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A Little Background (Some Trash Talk)
Jul. 20th, 2030 09:26 pmMost of my posts here will be purely in the realm of reviewing romance or romance-adjacent books I've read, or putting out thoughts on happenings in the romance community. This, though, is a little bit of background: on me, on why this matters to me, on why I believe it should matter, period.
I read my first romance somewhere around thirteen years of age, in the early nineties. It was a Jude Devereaux, I couldn't tell you which one. I picked it up for a quarter at a garage sale in my neighborhood and was hooked. In my case--and I think people have all sorts of reasons romance speaks to them--this was a book where the fact that a woman had been hurt didn't mean she couldn't have hopes and dreams. More, it didn't mean she couldn't attain those dreams.
I tried so hard not to seek out more. This was the nineties. Janice Radway had written 'Reading the Romance', but its ripples were still confined to academia, and even there, a particular sect of academia. Romance as a genre hadn't yet learned its own worth, and wouldn't even really begin to in wide circles until around 2005 with the founding of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. (More on that later.)
Rewinding a bit. I attended to a prep school in Kansas City, Missouri. I'm white, but I'm also practicing Jewish and have been out as queer since sophomore year. My high school had a significant number of weirdos which meant I could cobble together a friend group from other people who didn't fit the extremely wealthy, white, cishet protestant majority at the school. Intelligence was perhaps the foremost currency of relationships in my school, in the sense that if you didn't have it, friendships were hard to find unless you wanted to party. I was well aware I wasn't as smart as a lot of the other kids in my grade/at the school, but I was smart enough, and knew how to front as a survival technique.
I failed out of my first year of college at Columbia University. There were a ton of mitigating factors, but the hard fact is, I left before they could put me on academic probation, and it was, in part, because I wasn't smart enough to be there. I transferred to Oberlin, and fell into a deeply unfortunately timed fandom relationship with boybands. Prior to that, my fandom interests had been Highlander and X-Files. "Respectable" fandoms, inasmuch as any media fandom in the late nineties - early two thousands, particularly the slash corners of those fandoms, could be considered respectable. Like romance, fanfiction was the realm of women, and therefore it was necessary that the hegemonic structures which define what are appropriate leisure activities for the female-identified denounce it. Fanfic, unlike crafting or baking, had no tangible economically-viable product, and if women were to be allowed hobbies at all, society demanded they must be productive in ways men could understand to have value.
Popslash, as boyband fandom was called, was not respectable on any level. It was mass produced pop for brainless teenage girls (please take a moment to note the devaluation of things that appeal to teenage girls) to begin with. When you mixed in fanfic, established fandom was horrified by the real person element, and everyone else just figured I had managed to find the world's most embarrassing hobby, and acted like they were ashamed for me when I admitted to it.
In those years, instead of lying about my fandom activity, I made saying "I love the capitalist patriarchy" with a dead look in my eyes as unironically as I could to anyone who started giving me shit a way of living. I did not, in fact, love the capitalist patriarchy. Had I been older and wiser and the world much much further along in its discussion of female creation and economies of exchange I would have pointed out that me appropriating male bodies in a non-commercial community made up almost entirely of women to tell the stories that were important to me was arguably just as, if not more, radical as debating what Virginia Woolf meant for the eighty-thousandth time in an intellectual circle jerk. But the ability to make rational, well-reasoned points would come later. Oberlin and popslash simply taught me to be sharply defensive of my right to enjoy what I enjoyed.
Throughout all of this, I devoured romance books and didn't talk about that to anyone. Fandom was one thing: I had a community of women at my back who were smart as all get out, poised and professional and eloquent, letting me know there was nothing wrong with my desire to write stories using a backdrop of pre-existing characters, or, at times, worlds.
Romance was something nobody talked about. Or, rather, when it was talked about, it was by those who were mocking it. As the mid-2000s set upon us, romance was beginning to catch its stride. Women with advanced degrees who had spent time supporting themselves through a variety of other jobs and clearly had thoughts about women's treatment in the world began weaving these thoughts into the texts. The writing got sharper. Discussions around consent changed the shape of what was considered sexy. But somehow it was still rote that Jane Austens were classics, but never again should a romance occupy that space, let alone be considered something of value.
By this point, e-Books were gaining in use and popularity. One morning I was listening to the radio, it must have been NPR, I think I was on my way to my job, and by complete accident, I heard a report about the fact that with the advent of being able to download a book and not have anyone see the cover, sales of romance novels had skyrocketed.
And something in me broke. Because the sense that this thing I loved so much was people's dirty little secret upset me to no end. It was around then, 2007ish, that I discovered Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I'd long given up even trying to find a community of other women to discuss these books with. By that time, the community was well in swing and my imposter syndrome kept me from talking on the boards themselves, but I read a lot. I was a different type of romance reader than a number of the women on SBTB. I for the most part didn't like contemporaries, and while I respected her, I'd never really gotten into Nora Roberts. Even so, for the first time, it was like someone other than Janice Radway had stood up and said, "No, there's value here."
