I had read Joey Hill’s The Vampire Queen’s Servant, and didn’t much like it. Sometimes a paranormal romance is so heavy — everything is deep and earth shattering — I start to giggle. And while I have no problem understanding why a submissive male would seek a dominant female, I never could figure out why the hero in that book wanted to spend his life as a servant: it was a Big Black Hole where the motive should have been, IMO.

However, I know Joey Hill has a legion of fans, and not just in erotic romance. Readers who otherwise don’t really read erotic romance, never mind BDSM erotic romance, love her books. If you read this blog, you know I believe book reviews are objective in many ways. If a host of reviewers think an author is really good, and I don’t think she is (this is different from thinking she IS good, but just not my personal taste), I think I must be wrong, and I try again. The fact that I enjoyed Natural Law so much suggests that my system is a good one.

Natural Law is the second in Hill’s Nature of Desire series, but can be read as a standalone, which is what I did. All the Nature of Desire books are explicit erotic BDSM romance, most with female Doms. Most of the protagonists are at least loosely connected, many having spent time at The Zone, an “exclusive”, “high class”, “upscale” (and adjectives like that were so frequent in the text that I became really curious what a “low class” one looked like) BDSM nightclub.

In this book, BDSM isn’t a kink, but a sexual identity. As the heroine puts it:

D/s wasn’t a game to her. It wasn’t something she played at. In the last few years she’d been able to admit her sexual submissiveness was integral to who she was.

(Although, I must admit that at times the book did read a bit like a lesson on how not to be prejudiced against BDSM identified people.)

Mackenzie “Mac” Nighthorse is a big, brawny, rugged, successful homicide detective investigating a murder in Tampa’s BDSM community. Mac is BDSM-identified, and a submissive. The conflict in this book is not about how others can accept BDSM-identified individuals, but more about how Mac’s internal struggle to accept his own identification as a submissive (and there’s external conflict as the murder case heats up towards the end). So while the scene when Mac convinces his boss to let him go undercover at The Zone by revealing his sexual identity was very compelling reading, it merely paves the way for Mac’s introduction to Violet, a BDSM-identified Dom who is attracted to Mac the minute she sees him.

Romance novels create worlds, and just as it’s hard for me to say whether the Regency England historical romance writers create is “accurate” (as a philosopher, I would spend all my time figuring out what is meant by “accurate” anyway), it’s hard for me to say how “realistic” Hill’s portrayal of the Tampa BDSM scene is. As a reader, the world an author creates -whether it comes out of her imagination whole cloth, or is her version of a world that exists outside the novel — has to hang together, and this one did. I was fascinated, not just by the behavior and practices, but by the psychology governing them. Little things, like Violet’s immediate realization that Mac is a sub, from not only his silver cuff with onyx inlay and scrollwork, but his bearing, made the world feel very real.

A number of books telling the love story of those with marginalized sexualities focus on the inner conflict of one partner accepting his identity, or the external conflict of the outside world accepting the lovers. What I really liked about Natural Law was that neither of those categories really captures the conflict. The major issue preventing these two people who are very attracted to, and like each other, from getting together is that while Mac appears to have accepted him sub identity on the surface, one trip to the rentable private “playrooms” below the club’s glass floor reveals that he hasn’t: on some level Mac needs to keep the control in his sexual encounters, distancing himself from his own true nature and from true intimacy with Dom women. Violet nails it instantly:

You like to test yourself. That’s what you’ve used your Mistresses for. They’re just an extension of your workout, testing your skills to resist weakness.

Yes, Violet and Mac get it on … and on … in very creative ways, sometimes with partners, but the book is really about their emotions and their psychology, and that’s what makes it much more than erotica. Just as in any other romance, one partner understands the other in a way no one else ever has.

If Violet’s big insight into Mac had been “you’re a sub”, I would have rolled my eyes. It’s like an m/m where one partner teaches the other that he’s gay. I mean, can you imagine an m/f where the big breakthrough is getting the woman to admit she is hetero?* This book is beyond that, and that’s why it was good. (*I know, I know, the issues ARE a bit different for a sexual identity society tells you over and over you are not supposed to have.)

On the other hand, I am curious about why this sort of book would appeal to a kind of genre reader (i.e. me, and anyone who reads romance) with a pretty limited set of expectations about her male hero. I think in some ways Hill does in the text what Mac tries to do in his life: present a sub who … is still an alpha — EVEN, and this is key, in those moments of hard core BDSM play when he seems at his most submissive. Consider this line:

an alpha wolf who chose the role of beta in the bedroom, but only for the right woman

You have here all the earmarks of alpha masculinity that define the genre: “alpha”, “wolf”, “chooses” (he is autonomous), “only for” (again, he has control). So while I think we have in Hill’s novel a “new version of an alpha”, we don’t have a really mold breaking hero.

