On Reading Emma and Fourth Wing in the Same Day

The dangers of sex by algorithm.

A long time ago in a land far, far away I taught 10^th grade American literature and 8^th grade U.S. history. The most important thing I learned during that time was that I was not cut out for teaching sophomores.

But I had a lot of fun, too. I taught at the Episcopal School of Acadiana, a 6-12 private school in the heart of Cajun country. I learned that crawfish boils are the best eating there is. I also learned how to cook a gumbo, how to wash down boudin with beer, and how to pronounce “pecan.” (It’s not PEE-con). These are important life skills.

One year ESA’s beloved drama teacher put on the play version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I was offered a cameo role as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and I jumped at the chance to ham up such an obnoxious character for my students. The show played for one night. To my eternal shame I muffed my lines, and the young woman playing Elizabeth graciously covered for me. While I was still on stage, two other characters—Jane Bennet and Mr. Bingley, who had just gotten engaged off stage—re-entered the play. The student playing Mr. Bingley turned to the audience, grinned, zipped up his fly in an exaggerated way, and continued onto the stage.

Although I was in my early twenties at the time, and only seven years older than most of my students, I did not think this was funny. I wondered: would Jane Austen, transported to the world today, find our cavalier treatment of sex funny?

Now let me explain—I am not a prude. And I’m certainly not naïve about what has always been going on out there among young people (who are, ironically, having less sex than ever, but that’s the subject for another day). Although I was raised in the Church before the problematic purity culture of the nineties, I was taught that sex was a significant spiritual thing, and that losing one’s virginity as a woman or a man was not to be taken lightly. And not just because of pregnancy or STDs.

I still believe this to be true.

So when one day last month I found myself reading Jane Austen’s 1815 Emma and Rebecca Yarros’s 2023 blockbuster Fourth Wing, I had whiplash. I’m convinced that were Austen alive today she would find our culture’s cavalier treatment of sexuality problematic at best and devastating at worst. Especially for women.

You might be surprised to learn that the earliest readers of the novel were primarily young women. This holds true today, with an increasing gap between the genders. Although the novel was born in the late seventeenth century in a sea of what us literature nerds call “news/novel discourse” (in which semi-fictional reports from abroad featured significantly), it very quickly became concerned with matters closer to home. And there was—and is—no matter closer to home for a young woman than the matter of who she should love and marry. And so, in time, the genre of the romance novel as we know it today was born. And young women today still devour these books by the millions. Why?

Jane Austen’s work can help us see the continuity. Austen keenly observed—and gently mocked—what came to be called “the marriage market.” But Austen’s mockery had an edge to it because in her time marriage was no trifling matter. Without the right to vote or own property, marrying the right man could be a matter of life or death. Even when one’s situation was not dire, marrying the right man was greatly to be desired over marrying the wrong one or—gasp—becoming a spinster.

As it still is today. Here I’ll simply note that when I purchased my first home in Illinois 1999, I was referred to in the closing documents as “Christina Bieber, a spinster.” This seemed like a fate worse than death. They might have just written “Old Maid” because that’s what I felt like. I was thirty, a newly minted professor, with no prospects in sight. Old maid.

My point is that because young women are trying to avoid this fate—and the clock is always ticking—they are always going to devour stories about how other young women find their partners. In a way, novel reading for women is trying things on for size. It is a way of asking, “what would happen if I married Dr. Darcy?” or, “will I still find someone if I’m more like Jo than Beth?”

I picked up Fourth Wing because my friend who manages our local Barnes & Noble told me she can’t keep the series in stock. I was keen to learn something about what young women today think is desirable in a man. Or at least, what they feel is desirable in a man, which we all know is not the same thing. I was also keen to know why Austen’s novels, though addictive in their own way, are not nearly as addictive as contemporary romance and romantasy. (Millions of older women also consume romantasy, but that’s a subject for a different day).

What I discovered is that both Austen and Yarros start in the same place, with two unchanged truths about Western young women.

1. Young women daydream about their future partner

I really mean to say that young women fantasize about their future partner, but today the word “fantasize” suggests sex in a way it did not in Austen’s day. Regardless, in both times, “fancy” suggests an unfounded reach for something that can never be real, as in the term “flights of fancy.” Put simply, young women in every era dream elaborate dreams of being loved. Call on Freud or some current guru and you’ll get the same dreams with different reasons for them.

