In 1771, French quack doctor per excellence Jean Baptiste Louis de Thesacq, published his magnum opus, La Nymphomanie; a book where he pathologised “excessive” erotic desire in women as dangerous and unnatural. Thesacq provided a list of worrying behaviour that he believed would accompany the onset of nymphomania. He particularly urged worried parents and husbands to watch out for the reading of “luxurious novels” (i.e. romance novels) because they lead to “the knowledge of all the grosser passions” and cause young ladies to “glow with each lascivious sensation”.
The Victorians were little better when it came to young women reading romance novels. According to an anonymous pastor, writing in 1864, “I have seen a young lady with her table loaded with volumes of fictitious trash, poring day after day and night after night over highly wrought scenes and skilfully portrayed pictures of romance, until her cheeks grew pale, her eyes became wild and restless, and her mind wandered and was lost – the light of intelligence passed behind a cloud, and her soul was forever benighted. She was insane, incurably insane from reading novels.”
If you thought such bizarre opinions on women reading romance went out with the penny farthing, you would be sadly wrong. Just last week, two articles were published, in The Telegraph and The Spectator respectively, which sounded the moral alarm on the reading of not just romance, but “romantasy” (a smash up of romance and fantasy). This is a genre dominated by women readers and authors and is known for being, Heaven forfend – smutty.
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, young women have been reading books with sex in – on purpose. They have been reading stories about – deep breath – fairies shagging. And not just fairies! There is a whole load of demon, dragon sex going on with some light spanking and goblin face-sitting thrown in. We have elves grabbing their ankles and wizards putting their wands to less than wholesome uses. My pearls are clutched. My flabbers are ghasted. J.R.R Tolkien would be spinning in his grave.
Women have been enjoying these books so much that romantasy is now one of the fastest-growing genres globally, increasing by 42 per cent from 2022 to 2023 alone. Billions are being spent each year on “volumes of fictitious trash” and numerous specialist smutty bookshops are opening across the UK.
I know, dear reader. I am as shocked as you are. The filthy trollops. Has anyone alerted the village elders? Well yes, actually. They have. Writing in The Telegraph, Lara Brown frets that: “The generation that ushered in MeToo now proudly displays erotica filled with heavily-eroticised and dubiously consensual BDSM, assault and coercion on their coffee tables and in their Instagram stories.”
My God. You don’t mean to tell me that women have been enjoying erotica about domination and submission, do you? One of the single most common sexual fantasies reported by both men and women? Oh, the horror.
Writing in The Spectator, Alexander Larman was less concerned about the sex and instead worried about the intellectual worth of the romantasy genre. He concluded that he would not be visiting the new erotic bookshop in Oxford, saying: “I’ll be sticking to my usual diet of those incorrigible Oxford graduates Evelyn Waugh, Martin Amis and Philip Larkin. They would, I think, have dealt with the coming of a romantasy bookshop with the amused scepticism that such an idea inevitably merits. And so will their present-day admirers, too.” Quite right too. These silly, silly women, not reading Proust and James Joyce on their lunch breaks. How dare they enjoy a simple plotline with a happy ending and a werewolf getting rogered along the way!
Christ! Can’t a girl enjoy a vampire orgy in peace anymore? Is the world not miserable enough without demanding we grapple with post-modern, literary fragmentation in our down time? Of all people, surely Alexander Larman, who has written biographies on both Rochester and Lord Byron, can appreciate the value of a little literary smut? Or is it just the posh boys who get to enjoy it? Wasn’t it Byron who wrote: “Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure”?
I’ve never understood why we feel the need to be so critical of material that is both easy to consume and enjoyable. The Davinci Code, Love Island, Coldplay; things we refer to as “guilty pleasures”. But why the guilt? You’re not hurting anyone by enjoying it and not every creative endeavor has to rewrite the canon.
Look, women like the fantasy, they like the magical creatures and the knight in shining latex, and they sure as sh*t like the sex bit. Why can’t we just allow women to read racy books without getting our panties in a wad about it? People have been fretting about women reading for a sexy thrill for hundreds of years. Is it not time to just allow them to enjoy a naughty book without accusing them of lowering the tone, letting the side down, or just flat-out being perverts?
What particularly irks me about such sneering attitudes is that when men write books stuffed full of dragons, tits, and violent sex we call it Game of Thrones and give it an Emmy. When women do it, it gets called “fantastically awful” and they are accused of, in yet another Telegraph article, “cheapening popular culture”.
I grew up reading sword and sorcery authors like David Gemmell, R. A. Salvatore, and Robert Adams, and you better believe those books are packed full of magical creatures, hulking warriors, swooning damsels, and multiple accounts of graphic, often violent sex – but for some reason, no one seemed to be remotely concerned about the overwhelmingly male audience who were consuming them. I’ve yet to read any articles dripping with “amused scepticism” about the many bookshops that specialise in fantasy and science fiction that can be found throughout the UK.
Funny that. In 1949, men made up 93 per cent of the reading demographic for science fiction and fantasy books. By 2003, this had declined to 67 per cent. Today, it is broadly split 50/50, until we break it down into sub genres. Men are still the biggest audience for science fiction books and women are absolutely dominating the romantasy market. The “devaluation effect” is a sociological and economic theory that shows that work, skills, and traits predominantly associated with women are systematically undervalued. In fact, when a profession shifts from being dominated by men to a more equitable spread of labour, that profession will see wages drop and prestige diminish.
I would argue that this is what we are currently seeing with the disapproval being heaped upon romantasy fiction. Until very recently books about far-flung places, magical creatures, and well-endowed warriors in fur bikinis were largely written by and for men. Now, we are seeing a large chunk of this genre being written and enjoyed by women, and it has lost much of its prestige – and garnered considerable cynicism.
If you don’t like stories about a goblin king who is hung like a blue whale, then don’t read them. If you will only deign to read sex scenes written by authors who have a Nobel Prize in literature, then you crack on (tip, Annie Ernaux and Elfriede Jelinek are absolutely filthy.) But what we’re not going to do is dump all over the books other people like to read just to feel superior about our own choices. Personally, I am just happy people are reading at all.
No one is getting hurt here. It’s just women reading fun books about sword, sorcery, and shagging. Can we finally just leave them to get on with it?
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