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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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The Measurements thing is pretty common, but I'll caution that mainstream (even 'mainstream' in the sense of the Playboy 'I can't believe it happened to me' sense) filters male-focused sexuality a lot more aggressively than women writers, even around the same kinks. Tamora Pierce's weirder age gaps predate the real heavy norm shifts in the late 1990s, but there's reason I keep bringing up the Blue Is The Warmest Color problem in romance; it's something you have to actively avoid and block the further you get into fandom spaces. But even well outside of the squicky questionable or overt absolute number age problems, male-written fantasy like what you're motioning around is not just possible but pretty common in fandom spaces.

((And it's just an outright standard trope for M/M stuff, whether the writer or artist is a top, switch, bottom, or straight guy.))

There's just a lot of forces that make sure that sorta writing doesn't come from a man in modern publishing, from the general pressures against men writing romance-heavy stories, the heightened scrutiny if they do, and the wider pressures against hiring men in those roles at all.