Somebody Put It Into Words.

Somebody 👏🏻 put it 👏🏻 into 👏🏻 words.

There’s always a lingering question that I ask myself, which is why do I, a cis bisexual woman, enjoy romance between two men so much?  

There are easy answers, like that it’s just fetishizing.  And like, I find men attractive, yes.  But I also find women attractive.  I don’t have a problem with enjoying het romance, assuming I can find good ones.  I enjoy stories with female characters I can relate to.

But there’s something much deeper at play, IMO.  A friend of mine who is a gender studies professor was the first person to point this out to me, but a lot of women enjoy m/m romance and gay porn because of the lack of women.  It removes a source of pressure and sexism.  Without any women present, you don’t have to constantly evaluate the sexism of their portrayal, or be reminded of negative experiences in your own life.  It allows women to experience romance and especially sexuality without all the baggage that comes with it in our patriarchal society.

This was recently illustrated to me rather dramatically.  I read a recommendation for a het romance.  And it sounded cute, and came highly recommended.  The tropes at play were fun.  Until I read a snippet and realized this was a romance between a woman and her boss.  I had a visceral negative reaction.  

Instantly I’m thinking of sexual harassment stories I’ve read and heard from other women. I’m thinking of how uncomfortable it would be to have your boss develop feelings for you.  How icky the power dynamics would be, etc.  

And then I realized…this wouldn’t bother me if it were two men.  Now, there’s no logical reason for that.  Sexual harassment is just as wrong when its object is a man.  But I know I’ve read fics with a similar premise and never thought about it.  Because when it’s two men I can accept this is just a light romance, a fantasy, meant to be fun and sexy and not to represent the real world.

But I can’t when it’s a het relationship.  There’s too much baggage there.  Too much societal history of abuse.  I can’t relax enough with the premise to enjoy that story.  

Now some people can.  And that’s fine.  And some people are never going to be okay with power imbalances like that regardless of gender.  That’s also fine.  I don’t think having either reaction makes one morally superior.  It’s okay to just enjoy light entertainment for what it is without going into deep analysis.

But it’s much more difficult for me, and I think for many women, to relax and enjoy romantic and sexual stories when they involve female characters.  We’ve been burned too many times by shitty depictions, by shallow role models, by abuse portrayed as romantic.  We have developed a stress response, a trauma response to heterosexual romance.  We are hyper-reactive to a wide variety of triggers in regards to it.   But removing women from the equation makes stories safer for us.  And maybe it shouldn’t?  In an ideal world?  But for many of us, that’s the truth.

Wartober/Kisstober - Day 4

I’ve decided to combine @rubinecorvus Wartober 2021 and @raincoffeeandfandoms Kisstober 2021 prompt challenges for double the fun and double the headache. :3

Day 4 - Navigate + Slow Kisses

WARNING: POETIC AND OVERLY METAPHORED ALLUSIONS TO SEX AHEAD

Dick has always loved maps.

As a boy he’d been obsessed with charting the world, one latitude at a time. He could see the peaks of the Himalayas on every globe. The jungles of Madagascar in every atlas. The sea currents. The depths of the Pacific Ocean in every naval chart.

He’d trailed bony boy hands over the lines of longitude, zigzagging past the equator and up to each pole in turn, imagining the far off lands detailed in perfect topography beneath his fingertips and what adventures they may hold. Wild animals perhaps. Inland seas the color of blue only dreamt of, brimming over with dolphins bearing their backs of gold. Rubies deep in the planet’s crust the size of a fist, too glamorous even for the most queenly neck. Anything beyond the tidy suburban monotony of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

He’d joined the air force with a head full of boyish fantasies that never quite grew up. A misplaced Peter Pan training to plummet to the ground instead of fly, while fiery flak explodes in every direction. Dick falls from planes and navigation blows away, pulling it with him. A mere leaf in the wind. A tiny insignificant speck in a great big world.

He never lands in the lush tropical jungles of his childhood imagination. He never sets foot on the coastline with water so crystal clear you can see straight to the bottom. He lands in Hell. And there are no fantastic creatures here, no jewels or mountain-whisp clouds to chase. No sunsets over the curve of the horizon.

There’s only death. And fear. And the responsibility of leading men who look to him for guidance out of the smoke and into the daylight. He grips his compass like a lifeline and does his best. It’s almost good enough. They almost all make it to the next day.

Dick gets lost occasionally.

When he’s left to the watches of his chilly billet and the candles in the rest of the camp have long gone out. That’s when the isolation strikes hardest and the ghosts feel free to crowd in. They cast a shade so thick, he chokes, drowning on his own failures, his own insipidity. He wonders if he’ll ever make it out to see the sun again. If he’ll ever find the way back.

