Target: Romance Novels

A lot has happened since this blog was last regularly active. I had a baby. My father passed away. The United States of America voted in the Republican candidate for a second term. Plenty of people are legitimately concerned for a wide variety of reasons.

As a queer person, a queer writer, and a romance novelist, I can see there’s a lot to be worried about. Even standing on the other side of the border, I have concerns about what this means for romance novels.

Why be concerned about romance novels? Well, reader, I’m about to tell you.

Romance Will Be Classed as Porn

You read that correctly. Romance novels will be automatically classified as pornography. That means almost all romances, not just queer ones or explicit ones.

How do I know that? It’s happened before. Sure, perhaps some novels, like Tropic of Cancer or Lady Chatterly’s Lover, are basically erotica. Amazon already has a “dungeon” for those kinds of narratives.

But plenty of less explicit novels get caught up in these kinds of bans. Queer books—even when they don’t contain any sexual content—are automatically labeled as pornography. That comes out of the purposeful, political conflation of sexuality with sex itself.

This fuels everything from book bans to protests against drag queens reading to children at libraries. They will “corrupt” the children if they’re allowed to be anywhere near them, and “turn” them into other queer people.

It’s a bullshit narrative—we saw it in the mid-twentieth century used against gay men in the exact same way. Science says those scenarios are impossible. People either are or aren’t queer, and “becoming” queer is more about realizing, recognizing, and embracing one’s queerness.

This vilification then extends to sex workers—many queer people, and especially trans women, are also sex workers. But so are many cis, straight women.

As you might guess, though, sex workers are vilified as being “about sex,” much the same way queer people are. Sex workers are seen often as desperate women forced into something they don’t want to do. Otherwise, they’re portrayed as overly horny sexpots who can’t keep it in their pants. Either way, they’re imagined as a threat to children, a threat to “the family,” and a threat to the order of society more generally.

Power over Reproduction

Can you guess what the march against queer people and sex workers has in common with abortion bans and the vilification of birth control? All of these positions are an effort to reassert control over marginalized bodies and their reproductive power.

Queer people resist coercion over their reproductive power, by virtue of the fact they are queer. Lesbians and gay men, for example, cannot reproduce with their preferred partners. At least, they can’t without a good deal of modern technology or adoption policies that embrace queer parents. Discrimination in policies around adoption and reproductive tech are an attempt to stop queer people from asserting control. Yet queer people also exert control by abstaining from reproduction and parenting. The state, capitalism, patriarchy, and other power structures desire people to reproduce as much as possible, to create more exploitable individuals. Queer people, who traditionally cannot reproduce, resist this power and thus become targets of those who seek control.

Abortion bans and attempts to vilify birth control are similar attempts to exert control over a marginalized population. Since the mid-twentieth century, people with uteruses have gained increasing control over their reproductive power. Dropping birth rates and increasing standards of living threaten the current capitalist-nationalist structures, as well as patriarchy. People with uteruses now control how many children they have and when they have them, which often frees them from coercive and economic control by partners.

Sex workers are not necessarily controlling their reproductive power, but they are controlling two related power structures.

Sex Workers Hold Sway over Sex

That makes sex workers a threat to the current power structures, particularly patriarchy and the state. In sex work, traditionally marginalized groups—such as trans women, gay men, and cis women—hold power in terms of sex.

This is why narratives often strive to portray sex workers as desperate people in exceedingly terrible circumstances. This may be true in some cases, certainly. Not every sex worker is coerced or forced to stand on the proverbial street corner in order to feed their kids.

In the past, sex workers have often been revered. But in our modern culture, where men must control women’s sexuality through marriage vows, the sex worker is a threat—not to “traditional values” but to patriarchal power.

Sex Workers Can Gain Economic Freedom

Sex workers also hold a kind of economic power, especially when the work is chosen. Think of women who have become famous adult movie stars or have successful OnlyFans channels.

Sex sells, as the adage goes. The fact that it does can allow sex workers—who are, again, traditionally from marginalized groups—to determine their own economic fate. Some of them become rich, which further undermines the patriarchal-capitalist power structures that undergird Western culture.

How so? A woman who earns a good living as an escort or posting feet pics on OnlyFans doesn’t need to rely on a husband. Further, she is exploiting men, in what is almost a complete reversal of the usual capitalist structure.

So now we have economically free marginalized people who are exploiting the dominant group.

