Contra natura – or “against nature” – is the magnum opus of the famous Spanish author Álvaro Pombo who finally decided to lay out his understanding of homosexuality after a lifetime of being openly gay. Pombo doesn’t write about the gays who imitate the heterosexual setup by getting married and setting up joint households. For those gays he has quite a bit of contempt because the kind of homosexuality that fails to embrace its unnatural (contra natura), anti-social dimension is, in Pombo’s eyes, pathetic and vaguely disgusting.
Pombo’s novel is about another kind of gays, the ones who are gay in order to avoid the complexities placed by women on the way to sex. That there is such a duality among homosexuals – the ones who want to be (or to marry) men who are like women and the ones that want a sex life free from female patterns – was a commonplace even in the prissy US 15 years ago. But now it’s all a big secret and we are supposed to pretend that the entirety of homosexuality can be reduced to the lifestyle embraced by Pete Buttigieg.
Pombo is blissfully unaware of political correctness and writes his novel to show what happens to the non-Buttigieg gays in old age. What do you do when you are 65, and your body simply can’t give you rapid-fire sex acts with a large variety of new partners? You have to buy the companionship of young men, Pombo says. You have to open yourself up to humiliation and abuse. To Pombo, that is perfectly fine. The gays, he says, should not be like the heterosexual
shit-eaters whom we have always envied and hated. Our purest connection is with failure, with marginalization and with death.
And that, Pombo believes, is fine. Gay men are the shadow of self-satisfied bourgeois propriety. They are a conduit to the darker, more painful and chaotic side of human beings, to the Dionysian rites of pleasure and pain that inspire non-reproductive creation. Instead of running down the streets in Pride parades, says Pombo, the love that dared not speak its name should now choose to not speak it in order to remain on the margins where, says Pombo, it belongs.
I am a heterosexual woman, and much of the novel’s text was hard for me to understand. It’s a beautifully written work of art. Pombo is one of the Spanish greats, having received every literary prize in existence, and deservedly so. But it took me far longer to read the novel because none of it was understandable to me or rooted in any sort of intuitive motivation. Which, of course, is the point.
I recommend the novel only if you are VERY open-minded, both from the left and from the right.
Clarissa's Blog 
When you said this book was a difficult read for a heterosexual woman before, I figured it was good. I don’t share Pombo’s ideological views (his kind of thinking leads to horrors beyond human comprehension), but I always welcome a book that actually understands gay men, and better yet is willing to talk about the worst of it. Even gay men who are interested in love and relationships are usually more sexually oriented than heterosexuals seeking the same thing.
Of course, if the average person knew about the most worst sides of gay sexuality, gay marriage never would’ve been legalized, so there’s a major ideological interest in keeping quiet.
I’m not sure if Pombo talks about this (or whether this was even popular in his gay scene at the time he was writing), but you might enjoy this 2015 documentary: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5073738/
I have a few books of this sort on my own to read list, I’ll update you if I get to them.
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He talks about it and also about reasons why people can turn out gay. For some reasons, it’s a big taboo and we are supposed to accept that part of LGBTQ is “born that way” and it has to be accepted while another part of LGBTQ is the exact opposite and should never accept how they are born. Which is very confusing.
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I think a great deal of it is inborn but it’s not so black and white as people make it out to be
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I’m surprised this was written as late as 2005. Most stuff in this vein was written in the 20th century.
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My copy of the book arrived this morning and I’m just about to start reading it.
The issue is a complex one, and simplification does not help. One important element to keep in mind is the concept of normalisation. The normalisation of homosexuality goes hand in hand with the normalisation of abortion, the destruction of intact families, the dismissal of sexual continence and other disasters of modern life.
There has always been a streak among homosexuals that saw homosexuality as the domain of deviation from the norm, i.e. deviancy, in some cases to the point of criminality (cf. Jean Genet, Luchino Visconti, Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Quentin Crisp), as an irrational and even anarchical force capable of subverting the norms of bourgeois society. At the same time there has also always been another streak which worked actively to join mainstream society, portraying homosexuality as simply another “flavour” of sexuality, and rather vanilla at that.
