Charlotte Kersten

Elisabeth Wheatley is a successful indie fantasy romance author who has also carved out her niche as an online book influencer. She mainly focuses her videos on romance novels, historical facts, historical accuracy in fiction, and comedy skits. She recently made waves in the online book community when she announced that she was removing all of the graphic sex scenes from her books, with 5 books impacted in total. The start of the announcement covers the logistics of the removal process and the remaining availability of the “spicy” editions for a brief period of time, and the ending mostly addresses any concerns that this decision is stemming from Elisabeth’s recent conversion to Catholicism, which she denies being the case due to her familiarity with and deconstruction from high-control Christian fundamentalist religion.

We can’t ever fully know what led to her decision, and Elisabeth deserves the personal space to process her feelings about her work and make the authorial choices she is most comfortable with based on that. It’s extremely difficult to put your writing out into the world, and that vulnerability increases tenfold for many of us when it comes to writing about intimacy and topics that we have our own complicated feelings about due to personal experiences. Whatever choices she did make and whatever reasons she had for them, she should receive no harassment, cruelty, or invasions of privacy based on that.

All that I think it’s really fair to go off of in discussing this is the official explanation for the edits in the announcement post. That explanation is based on Wheatley’s opinions about current trends in romance book culture related to sex and gender as a whole, which are interesting to me….so I want to discuss them in relation to feminism and Wheatley’s own writing.

The statement reads:

So why am I doing this?

Well, I have been wanting to do this for almost a year, especially in the months leading up to the birth of my daughter.

The breaking point was right before my daughter was born. I was in a bookstore and over a selection of spicy romance books there was this big display of penis bookmarks. They had rainbow penises, tentacle penises, hockey stick penises (?) (maybe for a hockey stick shifter romance or something?????)

Anyway, this big display of dicks,  or “cockmarks,” as their labeling proclaimed them.

And as I was staring at the display of dicks I just had the realization that I didn’t…belong…there. 

I don’t like the larger trend toward blatant objectification that I see in the spicy romance reader community. Not all of us, of course, but I just see it so overtly and openly more and more and I don’t love it. 

I get that men have done it to women for centuries, but like… it’s awful??? We don’t get this license to objectify people back. 

I still don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong with what my characters do in the spicy versions of my books. But at this point in my career, I am very aware that I can’t control how people interact with my work. 

That is true for the sum total of the works, of course, but the sexual content specifically is by far the most easily interpreted or interacted with in a way that I personally don’t want to support, even inadvertently. 

So to be clear, objectification is the turning of a fellow subject (a being with agency) to an object (something that is acted upon or merely experienced by a subject). Sexual objectification is then the denial of a human’s interiority, agency, and humanity in a sexual context. Arising from feminist theory, this concept connects the sexualized dehumanization of women to the denial of female agency and rights, sexual and domestic violence, the valuing of women for their adherence to specific beauty standards above all other qualities, and the paradigms about sex and gender that justify systemic inequalities.

Objectification is different from but often confused with sexualization, especially in conversations about media, art, and advertisements. In comparison, sexualization is placing emphasis on a person’s sexuality and sexual attractiveness. With these definitions in mind as I read her statement, I did wonder if Elisabeth got the concepts of sexualization and objectification confused…because I don’t really know how she could be seriously denouncing the plight of the fictional shadow daddies, dukes, and billionaire CEOs who are being used for sex by FMCs in ways that remove their personhood and agency. 

My good-est faith interpretation is that she could be trying to critique some of the specific ways men can sexualized in Spicy Romance Books – unrealistic body standards, “performance” expectations, a disregard for consent that’s justified/dismissed by the narrative, an emphasis on aggression/dominance/penetration that doesn’t allow for vulnerability, complex emotions or diverse types of intimacy and pleasure. 

I’ve criticized some of the romance books I’ve read for these reasons, but this kind of critique is different from deriding the entire concept of romance books with graphic sex or considering them inherently inherently morally wrong. In Elisabeth’s case, it really seems that she is denouncing Spicy Romance Books for the very presence of spice in and of itself; she is removing all of the graphic sex scenes from her books simply because they are graphic sex scenes to begin with.

As a whole, this leaves me feeling that she is using terms and concepts that she is not very familiar with to discuss a topic that she is not very comfortable with. Then there’s also this framing that indicates distrust for female readers’ active enjoyment of their sexuality and how that activity will become malevolent or corrupting. They will interpret and interact with her work in ways that are uncontrollable and incorrect, and they will use sexism as a “license” to hurt men back. Hmmmm. Hmmm!

