Romantasy and the Lie of Libertine Freedom

In a recent video, author and YouTuber Hillary Layne dismantles the illusion that pornography addiction is a problem exclusive to men. She traces with unflinching honesty the psychological, emotional, and cultural toll that explicit content—particularly in romance and romantasy fiction—takes on women, often under the fraudulent label of empowerment.

Her point lands because it’s personal, experiential, and above all, truthful.

Layne’s central insight is that pornography and the moral debate around it have been rigged. Men who consume smut are shamed, though not always helped. Women, by contrast, are shielded from critique by a society terrified of ever appearing to constrain female sexual expression. The result is a double standard so glaring that it can only be sustained by the kind of institutional gaslighting that passes for cultural discourse today.

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But there’s a third party at the table: one Layne touches on only briefly, and which I want to drag fully into the light.

This third side doesn’t promote pornography per se, nor does it excuse it through identity politics or feminist slogans. No, their motto is freedom.

You know the lines. You’ve heard them all your life …

“It’s a free country.”

“What consenting adults do in private is their business.”

“Don’t like it? Don’t read it.”

The side that trot out these lines wrap themselves not in pink hair and rainbow flags but in paper shields marked Free Speech, Free Market, and Freedom of Choice. They are not the shameless smut-peddlers or their feminist enablers. They are the libertines. And they are the most insidious of all. Because they pretend to be morally neutral. They love to quote John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, and occasionally the Constitution. But what they really worship is license: the capacity to do whatever one wants without consequence, and more importantly, without judgment.

The libertines pose as champions of human dignity and individual agency, but at the end of the day, they are parasites feeding off the moral capital of a civilization they neither built nor defend.

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This is why Layne’s heroin analogy is spot-on. No one seriously argues that shooting up in your living room is a noble expression of autonomy. But when it comes to media designed to arouse and addict; when the dopamine fix comes from a Kindle screen instead of a needle, we’re expected to stand down in the name of "freedom."

But the libertine error stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom itself.

True freedom is not the ability to do whatever one pleases. Instead of a blank check, it is the power to do what is right.

A freedom has only as much value as the good it grants access to; no more, no less. Freedom of speech is good only because truth is good. Freedom of religion is good only because worship of that which is worthy is good. Freedom of enterprise is good only because the frutis of honest labor are good.

Once a freedom is used to pursue something intrinsically disordered, like lust, it ceases to be freedom at all. It becomes slavery disguised as liberation. A man who can't put down his phone because he’s addicted to gooning isn't free. Neither is the woman who reads herself into a dopamine coma with "enemies-to-lovers" erotica dressed up in gold foil covers.

A freedom detached from the good is not a freedom. A jail cell with no lock is still a prison.

Libertines love to paint themselves as realists by appealing to market forces.

“Sex sells. Publishers are just responding to demand. Besides, you can’t legislate taste.”

All of that is true. But none of it refutes the core moral issue.

Heroin also sells. So does fentanyl. The existence of a willing customer base does not justify the product; it merely damns both sides of the transaction.

The free market is a tool, not a god. And in a civilization that has replaced virtue with appetite, it’s a destructive idol.

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Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room: Publishing sexually explicit material for profit is not morally neutral. It is a calculated exploitation of human weakness. When the intended audience is adolescent girls, it is predation. Calling it "empowerment” is a diabolically clever con.

Layne rightly notes that literature didn’t become sexualized overnight. The rot has been spreading for decades, quietly infecting everything from literary fiction to airport thrillers. But the infection vector was neither female authorship per se, nor the female readership. It was the publishers’ abandonment of objective standards of the good in favor of expressive individualism that says, “If it feels good, do it!”

The root problem isn’t that women write sex scenes. It’s that we as a culture no longer believe restraint is a virtue. These days, modesty is seen as repression. And people believe they are most truly themselves when they are ruled by their most fleeting impulses.

But the monkey who keeps pressing the pleasure button until he starves to death isn’t free. He just has shackles with enough slack to destroy himself.

If we are to reclaim literature, and by extension our culture, we must start by rejecting the lie that freedom means doing whatever we want. That way lies decadence, despair, and ultimately death.

The future belongs to those who rediscover that true freedom is the power to pursue what is Good, Beautiful, and True.

Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.

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