romance discoursing

a digest of all the things I've been complaining about lately

Cast this spell with me: Fish found in water, fork found in kitchen. Another fucking thinkpiece, another person bitchin.

Romance is having a tough couple of weeks. First, it was that lady on tiktok talking about the importance of distinguishing between real literature and genre fiction¹, then it was Kallmekris posting a ragebait youtube video about how a bunch of Booktok books (nearly all romance) are gross trash (for more on this, watch Grapie’s lovely youtube video about it), and then there was this sly dig in a profile of Rebecca Yarros in Elle Magazine².

None of this is new. I’ve been a part of (lurking or engaging) online romance reading community for 4.5 years now, altogether, and some version of this take has emerged, zombie-fied, nearly monthly. It’s exhausting, but so are the rebuttals:

• Romance isn’t trash because it’s feminist: is it, always? And don’t no-true-scotsman me on this. Is romance inherently always feminist? I sure don’t think so.

• Romance isn’t trash because it healed my sexual trauma³: Well, okay. I’m glad, but I don’t think romance has to be medicinal to be worth keeping around nor do I think all romance is doing that for all readers.

• Romance isn’t trash because it isn’t porn: this one’s an interesting one– why are we so desperate to define ourselves in opposition to sex workers? Romance, to me, isn’t porn because romance readers and writers risk a lot less reputationally and interpersonally and bodily than sex workers do to make and be paid for porn. I also think that porn is poorly conceptually defined, slippery, and volatile– and I ultimately wouldn’t be upset if the cultural consensus was that yes, romance is porn because I don’t care to alienate myself from sex workers. The reality is that there are more areas for coalition building than separation between romance community and sex workers. Our fights are the same, our causes are the same, our enemies are the same.

• Romance isn’t trash because it’s written by women: oh brother. I don’t even want to touch this one. We know better by now, don’t we?

So how do we defend romance to people who don’t get it? We don’t. Or at least, I’m not particularly called to explain myself to people who aren’t a part of this space.

I find myself bored of the romance community’s attempts to justify its existence because I don’t think that appeals to unsympathetic parties are effective or useful. The idea that we can argue our way into being respected is naive and silly. More than that, I find myself frustrated by the idea that this specific kind of art needs to justify its existence more than any other. The emotions evoked by other forms of genre fiction aren’t under such close scrutiny because other genres are a little (just a little) less likely to make people horny, and being horny is dangerous. Being horny means you want.

The trouble with constantly engaging in a quest for romance’s recognition by an outside party is that it distracts us from having useful critical conversations in-community. Romance has so many issues right now: a slew of books wherein plot is substituted for “good vibes,” girlbossified protagonists, toothless intimate dynamics, an absence of decent spaces for criticism, craft issues, AI issues, ever-present race issues. When we’re constantly outsourcing frustration to third parties that don’t care to understand genre fiction, we rob ourselves of the chance to talk about interesting things. I don’t want to be talking about how a snobby critic called romance trashy, I want to be shouting from rooftops about how One Burning Heart by Elizabeth Kingston made me feel.

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A couple of years ago I was assigned a paper about sex work and moral crusades for school (Weitzer, 2020). The author names five core characteristics of a moral crusade⁴:

• Disproportionality: inflation of the magnitude and severity of a problem with claims that go well beyond the available evidence;

• Categorical conviction: crusaders insist that the problem exists precisely as they portray it, reject all counterclaims, and deny the existence of gray areas;

• Horror stories, in which the worst cases are privileged, described in detail, and presented as representative;

• Hostility toward at least some of the actors involved in the targeted activity, branding them as “folk devils”; and

• Framing of the problem as symptomatic of larger threats to the mores or to cherished institutions (Cohen 1972; Garland 2008; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994).

Every time another person picks up ICEBREAKER by Hannah Grace, a book cursed with a fun cover and drowsy third act (sorry, it’s true, you could cut 150 pages and the book would be perfectly fine), and accuses it of being singlehandedly responsible for a generation of porn-addicted, brain-dead tween girls, I think of this paper again.