Unlike Yarrow, who trades in flights of fancy, Austen is worried about them. They are the product of privilege and could lead one astray. Emma Woodhouse, carefree and wealthy, lives by her fancy because she can afford to. Austen, a genius of the first sentence, explains that:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Emma has too much time on her hands. She therefore fancies two things that are unreal. She fancies that she is not interested in marrying (again, the privilege only of those well situated), and she fancies that she can construct great marriages for other people. Chiefly she fancies that she can improve the prospects of her friend-become-plaything, Harriet. That Emma’s fancy dangerously blinds her to reality is the plot of Emma.

Rebecca Yarros also taps into the fact that young women daydream about their future partners. But there’s a huge difference here. Whereas Austen challenges a young woman reader’s flight of fancy through her protagonist, Yarros caters to it in her readers, who could also be said to have too much time on their hands. Fourth Wing is prototypical of the newish genre known as romantasy, which pulls no punches. It is designed to offer escape from boredom. It tantalizes with romantic fantasy in a fantastic world. There are dragons, magical powers, and easily acquired and effective contraception.

Why fantasy? Twenty-first century women (in the West) have more freedom to choose their partners than women have had at any other time. This doesn’t make finding the right guy easy, but the stakes are lower. Fantasy enables Yarros to create friction and sexual tension in an otherwise frictionless world. Her protagonist, Violet Sorrengail, is training to be a dragon rider in a war-torn community where no one is expected to live to see another day.

Compare her first two sentences to Austen’s:

Conscription Day is always the deadliest. Maybe that’s why the sunrise is especially beautiful this morning—because I know it might be my last.

Note the present tense and the sense of urgency. This is Hunger Games meets Game of Thrones. My point is not to suggest that Austen and Yarros should write the same kind of books. It is only to note that although their starting point is the same—the young female reader’s flights of fancy—they do very different things with their readers’ hearts and souls.

Yarros’s readers are put in an entirely different place when it comes to identification with the heroine. Yarros’s readers are already primed for the “girl meets dangerous and extremely hot guy” plot that they fantasize about. They want to be Violet and get the guy right now. This yields a reliable dopamine hit. On the contrary, Austen’s readers are warned that their own flights of fancy, like Emma’s, might be what is truly dangerous. They are led to learn what Emma learns before they end up with the wrong guy. The dopamine hit is greatly delayed and comes from a different source.

This leads me to the second thing that has not changed in young women:

2. Young women long for a partner they can trust.

It really didn’t surprise me that the plots of Emma and Fourth Wing both pivot on whether the men they are falling for (or are seeking out for others to fall for) are trustworthy. Emma is no different from Violet in that she follows her fancy rather foolishly.

But Yarros, wanting the quick dopamine hit for her readers, ups the ante. Xaden (yes, Xaden) starts out as an enemy who wants to kill Violet, only to have her fall for him anyway. But it is problematic that Xaden is a master of shadows. Shadow mastery is his literal signet (a magical power unique to dragon riders). Enormous red flag! But this is the formula of every romance novel ever. When Violet eventually discovers that Xaden has not been truthful, she withdraws. Xaden must earn her trust back, which means he must prove himself to be more than a scalding hot bod with gorgeous onyx eyes.

Reader, please notice that I’m arguing that both Austen and Yarros are starting from proven girl-meets-guy-but-isn’t-sure formulas. But that is where the similarities end. Seeing, as we have, that the pace and goals of these novels are completely different, it is easy to see the enormous change from Austen’s time. I’ll put it starkly:

Romantasy always puts sexual passion and fulfillment before the determination of a partner’s trustworthiness.

This has been the case for so long that we are in danger of forgetting what a huge sea change this is. Another way to put it is to say that twenty-first century readers have all been raised in a world where sex is viewed as spiritually trivial. Austen was not raised in that world.

Yes, Austen’s world was socially very different from ours. Yes, plenty of folk had sex before commitment at that time, too. And yes, plenty of folk found true love anyway, just like plenty of folk were forced to hide homoeroticism, and plenty had children out of wedlock and were socially shamed, and so on. But we shouldn’t confuse those realities with what Austen would undoubtedly think were she alive today: that women lose when they put sexual desire and fulfillment before character discernment.

You don’t have to be conservative or traditional or patriarchal to think so. You just have to read some Austen novels and know a little science.

One of the primary themes of all of Austen’s novels is that character formation involves learning how to know who to trust. In Emma, Emma’s tendency toward flights of fancy in the world of romance and marriage blind her to what she should be using to judge a person’s character: their ongoing behavior in all kinds of situations.

