Red Flags Are Now Red-Hot

What stalker romances reveal about liberalism’s blind spots.

Image Credit: Jasper Langley-Hawthorne

Is stalking someone bad? Most people would, assumedly, say yes. Stalking is a criminal offense in the state of California, incurring up to 3 years in prison and a $10,000 fine; it is also a federal felony under the 2005 Violence Against Women Act. 

Now, below is an excerpt from the blurb for Navessa Allen’s novel Lights Out. As of writing this piece, Lights Out has been on the New York Times top 15 bestseller list for 56 weeks and counting:

Trauma nurse Aly Cappellucci doesn't need any more kinks. She likes the one she's landed on just fine. To her, nothing could top the masked men she follows online. Unless one of those men was shirtless, heavily tattooed, and waiting for her in her bedroom. She dreams about being hunted by one in particular, of him chasing her down and doing deliciously dark things to her willing body. She never could have guessed that by sending one drunken text, those dreams would become her new reality.

Lights Out and other books in Allen’s “Into Darkness” series are lovingly labeled by trope-trigger-happy BookTok influencers as “Stalker romance” and “Morally grey MMC” [male main character] and “Touch Her and Die.” Upon first learning about the existence of these books (and their astonishing sales figures), I found myself wondering: is the meteoric success of dark romance novels like Lights Out and H.D. Carlton’s Haunting Adeline something to cheer for, or something to gag at? I hope to do two things in this piece. First, I want to examine why these dark romance books have appeal, and then opine on why they really shouldn’t be appealing. Second, I want to draw out of this discussion an understanding of how liberalism, for all its power, has certain blind spots when it comes to what Leon Kass called the ‘wisdom of repugnance’ and arguments in favor of the good rather than the right. 

Let me also state up front what my argument is not: it is not an argument to ban dark romance forthwith. Nor is it an argument against the portrayal of abuse, rape, etc. in literature as a whole per se. But, ipso facto, I find the argument that there should be reasonable ways in which we ought to limit the glorification of abusive behavior compelling, especially for young adults who may, increasingly, be picking up these kinds of books.

I have read, for the purposes of this article, Allen’s first book, Lights Out. Let me tell you, dear reader, I have seen and experienced it all: I laughed, I wept, I smiled and grimaced and soldiered on through a barrage of amateurish prose, throbbing genitalia and, yes, stalking and borderline criminal behavior. I did not love it. However, I do consider it important to first explore what is attractive about dark romance: I do not mean for this to be a critique of individual readers or their preferences. There are many reasons why residents of ‘romancelandia’ may like these books. For one, pleasure and danger can be correlated: the thrill, so to speak, of fantasizing about sex with a morally questionable stranger may have its appeal. Equally, perhaps there is a quality of protection and devotion inherent in the stalking behavior found in these works, a quality which readers might find lacking in a post-sexual revolution era of casual hookups and online dating. Finally, and maybe most interestingly, one might argue  that the predominately female readership of dark romance is drawn to the genre insofar as it represents an opportunity to express their sexuality without violating the image of chastity and innocence that women are oftentimes expected to fulfill; the dubious consent in these works offers a means of letting loose one’s sexual imagination without making the active choice to do so. 

Oppositely, I can think of a few possible grounds on which to object to dark romance. Most prominently for this piece, books like Haunting Adeline and Lights Out romanticize (ha) abusive and unhealthy sexual relationships: dubious consent, stalking, physical violence, etc. I don’t buy the argument that dark romance novels engage in ‘safe exploration of taboo.’ I’d imagine one could find the prospect of being stalked hot right up until one becomes one of the 43% of college students who have reported experiences indicative of stalking behavior, or one of the 25% of female college students who have reported being victims of sexual assault. One could argue that AI-generated child sex abuse material (CSAM) also engages ‘safely’ with a societal taboo, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find many ardent defenders of AI CSAM. 

Some proponents of the boons of these books may maintain that our minds are not susceptible to media in this fashion, and that the appealing presentation of stalking and violence in dark romance novels has no effect on our real-world relationships. I find this contention implausible; in the words of Harry Clor, the famous philosopher of public morality, “man, the image-making and image-using animal, can be influenced for good and ill by images.” There is also empirical research that links pornography consumption with intimate partner violence. 

I believe these conflicting sentiments on dark romance now present a novel inlet into a wider discussion about liberalism and how we as a society determine moral behavior and tastes. I intend to move beyond a reductive relativist approach here. I understand that relativism is the path of least resistance when it comes to reading. After all, given how few people are picking up novels anymore, reading anything is good, right? We all have different tastes; who am I to judge? However, taking this position amounts to putting on one’s moral blinders and plodding indifferently up the beaten track of moral isolationism. I believe that reading is not solely an instrumental act, valuable merely because it’s ‘better than scrolling TikTok.’

My interest lies in how we come to our understanding of moral judgements, both individually and societally. I don’t think it’s too radical to say that the approach to moral behavior embodied by fans of dark romance and the publishing industry more broadly is decidedly liberal (with a small-‘L’). Believers in John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, liberals’ rallying cry is: if it doesn’t hurt anyone, it’s a-ok by me. Opponents of the widespread popularity of this kind of literature most likely hail from more conservative camps: just because it doesn’t hurt anybody does not mean that it is good for me. 

Where do these divergent camps come from? I think Jonathan Haidt’s research on moral foundations theory is a great place to start answering this question. Haidt argues that there are five foundational moral ideals that come pre-packaged in the human brain at birth: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The care foundation is associated with empathy for others’ pain, fairness with reciprocal altruism, loyalty with coalition creation and maintenance, authority with hierarchy and tradition, and sanctity with disgust, degradation, and self-improvement. When debating the value of stalker romance, the sanctity and care foundations are most salient. 

Those who lean left are especially concerned with the values of care and fairness, whereas those who lean right favor all five foundations fairly equally. Haidt says that when one of these foundations is transgressed, we experience feelings of moral disgust or repugnance. Haidt writes in the tradition of Leon Kass, famous bioethicist and physician, who coined the phrase the ‘wisdom of repugnance’ in an eponymous essay against human cloning. 

As a purely descriptive matter, the publishing industry is overwhelmingly left-leaning. So is BookTok. This means that the industry sidelines as secondary the considerations of loyalty, authority, and especially sanctity prized by their conservative peers. What do we make, then, of the feelings of disgust, discomfort, or aversion that many people undoubtedly have regarding the prevalence of books like Haunting Adeline and the Into Darkness series? I believe that invoking liberal values of individual freedom, care, and fairness—Mill’s harm principle—does little to resolve this tension. Bringing up the notion of ‘safe exploration of taboo’, for example, to quash someone’s (my) distaste for this kind of fiction isn’t effective, because I’m not sure whether a ‘safe exploration of taboo’ can even exist, or should exist. Just because orthodox opinion disregards Haidt’s sanctity foundation doesn’t mean that everybody does. I sympathize with parents who may feel uncomfortable about how much of modern “literary” discourse vaunts these kinds of books, and what lessons their children may be picking up when BookTok serves them a healthy helping of Brynne Weaver, Navessa Allen, and H. D. Carlton.  That we are inclined to dismiss those parents’ concerns is, I believe, a great example of the moral ‘blind spots’ associated with the cultural dominance of liberalism. 

I’ll leave off with Leon Kass’s most famous line from his essay The Wisdom of Repugnance in full, for he can spell out the essence of my side in this moral quandary better than I:

“Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”