So one of the most annoying phenomena you’ll find on social media is the way that ideas will get passed around like a game of telephone until they’re virtually unrecognizable. The “anti-intellectualism in booktok” conversation is probably one of the more frustrating examples.
It all began in earnest, really. Often when someone would critique a book in the romance or romantasy genre, fans of the book would respond with things like “it’s not that deep” or “it’s just entertainment.” But these genres are just as deserving of criticism as any other, and people pointed out that dismissing legitimate media criticism like this was anti-intellectual.
And that’s not an incorrect assessment.
But there are a lot of factors that we have to consider with the romance genre, including that it has often been the target of derision for a lot of misogynistic reasons. It’s why fans get so defensive when any criticism is lobbed — because most of the time it’s not in good faith. I think that anchors a lot of pushback against the legitimate critism too. It gets looked at as a lesser form of literature, but people need to discern the real critique from the bad faith snark if that’s every going to change.
At this point, it’s not a great situation. It can one hundred percent get worse though.
You see, social media is full of people who just echo ideas without really understanding them, and with that lack of understanding just sort of turn a thing on its head. And this is where the “discourse” kicked in, because if social media does anything it’s flatten any nuance out of anything. Every discussion gets turned into an “us vs. them,” and the worst kind of people jump into the fray. Suddenly, the people who looked down on romance as a genre started to call romance books themselves and anyone who enjoyed them “anti-intellectual” — that somehow any book they thought was “dumb” fell into that category.
That is, of course, not what “anti-intellectual” fucking means.
The entire thing is frustrating. It opens the door to some rando making weird rants about how if romance readers don’t read other genres that somehow publishers will stop producing those other books. As if romance buyers haven’t been the backbone of the publishing industry for decades. As if romance sales weren’t what kept the book stores open. As if romance sales weren’t what kept every other genre in print to begin with.
And don’t even get me started on the people dismissing romance novels as “porn,” as if there’s something wrong with adult readers enjoying adult content. The rise of moral puritanism is a wider topic that deserves its own post.
In the end though, we’re stuck with what started as a legitimate conversation turning into nonsense, and the people trying to have the original conversation just get buried under all of the flotsam, their points lost.
It just kind of sucks.
If I told you that a Kevin James/Alan Ritchson buddy comedy ended with our leads purposefully killing dozens of children in a fiery explosion, you’d probably look at me sideways. If I told you they were the heroes, and this was supposed to be a “cool and funny’ moment, you’d think I’ve lost my god damned mind. But the movie Playdate is real, it’s been out for two months, and you can watch the scene unfold with your own eyes if you want to.
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