A lot has happened in the romance scene since 2007, obviously. For that matter, a lot has happened since 2019 and the (necessary) unraveling of the RWA's power structures. It's only within the past year and a half that the New York Times has done any serious reporting on and discussion of romance as a genre. It feels, in some ways, like women like Sarah Wendell, Leah and Bea Koch, Jessica Pryde, writers like Courtney Milan, Alyssa Cole, Jasmine Guillory, etc., have been underneath this layer of ice that's been keeping women who read and write romance pinned down, disrespected and dismissed, for years, and suddenly, finally, well past when it should have happened, there are starting to be cracks.
Personally, for the last thirteen years, I've been arguing that there are no guilty pleasures. For the record, I believe this. Outside of committing an actual crime, I see no reason any of us should find guilt in pleasure, whatever it is. But the real argument I've been making under that statement is that even WERE there guilty pleasures, reading romance wouldn't be one.
Reading romance, so far as I am concerned, is an act of defiance. It is supporting overwhelmingly women-identified authors. It can easily be supporting women-owned businesses. It is saying that the stories women tell have value, that our stories matter. It is acting upon the concept that women have complex lives and existences, and that doesn't mean we don't deserve happy endings. It is in fact stating, unequivocally, that we do deserve those happy endings. We deserve partners who are concerned about our enthusiastic consent and our pleasure, no matter what form that might take. We deserve lives where we are supported emotionally. We deserve for our voices to be not just heard, but listened to.
Which brings me to my final point. As I make clear above, I adore the work of SBTB, I think it created a shift in culture without which much of what has happened in romance could not have done so. I have nothing but the utmost respect for its creators. That said, I really dislike the use of the term "trashy." I get it, I do. If you insult yourself first, nobody else can beat you to it. In 2005, with where we were in the dialogue, it was a sassy, clever brand. But as much as one woman's trash might be another woman's treasure, when society says the word "trash" in reference to cultural pieces, it is a pejorative.
I am, at times, for reclamation of terms. Obviously, I self-identify as queer when lesbian is, in some ways, a more specific description. If we, as a community of readers and writers, want to reclaim the term trash in some way, maybe that's a conversation to be had. Honestly, I don't think we do. I think we want to talk about how these books, just like the women who read and write them, are not trash.
Are there bad romance books? Yes, lots of them. But no more than any other genre, percentage-wise. No more than "literature," percentage-wise.
Those books are not bad because they are romance, they are bad because their authors lack either the skill or the practice to carry off the story they are trying to tell. And there are so, so many truly amazing romance novels. Novels that create space for women's narratives where we have largely been pushed aside, novels that question our choices as a society, novels that show us the beauty of cultures different from our own, and novels that show us hope in moments when we are feeling none.
If that's trash, well. I'd best make my home in a dumpster.
I read my first romance somewhere around thirteen years of age, in the early nineties. It was a Jude Devereaux, I couldn't tell you which one. I picked it up for a quarter at a garage sale in my neighborhood and was hooked. In my case--and I think people have all sorts of reasons romance speaks to them--this was a book where the fact that a woman had been hurt didn't mean she couldn't have hopes and dreams. More, it didn't mean she couldn't attain those dreams.
I tried so hard not to seek out more. This was the nineties. Janice Radway had written 'Reading the Romance', but its ripples were still confined to academia, and even there, a particular sect of academia. Romance as a genre hadn't yet learned its own worth, and wouldn't even really begin to in wide circles until around 2005 with the founding of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. (More on that later.)
Rewinding a bit. I attended to a prep school in Kansas City, Missouri. I'm white, but I'm also practicing Jewish and have been out as queer since sophomore year. My high school had a significant number of weirdos which meant I could cobble together a friend group from other people who didn't fit the extremely wealthy, white, cishet protestant majority at the school. Intelligence was perhaps the foremost currency of relationships in my school, in the sense that if you didn't have it, friendships were hard to find unless you wanted to party. I was well aware I wasn't as smart as a lot of the other kids in my grade/at the school, but I was smart enough, and knew how to front as a survival technique.
I failed out of my first year of college at Columbia University. There were a ton of mitigating factors, but the hard fact is, I left before they could put me on academic probation, and it was, in part, because I wasn't smart enough to be there. I transferred to Oberlin, and fell into a deeply unfortunately timed fandom relationship with boybands. Prior to that, my fandom interests had been Highlander and X-Files. "Respectable" fandoms, inasmuch as any media fandom in the late nineties - early two thousands, particularly the slash corners of those fandoms, could be considered respectable. Like romance, fanfiction was the realm of women, and therefore it was necessary that the hegemonic structures which define what are appropriate leisure activities for the female-identified denounce it. Fanfic, unlike crafting or baking, had no tangible economically-viable product, and if women were to be allowed hobbies at all, society demanded they must be productive in ways men could understand to have value.
Popslash, as boyband fandom was called, was not respectable on any level. It was mass produced pop for brainless teenage girls (please take a moment to note the devaluation of things that appeal to teenage girls) to begin with. When you mixed in fanfic, established fandom was horrified by the real person element, and everyone else just figured I had managed to find the world's most embarrassing hobby, and acted like they were ashamed for me when I admitted to it.
