sold my heart for a song

It wasn't that long ago that banks and companies would refuse to serve gay people. People are going all the way up to the Supreme Court to enshrine the right not to serve LGBTQ people in their business. Rainbow capitalism showed which companies were safe to do business with and it pressured other companies to do the same.

Likewise, companies did and do try to discrominate against LGBTQ employees. Rainbow capitalism let employees be open about their identities and feel safe. The 50 year old gay man marching with Bank of America may have hidden his sexuality for decades because it wasn't safe to come out at work.

It helped set top down societal values and norms that LGBTQ people are a welcome part of society.

It pressured companies to adopt nondiscrimination policies and DEI policies.

It made companies donate to pride celebrations and LGBTQ causes.

with mixed success, it provided powerful and visible allies for political change, like the Respect for Marriage Act. Businesses pulled out of North Carolina and forced it to go back on a bathroom bill.

The drawdown of rainbow capitalism has real consequences. Pride celebrations losing corporate sponsorships means they are not able to hold those celebrations. DEI programs are being rolled back. Companies are buying less from queer owned businesses. Support for gay marriage is actually decreasing in polls.

Are these all cause and effect? No. Is it sometimes just a lagging indicator? Yeah. Are fair weather allies like big corps really not great? Yeah.

In this world where women are already subjected to the sexual whims of their male partners and their own desires are often ignored or belittled, I very decidedly don’t wish to read about that exact same thing happening to the FMC. Now, if the FMC is living her best life whilst being subjected to these tropes and shadow-daddy MMCs, then good for her!

I just really wish that the FMC’s pleasure and desires would be centered, rather than just assumed to be submissive and then executed as such without first asking.

But for things happening between the characters, if the FMC is scared-AND-horny or whatever, that's what the fantasy is supposed to be and you as the reader are expected to do some basic suspension of disbelief in order to engage with the idea that (just like in a kink scene!) this is not real, this is just for pretend, everyone is safe and no one is actually getting hurt. On account if it is fiction.

Now, if you're not into that, that's perfectly fine, I am not saying you have to be into reading things that you don't like. If you want to see some kink negotiation, that's cool. Sometimes, there are books that are about diagetic kink, and they do include those negotiation scenes. But for non-diagetic kink (aka the thing you're "taking issue" with), I don't think that it's fair to say that it's wrong for those books to be written that way. A woman's desires ARE being centered -- either the author's own desires or what the author is envisioning the reader will desire. If you're not into it--again, that's perfectly fine, it's just not the right book for you or the right genre for you. Read something else.

You missed the point of the first post, @atinymekanie, so let's read it together again:

women, especially straight women, have so few outlets for their sexual desires, especially if they have a partner who doesn't share them, and i will never understand why "someone ELSE'S private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable and therefore they should not be allowed to engage with it, even if i am in no way being affected by it or even aware of it at all" is such a popular party line among allegedly progressive young people.

I think part of the reason so many tropes related to IRL misogyny are prevalent in m/f romance is because this fiction often acts as catharsis for peoples' real life experiences and anxieties. If I said that a reader of Raped by the Financially Abusive Lord who Killed Me in Every Lifetime doesn't take sexual assault seriously I might as well say that horror movie fans want to legalize murder.