Dark Romance is a Rebellion

It can be hard to explain my enjoyment of the dark romance genre to an outsider. Describing some of my favorite titles is like swinging open the doors of a trauma museum or, at the very least, confessing my love of angst porn. Behold: people being hurt! Graphically, so! 

But despite the genre being so fraught with triggering topics, it is actually incredibly safe. Books come with trigger warnings; authors remind readers to take care of their mental health; the online communities are largely women, and people (men) get one-strike banned for attempting to slide into DMs. Dark romance is space crafted by—and made for—women.

Women make money off these books. Women form groups to talk about what they are reading. Women see themselves in the protagonists—being hurt in a world that largely doesn’t care about your existence, but always getting back up again. 

Violence against women is a fact of life. Most (all?) dark romance readers have experienced it in their lives. A romantic partner that doesn’t take “no” for an answer. A company leader who slams his fist on the desk when he’s mad. A stranger on the bus who seems entitled to your personal space. And don’t even get me started on the way men talk about—and to—women they don’t know online. 

If gendered violence is an inevitability, then aren’t we owed the catharsis of staking a claim in it for ourselves? To me, it makes all the sense in the world. Women are revisiting familiar narratives behind the safety of a glossy paperback cover. We can slam the book shut when we’ve had enough. We can talk about noncon scenes like the worst part of them is the cringy dirty talk (ugh). 

We thumb through the pages after midnight and indulge in the darkness. Reading is a quiet, cozy pastime and it carves out space to sit with difficult themes or emotions. There are a lot of challenging experiences that come with being a woman: places we can’t travel, spaces we aren’t welcome, remarks we have to bite back. Dark romance picks out the sutures we have painstakingly set for ourselves to reveal the discomfort underneath. 

Dark romance lets us bleed quietly, together, and bathe in the spectrum of complicated feelings that come with sexuality and survival. Why deny reality when we can carve it into a caricature of itself and worship it like a false god? 

Maybe when we’re done, and the moonlight is soft, we can set it alight like an effigy. We can burn the pieces and parts of the world that told us as little girls that we would only even be the object of desire, and never the Creator. 

We own this space. All of it.