Recently I’ve been enjoying some time away from the internet.

Yet, the internet has this annoying habit of finding me no matter how many times I log out of Instagram and Substack.

It all started when someone posted this video in one of my writer’s groups.

I could tell from the title and the thumbnail that this would be nothing but rage-bait and recycled opinions. We have this same discussion every single week.

“Romance books are just porn, romantasy books are not real literature, nobody writes any real literature anymore.”

I get it, you (capital H)hate romance novels.

Cry me a river, Karen.

I only made it about 5 minutes into the video before turning it off, putting my phone away, and going to sleep.

Not today, Satan.

But then my thoughts kept going back to the video, and I figured I might as well write about it since I can’t stop thinking about it.

So, why are we talking about this again?

Before we start, I’d like to point out that I share none of the opinions that are mentioned in the video.

I’ll dive into my specific grievances with the video first and then attempt to cobble together an answer to the question of why everyone hates romance novels (though by this point I think we can all guess why).

Opinions are like assholes

Everyone has one. And that’s fine. We all have opinions, some are good and some are bad. But at the end of the day they are opinions, not facts.

Let’s start with the video, and before we even start watching it let’s start with the title.

This is something I hadn’t even noticed until an author pointed it out, but the use of the word “degeneracy” in the title is very telling.

“Degenerate” means “having lost the physical, mental, or moral qualities considered normal and desirable; showing evidence of decline.”

And the opposite of “degenerate”? Pure.

I wonder about this obsession with moral pureness, and pureness in general (which could be a whole post on its own), but this word choice is certainly interesting *side-eye emoji*.

Okay, so let’s see what this lady is on about.

The decline of literature

*sigh*

If I had a nickel for every think-piece I’ve read about the “decline” of literature, I would be stinking rich.

She states that she started her channel because she noticed the decline of literature and storytelling. Her goal is to remind writers of the true fundamentals of storytelling.

Now, I don’t claim to know what those “fundamentals” are and why she is the resident expert on said “fundamentals”, but it seems to me that her fundamentals are less about craft and more about morals and ideology. And these fundamentals will come into play again later in the video.

But what I find particularly egregious in this video is the following statement she makes before starting her argument:

“This is not a video about what I like or don’t like to read. What I am offering you in this video is not my opinion or reading preference, it is facts.”

That’s facts with a capital F, by the way. She claims that she will give us only facts, but her next sentence is:

“Romance fiction, and most if not all women’s literature, is porn.”

That is the hard fact that she is presenting to us in this video. And if you didn’t stop watching as soon as she said that then I don’t know what to tell you.

A “fact” is a thing known or proved to be true. Key emphasis on proved here. If we approached this scientifically (which we all should) then we know that an hypothesis like this (all romance books are porn) should be testable and falsifiable at minimum.

Immediately this statement is easy to disprove, because I can only point you to one single romance book without explicit sexual content to disprove it (and there are MANY).

I also take issue with what she calls “women’s literature”. She seems to think that romance fiction is women’s literature when there is a distinct genre difference between romance and women’s literature1. Just because it was written by a woman does not make it “women’s literature”. And though romance books are written for women, they still aren’t women’s literature by genre.

But if we take that statement at face value, that “all romance fiction and most, if not all, women’s literature is porn” we can further disprove it by simply looking at the NYT bestseller list this week (24 August). Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid is number three. Written by a woman? Yes. Therefore women’s fiction and therefore porn. If you’ve read it, chime off in the comments please and let me know how much porn I should expect going into it.

This first statement, which is supposed to be irrefutable proof and FACT, is so easily disproved that I even if I were to agree with some points she made (which I don’t) her credibility as someone capable of making a thought provoking argument backed by research has already been dismissed.

Critical thinking has left the chat.

Let’s take a look at some of the other things she said.

She claims that Fourth Wing is one of the worst offenders for wildly explicit content, so I thought I would do the math on said explicit content. I don’t have the physical book so I can’t give accurate page counts, but Fourth Wing has 3 sex scenes. The scenes are on average 5-7 pages long. So we’ll take 6 pages x 3 scenes.

That’s 18. So there are 18 pages of sex scenes in a 517 page book. That’s 3.5%.

96% of the content in Fourth Wing is not sex. For a “wildly” explicit book, that’s an awful lot of non explicit stuff.

She also claims to have read the following books in the name of “research” *big sigh*:

• Deep End

• ACOTAR

• Fourth Wing

• From Blood & Ash

• Outlander

Now if you look at this list you would see some popular romance books ranging from contemporary to historical to fantasy, but you know what you don’t see here?

Any sort of diversity.

She later goes on to proclaim that she does not read romance, so what exactly was the point of this video? You clearly have no interest in the genre and neither do you seem to care for diverse perspectives on the genre or within the genre.

