Why horny historical romances are thriving in the Trump era

From Bridgerton to My Lady Jane to Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming Wuthering Heights, the horny historical romance has quietly become one of the defining genres of our cultural moment.

These are stories drenched in candlelight and corsetry, where handsome dukes ravish young maidens in shadowy sitting rooms and never once ask to go play Xbox afterwards. But it’s not as if period drama material is new.

Drawn from the novels of Austen and the Brontës, these tales of passion under patriarchy have found a new audience of mostly women. But why, in 2025, are we all suddenly yearning to get to third base in a horse-drawn carriage?

Women’s rights are undeniably under fire right now, from the wave of US abortion bans following Roe v. Wade’s overturning, to tightening access to contraception and reproductive healthcare in several US states, to rising attacks on gender equality initiatives and trans-inclusive policies in the UK.

So, you would think women would hate the idea of immersing themselves in fantasies where their fictional counterparts have almost no autonomy. So what’s going on?

Modern love leaves no room for wild abandon for women

The resurgence of so-called ‘bodice-rippers’ lies less in nostalgia than in exhaustion. Modern love, for many women, has become an exercise in vigilance.

Dating in 2025 often means navigating a minefield of inequity, as young men grow statistically more conservative and are increasingly drawn into the online ‘manosphere.’ Desire itself now feels politically charged.

As President Donald Trump parades the ugliest version of masculinity on the world stage, rewarding arrogance and punishing empathy, it becomes harder for those attracted to cis-hetero men to indulge in romantic fantasy at all.

When male power is so often expressed through contempt and control, even gentler masculinities begin to seem performative or suspect and women have learned to brace for the turn: the moment when charm curdles into dominance. That vigilance – necessary for safety – also poisons desire at its root.

Every romantic encounter now comes with a mental checklist: Is this dynamic equal? Is my safety assured? Is this desire mutual, ethical, free from manipulation? Is he seeing me as a person? Feminism has made women hyper-aware of these questions, and rightly so.

But constant awareness leaves little room for wild abandon. In a climate where consent discourse, #MeToo, and reproductive rollbacks have reshaped how women think about sex and power, surrendering to romantic passion can feel like a betrayal of principle – or worse, a re-enactment of real-world losses of autonomy.

This is where the horny historical steps in.

Set in eras when patriarchy was a fixed law of nature, these stories relocate female desire to a world where inequality is already settled fact. The result is paradoxically freeing, in that we don’t judge the woman for craving the love of a man, and we don’t mind that she isn’t #GirlBossing up the corporate ladder.

Indeed, we recognise romance is her best chance at real freedom, given the context.

When oppression is baked into the social order, a woman’s choice to feel, to desire, to seek pleasure becomes an act of rebellion rather than submission. The setting reframes the encounter: what would read as coercion in a modern office becomes transgression in a Regency ballroom. So we allow ourselves to find it sexy without guilt.

By stepping outside the present, these stories create a safe imaginative space for women to play with power, surrender, and recognition – without those fantasies colliding with the ethics of modern feminism.

But, it’s important to emphasise, they’re not dreams of oppression, nor do they express a wish for men to reclaim control – because their power lies in paradox. Let me explain.

Women don’t crave subjugation but the freedom to let go

The real key to understanding what modern women get out of these horny historical dramas is understanding that they take place in worlds where patriarchy is a fixed law of nature, where women are chattel, ornaments, or bargaining chips – and yet they imagine love as something capable of transcending those structures. 

The heroine may have no formal power, no political voice, no legal standing, but within the private realm of romance she becomes vivid and undeniable.

Perhaps even more importantly, the men who love her are almost always powerful, and when their authority bends toward her, she inherits the influence that the world refuses to give her outright.

In Bridgerton, for example, Penelope is forbidden from writing and using her voice until she marries Colin, who defends her to society and insists she continues to write.

The fantasy at the heart of Bridgerton, My Lady Jane or Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not simply to be desired and ravished by a man, but to be seen by a man – seen so clearly and completely that her personhood is affirmed through the act of recognition.

It’s this emotional recognition that makes the horny historical more than softcore escapism; it makes them about creating a fantasy of a male partner who sees a woman as a complete equal, even in the context of extreme gender inequity.

What this tells us about ourselves is that modern women long for the freedom to be loved wholly, to be seen and desired without fear, allowing themselves to give themselves to their lover with wild abandon. Yet in an era of resurgent misogyny and creeping authoritarianism, surrender to the love of a man feels dangerous.

Men are not haunted by that same risk; their giving-over is not shadowed by the possibility of erasure, so they don’t crave the same kind of escapism.

But for women, tired of the constant vigilance required to survive daily misogyny, the fantasy of a love so profound that it makes feminism momentarily unnecessary, not because equality is forgotten but because it is already achieved through mutual understanding, feels like an exquisite kind of relief made all the more poignant by the even more blatant misogyny of the 19th century.

So the next time you catch yourself daydreaming about a handsome gentleman declaring his love on horseback in the rain, probably with a ball somewhere nearby, remember that what you’re really longing for isn’t the past at all, but a romance in 2025 that allows you to surrender without fear — a love that transcends the vigilance modern womanhood demands.

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