One of the primary elements that’s kept me away from indulging in the wet and wistful pleasures of a good romance novel is that the sex was never rough enough and men were always drippy. They were either counts, billionaires, cowboys, or some other sort of amorphous type of “stud” that I’ve never encountered in Real Life, all of them talking like overly eager participants in a Renaissance Festival or dull vampires. BDSM novels provided no relief, either; with their protocols, safe-words, props, and theatrics—all feel as tedious to me as a Japanese tea ceremony. Or just like horny LARPing.
Call it a failure of imagination, but I need some verisimilitude in my romance reading to keep my attentions away from the kingdom of broadband pornography moaning my name.
Thankfully, mid-way through the RT Booklovers’ conference that Kelly Faircloth and I attended last week, she and a fellow romance lover suggested that I give Cara McKenna’s Willing Victim a spin. The book, they said, was a cult hit for women who like it rough—featuring deftly drawn, complicated men who do not have the ability to shapeshift or sparkle.
I devoured the novella in one night. Willing Victim centers around Flynn, a part-time-boxer, and Laurel, a wayward woman in her late twenties with an engineering degree who has put 0ff adulthood after her mother’s suicide. After being invited to one of Flynn’s fights, Laurel is introduced to one of Flynn’s current lovers, Pam, who asks Laurel to join her and Flynn back at his apartment for the main event.
“He gets off on being rough, domineering and cruel, but its not who he is,” Pam tells Laurel, “Just like me wanting to pretend a man is forcing me once in a while doesn’t mean I secretly think I deserve to get raped or that I’d ever in a million years want to be, it’s about control—having it or giving it up.”
Willing Victim came out a few years before Fifty Shades of Grey, and in many ways it’s is the exact inverse of E.L. James’s erotic phenomenon. Instead of a screwy billionaire who plays weirdo mind games, Flynn is a construction worker with a spartan apartment who is upfront about his desires and his romantic attraction to Laurel. There are no “walls” Laurel has to break through to reach Flynn’s vulnerable side; indeed, it’s Laurel who shrouds herself in emotional armor as Flynn attempts more intimacy. In place of Christian Grey’s red room filled with paddles, spurs, and various expensive harnesses, Flynn and Laurel’s sexual exploits involve a towel spread out on dusty apartment floor, a full-length mirror and a roll of duct tape. That’s all.
Most importantly, Flynn’s desire to command and overpower a woman through rape-play (with her enthusiastic consent) isn’t a symptom of a malformed personality, as it is with Christian Grey. Kink, here, is not evidence of a problem to be solved.
Early in Willing Victim, Pam invites Laurel to watch she and Flynn go at it to see if rape-play is something Laurel might be interested in. After some friendly banter, Pam and Flynn get down to business. Flynn grabs Pam’s jaw hard in show of “dominance and ownership”; he gives commands like “choke on my cock like a good girl” with a cool, easy confidence, and fucks Pam harder when she issues meek protests.
From the corner of the apartment, Laurel watches, transfixed:
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