I realize, despite my age and sex, that I am probably not the target for the new Wuthering Heights movie. I haven’t read the book and have a mild distaste for Gothic British lit in general. What’s more, I’m a happily married woman with no deficiencies in my real-life happiness that require erotic fiction to compensate.

But unfortunately, no one is safe from the internet, and now that I’ve seen the teaser trailer that dropped on Wednesday, my distaste has intensified. Whether your thoughts on Brontë’s novel are positive, negative, or nonexistent, you should be able to recognize that whatever Emerald Fennell is selling in her new trailer, it’s not romance. 

The entire trailer is a litany of overwrought vignettes, nearly all sexual, most disturbing, and some downright bizarre (one involves a fish). There are blindfolds and whips. In one scene, Margot Robbie’s face is being fitted in something that resembles an equestrian bit and bridle. All in all, it makes the controversial cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s new album look remarkably tame. 

Explicit movies are nothing new from Hollywood. But this one is comically over the top in its attempt to take the growing genre of lazy fantasy smut aimed at young women and pass it off as mainstream.

“Romantasy,” as the New York Times defines it, is “a subgenre that blends fantasy elements like magic, fairies and dragons with love, yearning and explicit sex.” Trashy, pornographic stuff that might once have been confined to the dark alleys of internet fanfiction sites is now one of the most popular categories of books — I refuse to call it literature — in mainstream bookstores. In 2024, the genre “topped more than 32 million copies in print alone,” according to a recent Times article. “Five of the 10 best-selling adult fiction titles this year are romantasies. At the same time, adult fiction sales overall have stagnated.”

One of the most infamous examples — which I will never read but have been subjected to seeing in my Twitter feed, which is probably reason enough to ban the internet forever — is about a millennial woman “on the verge of moving into her parents’ basement” who falls in love with a minotaur. It’s been on USA Today’s bestseller list and has supposedly sold more than 60,000 copies.

The genre appears to be designed for the kind of woman who has given up on real men and seeks comfort in the kind of man (or in some cases, grotesque creature) that only exists in the minds of other jaded females. Gone is the truly romantic equilibrium between masculine virtues like chivalry and courage and feminine virtues like purity and compassion, akin to what you might find in classics like the tales of King Arthur or Cinderella.

You don’t have to read this smut to recognize that it perverts the truly masculine and feminine. (Whoever said you can’t judge a book by its cover clearly never saw some of these.) The men are portrayed as either grossly feminized or grossly barbaric. In reducing men simply to objects for female entertainment, the genre does exactly what the “female empowerment” crowd condemns Hollywood for. For their part, the women who write, read, and inhabit the genre are doing exactly what decades of late-stage feminism groomed them to do: remaking themselves in the image of what culture has taught them is a male appetite for sex.

Feminists reinterpreted the entire world history of male-female interaction as a fight for power and dominance instead of a complementary relationship designed for mutual edification. In this cosmic battle, Kate Millett suggested in her 1970 treatise Sexual Politics, romantic love was merely “a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit.” The feminist solution was to go and do likewise.

If men were really as awful as Millett supposed, “it would have been a logical thing for second-wave feminism to ally itself—as first-wave feminism had done—with those forces of prudery that had always worked to trammel or civilize male sexuality,” Christopher Caldwell pointed out in The Age of Enlightenment.

Instead, we ended up with women like Olivia Wilde, who admitted to Vogue that she put an explicit scene in her 2022 movie Don’t Worry Darling because she wanted audiences to “realize how rarely they see female hunger, and specifically this type of female pleasure.”

And then there’s Emerald Fennell, the director of the upcoming Wuthering Heights, who believes “being a female filmmaker is a political act” and has said that “everything I do is feminist because it’s what I live my life by.” The first feature film she directed was about a young woman who responds to the rape of her friend by hiring a man to trick another friend into believing the same thing has happened to her, and eventually trying to exact revenge on her friend’s attacker. Probably unintentionally, it’s an apt parallel to the feminist philosophy of responding to male sins by committing similar ones. By the end, the protagonist’s vendetta has gotten her killed.

Now, Fennell has reimagined a nineteenth-century novel as BookTok smut and given it access to a Hollywood budget and costume department, complete with original songs by Charli XCX (yes, really), and wrapped it up in what looks like a Gone with the Wind poster with “Wuthering Heights” plastered on it in the Godfather font. It would be comically bad if it didn’t represent a lie that millions of women have bought into.