B.K. Borison says her romance heroines rarely give head because male pleasure is already centered in media

B.K. Borison has noticed the blowjob deficit in her own books, and she is not apologizing. On House of Maher, the First-Time Caller author said her romance novels tend to skip women servicing men because sex in media already gives male pleasure the best lighting, the best angles, and the longest runtime.

This is the kind of reader note that sounds unserious until it suddenly becomes the thesis. Ilona Maher, doing what she called hard-hitting journalism, brought up a pattern she had spotted after reading First-Time Caller and Now Back to You.

The main girl doesn’t give head often to the guy.

Borison did not blink. No fake scandal, no sheepish “well, you know.” Just, essentially: yes, exactly, please see the syllabus.

I feel like with a lot of portrayals of sex in media, we often see men centered pleasure. And not that a woman can’t enjoy giving a [ __ ] um, but, you know, I really like to center the ladies getting their due

The fantasy is not fairness. It is priority.

That answer is more revealing than the usual BookTok spice discourse, where sex scenes get sorted like hot sauce labels. One chili pepper, three chili peppers, cartoon skull emoji, proceed accordingly. Borison is talking less about heat level than about camera placement. Who gets described? Who gets pursued? Who gets to want without managing someone else’s ego like a fragile heirloom plate?

Her point is not that women never enjoy giving oral sex, which she says plainly. The point is that in a culture where straight sex is still often staged as a man’s event with a woman’s reaction shot, a romance novel can choose to be impolite. It can say: the lady goes first. Maybe she goes second, too. Maybe the hero can hydrate and reflect.

if there’s time, and there’s never time. There’s just simply never time.

The joke works because Borison’s books are not anti-men. They are full of soft-focus men who fix things, pine correctly, and generally behave like golden retrievers who have read bell hooks. But the joke also has teeth. Her heroes are not the prize because they are sexually rewarded. They are the prize because they know how to make the heroine feel wanted without turning the scene into a performance review.

That tracks with how Borison talks about her work elsewhere in the interview. She describes the Heartstrings books as nostalgic, community-minded romances, the kind of fictional universe where local radio still matters and a Baltimore weather reporter can feel like extended family. The sex politics fit that coziness. This is not fantasy as conquest. It is fantasy as being seen, fed, flirted with, and yes, properly attended to.

The movie may test the theory

There is already a B.K. Borison adaptation wrinkle here. First-Time Caller is being made into a movie, and Borison said she has handed the book over with a practical calm that sounds healthy and faintly terrifying for any author whose readers have memorized the closet scene.

I wrote the book, put out the book, and when you do that, it’s no longer yours.

She could not say much about the film, beyond the fact that it exists, though she did name one oddly perfect hope: Aiden and Lucy slow dancing to “Thong Song,” partly because Borison’s Baltimore pride requires proper respect for Sisqó. That is charming and deranged in the correct ratio.

But if the adaptation wants to preserve what makes Borison’s romance feel like Borison, it can’t just keep the cute radio premise, the slow dance, or the book-club-approved banter. It has to keep the gaze. In Borison’s world, the heroine is not there to prove the hero is desirable. She is there to be desired, inconveniently, specifically, and first.