The terms “male gaze” and “female gaze” are two other trendy feminist buzzwords closely intertwined with the concept of objectification. Coming from feminist film theory, the term “male gaze” describes when art (overwhelmingly) represents a masculine perspective for a presumed male audience and so depicts women as sexualized, objectified or otherwise limited by their gender. It gets rapidly Freudian in a way that I can’t speak to very well and was even less equipped to understand when I actually read theory about it in undergrad (at a Small Liberal Arts Women’s College, no less!!!!) but it is about the power that comes with the act of being the viewer – having the agency to view rather than be the object of viewing, having your perspective and preferences matter enough to shape what is depicted in art.  

The term “female gaze” can be about how women look at themselves and other women with internalized sexism, but it can also be about how they reclaim the act of viewing. To gaze back is to deny your status as a sex object and affirm your subjectivity, interiority and sexual agency. This is disruptive to patriarchal power, a threat, and threats to the patriarchy are most often framed as reverse oppression implemented by women deviously playing the victim card. This framing is done by those who cannot conceptualize oppression as requiring entrenched, multifaceted structures of power that significantly impact material conditions.

I get that men have done it to women for centuries, but like… it’s awful??? We don’t get this license to objectify people back. 

So of course men are not being objectified by Spicy Romance Books; of course graphic sex scenes and hockey cockmarks are not reverse oppression. (Also not 100% sure that the rainbow penises are being marketed to the romantasy girlies as their primary demographic, but what do I know?) These are patently absurd statements, but they track based on the logic of sexism that I outlined here. This logic is everywhere, impacting our lives on every level. A specific version of it can be found in the roots and various branches of Christianity, including Catholicism, fundamentalism, and this Hot Not-New Trend of Christian nationalism that’s sweeping the nation!

I don’t really believe Elisabeth’s stated justification for the choice she made in the announcement….but after sorting through all of this in my head, I was still very curious about her books and the sex scenes therein that were not long for this world because of how they were possibly being used by female readers to strip men of their humanity. Of the impacted books, I picked up Tears of the Wolf because it would count for an r/fantasy bingo square I needed to complete and fit my ongoing-neverending reading project focusing on SFF books about trauma and healing. 

Tears of the Wolf follows a young sorceress named Brynn who is granted a divorce from her first husband, an emotionally abusive and neglectful man who is preoccupied with his dead first wife and children. Shortly before the book begins, his lands were attacked by not-Vikings and Brynn’s infant son was killed in the attack. Once Brynn is granted her divorce by the king, she immediately remarries another alderman who was selected as a suitable match in order to keep herself far away from dangerous court politics. This alderman,  Cenric, has reclaimed his family’s ancestral lands from the Vikings after spending his childhood and young adulthood amongst relatives in the Viking lands, raiding and doing mercenary work. 

Cenric and Brynn gradually bond as she gets established in his household and they navigate various threats to their land together, including when her evil sorceress mother tries to kidnap her and make her marry someone else at the end of the book. The overall trajectory is one of healing for her as she learns what it is to be loved and valued for the first time in her life. 

My main takeaway after finishing Tears of the Wolf is that, regardless of whether the single graphic sex scene is removed, it is a book that is very concerned with sex throughout, and it’s concerned with sex in some very specific ways.  At the start of the book, there is a lot of worrying over the consummation of the marriage…..will Cenric be a Lustful Brute who will “throw her onto her back and lift her skirts”?? Despite him telling her in their first conversation that [he] could beat [her]” and “make [her] [his] whore,” (to which she has sassily quips back) the reader and Brynn are soon relieved to learn that he would “hardly…take a weeping woman.” Ok great!

After he doesn’t rape her on their wedding night, the focus shifts more to their building sexual anticipation and how Cenric is experienced and Brynn isn’t. She is “so innocent, so sweet, yet so timid” and she whimpers a lot. While Cenric has to go take care of leadership duties, Brynn stays home and worries about his sexual history, partially out of jealousy/insecurity and partially because she’s still not 100% convinced that he isn’t a Lustful Brute. She goes to the village to discuss things with Rowan, the woman who formerly served as Cenric’s concubine before he got married. Rowan reassures Brynne that he is a “good man” because he has “taken concubines” and “maybe a few whores here and there” but “not the household girls and not random village women.” Ok great again!

This delineation between Types of Women and what is okay to do to them continues to be a strong presence throughout the rest of the book. Cenric later worries that he is exploiting Brynn by marrying her because she needs to remarry to ensure her political safety, but no further thought is ever given to whether those concubines or “whores” could have been at all exploited in their transactions with him.

One of the household servants Brynn meets is a woman named Giatha who used to work in a brothel. She’s often either making out with her husband in public or joking with him in ways that are clearly intended to be funny side character banter but are sort of bizarrely off-putting instead:

Giatha: Now I only have to worry about satisfying one man.

