commenting on this because their morality is also messed up” things? How can I possibly continue to empathize with a self-confessed rapist? How the heck does the author expect me to do so??
The narrative continued to portray him as a good person. The rape thing is never brought up again. Lessa is never anything but in love with him. There’s never a hint in the novel that she’s distressed by their sex or that anything untoward is happening. I am experiencing a huge amount of narrative dissonance for quite a while, because everything in the novel is saying “basically happy couple, especially from her point of view” but the literal text used the literal word “rape” and these two things do not fit for me.
Ultimately the sane resolution clicked into place in my mind. As we know, Lessa is super into kinky predator/prey sex. She’s bored with the sex that doesn’t have that. Her mate is doing his best to get her excited and make her lust him, but if it doesn’t have that kink it isn’t working, and he’s super frustrated and dejected by that. I assume he’ll eventually realize she’s got an obligate kink and will figure out a way to incorporate it. But right now, he feels really bad about himself, and he’s berating himself saying of the vanilla sex that “it might as well be rape” because of how unfun the sex is. He wants her to be lusted in sex and feels crappy that he can’t figure out what he’s doing wrong.
First, that resolves the narrative dissonance, explains why we’re supposed to stay liking him, and does in fact actually make me able to remain liking him. But second, it really reveals a difference between readers in the 60s and readers today. McCaffrey assumed she could write that sentence and her audience would understand her meaning without being torn out of the novel. She didn’t expect it to be shocking. Culture is very different, to the point where some words’ meanings are hard to reconcile over the span of a few decades.
McCaffrey Likes Men
I know this is gonna sound weird, but hear me out. I think McCaffrey likes men. Not just likes sex with men. But actually legitimately likes men for being men.
Like everyone else raised in liberal America, I don’t like men1. So it’s surprising to pick up a book from not all that long ago and discover someone writing in a way that reveals an diametrically opposed attitude.
The first example is very early on, when the dragonriders are approaching Lessa’s hold. The current lord has been lax, and vegetation is growing where it shouldn’t, which is a security concern (for magic reasons). The dragonriders swoop down, strafing the greenery, absolutely blasting it apart with dragonfire. They have a great time doing this, absolutely reveling in having this amount of raw power over the physical environment and getting to use it so brazenly. Flight! Swooping! FIRE!
The way it’s written isn’t scolding or disapproving or judgey in any way, except maybe judging it to be awesome! The narration is admiring, excited even. I couldn’t believe this was written by a woman! I could see a man getting carried away with this sort of thing, but a women being into it?
This sort of thing happens many times. When men do masculine things in the service of good, that is portrayed with a sort of excited admiration that I don’t remember seeing in so long that I didn’t remember what it looked like. The male characters doing these things aren’t good in spite of doing this, they are good specifically because they are doing this. Doing masculine stuff is what makes them desirable. At such an unassuming, unexamined, basic level, that it just seeps into the writing.
It makes the men do stupid shit sometimes. Which leads to conflict with each other, or with Lessa, and sometimes she steps in to temper their idiot-headed ideas. But the difference between the normal portrayal of “Look how awful men are,” versus McCaffrey’s “Yeah, sometimes our differences lead men into error, but we wouldn’t have them any other way. It’s a good thing we have women too, eh?” is too stark for mere words. To see a portrayal of masculinity by an author who really deeply likes masculinity and is attracted to it was such a strange and uplifting experience.
It’s going to be a long time before I forget that feeling, and the surprise of seeing it from a woman’s perspective.
I really liked it.
I am getting better though, with some heroic support