Alan Elsner Thinks Romance Novels are Porn. I Wonder What He'd Make of Erotic Romance Then?

I’ve got used to the entire world minus romance readers taking pot shots at the romance industry whenever it feels like having a good guffaw over what they presume to be the sweats and teeshirt brigade sighing into their paperbacks over the latest obsession in tree-trunk-thighed heroes and vestal virgins and all the usual and erroneous cliches they trot out on these occassions.

Mr. Elsner is a case in point.  In his December 2 essay on Huffington Post he professes to have actually read “a stack” of romance novels to prove his case this time around.  The fact that he seems to have confined his reading to historical romances written two decades ago doesn’t exactly endear him to any romance readers on the planet. He breaks down the entire romance genre with a handful of clichèd and callous observations based on his reading of said novels (which he carefully doesn’t name).

Describing them as porn really finishes him off in my estimation.  It also makes him look stupid in front of the 56% of the popular fiction buying public who regularly read and love romance fiction.

The romance genre has got used to such diatribes from men who feel threatened or somehow inadequate and use their public positions to hit back.

The more interesting question, I think, is what he might have said if he had purchased current titles and read those, instead of raiding the public library shelves for dusty, decades old romance titles that no one reads anymore.  (There’s a reason they were actually sitting on the shelves and not checked out.)  What if he had read an erotic romance?  Would his self-esteem have plunged even deeper?

I guess we’ll never know.  But I do like to wonder.

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