Baring it All

Teal Deer (TL; DR)

Baring it All: Where have all the condoms gone?

Over the past four or five years, I’ve noticed an uptick in unprotected sex in romance novels and erotic romances and I’m both fascinated by where it’s coming from (pun fully intended!) and intensely disturbed, as someone who grew up during the height of the AIDS crisis. Condoms were everywhere in media at the time. Remember Vivian offering Edward his pick of prophylactics in Pretty Woman? “I’m a safety girl!” she trilled, adorably. But safety girls are a rare breed these days. In more ways than one.  

Now, this isn’t new. Obviously. As my friend Elizabeth Kerri Mahon pointed out on Bluesky, “Given how many pregnant heroines are featured in Harlequin Presents every month, you would think birth control never existed.” She added that the  Harlequins she read in the 1970s and ‘80s “weren’t like that.” But secret babies with tycoons have been that imprint’s bread and butter for at least two decades. And elsewhere in romance, you can find books going back years wherein some nubile 21-year-old is getting knocked up by their dad’s gruff, older best friend. It never fails to crack me up that Zoe York, writing as Chloe Maine, has an entire series called—and set in—Conception Ridge. Get your tubes tied, wear a full-body condom, insert a sponge, pray for sudden-onset menopause…because a visit there clearly means the odds of pregnancy are extremely high. And I really enjoyed Adriana Anders’s Well Bred, about a woman who just wants a baby and hooks up with a guy—claiming no strings, no emotions—to get the job done.

Breeding kink has gone a lot more mainstream these past few years, along with hetero Omegaverse (IIRC, it used to be exclusively gay; I don’t know when/how the straights got a hold of it). I’m not sure how to explain the latter because it’s not my lane, but the former is pretty much what exactly what it sounds like: finding the act of impregnation itself sexually arousing. I’m not a psychologist or evolutionary scientist, but I feel like the root of both breeding kink and Omegaverse is the biological impulse to mate and procreate—and it’s eroticized as the ultimate in possession, “owning” someone, marking them as yours and cementing it with offspring.

When I put it like that, it’s not very romantic. Rest assured, in the hands of the right authors it absolutely can be—and in the hands of a lot of other authors, it can have some pretty disturbing messaging. I mean, if you look back at the more traditional romances of the 1980s and 1990s, getting married and having a baby was the ultimate heteronormative Happily Ever After. Cementing gender roles and patriarchal ideas of home and hearth. This is in the same vein, except without the need for wedding rings or a white picket fence. It’s hornier, darker, wrapping traditional values in the thinnest veneer of taboo and kink. You shouldn’t want this big, broody, alpha male to spurt inside you and fertilize your eggs, but isn’t it so hot when he does?   

The thing is, the more we see it, the less taboo it becomes. After a while, it’s normalized. Even the risk of STDs is hand-waved away. There’s maybe one throwaway sentence where the characters say “I’ve been tested” and then it’s off to the splooge-soaked races. (Romance phlebotomists must be making bank. Look at all these protags singlehandedly keeping their labs in business.) It takes on a particularly insidious bent when you consider that, right at this cultural moment, contraceptives are being demonized. The current regime is moving to make it entirely illegal—just look at the planned destruction of 10 million dollars’ worth of USAID birth control and the labeling of IUDs, hormone implants and pills as “abortifacients” (which they are not!). And there is a huge online influencer push occurring, sowing disinformation and fearmongering, encouraging young white women to eschew the Pill. Now add that to the promotion of the sexual allure of condom-less sex and having men flood your innards with their seed. Cue a real-life baby boom, raising that birth rate!

Being pregnant and having babies is way less sexy in reality, no matter how bucolic it looks when a tradwife sells the lifestyle on TikTok. Especially if you don’t have a hot rich guy spoiling you rotten. Congratulations, you are gestating and then raising children in a country that wants to take away your health insurance and doesn’t care if your kid gets shot in kindergarten. But by the time that lesson sinks in, it’s too late.

Whoa, I took that to a grim place. But, I’m sorry to say, a grim place is where things like this can end up. Condom-free is never truly risk-free.