The Unexpected Curriculum
What M/M Romance Taught Me About My Nervous System, Male Energy, and Healing I Didn't Know I Needed
HOW IT STARTED
I didn’t go looking for this. I started watching a series — Heated Rivalry — and something cracked open. The show led me to man-on-man hockey romance novels. From there, I tumbled so far down the rabbit hole that I’m not sure I want to find my way back.
And I’m apparently not alone. There is a large, documented, quietly embarrassed, and then loudly unembarrassed population of heterosexual and bisexual women who have become deeply, sometimes obsessively, drawn to M/M romance. Sports romance in particular. The genre is booming. The fandom is real.
But I’m not here to talk about the market. I’m here to talk about what happened to my nervous system when I entered it.
I didn’t know I needed this. But my body did.
THE FUJOSHI FRAMEWORK (AND WHY IT MATTERS)
The Japanese have a word for this: fujoshi (腐女子). Literally “rotten girl.” It’s used to describe women — typically straight or bisexual — who are drawn to Boys’ Love (BL) manga and anime: homoerotic male romance content.
This isn’t a fringe phenomenon. It’s been studied seriously in gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies for over twenty years. It emerged in Japan, spread globally, and now shows up in the popularity of M/M romance novels, fanfiction, and sports romance across English-language publishing.
The academic conversation around why straight women are drawn to this content is rich and unresolved. Some researchers point to the absence of power imbalance — two men on roughly equal social footing, negotiating vulnerability and desire without the gendered scripts that often burden heterosexual romance. Others point to identification: women who have been socialized to see themselves as objects of desire finding relief in being the observer, finally, rather than the observed.
Both of these things feel true to me. But neither fully explains what happened when I started reading.
THE SAFE CONTAINER THEORY
Here’s what I know about my nervous system: it has been trained by experience. Some of those experiences have been wonderful. Some have been wounding. I’ve been cheated on. I’ve had a #metoo moment, and navigated abusive relationships. I’ve been in relationships where my emotional intelligence was weaponized against me. I’ve loved men I genuinely believed in who turned out to be someone else entirely.
What this creates, over time, is a kind of bracing. A low-level hypervigilance around male energy. The nervous system learns to anticipate threat. And so it prepares. And in preparing, it cannot fully relax.
What M/M romance offered me — and I’m being completely serious about this — was a safe container in which to experience male intimacy without the threat response. Two men, navigating love and vulnerability and desire, in a fictional space where I had no skin in the game. My nervous system didn’t need to protect me. It could just watch.
And in watching, it started to unlearn some things.
This is nervous system regulation disguised as a beach read.
THE ANATOMY EDUCATION (YES, I’M GOING THERE)
I’m going to be honest about something that is a little uncomfortable to say in public: I have learned more about male sexuality, male desire, and the male emotional interior from M/M romance novels than from years of heterosexual relationships (honestly, I bet many heterosexual men would be in the same boat).
The genre, at its best, takes male interiority seriously. It doesn’t treat men as emotionally simple. It doesn’t reduce desire to transaction. It asks: what does it cost a man to be vulnerable? What does it feel like from the inside to want someone and be afraid of it? What happens when two people who have been socialized into emotional stoicism have to crack that open for each other?
Reading this has recalibrated something for me. Not about what men are, necessarily — I know men are complicated — but about what I was willing to imagine was possible. The fiction expanded my sense of what male emotional experience could look like when it wasn’t being performed for an audience.
That expansion changed how I relate. It changed the energy I bring to men and masculinity. It reminded me how important it is to have a gay bestie. It changed what I notice when I see it.
THE MASCULINITY WE WERE NEVER SHOWN
There’s a version of masculinity in M/M romance that doesn’t get a lot of airtime in mainstream culture. It’s the giant NHL defenceman who cries in the locker room. The firefighter who reads poetry. The CEO who is terrified of being abandoned and says so out loud.
These men are physically large and professionally capable. They are also emotionally present in ways that heterosexual romance — even good heterosexual romance — often doesn’t quite reach. Because heterosexual romance still has to navigate the gendered scripts. The hero still has to be slightly more stoic than the heroine. The power dynamics still get baked in.
In M/M romance, both parties have to do the work. Both people are carrying the conditioning. Both people have to crack themselves open. And there’s something in watching that — in being allowed to witness two men choosing each other with full emotional presence — that has been quietly healing for me.
I don’t think I’m the only one.
A GENERATION ASKING BETTER QUESTIONS
The recalibration isn’t only happening in women.
Something is shifting in how younger men and boys are approaching masculinity itself — in the conversations they’re willing to have publicly, in the creators they follow, in what they’re asking for from relationships and friendships. The rigid performance of traditional masculinity is being questioned from the inside, not just critiqued from the outside. Younger men are naming loneliness. Naming the cost of emotional suppression. Asking, in growing numbers, for something different.
This matters because it tells us the version of masculine emotional literacy that M/M romance imagines isn’t actually fiction — it’s a direction of travel. A generation of men is moving, however haltingly, toward the wholeness these books have always assumed was possible. The books are ahead of the culture by a margin that is quietly closing.
For those of us who care deeply about the wellbeing of men — as partners, as sons, as colleagues, as humans — that closing gap is worth paying attention to. The conversation about masculinity needing a broader definition is no longer only being driven by women observing from the outside. It’s being driven by men living it from within.
The fiction imagined it first. Now real life is catching up.
WHAT I ACTUALLY THINK IS HAPPENING
I think a lot of women are quietly using fiction to do nervous system work they didn’t know they needed.
I think the genre is popular not just because the books are good — though many of them are — but because they offer something that is genuinely hard to find: a space to experience male intimacy without risk. To practice receiving emotional presence from men in a context where the stakes are zero. To rehearse a kind of relationship that feels possible but hasn’t quite happened yet.
I think some of us are coregulating with fictional men because the real ones haven’t always been safe to coregulate with. And I don’t say that as an indictment of real men. I say it as an observation about what the nervous system needs and what it finds when the landscape isn’t offering it.
Fiction has always been a rehearsal space for emotional experience. This is just a particularly interesting form of that.
THE HONEST CONCLUSION
I came for the hockey, haha, yeah right, more accurately I give a sh*t about hockey again thanks to this genre. I stayed because something in my nervous system exhaled.
I’m not embarrassed about this anymore - although I won’t tell you how many rereads I’m on... I’m curious about it. I think it’s worth naming — for the other women who are quietly in this rabbit hole and wondering what it means about them, and for anyone who is interested in what we reach for when we’re trying to heal something we don’t quite have words for yet.
The genre found me at exactly the right time. That’s not an accident. Bodies know what they need, even when we don’t.
This is Part One of a three-part series.
Part Two — The Protocol (paid) What to actually do with what gets activated. The regulation tools that turn a genre you love into a somatic practice.
Part Three — The Binary Was Always the Lie (paid) The personal essay. Mexico, sobriety, two sons, building businesses in rooms not designed for me — and how a hockey romance novel became the spark behind the most meaningful work I’m doing right now.
Megan Swan is a wellness strategist, writer, and founder of Megan Swan Wellness — a platform for female founders built around nervous system science. She is the author of Marinating in Chaos and 10 Day Detox, and host of the Wellness Infrastructure Podcast.