Despite the market surrounding modern literature being a constantly changing arena, one genre has remained the leading competitor for book sales in the U.S. above all others; Romance. With nearly 46% of the paperbacks sold in the U.S. every year being romance literature, it is a multi-billion dollar industry year in and year out. Simultaneously, there is no genre as highly contested or openly mocked as the romance genre, particularly erotic romance. None of the statistics that prove the market’s quiet success mean anything when it comes to the fact that the majority of the genre’s readers are women. For this fact alone, the genre as a whole is not taken seriously by the inherently patriarchal systems already in place not just amongst the publishing community, but by readers as well. The subdivision of erotic literature within romance is typically written by women for women, and for no reason other than this it is treated with hostility and disgust. 

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When it comes to readers of authors such as Sylvia Day, E.L. James, or Julia Quinn there is a certain tendency amongst self-proclaimed bibliophiles to turn up their nose. But this is because when it comes to erotica in literature there are many misconceptions surrounding female sexuality. Many readers believe that erotic romance is simply a form of pornography, when in reality many of these novels (and that’s not to speak for the outliers that occasionally go viral on social media for how outlandish they are) are an exploration of sexual situations in which characters experience incredible emotional growth. The narrators in these stories, usually women, are placed into scenarios in which they are faced with some sort of unbalanced power dynamic and as a result typically are forced into storylines in which they can only express their wants and desires through physical interactions. Any deeper subtext underlying these interactions is treated as nonexistent by people who don’t actively consume literature from this genre because it is easier to assume women fantasize about being “dominated” than to understand it is our own way of controlling the narrative surrounding sex. 

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The issue many people claim to have with these novels/series’ is their tendency to be centered around poorly written one-dimensional female protagonists, when they are actually far more likely to have well-developed female characters than any other genre. Because male authors set the narrative for the majority of most other genres, it is just as difficult now as it was in The Romantic Period (1798-1873) to find accurate depictions of the female perspective outside those present in romance novels. Literature, at its root, is a form of exploring fantasies. This fulfillment of fantasy told through the male gaze has been exploited every which way to degrade women in stories and create stereotypes surrounding our gender that must continually be combatted. 

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With the latest “hot” trend for readers across platforms such as #BookTok and #bookstagram being erotic romances, it has become so incredibly important for us to celebrate the exploration of female sexuality through storytelling. There is a dangerous assumption that the women who write and consume these stories are inferior, or just flat out stupid, when in fact men have simply disguised centuries of misogyny behind casual digs at the absurdity of our reading material. Of course it is only as a result of our own systematic repression of the female gender that we have allowed an entire subcategory of fiction intended to reclaim the narrative surrounding sexual pleasure to be reduced to something laughable. It is by this very standard then that we allow the notion of female pleasure to only truly exist in a fictional setting, by choosing to contribute towards the negativity around modern romance literature. It would certainly mean that we have come a long way if a woman would feel not only safe in public reading a romance novel, but feel empowered to do so because she knew she wouldn’t be attacked on the sole basis of exploring all facets of the female gaze.

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Rosenberg, Alyssa. “Men, Stop Lecturing Women about Reading Romance Novels.” The Washington Post, 26 Oct. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2014/05/20/men-stop-lecturing-women-about -reading-romance-novels/.