Her husband: But I have the lust of ten men, so be sure to pity her just a bit, aye?

We also meet Vana, the concubine to Cenric’s Viking cousin Hroarr, who is similarly described as svelte and confident and blasé about her position as a concubine. In general it’s fine to depict women who are comfortable with sex work and there could very well be some historical basis for what Elisabeth is doing here, but there are also certain implications to that choice when the narrative is simultaneously lingering on the plight of the (noble, tragic, beautiful, sexually pure) main character and whether she’s going to be brutalized by her new husband while she tries to find her way through a patriarchal world where her options are limited. 

Brynn is a Good Woman so her safety, suffering and healing matter, and a big part of what makes Brynn a Good Woman is that she really, really, really, really wants to “do her duty” to Cenric. She says this several times and throws herself into her work as the village healer and the manager of his household… but would you be shocked to learn that she also says this in bed? In the same scene that he calls her “good girl” lmao? 

Besides the horrific death of her young son, which is given serious weight and focus, it sometimes feels like the other tragedy of Brynn’s first marriage is that she was a Good Woman wasted on a man who didn’t appreciate her virtues: “she had poured her heart and soul into being the perfect wife, a good mother, and all for nothing.” Our happy ending doesn’t ever involve any questioning of Brynn’s duty. The reason it’s a happy ending is because Cenric loves her, appreciates how well she does her duty,  gives her a puppy, and lets her use her womanly graces to restrain his base masculine urges to solve his problems with violence. She throws a dinner party to solve a political dilemma after talking him out of solving it with a massacre! We see very clearly what a woman’s role is – to run to the household, to be a healer, to have children, to be his better half and tame his worst impulses – and we are just supposed to be happy that Brynn is happy now and is finally getting the recognition she deserves for being the best wife ever. 

This is in comparison to his arrangement with concubine Rowan, btw: “she had smoothed many of his rougher edges and he had expanded her horizons, but it was not enough.” It is interesting to note, as well, that our villain is a powerful and scheming older woman from a matriarchal group who views sex as a transaction for power and having and/or killing children as nothing but strategy to gain the throne. As far as the sorceresses go, they could be interesting as far as disrupting gendered power dynamics in this world, but just end up feeling incongruous – why do these powerful women like Brynn fight and kill in the backstory wars but still have to marry for political safety and obey their husbands?

TL;DR: the one Good Woman’s limited agency, sexual vulnerability and happiness matter in this patriarchal world when all other women’s (especially the unmarried sexually active ones) are not examined. In reward for selflessly, virtuously doing her feminine duty throughout all her noble suffering, she is finally rewarded with the love of a good man who has NOT exploited any household/village girls!!!!! and whose violent warrior urges she can continue to temper over their blissful lifetime together because he listens to her. And, perhaps, she can have an orgasm or two? 

I think it would defeat the point of what I’m trying to do here to declare my judgment of whether the sex scene is good or bad. It’s a consent-forward, hetero, vanilla sex scene. It is a scene from the perspective of a woman who has always put her wants last and was previously married to a man who disdained her and put no effort into making their intercourse pleasurable or intimate in any way. She describes her prior sexual experiences as physically painful and obligatory for both of them, nothing more. At this point in the story, she gets to be with a man whom she loves and who loves her back, and he helps her discover what brings her pleasure in a way that is depicted with specific sexual acts as well as emotional intimacy.

At least in this book out of the five impacted, that’s the gist of what Elisabeth is worried about her readers interpreting and interacting with in ways that she doesn’t personally support. Maybe, if we take her statement at face value, this means that her readers could objectify Cenric in this scene – view him in a way that is degrading and dehumanizing to the character and men as a whole. More likely, it means that readers will sexualize him or derive some level of sexual gratification from the scene by putting themselves in Brynn’s perspective. 

I haven’t read the fade-to-black version yet, but after posting a slightly shorter version of this review on r/fantasyromance, some of the commenters there made the fantastic point that given Brynn’s circumstances, the level of detail that a graphic sex scene allows for is actually beneficial to demonstrating her healing and emotional catharsis in her romance with Cenric. Explicit detail allows for characterization and relationship development through sex that I struggle to imagine being equivalent in fade-to-back…….but it also bears the terrible risk of readers being titillated at the same time!

In the context of everything else I just described related to sex and gender in Tears of the Wolf – the gender essentialism, the qualifications for a Good Man vs a Good Woman, the Madonna/Whore complex of it all, the persistent, weird sexual anxiety throughout – isn’t it just soooo interesting that the sex scene is the part of the book where the “vibes feel off?”