All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
The subject line was simple—nice, even: “Big fan!”
But when Alisha Rai clicked to open the email, she found a message from a man she didn’t know: “Your dad is so lucky he’s dead and doesn’t have to see the twat you’ve become. And the utter trash you write. Whore.”
She screenshotted the email. Then she went back to work.
With more than 15,000 Twitter followers and a slew of best-selling romance novels—including Glutton for Pleasure, A Gentleman in the Street, and her latest, The Right Swipe—Rai is used to talking to readers on Twitter, email, and elsewhere on the internet. But with that success and connection also comes near-daily harassment—propositions in her DMs, alongside threats and abuse in her inbox.
“It feels like I almost can’t remember a time when it didn’t happen,” Rai says.
Rai is part of a growing and increasingly visible group of women online who write romance novels. Despite its clichéd dismissal as “chick lit,” there’s serious power in the romance genre—both in terms of influence and audience. In 2016 romance made up 23 percent of the overall fiction market, according to a survey from Romance Writers of America (RWA). And NPR notes that “the billion-dollar industry…outperforms all other book genres” in terms of sales. The Fifty Shades series alone has made writer E.L. James a household name, with the Los Angeles Times pegging her net worth around $58 million. Even beyond that fan fiction turned blockbuster movie example, one report in City Lab found that with the success of electronic and digital books, the median income for romance writers in 2018 had almost tripled.
To just exist as a woman online is to be at risk for harassment. According to a 2017 survey from the Pew Research Center, 21 percent of women aged 18 to 29 reported they had been sexually harassed online—more than double the rate for men in the same age group. But women who write romance are particularly vulnerable to abuse. These are people who create narratives around sex, pleasure, and female happiness—in other words, women who are magnets for targeted sexist harassment.
“We’re talking about a genre that centers marginalized people in happiness, and happiness is threatening to people,” says Sarah MacLean, a romance novelist and a columnist for the Washington Post. “It’s part of the job,” she says of the harassment. “It shouldn’t be, but it’s women writing books having sexual parity and happiness. And that’s a threat to some not-great people.”
For people like those who emailed Rai about her dad, the mere fact that a woman writes about sex is grounds for punishment. “Sometimes I get threatening stuff, and that’s a lot scarier,” Rai says. “I can deal with the gross stuff now. I would almost rather the propositions. You know—if I’m playing Which Poison?"
At The Ripped Bodice, the only romance-specific bookstore in the United States, co-owner Leah Koch says she’s deleted comments from haters who troll their business on Instagram. She’s even had to ask people to leave the store.
“I’ve talked to male reporters who want it to be more complicated, but it’s not,” Koch says. “It’s misogyny. It’s just sexism. It is deeply ingrained.”
The success of James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (and the movies that came after) put a new focus on the genre—and the mechanics of its success. James self-published the first books in her BDSM series, as some other romance writers elect to do. (Rai did so for one of her award-winning books.) With her rise, the image of romance writer changed; Nora Roberts, no longer. Now the casual reader instead envisions a woman like James—a mom writing Twilight fan fiction as an exorcism of some supersecret, hyper-erotic fantasy.
“As soon as you say you write romance, people automatically assume you’re writing Fifty Shades,” said Farrah Rochon, a romance writer known for her New York Sabers and Bayou Dreams series for Harlequin’s Kimani Romance imprint. “There’s a typical question: ‘How do you do your research?’ With a leer.”
Rochon isn’t the first to notice how people respond to her work, or even to use that particular phrase. Jen Lois, a professor of sociology at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, has researched the particular disdain—and even abuse—reserved for romance writers. Her work with Joanna Gregson, a professor of sociology at Pacific Lutheran University, in Tacoma, Washington, examines how entrenched misogyny and sexist ideas about sexuality can stigmatize romance writers, both online and off. Lois has categorized how people respond to romance writers, with reactions that tend to fall into one of two categories: the “sneer,” as Lois dubs it, and the “leer.” The emails Rai gets, calling her work “trash,” can be categorized as “sneers.” But the comments Rochon and Rai say they often get IRL—invasive questions about sexual preferences, or prompts like “Do you practice at home?” and more—fall into the “leer” framework.
“Responding to leering is much more complicated, because it’s almost a micro-aggression,” Lois says. “Many people walk away from those conversations and say, ‘Wait, what just happened? I feel like there was an undercurrent there?’”