Yeah, no wonder that seems like a threat to those in power. Thus we see narratives that present sex work as degrading. We also hear the narrative that it’s poorly remunerated, that most people who do it are living in abject poverty.

Again, there are cases where this is the truth. Sex work is not necessarily glamorous or even safe. But it’s often unsafe or poorly paid because it’s illegal—and it’s illegal because it otherwise presents a threat to the ruling class.

Romance Novels Are Sex-Work Adjacent

Now we can see why queer people, sex workers, and people with uteruses are all under attack. But where do romance novels fit into this paradigm?

Romance novels are, by and large, sex work-adjacent. That means that the novelist writing romances is considered only a step away from being a sex worker. While the novelist might not be posting feet pics or walking the street, they are following that same old adage: sex sells.

Many romance novels are explicit. Some only go so far as “fade to black,” but that doesn’t matter in the eyes of the Christo-fascist regime that wants to restore “traditional values” by eradicating queer people and forcing people with uteruses into roles their grandmothers fought to escape.

The romance novel is, perhaps, even more dangerous than sex work or the seductiveness of the so-called queer agenda. Why? It peddles smut, but it also peddles ideas.

Romance Novels Dream of Something Better

Romance novels hinge on the promise of escapist fantasy. While the focus is usually on the emotional core of a relationship—rather than the steamy part of it—romance is, by and large, fantasy. It allows the reader to act out their fantasies by proxy. So Twilight is loved by a lot of people who wish that they could meet a vampire, fall in love with a vampire, and even become a vampire. All those Harlequins about meeting a billionaire or a prince and having him fall madly in love with the heroine are wish-fulfillment for the reader.

So, first off, the sex scenes are often wish-fulfillment for the reader, who may or may not have a lacklustre love life of their own. And the emotional fulfillment of the relationship may also be wish-fulfillment for those who feel romance is lacking in their own lives—even if they’re in a relationship.

This is threatening to patriarchy, because it gives people ideas. And ideas are dangerous. In this case, the reader yearns for something more or better than they have—and they can see that it might be possible.

With that, these escapist fantasies become a threat, because they could empower women and other marginalized individuals to demand better. And that, in turn, smacks of feminism—which is precisely what this backlash is all about. Romance allows people to dream of something better. And when you can dream it, you can demand it in real life.

Romance Novels Are an Economic Powerhouse

Further to that, romance also provides economic power to those who are often marginalized. Romance is a billion-dollar industry. Think of Nora Roberts. Nora Roberts is a successful novelist, and with her royalty checks, she doesn’t need to rely on a man to support her.

An economically free woman is a dangerous one in the eyes of the patriarchal state. Much like sex work, the patriarchal-capitalist state seeks to take away lucrative opportunities that could create more economic freedom among those who are oppressed by the state. When the oppressed have economic freedom, they’re able to fight back against their oppression more effectively. So the state seeks ways to impoverish marginalized individuals.

After all, there isn’t actually much difference between being a sex worker and being a cashier at Walmart. In both cases, you’re whoring out your body and your labor in hopes of earning enough to provide the necessities of life.

In fact, the sex worker may have a better gig. Depending on the situation, they may be their own boss, may dictate their own hours, and may earn a lot more than the Walmart cashier. Capitalism balks at this. It needs sex work to be dangerous, dirty, degrading, and ill-paid so that showing up for your shifts at the local big box store sounds more appealing.

The same is true of the romance novelist. Capitalism must take away this lucrative avenue so more people will be forced to work menial jobs for next to nothing, versus taking a risk and hoping to make it big.

Power in Romance Novels

And so it follows that romance novels must be neutralized as a threat. They need to be mocked, they need to be denigrated, they need to be degraded and labeled as porn. They need to be banned, and romance novelists should be labeled as nothing more than peddlers of smut corrupting not just “the youth” but the entire social fabric of society. Romance novels become part of a sort of Satanic Panic, a sin that must be stamped out.

None of that is true, other than the fact romance is a billion-dollar industry precisely because it peddles escapist fantasies and the promise that something better can and maybe does exist. And if people are spending billions of dollars on escapist fantasies, we should probably spend less time creating a witch hunt about things they enjoy and spend more time asking why they feel such a powerful need to escape this reality.

And that, of course, is precisely what the powers that be don’t want us to see. We’re miserable and need to escape because the current power structures are set up to make us do precisely that. Romance novels can show us the way out–which is why they’ve got a target on their covers.