Are romance novels cringe?

A few days ago I was scrolling through Booktok and saw someone saying that reading romance books is automatically cringey, and that you have to Embrace the Cringe if you’re going to read a romance novel. As someone who’s read romance and women’s fiction for years, I was confused. Cringe? Why?

I was also a bit exhausted, because this sort of rhetoric around romance novels is not new at all to anyone in the romance reading or writing community. We hear it all the time, and we pick and choose our battles on when to speak up and when to just ignore the haters. Often, romance novels are described as fluff, easy to read, and light reads. No match intellectually for Literary Fiction! Not comparable to those fancy Pulitzer winners!

I very kindly pushed back on that TikTok creator and explained that “cringe” was never a word that came to mind when I picked up a romance novel. I gravitate to this genre because I find that it centers and validates my emotions.

This is the very reason that romance novels get their reputation—because they make women feel valued.

I really enjoyed this opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg, which discusses the success of the biggest Blockbuster of the summer as well as the tour of one of this generation’s greatest singer/songwriters.

“An obvious lesson from the gargantuan success of both Barbie and the Eras Tour is that there is a huge, underserved market for entertainment that takes the feelings of girls and women seriously.”

Girls and women want what matters to them to be taken seriously, and they’re more than happy to support entertainment that does just that. The fact that the romance is selling better than ever before is proof of this. We want to do our girly things and not be belittled for liking it or taking part; instead, we want to exist unapologetically and without shame projected onto us. We do not need to feel guilty for the sheer act of feeling.

Gal Gadot and Rachel Zegler were interviewed about the new live action Snow White coming out. They made it clear that this won’t be your regular, run-of-the-mill Snow White. No sirree! Instead of True Love, Snow White will awaken because she is called to become the leader she was always bound to be. It’s got nothing to do with stupid love.

To which, many people were like: Why? Why can’t it be about love, or romance, or emotions? Why must every Strong Female Character be a bossgirl who is too preoccupied with her calling to find companionship? Why is love dismissed as not worthy enough of a motivator?

And I get that we’ve had plenty of media and entertainment in the past where falling in love and getting married was the only thing a woman would focus on—but that doesn’t mean the pendulum has to swing so far away that love is out of the question. And it definitely doesn’t mean that any kind of media that centers romance is a bunch of frou frou nonsense.

Romance novels are dismissed because, very often, the genre centers the female experience. It’s a genre enjoyed by readers who primarily identify as female. As is often the case with anything made by or enjoyed by women, it’s reduced and given a reputation as less than. (and yes, internalized misogyny means women will declare romance cringe just as much as men would)

This devaluing happens all the time in various ugly forms. Enthusiastic supporters of musical artists or movie stars are looked down on as silly little fangirls, while rabid sports fans are deemed masculine enough, and therefore their enthusiasm is acceptable. Or there’s this infuriating fact I only learned recently: as women take over a male-dominated industry, the pay they receive decreases.

While there absolutely are minimally demanding reads in the romance genre, this is also the case for any genre of book. The same goes with cringe—fantasy, literary fiction, or memoirs have just as much capacity to come off as cringey as romance. If someone believes that it’s primarily romance books that are cringe, then perhaps the root of what bothers them is this focus on women’s emotions and experiences.

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