Isn't it romantic?
On Romance novels and their affirmation that women are people
Other than a few guilt inducing (thanks, purity culture!) forays in my early 20s, I wasn’t a romance reader until Bridgerton launched me into the genre in 2020. What started as a comforting pandemic pastime has morphed into utter fascination with a much maligned genre that is, incidentally, primarily for and by women.
Most non-romance readers associate the genre with the shirtless Fabio, bosom heaving Harlequins your grandma had on her bedside table. In popular imagination, they follow a romantic relationship endangered by miscommunication, while ticking the boxes of round-the-bases sorts of sexual encounters, but romance defies such a narrow view. According to Romance Writers of America, “Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” Venture into any online conversation of romance and you’ll find discussion of closed-door and reverse harem, paranormal and mafia, historical and contemporary, but as fascinating as why someone might choose to fantasize about a love interest who is a violent criminal underlord (yes, I have theories) RWA explains the entire genre in their definition: in romance, women end up happy.
If romance is about what women want, then it makes sense that it’s treated with derision in a world where women are shamed and blamed for literally every choice we make, every desire we have. In the broader fictional world, women are plot points in men’s stories, and a female character’s sexual activity isn’t a precursor to death only in horror films. In books with female protagonists, how often does she get both personal and romantic fulfillment?
Romance has been labeled smut for years, but recently, fans have decided to boldly embrace the term. Songs like Smut Slut from Farideh, T-shirts and bookmarks stating “probably reading smut” litter the internet. Romance readers, above all, have a sense of humor about their beloved genre. No one mocks romance the way romance readers mock romance.
Romance isn’t only about sex. The pendulum swings from fade-to-black scenes in closed-door books, to erotica padded with a story. Many romance books have fewer sexual encounters than Game of Thrones, but GoT is fantasy, not romantasy, literature rather than smut. Why? Sex is weaponized in GoT, rarely about a woman’s pleasure or connection with her partner. Society is more comfortable with women as victims of sexual violence than we are with women as recipients of sexual pleasure. The 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated details how women’s pleasure is more penalizing than violence when it comes to rating a film; there’s ample evidence that it's treated similarly in literature. Women’s bodies have always been commodities, currency. Although the bartered bride trope is a favorite amongst many romance readers, the focus and arc of the sexual encounters is always toward valuing the woman as herself.
Romance is often written off as “girly books” by men who also claim to be confused by their wives and girlfriends, as though there weren’t a billion dollar book industry out there that might give them a clue. My husband, a university Senior Lecturer of English, was once told he should "turn in his man card” after admitting to liking Jane Austen. “Should men read romance?” is the grown up equivalent of that tendency in children’s literature to classify a book with a male protagonist as a “children’s story,” and a book with a female protagonist as a “girl’s story.” It also smacks of the Victorian fear of women taxing their feminine brains with complicated matters. If you’re a man, and you like fiction, you will absolutely be able to find a romance novel that you’ll enjoy. I promise it won’t overtax your masculine emotions.
I recently read a romance in which the female protagonist writes a romance novel based on the male protagonist. “If I wrote a romance novel based on you, what would it look like?” I asked my husband. “What is it men want in their romantic relationships?” He told me, “We want to know we’re worth loving.”
Over the following week, mulling on our conversation, I stopped thinking of romance as only about what women want. At its most basic, I think the genre is about what most people want: personal and romantic fulfillment. The true audacity of the romance novel is that women are treated as people.
Recommendations:
If you’d rather not read a sex scene, you’re not alone! Closed-door doesn’t always mean religious. There are some wonderful closed-door romance authors, and Mimi Matthews is my absolute favorite. She writes lovely historical romances wherein the characters aren’t all dukes and earls, aren’t all white, and aren’t all able-bodied. Check out her article, Closed-Door Romance: What's the point?
If 19th century literary references, satire, and absurdity are your thing, I cannot stress how much fun it is to read India Holton. There’s also the plus of reading an autistic author writing neurodivergent characters.
Want a historical romance without the problematic virgin tropes? Martha Waters’s To Have and to Hoax contains the most hilarious virgin bride scene I’ve ever read.
Fake it Til You Bake It by Jamie Wesley is a moving self-discovery romance featuring mostly black characters and a neurodiverse fmc.