The reality is quite different. While there are of course many hundreds of thousands if not millions of homosexuals who lead sexual lives that are quite similar to those of heterosexuals except for the sex of their partners, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions – I have no idea how to quantify this phenomenon – who have sexual lives beyond the wildest imagination of most heterosexuals and even of quite a few homosexuals. You simply have no idea and you don’t really want to know.
As to the origins and causes – is one born or does one become a homosexual – speaking in terms of personal experience, I would say that for the most part one becomes a homosexual, albeit at a very early age. Probably, there is also a small number – again, how does one go about quantifying this? – of people who are actually born homosexual insofar as sexual orientation is considered a purely biological function instead of a cultural-cum-biological condition. There are interesting studies in this area, which support the idea of hormonal influences in utero (normally at around the sixth week of gestation).
Personally, I would say that some people are born with the predisposition to become homosexual – heterosexuality being the default position for most babies – and then they become homosexual if certain conditions are fulfilled in terms of family life. These are the usual ones; for boys: lack of a loving father and/or a strong male figure, presence of an overbearing/castrating mother, childhood trauma (any kind: from abandonment issues to sexual abuse, but really, ANY kind of trauma), any of these factors alone or in combination. I became aware of sexual attraction towards males at around six years of age, while most of my friends between 6 and 8 years of age, though others have reported ages as early as 5 and as late as 18-20, or even later.
Final considerations: I have three brothers, two of whom are also homosexual. This seems to be quite common, with about 50% of male homosexuals having at least one sibling (male or female) who is also homosexual. There are, apparently, half as many homosexual women as there are homosexual men, but the data are not reliable insofar as among women there seems to be a wider movement between homosexuality and heterosexuality, i.e. more women than men seem to lead heterosexual lives, move to homosexual lives and then go back to heterosexual lives. The vast majority of men instead, once they discover they are homosexual remain homosexual, even when they reject the so-called “gay lifestyle”, as in my case. I’m no longer gay but I’m still same-sex attracted, and this – presumably – will continue for the rest of my life.
What many people are not aware of – including readers of this blog – is that there are a great number of homosexuals like me who, after leading the “gay lifestyle”, have rejected it totally to embrace a life of continence, refusing to let themselves be defined by their sexual orientation. In a memorable video, the great Charlie Kirk – may his memory be a blessing – explained this to a young man, showing both compassion and understanding: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/34N9pIWc_pc
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Great point. Homosexual behavior has existed throughout human history, but for most of that time it was understood primarily as an act, not an identity. Today it’s framed as an identity, complete with a civil rights apparatus designed to enforce its “normalization.” That’s why I find it funny when people insist certain historical figures were gay as if that means anything. Like, do you really think Alexander the Great was wallowing about his oppressed status as a sexual minority, demanding equal rights for people like him from those mean heterosexuals? lmao.
And the same (controversially) goes for much in the middle east. Homosexual encounters are quite common over there. But it’s mostly thought of as an act. Something you do rather than something you are. And if there’s any identity involved, it’s more along the lines of “passive” and “active” roles in sex rather than heterosexual or homosexual.
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I read a lot about the gay culture and am particularly interested in the aspect Clarissa mentions, how men (presumably all) would behave sexually if they didn’t have to negotiate with women for access to sex. (Women have good reasons to not be promiscuous, including violence and pregnancy and much worse repercussions from STIs.) I understand what Clarissa says that it’s hard to read about as a heterosexual woman; it’s disorienting because it’s such a different mindset, never having to put on the breaks that women have to put on all the time when it comes to no-strings sex. But, like with everything, you read about it enough and get used to it and actually start understanding the underlying drives and perhaps even build something akin to an intuitive understanding. I find that Reddit provides plenty of eye-opening accounts of gay men’s attitudes toward love and sex. Also, reading romance and erotica written by gay men is quite instructive since they are on the whole much earthier than anything written by women and for women.
Anyway, a recent book of possible interest to the readership: BOYSLUT by Zachary Zane. It’s “a memoir and a manifesto” by the bisexual, extremely promiscuous (think thousands of partners) sex-columnist author, with plenty of emphasis on sex between men, kinks, etc. The book is on the whole uplifting and sex-positive, but definitely requires open-mindedness.
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It’s truly a different world. Human sexuality is so much more complicated than the standard narratives.