As I was reading Natural Law, I was asking myself why I read erotic romance at all, when I get more of an erotic charge out of a long delayed kiss in a historical romance than the marathon sexual gymnastics I encounter in erotic romance. Then it hit me: I love reading love stories, and I especially love contemporaries. I think erotic romance is some of the best contemporary romance out there, and this book is a case in point.

That’s what a good Mistress did. Break him down to the core, so he was open to her, both finding ultimate completion in a total connection of the mind with the body.

Isn’t that union of body and soul just what an HEA is in any romance? (although see a different way to read this passage below).

The other part of the book I really appreciated was Violet and Mac’s bringing their relationship out into the world beyond the BDSM community. How do a male sub and female Dom translate a relationship forged in the crucible of a rigid, clearly defined social world to regular society, especially with its opposing gender expectations? Little bits of conversation like this are indicative of what I mean:

“I want something, Mac,” she said. “Anything, Mistress.” “No. I’m…I’m not asking it that way.”

I haven’t said much about the murder subplot. I generally don’t expect much from suspense subplots in erotic romance, but actually, I was quite drawn in to this one. I had no idea whom the culprit was and was genuinely on the edge of my seat at the climax when our hero and heroine are in real danger. The book was just entertaining all the way around.

But what about the subtitle of this review? I did notice a subtle privileging of BDSM relationships as better able to get at the essence of romantic love than “vanilla” relationships. And even the word “vanilla” has a negative connotation, of boring, unimaginative, perhaps even unsatisfying sex. At one point in the text, the phrase “mundane world” is used, making the subtext text, as they say.

Here are some quotes that get at what I mean:

Sometimes, you just were what you were. Unfortunately, this was one of those things that only those who felt it would understand.

it was, in fact, beyond most people’s comprehension, like a choice of religion or lifemate.

To be given the trust of a sub… Every Mistress, every Master longs for that. It’s a gift beyond comprehension to the vanilla world. Maybe even to subs.

If I compare this language to language I have seen in m/m or used by gay men and women, it’s different. I don’t recall hearing “beyond your comprehension” when gay people talk about their sexual identity to heterosexuals. Nonetheless, it’s probably accurate.

one of the most intense forms of sexual interaction there was.

but she knew D/s went deep into the psyche of each individual, with often unpredictable reactions.

That’s what a good Mistress did. Break him down to the core, so he was open to her, both finding ultimate completion in a total connection of the mind with the body.

She knew he sensed the rousing of the Dominant in her

I put this one in there because it reminds me of books where the heroine is a wolf or shapeshifter — and the beastly part of the “essence”, the “real” part. In that sense, maybe this language has a corollary in “mate” talk in paranormals?

This place isn’t about games. It’s about getting past the games.

What does this last line imply? To me, in the context of all the other bits of text I have quoted, it implies that “vanilla” relationships are bound by mass society’s games, but BDSM relationships penetrate to the core or essence of the partners. To me, any sexual identity is social (and political) most of the way down. Why is BDSM a “natural” law while heterosexual relationships are socially constructed? And why the implicit aligning of “nature” with “essence” and “depth” here?

This is not the first BDSM romance I have read in which language is used that suggests not only that “vanilla” folks “won’t get it” — which is fine, because they usually don’t — but that “vanilla” folks are just not having the kind of relationships, sexual or otherwise, that “penetrate” or get at the “essense” or are as “psychologically deep”, or as “extreme” in some valuable way, as BDSM ones. There’s a kind of unfavorable comparison going on that makes me uncomfortable.

My personal guess — which is more than possibly wrong, so please share alternative views — is that BDSM identified folks are so sick of others telling them they are merely playing games, that BDSM is a “kink” that is merely a break from “vanilla”, and has nothing to do with who they are, the way a heterosexual or homosexual identity does, that this language is meant in some way to emphatically combat that, and portray BDSM as essence, not experiment.

But in doing so, heterosexual identity is “othered” in a way I don’t appreciate overly much. You can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, not even if they’re whips and chains.

I’ve rambled on long enough. But this book was a lot of fun to read — a quick read actually – and also gave me a lot to think about. Can’t ask for more than that.

Tags: Joey Hill, Natural Law