Smut or Smart? The Romance Genre’s Battle for Respect

Romance may be ruling bestseller lists, but its leading ladies are still fighting for respect. As the genre’s heroines break hearts and defy odds, the books themselves remain boxed in — dismissed as frivolous for centering on women’s desires.

The genre’s recent surge has been fueled by TikTok trends, transforming guilty pleasures into a literary powerhouse. Popular romance books, in particular, found fame for their abstract, childish covers and erotic content rating.

Bright, cartoonish covers now dominate bookstore displays, replacing the windblown Fabio-era of mass-market paperbacks. The playful packaging signals a shift — romance is mainstream, yet still battling for respect.

Natalie Kalich, a composition and literature instructor, said gendered trivialization is what keeps romance novels from being taken seriously.

“Romance explores a lot of different emotions,” Kalich said. “It’s about vulnerability, it’s about anxiety, it’s about communicating with other people. But action movies, which are just as absurd, are treated as cool and tough, while rom-coms get categorized as chick-lit or undermined with cartoonish covers, as if women are less smart.”

Kalich said romance novels are often dismissed as lowbrow, not requiring deep analysis, while classics are considered worthy of academic attention. This perception is reinforced by romance’s often cartoonish covers, which Kalich said drives conclusions that the genre is unworthy of high consideration. 

The recent redesign of Jane Austen’s novels by Penguin, featuring bubbly, stylized artwork, has only added to this debate, Kalich said. While the modern covers are more colorful and lighthearted, for Kalich they’re overly childish and, in turn, diminish Austen’s literary work. 

Orion Elrod, a second-year English master’s student, said this aesthetic shift dilutes the genre’s complexity. Elrod said publishers might be merely capitalizing on a trend, noting some feature people of color despite their characters not reflecting those identities.

However, Elrod said these changes might attract a broader audience, encouraging more readers to engage with romance and recognize its depth rather than dismiss it.

“We envision our society so many times as built around the nuclear family and reproductive model,” Elrod said. “Romance can do a lot of work in threatening that and reaffirming different types of relationships, different narratives — it’s threatened because it’s a genre that is targeted at women, young people and queer people.”

The stigma around romance extends beyond the cartoonish marketing aesthetics. Kalich said romantic storytelling, which centers emotional relationships, is deemed less valuable than works focusing on violence, power or existential despair. 

Virginia Strain, an associate professor in Loyola’s English department, said this devaluation is nothing new — it’s rooted in how cultures perceive genres. Strain, who specializes in Shakespearean studies, said romance is fundamental in literature because it’s essential for life. 

“Shakespeare is ground zero for romantic comedy,” Strain said. “But culturally, we privilege his tragedies as more important. The romantic comedy is about individual life choices — who you want to spend your life with, who you want to have children with — those are radically important.”

Strain said romance offers insight into culture, helping readers recognize cultural and political preferences toward relationships. Kalich said even contemporary romance — which often tackles complex issues through an emotional lens — is frequently dismissed.

While romance novels speak to themes of trauma, mental health and identity, they’re still categorized as mass-market entertainment. Kalich said this trend was seen in previous centuries, when authors like T.S. Eliot aspired to appear elite but still relied on publishing mass-media literature to earn a living. This association with accessibility and emotionality makes them easy targets for literary condescension.

“If I’m comparing a romance novel by Emily Henry to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ Emily Henry is way easier to read,” Kalich said. “It’s more accessible, but accessibility doesn’t have to mean bad.”

The literary world’s reverence for difficult texts often overlooks artistic and emotional merit, Kalich said. While Joyce’s experimental prose is seen as highbrow, romance’s emphasis on reader connection is written off as unserious — a bias, Kalich said, shaped by gendered cultural norms.

Evelyn Johnson, a second-year environmental studies and English major, said new or infrequent readers feel less intimidated by the genre’s casual nature.

“There’s a lot of pretension in reading as a hobby,” Johnson said. “People act like audiobooks don’t count or that if you’re not reading the Booker Prize winners, you’re not reading anything interesting. But romance is easy, silly and fun — and sometimes that’s what you need.”

The criticism of accessibility, Kalich said, is intertwined with a broader dismissal of emotions coded as feminine. The intimacy and emotional expressiveness celebrated in romance novels are viewed as less valuable than stoic or violent narratives.

“Romance gets a bad rep because in our culture we’ve decided certain emotions are tagged as female and thus inferior,” Kalich said. “Whereas other emotions, like anger — when expressed by a man — is seen as powerful and in control. But if you have an angry woman, she’s hysterical, she’s a bitch.”

Beyond its artistic merit, romance has become a battleground in broader culture wars. Across the U.S., school boards and lawmakers have increasingly targeted romance novels with book bans under the guise of protecting children from explicit content, according to PEN America. These bans overwhelmingly target books with LGBTQ+ themes, diverse authors and narratives that depict female sexual agency.

Kalich said these bans aren’t about obscenity — they’re about control.

“One of the reasons the government wants to ban romance novels is because it’s about controlling women,” she said. “Women are reading these books, and they might read a scene with a man pleasuring a woman — not about his orgasm, but hers. And if women learn that they can say no, that they deserve consent, that’s gonna be a problem for the patriarchy.”

For Strain, this gendered divide is seen in classics, where men’s sexuality is normalized while women’s agency remains contentious. Novelized eroticism is often dismissed as gratuitous, Kalich said, but is also increasingly recognized as an act of reclamation.

Gia Rutkowski, a first-year sociology major, said this double standard is deeply ingrained in how society views female sexuality.

“Erotic media within romance novels is very important — it’s the next viable step to women having less shame around sexual expression,” Rutkowski said. “For women to find perceived equality, they’re expected to act more like men. Women are now saying, ‘We can write smut too,’ but it still centers men. Female liberation is still being defined by male norms.”

Aside from sexual fantasies, romance can be joyful representation. Elrod said romance’s value lies in its portrayal of relationships outside of mainstream, heteronormative narratives.

“Romance can be a really great tool in trying to understand healthy relationships and trying to understand boundaries and communication,” Elrod said. “Romance is a great kind of genre where marginalized people can write for and about their communities, trying to imagine the future that they want to have without focusing on suffering all of the time.”

In a literary landscape that often rewards complexity and difficulty, romance offers a space for emotional connection and comfort. Rutkowski said this view of the genre’s casual nature reflects women’s struggles with societal expectations. 

“When you are writing a novel, you have all this pressure to conform into being the perfect woman, to writing the perfect main character, to be accepted into it,” Rutkowski said. “We should be aware of the way these female writers frame their female characters.”