Why are we here then?

Why make this video in the first place?

Maybe you could, I don’t know, actually critique romance?

I love critiquing romance, both as a genre and individual books. In my opinion, we should hold romance books to high standards. It should be subject to real literary analysis, but this creator clearly has no interest in that. She’s only focusing on the 3.5%, and not the other 96%.

The morality question

What I find most fascinating about watching this video is that she talks about how romance books and sex scenes all follow a specific formula, some fundamentals if you will.

It is this formula that these stories follow that hook readers in and give them that rush, but also what causes the addiction. She herself admits that while she was reading these books, she was unable to eat, sleep, or even think about anything else but the book even though she didn’t care for the characters.

Her entire business is built on teaching people the fundamentals and formulas of storytelling so that they write unputdownable books, but when romance books employ those formulas it’s suddenly “dangerous” and “a porn addiction”??

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never lost sleep or couldn’t eat over a book I wasn’t invested in. If I don’t care about the characters, there is no way I would continue to read something and have it consume my life like that *side eye emoji*.

But this is where she makes the majority of her arguments that romance books are porn and are harmful to women, similar to the porn addiction that is known to be harmful to men.

She claims she’s talked to and read accounts of women being addicted to hardcore content and 95% of those women started with erotic fiction.

To this point I have only one question, and it doesn’t even need a full sentence.

Source?

There are zero sources given in this video. Less than zero, if such a number were possible. The only link in the video description is a link to her book (how many side eye emojis can I put into this essay?).

She even goes on to claim that the women she talked to preferred written things that would be illegal in video form.

Once again, source?

And then, in a surprising twist, she says that “zero studies on the effect of erotic fiction on women have been done”.

WHERE did all of your previous information come from then???

Source? Trust me bro.

Seriously, I feel like my advisor working through the first draft of my thesis. Red pen marks all over the place asking for sources.

Anecdotal evidence (contrary to the name) is not evidence. While I have no doubt that there are people who experience the things she’s talked about, using their lived experiences in a video to support your argument that all women’s fiction is porn just feels gross.

And if your real concern is about addiction, why are you not sharing any resources and calling for more research into the subject? Why are you effectively trying to shame people, calling them degenerates, just for a literary preference?

The math ain’t mathing here.

Addiction as a moral issue

That’s what it all comes down to in the end — the belief that addiction is a moral issue.

I had an interesting discussion with my fifth grade class about it the other day. They were wondering why people smoked when they knew it was bad for them. Several of them claimed that people who smoked were “weak”, others thought that they were simply “bad” people.

It took me quite some time to explain that addiction is actually a disease2 (these are ESL students, so we had to cover some new vocabulary as well) and that no amount of willpower can change your brain chemistry.

So, like my fifth graders, this creator seems to think that addiction is a moral issue. That we degenerates who love romance books and smut (gasp) are simply morally impure. That we have been tricked into an addiction by marketing. That we are weak and we should be shamed for our weakness.

And again, I find myself wondering “why are you so mad about it?”.

My mother likes to say that people get angry for three reasons: you’re scared, you’re ashamed, or you’re guilty. And while I think that oversimplifies the emotion, I do believe there is some truth to that statement.

If you’re angry that books with explicit content are “giving” people porn addictions, why aren’t you sharing resources and calling for research, or hell even doing the research yourself (something that is entirely possible)?

If you’re angry that you read these books and enjoyed it, why not do some introspection instead of shaming yourself and others for enjoying it?

Or is it more likely that you’re just angry that a book you consider to be “low quality literature” with 3.5% sex scenes has made millions of dollars and is an international best seller?

Given the fact that the only link in the entire video is one that goes to her book, I can draw some conclusions on what she’s angry about. The real emotion here might not even be anger, but jealousy.

Yes, you’re allowed to hate romance

You’re allowed your opinion (not to be confused with facts though) and you’re allowed to critique romance. As I said earlier, we should be critiquing it.

However, if you’re not going to put any sort of care into your critique, then you’re just a bad hater.

In this wonderful post, Sanjana says: “My favorite haters are rigorous, careful, even hopeful. They’re also interested in questions beyond the commercial and moral. They’re interested in good stories and complicated truths and ambivalences and all the nitty gritty and inconvenient details. Something to aspire to, I think.”

scratch paper

romance discoursing (#2)

Recently, a creator I follow posted a kind of disappointing substack about her fondness for romance novels. She spends a lot of the essay talking about romance novels like junk food. She compares them to Doritos, then writes “These books are laced with the literary equivalent of MSG. I know they’re not that substantial and might even have other things i…

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10 months ago · 135 likes · 28 comments · Sanjana

To the creator of the video I ask, where is the nuance? Where is the diversity? Where is your care?

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