Why Are So Many Young Women Obsessed with Gay Romance?
There's a lot to unpack here.
For years I have been observing my fellow female book readers becoming weirder and weirder. Book club women (and frankly, any women who spend a lot of time in women-only clubs) can be a little coven-ish, and my brief attempts at going to book club meetings were mostly unbearable.
Conversations about plot would devolve into therapy sessions where other L.A. preschool moms overshared about their husbands, their infidelities, and their sex lives. I decided to close the book on group activities with book women.
When the back-to-back sensations of Twilight and then 50 Shades of Gray hit this population of women (roughly ages 18 to 40), things got even weirder. A multitude of fanfic sites blossomed. This is of course where 50 Shades came from: it started life as X-rated fanfic with the lead characters from Twilight.
But at least these books had recognizably aspirational normie romantic characters: a handsome, brooding, strong male who falls desperately in love with the heroine for life. Infidelity? He’d rather die. She threatens to leave him? It’s the end of his entire world.
No wonder women swooned at Edward and Christian Gray—these two characters stood in for the timeless male hero that young ladies swooned for, even if they weren’t allowed to admit it to each other. Yes, in fact, ladies, you do want to be swept off your feet by a heterosexual man who thinks you are the most alluring creature ever born.
But this traditional female fantasy has been replaced. Gen Z is not interested in these idealized male-female romances.
Because they’re interested in male-male romances.
Somewhere along the way, young women stopped craving self-inserting themselves into romantic storylines, and instead started preferring to watch two men self-insert themselves into, er, each other.
