Patriarchial Sexualities (part 1)

By Jenifer Carter

Warning

Contains spoilers for Lights Out if that concerns you.

The latest book I’m mad about is Lights Out by Navessa Allen. This book is marketed as a dark stalker romance that depicts various kinks including but not limited to: consensual dubious consent, breath play, knife play, fear play, and mask play.

Per Goodreads, Lights Out is part of a #1 New York Times best selling series, was an instant USA TODAY best seller, and went viral on BookTok. And I find that concerning!! Because this particular novel presents such a specific, heteronormative interpretation of kink that is ultimately incredibly regressive and upsetting if you spend like half a second thinking about it.

A short summary with many spoilers

Our main character, Aly, is a trauma nurse who watches “Masked Men” tiktoks to unwind after a long day caring for others.

Our hero, Josh, is a hacker and son of the serial killer dubbed “The Ken Doll Killer.” He spends his time socially isolating (for fear someone will recognize him as the Ken Doll Killer’s son) and posting #MaskedMen thirst traps on a popular social media app.

Aly comments on his posts and catches Josh’s attention. He recognizes her as his roommate’s ex-girlfriend and begins to lurk her socials. Josh then becomes obsessed: he breaks into Aly’s home to plant surveillance devices, hacks into the hospital’s security system to monitor her, and in general tracks her movements and activities.

Josh is very kind about it though! He breaks into Aly’s car so he can make sure it’s warm when she finally leaves work after a long shift in which she helped treat victims of a mass shooting. Josh even drives her home and brings her snacks because she’s so tired. He later shovels snow out of her driveway and leaves takeout in her empty refrigerator, and buys her nice security equipment because her house is so easy to break into.

Is it any wonder that Aly is disturbed, but also charmed by this gentleman stalker??

They engage in some home invasion non-con fantasies, but Josh is ever the gentleman and reassures Aly that she’s the one in control. He tells her, “No safe words,” but that he will stop as soon as she says to stop. And, in the erotic coup de grâce of the novel, Aly fucks a knife (which the author makes a cheeky reference to in her dedication).[1]

Throughout all of this, Aly’s life in the city is plagued by the constant threat of sexual violence from strangers. She has a gun in her home in case of a legitimate home invasion, takes martial arts classes to practice self-defense, and encounters rapists constantly at the hospital where she works.

The second act of the novel involves Aly catching the attention of a particularly sociopathic rapist at the hospital. When he tries to break into her home to rape her, Josh is there to stop him.

Aly and Josh end up killing him, and spend the last part of the book working with the mafia to dispose of the body and cover their tracks. They also deal with their respective traumas and decide to commit to a relationship.

Regressive Anti-urbanism

There’s a lot to unpack here, but it’s notable to me that the backdrop for our story is a city that poses a constant threat to women.

Aly works in a hospital in the “inner city, in a metropolis known for its sky-high crime rates” where she constantly treats “stabbings, rapes, gunshot wounds, abuse victims, survivors of horrific car accidents, you name it.” [2] As a trauma nurse, she’s exposed to myriad horrors on a near daily basis.

Further, an obsession with true crime lurks in the periphery of Lights Out: Josh, son of a serial killer, is wary of dating true crime fans lest they recognize him as The Ken Doll Killer’s son; Aly admits to watching a lot of true crime documentaries[3], though she swears she’s not like other girls not that into the genre.[4] Between the city’s high crime rates and a true crime media diet, Aly takes strong measures to protect herself from the big city and its constant threats:

Living alone in a big city and seeing the worst of what it could do to women on a nightly basis made me paranoid. I had a gun in my car and one more besides the one I now held hidden nearby. I slept with a baseball bat beside my bed and mace and throwing knives on my nightstand within easy reach. Two days a week, I took a hand-to-hand combat course taught by an ex-marine who didn’t go easy on me because I was the only woman in his class. [5]

Okay, first: lmao.

Second: her fear is about what the city will do to women. Once she steps out the door, a woman must have constant vigilance, an armory, and martial arts training to survive the constant threats of rape, abduction, or murder by an unknown stranger on a dark street.

Josh also fears for Aly’s safety in a city full of men: “The thought of her unarmed in this city made me want to both rage and puke at the same time….”[6] As something of a stalker himself, he understands just how dangerous the unmasked men of the city can be. He even buys her a fancy home security system after he proves how easily “someone truly determined” can break into her house.[7]

Even his own behavior toward Aly frightens Josh. He worries that his own actions are a threat to her, that he is not unlike his serial killer father. Josh wonders how far his play-acting as a masked man can be pushed until he inadvertently hurts the woman he’s obsessed with.

This ever-present fear of men smacks of anti-urbanism![8] Navessa Allen’s setting rests on an underlying assumption that the urban environment is fundamentally dangerous for women, that proximity to unknown others heightens the possibility of encountering men’s inevitable and unpredictable aggression.[9]

Aly and Josh eroticize these anxieties through their respective consumption and creation of Masked Men content, sublimating their fears into embodied sexual experiences. In this way, their sexual expressions are “encoded by the culture” in which they live, and their perceptions of gender roles. These expressions in turn “reflect and reinforce this culture’s values and interests.” [10]

The worst part about this book is it exposed me to the hashtag #MaskedMen, a very cringe subset of short-form video content catering to people interested in being overpowered by “morally gray” men during a home invasion or kidnapping (as far as I can tell).[11]

Kink is complex, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with finding traumatic or abject experiences erotically fulfilling. I do wonder, though, what it means that this particular power fantasy is being monetized and sold to women through social media algorithms. I think this particular “dark romance” fad relies on specific cultural assumptions that seem specifically anti-feminist and reactionary.

  1. After Josh stabs a knife directly into Aly’s mattress, he demands she ride the handle. She does! ↩

  2. Allen, Nevassa. Lights Out, 2. ↩

  3. Ibid, 258. ↩

  4. Ibid., 221. ↩

  5. Ibid, 29. ↩

  6. Ibid., 72. ↩

  7. Ibid., 180. ↩

  8. According to the author’s website bio, she grew up in the mountains, has worked on a farm, and has served in the military. My personal biases lead me to assume she doesn’t actually know anything about living in a city? ↩

  9. Dworkin, Andrea. Right-Wing Women, 12. [[Dworkin]] ↩

  10. Ellison, Marvin. Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality, 39. ↩

  11. I had a screen recording from TikTok I was going to include showing just how weird and bad these videos are, but idk if i want to see that on my website lol ↩