In those years, instead of lying about my fandom activity, I made saying "I love the capitalist patriarchy" with a dead look in my eyes as unironically as I could to anyone who started giving me shit a way of living. I did not, in fact, love the capitalist patriarchy. Had I been older and wiser and the world much much further along in its discussion of female creation and economies of exchange I would have pointed out that me appropriating male bodies in a non-commercial community made up almost entirely of women to tell the stories that were important to me was arguably just as, if not more, radical as debating what Virginia Woolf meant for the eighty-thousandth time in an intellectual circle jerk. But the ability to make rational, well-reasoned points would come later. Oberlin and popslash simply taught me to be sharply defensive of my right to enjoy what I enjoyed.
Throughout all of this, I devoured romance books and didn't talk about that to anyone. Fandom was one thing: I had a community of women at my back who were smart as all get out, poised and professional and eloquent, letting me know there was nothing wrong with my desire to write stories using a backdrop of pre-existing characters, or, at times, worlds.
Romance was something nobody talked about. Or, rather, when it was talked about, it was by those who were mocking it. As the mid-2000s set upon us, romance was beginning to catch its stride. Women with advanced degrees who had spent time supporting themselves through a variety of other jobs and clearly had thoughts about women's treatment in the world began weaving these thoughts into the texts. The writing got sharper. Discussions around consent changed the shape of what was considered sexy. But somehow it was still rote that Jane Austens were classics, but never again should a romance occupy that space, let alone be considered something of value.
By this point, e-Books were gaining in use and popularity. One morning I was listening to the radio, it must have been NPR, I think I was on my way to my job, and by complete accident, I heard a report about the fact that with the advent of being able to download a book and not have anyone see the cover, sales of romance novels had skyrocketed.
And something in me broke. Because the sense that this thing I loved so much was people's dirty little secret upset me to no end. It was around then, 2007ish, that I discovered Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. I'd long given up even trying to find a community of other women to discuss these books with. By that time, the community was well in swing and my imposter syndrome kept me from talking on the boards themselves, but I read a lot. I was a different type of romance reader than a number of the women on SBTB. I for the most part didn't like contemporaries, and while I respected her, I'd never really gotten into Nora Roberts. Even so, for the first time, it was like someone other than Janice Radway had stood up and said, "No, there's value here."
A lot has happened in the romance scene since 2007, obviously. For that matter, a lot has happened since 2019 and the (necessary) unraveling of the RWA's power structures. It's only within the past year and a half that the New York Times has done any serious reporting on and discussion of romance as a genre. It feels, in some ways, like women like Sarah Wendell, Leah and Bea Koch, Jessica Pryde, writers like Courtney Milan, Alyssa Cole, Jasmine Guillory, etc., have been underneath this layer of ice that's been keeping women who read and write romance pinned down, disrespected and dismissed, for years, and suddenly, finally, well past when it should have happened, there are starting to be cracks.
Personally, for the last thirteen years, I've been arguing that there are no guilty pleasures. For the record, I believe this. Outside of committing an actual crime, I see no reason any of us should find guilt in pleasure, whatever it is. But the real argument I've been making under that statement is that even WERE there guilty pleasures, reading romance wouldn't be one.
Reading romance, so far as I am concerned, is an act of defiance. It is supporting overwhelmingly women-identified authors. It can easily be supporting women-owned businesses. It is saying that the stories women tell have value, that our stories matter. It is acting upon the concept that women have complex lives and existences, and that doesn't mean we don't deserve happy endings. It is in fact stating, unequivocally, that we do deserve those happy endings. We deserve partners who are concerned about our enthusiastic consent and our pleasure, no matter what form that might take. We deserve lives where we are supported emotionally. We deserve for our voices to be not just heard, but listened to.
Which brings me to my final point. As I make clear above, I adore the work of SBTB, I think it created a shift in culture without which much of what has happened in romance could not have done so. I have nothing but the utmost respect for its creators. That said, I really dislike the use of the term "trashy." I get it, I do. If you insult yourself first, nobody else can beat you to it. In 2005, with where we were in the dialogue, it was a sassy, clever brand. But as much as one woman's trash might be another woman's treasure, when society says the word "trash" in reference to cultural pieces, it is a pejorative.
I am, at times, for reclamation of terms. Obviously, I self-identify as queer when lesbian is, in some ways, a more specific description. If we, as a community of readers and writers, want to reclaim the term trash in some way, maybe that's a conversation to be had. Honestly, I don't think we do. I think we want to talk about how these books, just like the women who read and write them, are not trash.
Are there bad romance books? Yes, lots of them. But no more than any other genre, percentage-wise. No more than "literature," percentage-wise.
Those books are not bad because they are romance, they are bad because their authors lack either the skill or the practice to carry off the story they are trying to tell. And there are so, so many truly amazing romance novels. Novels that create space for women's narratives where we have largely been pushed aside, novels that question our choices as a society, novels that show us the beauty of cultures different from our own, and novels that show us hope in moments when we are feeling none.
If that's trash, well. I'd best make my home in a dumpster.