And then enters Nix.

With his sly, self assured grin and his dark, sardonic wit. He slips like a wish into Dick’s billet, or the potato cellar of a blown out building, or the back of the jeep when he purposely drives off the marked path. He takes Dick’s hand and cocks that brow that says “Trust me” and by God and all his angels, Dick does. He follows blindly and oh so willingly, grateful for the guide and indebted to Nix for knowing exactly when he’s in danger of venturing too far off course.

Nix strips him of the olive military wool that demands strict obedience. The color that barters not a hair of deviation from a pre-drawn map made by men who don’t know what it’s like to nose dive into the inferno of battle. Nix casts it away, tossing it to the floor and covers Dick’s skin with his own hands, paints him with his own array of colors. A black-brown fan of lashes skirting over his collarbone, the red of his mouth at Dick’s pulse point, coral pink tongue in the shell of his ear, the beach sand tan of his calloused fingers tightening around Dick’s naked bicep. Teeth with brightness to rival the Pacific white caps on his chest and abdomen. Eyes the color of expensive coffee from the tropics glancing up over his belt buckle, warm and rich.

Nix kisses him and he can feel the earth’s rotation slow beneath his feet.

Nix touches him and gravity is solid and real beneath his back once more.

Nix traces the constellation of Dick’s freckles with his lips and Dick can set time by the star’s orbit again.

He lets Nix take him apart and put him back together, piece by tattered piece. Until he’s whole and functional again, at least for a little while. Long enough to get his bearings and restart the cycle of playing tour guide through the landscape of dreary Europe, his band of Lost Boys in tow.

He comes to the siren song of Nix’s praises, his lover urging him on with clever fingers that play Dick's body like a well rehearsed instrument. When he’s caught his breath and regained his sense enough to flip their positions, Dick pins Nix down. Cages him against the cot and splays him wide, the scroll of his skin like fine golden parchment in the dim candlelight.

Nix squirms under the tenacious attention, craving speed and friction. But Dick is on a mission. He’ll recommit every part of him to memory, burying it deep in his psyche like treasure. Until the mental image of Nix bowing under his hand becomes as priceless and coveted as monstrous gemstones he can bask amongst at whim. Sorting them like a king sitting on his spoils. He’ll relearn the lines and transits of Nix’s form until he can recite in perfect detail the landmarks of his moles, the patterns of his body hair, the slope and angle of his wrists. He’ll stake his flag here, laying claim to Nix’s body and heart as conquistadors of old did to things and locations too precious to part with.

He can read his future in the curve of Nix’s hip bones. The universe in the earth tones of his eyes.

“Dick,” Nix whispers, something between a whine and a moan. He scraps desperate fingernails along Dick’s scalp, trying to steer his mouth where he needs it most. “Come on. Come on.”

Dick won’t be bullied off course. He runs the tip of his tongue along the shadow of the Adonis belt Nix used to have when he was in peak fighting shape at the start of the war, lingering at the scar just there above the pelvic crest. He lets his lips trek as fingertips do, memorizing the most scenic routes across and over and around this body he loves so dearly.

He steers southward down from the navel, following the trail of dark hair and Nix groans. He heads north to circumvent a nipple and Nix whimpers. He nibbles and sucks contrails on every inch he can find, until Nix bears the purple marks that label him as Dick’s territory and Dick’s alone.

He wrings curses and prayers and nonsense from Nix’s mouth. Until he arches beneath him and cries his release into the hush of Dick’s palm, breathy laughter squeezing through the spaces in Dick’s fingers.

“Jesus Christ,” Nix gasps, chest heaving with blasphemy and bliss. He tugs at Dick until he slides back up the length of his form, letting out the softest sigh for every slow kiss pressed to each body part on the journey up. “How do you do that? Remember exactly what gets me going? You always know.”

“I’m good at cartography,” Dick says.

“The hell does that mean?”

Dick just shrugs, cranes his neck down to pepper his shoulder with kisses.

Nix pulls a face that suggests Dick might be moderately insane, but then he laughs that ruby-ocean-wilderness-touchstone laugh of his and maneuvers Dick fully down on top of him for a long, lazy, silky sweet kiss. And though they’re both sated and satisfied for now, passing back and forth the same oxygen, filling each other's sails - it does not feel like journey’s end.

It feels like a beginning. Each and every time he’s with Nix and resets his course by the steady, unwavering foundation of his being. It’s always a new start. One he hopes against hope never stops resetting.

Because Nix has always been his True North.

Dick kisses his mouth and feels like he’s come home.

Ron Livingston in Beat - Gary Walkow, 2000 (7/10)

I love you Dick Winters

🤤

Stay. Don’t you ever leave me.