Whenever a romance novel hits the mainstream and people start reading it, the discourse inevitably becomes contemptuous with the amount of sex in it. Sometimes because they are not aware of how much sex is in a lot of romance, but often it can just feel like a knee-jerk reaction to brushing up against having to unpack sex and sexuality generally.
They start calling it fetishism or pathologising the people reading it. Often the discourse veers into the misogynistic or paternalistic or puritanical and they start saying it's trash or fan fiction or immature or porn. In fact, fan fiction and romance actually are similar genres (if fan fiction is a genre?) because they're both primarily focused on the romantic and emotional journey of their characters. It's often about character development and relationship development and internal turmoil, any external plot only servicing the emotional journey rather than the other way around.
This is a pretty well documented phenomenon in Publishing's most lucrative genre and not just within queer romance. Bridgerton received this treatment too, for example. Personally, I think the contempt has as much to do with subverting patriarchal norms as it does sitting with sex as a open discourse. Men in romance and fan fiction are often vulnerable and emotional in ways that break away from suppression or anger. They need and want love, express that (eventually), and are not sexually selfish partners. If it's queer romance then that subversion hits a bit deeper. The romance genre also says that sex is important to women too, as important as love is, and that pleasure and attraction matters— in this way romance confronts the barriers around how women should act, how relationships are 'supposed to be', what depictions shouldn't be relegated to the public sphere, etc...
It takes effort to dismantle these limitations in thinking, but please understand, an obsession with sex also encompasses an obsession with policing sexual expression. Sex is a part of human relationships, human expression, and human experiences and the romance genre has never shied away from depicting it. The amount of sex in romance varies, of course, and more ace spec romances are being written, which is good, but I just wanted to express, as someone who has read romance for years, how many steps of this dance romance readers and romance writers already know, and how tired of it we are.