No one ever seems to be able to point to a real, living, breathing adolescent harmed by the supposed epidemic of mis-shelving Icebreaker. No one ever seems to consider that, rather than having these books pressed into their hands by sin-peddlers in their seedy neighborhood indie bookstore, teenagers might seek out explicitly sexual material of their own free will on God’s green internet because they are, again, horny. No one ever considers that a book in which the main characters engage in consensual, extremely pleasurable sex (truly, Stasi orgasms enough to power the state of Rhode Island) while wearing condoms may be fun and perfectly developmentally appropriate. We are all obsessed with the plight of hypothetical children encountering hypothetically harmful material in a hypothetical place where bare-minimum parenting, competent booksellers, informed teachers, and literate librarians do not exist. Won’t somebody please stop thinking of the children for like two seconds?

your friendly neighborhood smut-peddler

Putting aside the fact that well-meaning moral crusaders are handing book banners the language they need to suppress the creation of art and putting aside the fact that , conservatism is on the rise in a big, splashy, scary way, the harder pill to swallow is that sexual violence exists in the real world, in our real lives, and in the lives of teenagers. It exists on the Supreme Court and in the Oval Office and in boardrooms and in classrooms and a hundred other places that aren’t the pages of a book, which could never jump out and actually touch you, even if it upsets you. The rot of patriarchal violence is structural and inescapable. That is the panic, that is the thing we can’t solve for by banning books.

The difficulty with these kinds of things is that the second we give bad faith critics airtime (yes, even in this substack), we also enshrine them in some small way as legitimate. We draw eyes to these perspectives, we pick them apart, we treat them as if they are anything but a desperate gasp for views in this tense attention economy. I find myself needing to talk about this and complain about this to long-suffering friends and write about this and I also find myself desperately tired of it. Romance community co-constructs narratives about itself with (and in opposition to) media about romance community, and so we’re strapped in to the steaming hot take machine forever and ever and ever.

On the eve of booktok going away I am vaguely haunted by the spectre of every uninspired think piece published in a major publication about the community and, more specifically, the romance reading segment of it (though the other corners got weird flack too). The work of loving something deeply, for me, is to attempt to see it clearly and fully, something that a guest lecturer in an Elle Magazine profile is not qualified or able to do because they do not love romance. I’m not oblivious to the issues of romance community (on or off booktok). I love to complain about this place and its offerings, and will continue to do so at length, but I am weary of this windmill of bad takes, the feeling of swiping the algorithm and waiting for something to make me mad again. I’m nervous about careless people who hand book banners talking points. I’m annoyed by people’s feverish attempts to protect romance by sanctifying it. There are better ways to talk to each other on here. There have to be!

Anyways, next post is about all the stuff I have been loving in romance as antidote to this post.

1. I don’t necessarily object to the idea that there is a distinction between literature and genre fiction because it does not feel complicated to me that The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin is a thicker, weightier, and more texturally dense text that should be taught in schools versus, say, The Hating Game by Sally Thorne (a book I unreservedly love and reread often). I do think that attempts to reinforce these distinctions always feel charged, though. What if I replaced these books with The Bell Jar and Indigo by Beverly Jenkins? How do the chips fall, then? And does quibbling about what constitutes “real literature,” serve us well in a moment where half of America can’t read at all?

2. I liked Kate Clayborn’s thread about purple prose even if I’m still figuring out how much I agree with it— she’s a person who thinks deeply and richly about romance and I’m eternally grateful for it.

3. I am interested in what readers get from reading romance on an interpersonal level– I’ve talked about how romance has repaired my relationship with earnestness, made me feel more hopeful, has shaped my attitude towards other people, etc. etc. I do think these are things worth exploring and talking about in-community. I don’t, however, think other people care or find it persuasive and I worry that light-medicalization of romance reading is a misguided path to defending its existence.

4. The author notes that moral crusades are less time-limited or urgent than moral panics, and characterized by a kind of organized and ongoing tension that may fluctuate in popularity and consensus at various times. Panics may happen within crusades.

Weitzer, R. (2020). The Campaign Against Sex Work in the United States: A Successful Moral Crusade. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 17(3), 399–414. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-019-00404-1