Samantha Jaxon, a law student and romance writer who’s hoping to self-publish her upcoming series this summer, says the comments she gets from random people online have her already preparing to fend off troll attacks that could come when she promotes her books. She’s also had to cope with derision and assumptions in the real world—even from people she once trusted.
“I’ve had some friends who now aren’t as close friends, because they’ve made so many jokes at my expense,” she says. “They act like I don’t have a real job, like I’m just a horny person all the time.”
Recently on The Late Show, host Stephen Colbert invited former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams onstage. After some chatting about politics and voting rights, he brought out a sheaf of papers. He read aloud some excerpts from Abrams’s romance novels.
Abrams, who lost her race in November amid cries of voter suppression, once wrote under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery. When Colbert began to read an excerpt, her face changed—“God, no, I don’t want you to read from any of these,” she told him. “I want people to read them in the quiet of their home.”
But Colbert pressed on, a move that the writer Ashley C. Ford later said “was a little bit trying to embarrass you…. It felt dismissive of the genre.”
Rai saw herself in Abrams’s onscreen reaction: “I’ve shot that same look.”
But because women write most romances (95 percent of it, per a 2017 report from the RWA), they’re in a double bind, Lois’s research found. They face what she calls “the double sword of the internet.” They’re women writing about sex and pleasure, so they’re much likelier to face abuse, but many writers are also encouraged to promote their work on Twitter, Instagram, and other hubs of online community. As Rai points out, she writes alone much of the time. She likes being online—when it’s safe.
Romance writers like Abrams may use a pseudonym (hers, she insists, was for just for better search results). But in the age of doxxing, a pseudonym is a flimsy shield against harassment. Rochon had a stalker contact her explicitly because of her romance pen name. He became convinced they were somehow related and destined to meet, bombarding her with messages asking for more and more information. She eventually blocked him and refused to respond, but she says the experience made her think twice about the supposed safety of a pseudonym. At the time, she lived alone, and she felt exposed.
The problem of harassment is compounded for women of color, like Rai and Rochon, who are still underrepresented in the field. According to a report from the Ripped Bodice, books from white women take up a large share of romance shelves. The report found that for every 100 books published by leading romance publishers in 2018, only 7.7 were written by people of color. And a report from the RWA found that 80% of romance novelists identify as white. So women of color aren’t just battling trolls going after women; they’re also fighting to tell stories that center protagonists who look like them.
“Romance is dealing with a really insidious and deeply institutionalized racism problem, but it’s slow-going,” Koch said. “I think for any white author who has experienced something shitty, an author of color has experienced that 10 times, and worse.”
The RWA, the national organization for these writers in the genre, is aware of the problem members face online. President Helen Kay admits she’s even received harassment not just on Twitter but also via the contact form on her website.
“Our stance has always been, we are not ashamed at all about what we do for a living and how it allows our members to earn a living,” she says.
But as Rai and others view it, it’s a problem that won’t be solved by statements of support from romance writers and others in the community. Unless social media giants like Twitter and Facebook take action to protect vulnerable users, she doesn’t see an end to the malicious messages.
“I don’t think I’ve ever reported someone and something has happened,” Rai said. “I’ve reported a good number of people. It just doesn’t seem like a priority for any of the platforms.”
In the absence of decisive action from the companies themselves, romance writers have banded together, if not to spur change, then at least to raise awareness and offer support. Rai points to the conversation on Twitter following Abrams’s appearance on The Late Show. Romance writers came together to “ratio” Colbert’s tweets and share “good parts” of their books, as a kind of counter-programming tactic.
“Women understand immediately, because it’s a common thing in many areas of our lives, because of the stigma of women’s sexuality in general,” Lois says. “All women understand the fine line you have to walk, that it's really a no-win situation for women in the culture.”
In Rai’s next series, she explores the dark side of social media. Following accidental viral stardom, her protagonist experiences what an internet maelstrom can feel like firsthand. But as for the harassment she experiences on near-daily basis—it’s not exactly book material, Rai says.
“This is something that will just be going on for forever,” she says. “The harassment we receive as women or women of color or romance authors, it’s sort of the ugliest parts of society…. It’s hard to write a romance around that.”
Julia Carpenter writes about gender, culture, and work and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Vogue, Elle, CNN Business, and more. She lives in New York City.