The old-fashioned word for this blindness is that Emma is easily flattered. Flattery keeps you from learning true things about yourself and others. Mr. Knightly (the character every reader already recognizes is the right guy for Emma) knows that Harriet, Emma’s pet project, is not going to be good for her because she will only flatter her.

I think her the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have. She knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing. She is a flatterer in all her ways; and so much the worse, because undesigned. Her ignorance is hourly flattery. How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while Harriet is presenting such a delightful inferiority?

When you think you already know everything, you can learn nothing. All this to say that Austen wants women to wake up before they give themselves away. She is talking about discernment. Wisdom. Discernment requires collecting objective evidence regarding the behavior of the future spouse. It is inherently better if that judgment is not clouded by fancy or oxytocin or gorgeous onyx eyes.

Violet has already rushed in, led by sexual desire. The question of Xaden’s trustworthiness is secondary, and she is left wondering if she made a mistake in choosing him.

By now you are probably thinking—so what? This is romantasy. It is reading for escape. No harm, no foul. But is that true? We are talking about tens of millions of women consuming a steady diet of novels that follow this exact same formula. Studies are now revealing that story-driven erotica has the same addictive effect on women as visual pornography has on men. It is clearly designed for sexual arousal, and it is fueling isolation in many cases.

Dr. Anna Lembke, in her excellent book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence admits to herself having a problematic addiction to this formula. She also points out that the steamy scenes occur in a predictable pattern in all romance novels, with the steamy stuff occurring at 75% (which is in keeping with where women want them to occur, after sufficient sexual tension and buildup). Sure enough, after many scenes of buildup, in Fourth Wing the steamy sex began exactly 73.9% into the book. Sex by algorithm.

Don’t take my word for it; read Lembke. The science is all there, and it is pointing to addiction. Like all addiction, it involves feeding one’s indulgences and receiving diminishing returns with them. It usually ends in isolation.

Since I do not have space to go into the devastating effects for women, I suggest listening to this podcast.

It is also worth noting that many women who read these novels do so because they don’t feel safe in real-world dating relationships. In her article “What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now; ‘Romantasy’ novels are booming when romance in general is in decline,” Anna Louise Sussman writes about one reader:

“I didn’t feel safe in my real-life dating, but reading about it, I could feel safe,” said Nauheimer. She raced through the next four books in a little more than a week and pored over them with her best friend in California, who had coincidentally picked them up too. Nauheimer said she now summons the heroine’s superpowers to psych herself up before dates: “If Feyre can save all of Prythian, I can go meet a man at a bar for a drink!”

I’m skimming the surface of a huge issue here, so let me point out one thing about Sussman’s article. Nowhere does she consider that it is disordered sexual mores that make today’s dating world so unsafe for women that they’d rather read a romance than have one. Women today are not allowed the luxury of dating a man who is socially restrained from seeking sex on even the first date. After all, we have barely gained the luxury of dating a man who is socially expected to request consent! A woman is expected to be willing to play all her sexual cards just to get into the game. She is also expected to enjoy casual hookups with the same frequency and alacrity as men, even while the science of sex proves that hormonal attachment works differently for women than it does for men. We must remember that this cavalier attitude toward sexual behavior is relatively new, and Austen would have abhorred it.

Not that men gain much, either. Putting sexual passion and fulfilment before commitment is part of what has created a whole class of relationships now called “situationship.” Sussman explains it as “a phenomenon in which a couple’s romantic status is ambiguous to one or both parties. Around half of American 18- to 34-year-olds say they have been in a situationship—the largest share of any age group—according to a 2024 YouGov survey.” When there’s total freedom without commitment, how can you ever know when you are on the same page with someone?

This just makes me sad. I’m not saying that Jane Austen’s time was better for women in every way. Of course it wasn’t. I’m also not saying that a woman should never read romance novels. I typically do not read for entertainment, but I do watch a lot of TV and movies for just that purpose. But since I believe that good literature can have an enlarging effect on one’s soul, I must also acknowledge that cheap entertainments can have a shrinking effect on one’s soul, too. It’s all about habitual exposure to a way of seeing the world. We are inherently mimetic creatures, and social contagion is real. Eventually the point of view that you thought was a harmless indulgence sinks in and affects the way you see others—and the way you see yourself. It is just how we are wired.

Want to find a better class of person in your future partner? Then it might be time to consider that your romantasy diet might not be serving you.

Stay thirsty, my friends. For wisdom.