This summer, Britain gets its first romantasy bookshop. Bad Girl Books opens on 4 July 2026 on Walton Street in Oxford, painted pink and stocked with spicy faerie romances, and at least two national newspapers have responded as though someone were opening a crack den next to a primary school. The Telegraph clutched its pearls about the MeToo generation reading smut on the train. The Spectator sighed that it simply is not very good.
So we thought we would ask the obvious question. Why does a genre written by women, read by women and bought by women in enormous numbers make people quite this cross?
What is romantasy anyway?
Romantasy is exactly what it sounds like: romance welded to fantasy, with a proper love story running through a world of fae, dragons, magic and morally grey men who make questionable decisions. It is not a niche. The genre generated more than $610m in sales in 2024, and grew 42% between 2022 and 2023. Sarah J Maas, widely called the queen of the genre, has sold more than 75 million books worldwide across her A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass and Crescent City series.
Much of its rise has been driven by BookTok, where readers recommend titles by trope rather than plot. If you have seen the phrases “enemies to lovers”, “touch her and you die” or “only one bed”, you have seen romantasy marketing at work. Other names worth knowing are Rebecca Yarros, whose Fourth Wing (2023) is set in a military war college for dragon riders, and Alex Aster, whose Lightlark (2022) went viral on TikTok before it was even finished.
The panic is 250 years old
Here is the part the broadsheets tend to skip. Fretting about women reading racy books is not a new development. It is one of the oldest anxieties going.
In 1771, a French physician published a whole book pathologising female desire and warning that “luxurious” novels would corrupt young women. In 1864, an anonymous pastor described a young woman reading novels night after night until, in his words, she went incurably insane. Swap the fainting couch for a train carriage and the script is almost identical to the one being read out in 2026. The format changes, from novels to romance to romantasy, but the underlying worry stays the same: that women are enjoying something, and choosing it for themselves.
When men do it, it wins an Emmy
The double standard is the bit that really gives the game away. When men write dragons, graphic violence and plenty of sex, we hand it an Emmy and call it prestige television. Game of Thrones is not short on nudity, brutality or dubious consent, and nobody suggests its fans are a threat to public morals. When women write the same ingredients, it becomes fairy porn, trash, and a sign the sisterhood has lost the plot.
There is a name for this. The devaluation effect describes how work and interests associated with women get systematically marked down. When a field shifts from male-dominated to mixed, its wages and its prestige tend to fall. Science fiction and fantasy readership was around 93% male in 1949. Today it is closer to 50/50. As women arrived, a chunk of the cultural respect quietly drained away, and the genre women now dominate is the one being called worthless.
Does everything have to be high art?
The Spectator’s real objection was not the sex but the supposed lack of literary merit. The writer conceded the books are not designed as great literature, then spent the rest of the piece sneering at them anyway, before signing off to return to Waugh, Amis and Larkin.
Fair enough, read what you like. But the idea that reading only counts when it is difficult is snobbery dressed up as taste. We call these books guilty pleasures, and it is worth asking where the guilt is supposed to come from. If your entire day is spent wading through searing political commentary, there is nothing shameful about winding down with a dragon and a happy ending. Not every book has to rewrite the canon.
The genre is not above criticism
None of this means romantasy is beyond reproach, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. Plenty of it is repetitive. The recurring pairing of a centuries-old immortal man with a heroine barely out of her teens is a dynamic worth squinting at, however swept up you are in the moment. There is a real shortage of older heroines, which is a shame for those of us who would happily read about a fed-up 45-year-old blowing things up. Queer characters too often hover in the background rather than leading the story.
But there is a difference between criticism from within and dismissal from without. A reader who loves the genre and wants better older women, sharper writing and more variety is building it up. A columnist who calls the entire category trash without distinguishing the good from the bad is simply pulling rank, and doing to romantasy what nobody would dream of doing to fantasy written by men. Lord of the Rings does not get dragged down by the existence of far grubbier male pulp, and it should not. The same courtesy might reasonably be extended here.
Because in the end, women reading is a good thing, full stop. Sometimes a dragon is just a dragon.
This is a companion piece to our episode “It’s Friday I’m Reading Smut on the Train: Romantasy, Female Rage and the Broadsheet Pearl-Clutching”. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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