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Does anyone have an idea what’s going on with pornography in women’s publishing? Apparently it’s rampant. This book has 20k reviews.
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Yes, the pornography for women is all on Kindle. Women getting together with all kinds of creatures is very popular. The Orc Sworn is pretty memorable: https://www.goodreads.com/series/281847-orc-sworn
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Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
But seriously, wahmen, explain yourself!
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I’m discovering a whole new world here.
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I really think that AI (porn, “boyfriends,” “therapists” etc. )will be more destructive to women than men. Men are already used to being lonely and living atomized lives. Women, not so much.
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I actually read that book and it’s on the whole adorable; it is a monsterf*cker classic. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves the penis. But more on that later.
As someone who’s pretty steeped in the romance publishing industry, I have a lot of strong feelings and opinions about claims such as that pornography has entered women’s publishing. I will try to convey what the consensus among the authors is. But first, let’s define terms.
Romance is a genre with only two nonnegotiable tenets: 1) There must be a romantic relationship that is central to the plot, and 2) there must be a happy ending (often written as HEA, happily ever after, or HFN, happily for now). Romance comes in various lengths, but generally novel length (think 300-400 pages, or 6 or so hours to read) and novellas (150 pages, think 3 hours to read). Other than the two tenets, it’s free for all, which is why romance comes in many (MANY!) subgenres. You would be surprised how well written some romance novels are. But people generally tend to look down their noses at anything women love. However, that’s a story for another day.
Erotica: The sex is the plot. Erotica is generally novella or shorter (novelette or short story), meant to be read in an hour or two, tops. The main purpose of erotica is to titillate.
If anything is akin to porn, it would be erotica, because of their shared purpose to get people off. However, erotica is not porn either.
Porn exploits real living people. No form of literature does that. People having arbitrarily acrobatic or dubiously consenting or any other kind of sex on the page are not in porn. You use your imagination to create a mental image. The term “the therater of the mind” is appropriate here.
Now, romance comes with many different levels of sex content (often referred to as spice and characterized by chili pepper), starting from clean or sweet (think nothing but longing glances), to kissing only, to implied sex (fade to black), so some sex on page (few scenes and no crude language), to lots of sex and profanity on page, to kinkapalooza (multipartner sex, dubcon, taboo, various kinks). This is a good guide on spiciness. https://www.romancerehab.com/chili-pepper-heat-rating-scale.html
Now, there has always been sex in romance novels, it’s not a new phenomenon. In recent years, with the explosion of indie publishing, there has been an increase in certain subgenres of romance that traditional publishers haven’t touched (but you can bet your a$$ they do now that it’s lucrative), such as dark romance (think of the heros being various criminals, mobsters, stalkers, miscellaneous violent types) and monster/alien romance (where the book you quote falls). There is also influx of very young (early twenties) readers and influencers on TikTok who are simultaneously hungry for these genres but also embarrassed that they read them, which is leading a ridiculous backlash against explicit cover art (you used to be able to tell from the cover how sexually explicit a book it, but now everything has pastel cartoon covers like it’s a romcom, even though inside a woman might get railed in a sex dungeon by seven shape-shifter mafiosos; the whole cover art thing is a rant on its own).
Anyweay, there is a weird moral panic led by the youth that are simultaneously horny for sexplicit romance and weirdly regressive and pearl-clutching about it.
Women love sex. Women love to read about romance and sex. It has been shown many times that women have much livelier sexual fantasies than men, and they really respond strongly to erotic literature and not very strongly to visual stimuli like porn (which works for men). This is not new, but somehow every few years there are articles with people being shocked by what women read because the mainstream Hallmark narrative is that all women want to do is bake pink cupcakes and decorate Christmas trees and drink hot cocoa with their kids and eunuch husbands. 🙄 I am friends with a lot of male authors who should really know better, yet they consistently get shocked and re-shocked by what women read because there’s such a culturally ingrained narrative that men are the only ones with sex drives. I would actually recommend that all the men who think women don’t like sex go read some spicy romance and they will be quickly disabused of that notion and might get their eyebrows seared off in the process.
