NOM

So I've been listening to gay romance audiobooks lately. (What a way to start a conversation!) It's helping me to fill a void in my life while I figure out how to get out there and meet a special someone. Very hard to do when you're gay, on top of all of the other challenges of dating in middle age.

Anyway, they usually follow a pretty stereotypical pattern: guy meets guy (usually someone in an antagonistic position at first), guy falls for guy, they are happy for a while, some seemingly irreconcilable conflict comes up, then everything gets resolved and it's happy ever after...

Well, in my searches for audiobooks I keep running across two strange genres. The first is a pretty obvious/normal one--you know, boy plus vampire, or boy plus werewolf, or vampire boy plus vampire werewolf, etc. The second, is--well--a little strange. It's set in a place called the Omegaverse. Men and women aren't just hetero-/homo-/bi-. Some are Betas, which are just normal straight/gay/bi folks. But the others are either Alphas or Omegas. Omegas can get pregnant. Yes. Boys who get pregnant and raise kids. And the Alphas are the only ones that can fertilize. Plus, there's some kind of irresistable pheromone thing going on that drives Alphas and Omegas together. Which is, of course, exploited to create conflict in the story.

Weird. I get it...but, not for me. Thoughts?

Hmm. So, the Alphas and Omegas technically are not human since they can't procreate with the Betas, but only with each other? It kind of sounds like they've just shuffled off the regular spectrum of people's sexuality to the side and replaced it with the same kind of binary viewpoint that has been held as "normal", only with all males. Seems like lazy writing to me.

I agree. In the stories there seemed to be a clear message that Alphas and Omegas were superior somehow.

Romance novels are basically fantasy fulfillment, so I'm sure the Omegaverse serves to fulfill somebody's deepest desires. I've noticed that most of these Alpha/Omega novels are written by women, which is interesting. They also seem to be the authors of vampires and werewolves stuff.

My mother loved Twilight. I'm sure there's something to that, although maybe it's also a stereotype that women like vampires... I don't know...

Well, cis hetero romance novels are mostly written by women because they're woman porn. (Not really, yo. Need to make that clear.) I have no idea how this stuff works otherwise. I would have expected more male authors.

The Omegaverse stuff reminds me of those sparrows that have four sexes, and also a bad movie called Junior wherein Arnold Schwarzenegger gets pregnant. Both demonstrate that nature is amazing in its variety and imagination.