Evie Dunmore’s Portrait of a Scotsman gets down and dirty with the emotional implications of the “trapped into marriage” trope.
Rebekah Weatherspoon is gloriously body inclusive in her leads, includes queer and racially diverse characters, and is on the spicy side.
I’ve been enjoying Devney Perry’s romantic suspense. Kait Nolan is another great author who writes both small town romance and romantic suspense. Grace Burrowes has my heart forever for how brilliantly individual her characters are, and for her portrail of strong male friendships.
An incomplete list and description of subgenres:
Single mom romance: Being a mom is exhausting. A man stepping up is gold.
Shifter/monster romance: Let’s be real, humans have always been into this shit. Beauty and the Beast, The Birdcage Husband, The White Cat, The Brown Bear of Norway? Folk tales and mythology are full of animal/human lovers.
Mafia/MC romance: Look up the stats on how poorly our justice system protects women. Now imagine your lover has no qualms about legalities when it comes to keeping you safe. There’s no secret as to why that might be appealing. Some authors try to make their mmc mobster more ethical than those they’re protecting the fmc against, but this subgenre does tend to veer into Dark Romance territory, which makes me want to lob it into the compost.
Romantic suspense: When you like thrillers but don’t want your leads killed off at the end.
Reverse Harem: When first presented with this concept, women will recoil in horror and joke “It’s enough work taking care of ONE man!” but in this subgenre, the men involved have emotionally supportive relationships with each other and work together to meet their own, and the fmc’s needs. The woman isn’t her man’s sole emotional support? Sign us up!
Age gap: Women are tired of mothering our romantic partners, y’all. Maybe a 1300 year old Fae Prince will put his socks in the hamper and do basic hygiene without reminders.
Billionaire: I can’t roll my eyes hard enough about this one, but god, it would be nice to be able to pay for my home repairs.
BDSM: Considering the research on women’s mental load and hetero women’s lower sexual satisfaction, it’s not surprising that most of these books present the fantasy of being able to lay that mental juggling aside in the bedroom and still experience pleasure. This subgenre might give lip service to Dommes, but most storylines involve the fmc as the submissive partner.
Dark Romance: I may lose some of y’all, but this is the subgenre that worries me. I’m not talking about CNC or BDSM, this stuff takes the leap from morally gray to straight up coercion, kidnapping, and rape. I don’t want the male gaze in my female lit, and having your fmc fall in love with her rapist seems like a recipe for intimate partner violence. There are plenty of stats about the increase of violent pornography, and I believe this subgenre is mirroring that in order to push girls into accepting violent sexual encounters.
As a fellow romance reader I loved this. Ive been reading romance since I was a teen (probably shouldnt have been lmao) but honestly yes yes yes to everything you said here. When I was working at a DV shelter back in the day when 50 shades came out I hated how the storyline normalized DV and even made it seem like what girls/women should want out of romantic love. I def agree with what you said about dark romance normalizing abuse. Its very blatant that our society has a generalized toxic idea of what passionate and or romantic love should look like but it cannot include violence imo and I hate DR books for normalizing that. Esp when its marketed to YA who are still learning about relationships.
In Literature classes we always have a conversation about Genre that mirror the 19th century conversations about "the superfluous woman". What do we do with SciFi? Where do we put Fantasy?
Thankfully, most all my peers come to it's defense. Nonetheless, the conversation shows how Genre is institutionally, and thus patriarchally, othered.
And whenever othering occurs, it proliferates. There is a joke in recovery communities:
"Why does NA exist? So AA has someone to make fun of."
Romance is treated as if it narrowly cuts across all genres, but literature is at it's heart romantic. Romance is not some ravine that cuts across the literary landscape, it is the deep woods and high mountains which create a sublime realism--magic.
I've been all over the place with the word "Romance", but, as a genre, Romance is treated like a reservation for Women. No wonder the magic of literature feels increasingly esoteric.
Maybe Sarah J. Maas is our literary Messiah. She's the easy choice right now, but I generally mean it. Fuck the meek, let a generation of Romance writers conquer the literary world, their birthright! Because, when they leave that world to the next generation, the real world beside it will have been forced to change for the better in order to match it's literary reflections.