Monster romance is extremely popular because plenty of women love the idea of f*cking a giant monster who’s scary to eveyrone except her. Think of the movie Beauty and the Beast. No woman liked the stupid prince. Every woman (including Belle) would have totally been game to get it on with the Beast. Google why women like monsters. It’s a similar reason why they like criminal types (in fantasy, not real life). Monsters have huge and/or interesting penises, they are scary (but loving to her), they often embody the primal unbridled masculinity that straight women find appealing, they demand total surrender (a common female fantasy), etc.
tl; dr Women are and have always been very horny and hungry for raunchy literature. None of this is new. The moral panic is cyclic and rooted in misogyny, but the latest wave of panic has arisen from hypocritical prudish TikTok Gen Z influences and is exhausting and concerning.
The book above (Morning Glory Milking Farm) is a legendary classic, and it’s actually quite cute. Genre-wise, it falls under so-called cozy monster romance in that it’s actually low angst and focuses on the development of a nontoxic relationship between a human woman and a minotaur in a world where minotaur, mothmen, vampires, werewolves etc. are all just different races that live together in an essentially modern society. The premise of that book is that minotaur semen is used to basically make Viagra for humans, so minotaurs donate it for money, and there are these milking farms where minotaurs go to get jerked off. Violet is underemployed in her humanities field and gets a job in one such facility where she is a tech that helps jerk them off. There are many, many handjob scenes, and those could’ve only been written by someone who really loves dick. Anyway, Violet and one of her minotaur clients have a special connection etc. but this is all in the context of her trying to establish her life in a new town. It’s a really cute book, and I wouldn’t even consider it very spicy. There’s far, far raunchier stuff out there.
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I knew you were the right person to ask. Thank you so much for your detailed explanation!
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My pleasure! Always happy to discuss genre fiction, especially romance
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“The premise of that book is that…”
I’m still trying to imagine someone thinking that scenario up….
I actually did know, from students, that the general genre of interspecies romance (or intraspecies romance between not quite humans and other…. stuff) existed but… I dunno…. I. Just. Don’t. Know.
Delicate question: Getting a job to manually stimulate man-bulls (bull men?) to climax sounds an awful lot like “sex work”… and only saved by her falling in love with her first john…. How much does semi-prostitution feed into plots?
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“the general genre of interspecies romance…”
The one rule is all the parties must be sentient and consenting, but other than that it’s free for all! 🙂
Btw, speaking of interspecies sex, here’s a sci-fi short story that got all the serious awards and nominations. Not romance by any stretch and more distrurbing than any interspecies romance because there’s no communication between protagonist and her “roommate,” but excellent and well worth reading.
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/johnson_10_09/
“Delicate question: Getting a job to manually stimulate man-bulls (bull men?) to climax sounds an awful lot like “sex work”… and only saved by her falling in love with her first john…. How much does semi-prostitution feed into plots?”
This is actually a deeper question than you perhaps thought you were posing.
Part of the answer is that yes, Violet (the heroine) is deeply conflicted about it at the outset. It’s part of her character arc. Over time, she realizes she’s actually closer to a nurse or a phlebotomist as she develops understanding and empathy toward her patients (clients? I forget what they are called, but the setup is basically that of a medical clinic). As it turns out, most minotaurs don’t go there for the jollies but for the rather large payout (e.g., family men with mortgages and kids to send to college) and generally have their own complex lives.
Now, a bigger issue is sex work and sexual violence in romance. These questions are very common in romance, because sexual assault and forced prostitution are basically the center themes of women’s horror, something that women universally fear. (There is also the fact that romance and horror are two closest genres as they are the only two enamored of human carnality, but that’s a discussion for another day.) No matter how high or low esteem one holds romance as a genre in, the truth is that romance novels are creative works written by women and for women, so it is only understandable that the deep-seated fears shared by the author and the audience will find their way onto the page even if the story itself is nominally one of love and hope. In other words, women’s worries over sexual and physical violence often make it into even the most light-hearted romance.
