Why are so many women writing about rough sex?
Recently I have found myself wondering about the prevalence of rough sex in new fiction written by women. It’s viscerally present in You Know You Want This, the new short-story collection by Kristen Roupenian (who shot to fame last year with Cat Person, published in the New Yorker): I found some of the scenes so unpalatable that I had to keep putting it down. They (spoiler alert) include a woman strangled to death as part of a sex game; a man who imagines his penis is a knife when he has sex; and a woman who says to the guy she is sleeping with: “I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you can. After you’ve punched me, when I’ve fallen down, I want you to kick me in the stomach. And then we can have sex.”
Now, my personal discomfort with the sexual content is no comment on its quality – fiction that never challenges us isn’t good fiction at all. Each reader can make up their own mind about how good the work is. But what is interesting about this rough sex is what it tells us about the current cultural moment. It is supposed to be
edgy and transgressive – in You Know You Want This, it feels deliberately put there to shock – and yet it’s everywhere. More often than not it is women writing it and female characters desiring it, and frequently those characters are using sadomasochistic sex as a way of processing their own trauma. The #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have shone a light on abuse and harassment, so it’s no wonder a new generation of women are exploring how that manifests itself in sexual relationships.
In Sally Rooney’s much-lauded Normal People, the heroine Marianne brings the legacy of the abuse she has suffered at home into the bedroom: “Will you hit me? she says.
For a few seconds she hears nothing, not even his breath.
No, he says. I don’t think I want that. Sorry.”
It also features in Rooney’s 2017 debut novel Conversations with Friends, where Frances, another selfloathing, self-harming heroine asks a man to hit her while in bed: “I felt I was a damaged person who deserved nothing. Would you ever hit me? I said. I mean if I asked you to.”
And in Roxane Gay’s 2017 shortstory collection, Difficult Women, the female characters are beaten, raped and strangled. Again, trauma is a factor:
“‘Hit me,’ I said. I begged. I grabbed his hand and curled his fingers into a fist and held his fist to my breastbone. I said, ‘Please, if you love me, hit me.’”
It has become a common narrative device and not one limited to literary fiction, as Fifty Shades of Grey demonstrates. That book was heavily criticised for equating a predilection with BDSM with a traumatic childhood, and indeed these are associations that have dogged the BDSM community for many years. Pamela Stephenson Connolly wrote for this newspaper that “BDSM, played in a safe and consensual manner, is not proof of mental or physical illness, essential badness or emotional damage from trauma or abusive parenting.”
This line of thinking has been noted in Rooney’s work. Normal People’s “portrayal of the complexities of submission, dominance and consent can never quite shake the suggestion that Marianne is somehow abnormal, or damaged,” wrote Helen Charman in the White Review, suggesting that there was something “Victorian” in the narrative desire to pathologise her. Others, perhaps partly because of her Irishness, have sensed the remnants of a religious morality in Rooney’s writing about sex.
However, some women do draw a link between rough sex and trauma. Gay has written extensively about her own rape and its legacy, including fantasising about her attacker. A young woman I interviewed, who asked not to be named, told me of her own rape: “As gross as it sounds, I used to search for almost identical scenes in porn as it was the only thing I could get off on, even