Culture, Digested: Romance is a Sub-Genre of Horror

The heterosexual project has always required a strong fantastical component to keep it working. Parasocial relationships with celebrities, novels and movies and happily ever after fairy tales, knights in shining armor. The house is where women go to die – in childbirth, in violent altercations with fathers and husbands, in accidentally setting yourself on fire with your ruffled sleeve as you try to tradwife yourself into social media stardom – so keeping her there requires fantasies of love and romance and lives worth living.

So romance, at its extreme point, will always meet back up with horror. Sex leads to death in all kinds of ways.

There are stories that understand this. There is Bluebeard and Gothic romance. In Hitchcock’s Rebecca, there is visible relief on Mrs. DeWinter’s face when she finds out the terrible secret her husband is hiding isn’t that he still loves his first wife but that he murdered her. The romance novelist Reiko in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Loft is just trying to finish her next book but everywhere she goes they are digging up women’s corpses. When Marina realizes in Almodovar’s Tie Me Up Tie Me Down that the performance of love she’s put on to keep her stalker and abductor calm and herself alive has become internalized and she really does have feelings for him.

But in the less conscious, and more palatable realm, horror elements have infiltrated mainstream romance. Romance is just part of a life and death struggle, and the romantic figures are not heroic men they are monsters, dragons, werewolves, and vampires. The rise of romantasy, with its very devoted online fanbase, has dominated book sales to such a degree that now even the critics are paying attention.

Romantasy is not good, but it’s not supposed to be. The romance genre has always been derided and ridiculed. But it was always done so with the understanding that it was a niche subculture. Wildly popular, yes, but everyone who wrote and read it had something of an understanding that it was silly. But as it gained popularity and visibility through the swamp of BookTok and the front tables of bookstores were now carrying these dragon-fucker books instead of at least making a polite display of books nominated for the Booker, there was a desire to reclaim book culture for the Real Readers.

There’s probably not a direct correlation, but there was a simultaneous push from the Literary Guys, the Brodernists, to a flaunting of difficult, obscure, experimental texts to differentiate themselves. Let’s not forget that, as Noah McCormack writes in “We Used to Read Things in this Country,” Modernism “was created as a form of elite expression that would be impenetrable to the newly literate masses.” And that the educated elites have always expressed horror at what the masses are entertained by, if not arguing directly that the education of the rabble is going to poison the culture.

That is not to say that a person should offer thoughtful critical attention to the romance genre, as has often been demanded by romance writers. (Listen, whatever you are not getting is the thing that you want. Writers who make money at stuff like romantasy or SF always want to be told they are geniuses, too – especially if they are not. Pretty girls always want to be told that they’re smart. You don’t have to play along with this stuff, but it is basic human nature.) A serious critical review of the genre is giving the romance genre what they want, in some way. Treating it as literature. But by refusing to understand the context in which this genre is flourishing does more to reveal the silliness of much of “the literary critique” than the romance novels themselves. All it does is sneer “this is not good” while refusing to engage with the cultural shifts around it. Because in 20 years, it’s going to be something else, in the same way that the elites have decried in the past comic books, pulp fiction, detective stories, and tabloid journalism.

Anyway, surprise surprise critic Daniel Yadin finds romantasy to be less than brilliant. In an essay for The Drift that has been circulating with superlative trills of praise, he keeps his eye trained only on the texts and not on the culture around it. He seems surprised that romance novelists use a lot of different kinds of words for sexual desire. “The heroines of romantasy are licked, flicked, nuzzled, ridden, throttled, bitten, pulled, plowed, hit, filled, soaked, and — here’s a [Sarah J.] Maas favorite — shattered.” He compares the readers to religious devotees, writing “I witnessed displays of devotion I had previously thought unimaginable outside the Vatican.” The implication, I’m guessing, is that the fans are like the superstitious, uneducated masses who participate in religious rituals. He has nothing really to say other than that the prose is bad, the fantasies are silly, and suggesting the mainstreaming of this material is going to lead to the intellectual downfall of our once great nation.

There’s a level of bitterness to this kind of critique. (Like a pretty girl who wants to be called smart, the credentialed bro wants desperately to be loved by those he sneers at.) Why are you reading this thing, this garbage, when you could be reading The Drift? A magazine by a bunch of people who went to Harvard. Why isn’t that satisfying enough for you? Oh sorry it doesn’t have enough dragons or whatever. It’s based in a kind of anxiety – which is legitimate, really – that the already precarious position of the writer is going to deteriorate as literacy rates decline and a preference for video content increases. But mostly I see this expressed not through direct admission and reckoning but by yelling online at dumb people for being dumb and telling them they are enjoying art wrong.

Yadin writes that these novels are a kind of fairy tale, which is true but not in the way that he is thinking, since he seems to misunderstand what fairy tales are for. “Now, fairy tales are back with a vengeance at a moment when the category of ‘adult,’ as we’ve known it, is fading away.” The original fairy tales come from oral culture, a way of transmitting essential information from one generation to the next. And in most fairy tales, that information is related to the people who are likely to kill you. Mothers, fathers, lovers, strangers. You know. Love stories.

I don’t know that it’s so difficult to figure out why romantasy is popular. When the average romantic encounter with a human male is fraught with the threat of danger, with sexual dissatisfaction if not actual sexual violence, with the disappointment of not finding someone politically, emotionally, or intellectually compatible, no wonder it takes fucking a dragon to even imagine the possibility of sexual and romantic satisfaction. And that a lot of the fans for these books are married, well, then you’re just in line with the previous blockbuster romance books like 50 Shades or Twilight, also huge with disappointed middle-aged women trying to compensate for reality.

Much like the credentialed display a contempt for the uneducated out of anxiety that they are not needed in a post-literate society, I think the masculine contempt for something like romantasy might be based in an anxiety that women feel less and less like they want to build lives with men. I see in romantasy less a penchant for fairy sex and more an imaginative exhaustion with patriarchal heterosexuality. It says, look, we imagined all the possible types of guys we want to have sex with, and that’s not really working anymore because we know too many real ones. So we’re using dragons now.

As young women express disinterest in marriage and romantic engagement with men, I’m wondering less what the romantasy imagination is going to lead to and more what women are going to fantasize about next. If you don’t have to spend all this time compensating for disappointment, what can you spend your fantasy life on instead?

Recommended:

• I liked Loft a lot. You can find it on the Japanese Horror YouTube channel.

• I feel like 80% of Substack content these days are breathless arguments about the necessity of cultural criticism. I just wish that someone would make this argument by writing an essential piece of cultural criticism instead.

• Equator has been really excellent so far, today’s recommendation is Benjamin Moser’s “We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves”. Also can’t recommend the McCormack essay at the Baffler about how “the history of literacy is the history of class” enough.

• BBC’s “Anatomy of a Cancellation” is frustrating listening. It investigates what happened to poet Kate Clanchy after her memoir was attacked on multiple fronts for being racist, but no one says the obvious thing, which is that it is absurd to try to hold an individual accountable for institutional failings. So the cancellers are still self-righteous, Clanchy is still asserting she did nothing wrong, and the debate stays on whether or not Clanchy suffered disproportionate consequences for using language some people felt offended by.