Romantasy, Virginity and Other Fictions

Abstract

Virginity is a gendered, racialised, and classed construct disproportionately applied to girls and young women. As a disciplinary mechanism, purity ideals uphold the sexual double standard and regulate femininity through discourses of morality, respectability and innocence. Ideals surrounding ‘correct’ virginity loss also continue to shape female sexuality, including within youth-oriented popular culture and sexuality education. Against this backdrop, this article examines contemporary romantasy literature as a form of public pedagogy with the potential to disrupt and reconfigure dominant virginity narratives. Focusing on four female protagonists across three popular romantasy series – A Court of Thorns and Roses, From Blood and Ash, and The Five Crowns of Okrith – the article analyses varied depictions of sexual (in)experience and first sex, grounded in the legitimacy of female desire and sexual agency. Through embodied, emotionally rich narratives, romantasy creates imaginative spaces for exploring intimacy, sexual decision-making and pleasure beyond purity norms. While these texts do not fully escape heteronormative or romantic conventions, they offer valuable counternarratives to restrictive purity frameworks and open up more expansive possibilities for imagining female sexual subjectivity.