For example, there it the subgenre of historical romance (Bridgerton is a popular recent TV series based on 20-year-old books). All of historical romance is centered on the facts that women couldn’t own property, divorce didn’t exist, women’s main value was virginity and if they lost it their futures were ruined, the only way to escape the confines of parental oversight and gain some sliver of freedom was to get married, basically replacing one master with another, yet women usually didn’t have the option of choosing their spouse and were basically sold into sexual servitude. The precariousness of that situation is the backbone of every historical romance novel, often coupled with the fact that the woman’s sexuality was something than only prostitutes owned, while “good” women weren’t supposed to acknowledge or enjoy. It’s a genre with lots of very lush writing, and it’s very uncomfortable to read as a modern-day reader about women with so few rights and so little agency, but it certainly speaks to the perennial struggles between sexuality, agency, and societal constraints.
Anyway, people like to look down on romance because it’s by women and for women, so it’s automatically assumed to be silly and frivolous. Even authors of other maligned genres, like horror, still like to crap on romance. Yet, romance is a best-selling genre globally and keeps the publishing industry in business (plus, about 18% readers of romance are men). You’d think that the fact the genre resonates with so many would have people treat it with curiosity rather than kneejerk disdain, but you’d be wrong. Misogyny is one hell of a drug.
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This is very enlightening. I also want to add that many (probably most) men have absolutely no idea how much female sexual fantasy relies on words. Words are for female sexuality what images are for male. This is actually great because nobody needs to be exploited for women’s erotica. It’s word-based! It’s healthy, it’s good.
As for women’s novels, I routinely get mocked in professorial circles for reading massive quantities of mommy fiction. These books are not only very enjoyable to read but they are a way for women to play out different scenarios that matter to us. They are a toolbox of female psychological coping and life skills. People scoff because their imagination is impoverished and they can’t imagine how other people’s minds work.
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“I routinely get mocked in professorial circles for reading massive quantities of mommy fiction. These books are not only very enjoyable to read but they are a way for women to play out different scenarios that matter to us.”
I feel this so hard. I work in STEM, in one of the macho math-heavy fields, so I absolutely do not mention I read romance or have any connection to it because most of my male colleagues already barely accept the idea of women in this career. If we talk about fiction or movies, I only discuss sci-fi, horror, and thrillers (all of which I read and enjoy), which are considered worthy masculine genres. I don’t want to waste my time and energy trying to convince people who will never be convinced that the genre so many women enjoy is meaningful and worthwhile.
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There’s always this suggestion that I must be primitive or unable to understand other kinds of reading if I enjoy these books. Even though it’s very clear that I read widely, voraciously, and at different levels of complexity.
I have found that it’s people who are, indeed, uncertain of their brain power who need to engage in performative condemnations of this literature. It’s always so showy.
“YOU?? I can’t believe you of all people want to waste your time on this GARBAGE!!!” The definition of protesting too much.
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“romance is a best-selling genre globally and keeps the publishing industry in business”
I seem to recall hearing at some point that over half of everything published in the US are romance novels… (by way of contrast over half of everything published in Japan are comic books).
Over the years I’ve read a few in different circumstances and while it will never be a go to genre for me I can understand (some of) the appeal it has for women.
It will say that a couple I read from the late 50s early 60s were ridiculously straight laced… the leads didn’t make out or kiss they barely touched each other. It would be 200 pages of missteps and “But I’ve loved you all along!” on the last page…
One (I had to read for work) had a soft core rape scene in a dinghy (a lot of… wave imagery)….
I even read a Barbara Cartland (with special guest star: Sissy! who was in England… for some… reason) …. anyway…. it ended with a 15 or so page debate between the leads about whether they should get together. She raised objections and he overcame them with facts and logic!
On the whole… they don’t seem that popular in Poland (fitting an overall lack of love stories in Polish literature). Series of Scandinavian ‘historical’ multi-volume romance sagas seem at least as popular as Harlequin…
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Modern romance is fun and very varied (also much less rape-y and more concerned about contraception than the 60s-80s fare; even books from early 2000s often read as dated). Harlequin is definitely no longer the main purveyor or romance by any stretch. You might enjoy some newer books; I can recommend some well-written free books if you’re interested. LOL Barbara Cartland is an infamous author prude! There’s an 80s interview between her, foaming at the mouth about on-page sex being vulgar, and Jackie Collins, cool as a cucumber and slightly amused, asking why a natural part of romance that people enjoy in real life should never be depicted on page.
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