Julia wears a dress by Fendi. Valentyn wears a jacket and trousers by EGONLAB, shoes by Christian Louboutin and belt by Anna Danielsson.

In March of this year, my attention was alerted to The Boyfriend Book Box, a subscription service that curates gift boxes as if they were given to you by your chosen romance fiction hero. The boxes – which sell for $497, with a 20,000-strong waitlist – include a copy of the book, a candle to mimic the smell of his room, a “borrowed” shirt and necklace, a bottle of cologne and, crucially, a replica dildo based on descriptions gleaned from the text. In one TikTok, an influencer who’d been gifted the box holds up the sex toy with her jaw agape, the oversized shirt hanging off her, and says, “I feel so dainty!” before making a pun on the Box’s ability to “insert” the reader into the fictional universe. According to one article, the service has made nearly a million dollars in revenue since 2024.

Like fanfiction, from which the romance genre is regularly derived, The Boyfriend Book Box seeks to flesh out the novel’s universe in as many ways as possible. Readers are encouraged to engage not only with the original book but all of its paraphernalia, to deepen both their understanding of the book and the pockets of those reproducing it. This pursuit of hyperstimulation through immersion reminds me of some of the more aggressive forms of modern porn consumption. There is a clear gender divide operating across these categories: men are twice as likely to watch porn as women, but women buy 90% of romance novels, erotic or otherwise.

Similar to pornography, contemporary romance literature hinges on specificity, degraded over time into a series of flat, reproducible tropes. In 2022, Ali Hazelwood, former fanfiction writer and author of The Love Hypothesis (2021), confessed in an interview that she found the transition to novel-writing difficult, noting that fanfiction allows for pre-packaged characters to plod along without narrative structure. She recalls how her editor had supplied her with a “bunch of tropes” around which she could develop the story. Tropes provide a semblance of structure and reliability: empowered by the illusion of choice, the reader is coddled by books that follow recognisable patterns through to a happy, predictable end.

Julia wears a jumper and skirt by N°21 and gloves by Vivetta.

The mass production of modern romance literature raises questions of quality and originality. Romance novels are rarely standalone; series of six plus books are common, never short of 500 pages apiece. Sarah J. Maas, author of the A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) series (2015-present), has sold over 75 million books worldwide and has her own imprint with Bloomsbury. Across 12 years, she has published 15 full-sized novels with at least two more expected by next spring; in a particularly productive period between 2015 and 2018, she published eight novels across two series. Not wanting to downplay the impressive work ethic here, but isn’t there something quite unsexy about mass production?

A portmanteau of “romance” and “fantasy”, romantasy is the foremost subgenre of them all, an anything-goes arena wherein elaborate systems of class and species maximise the erotic potential for power dynamics and age gaps between all. In Maas’s ACOTAR, expositions are convoluted, and chronology is inconsistent: some of the creatures wear sweatpants, others medieval garb. In this way, romantasy novels are about as narratively fulfilling as a mediocre porn video: unnatural dialogue, bloated exposition, and endless cycles of yearning and sex in place of plot progression. In a New Yorker story on an allegedly stolen romantasy story, an editor and author stayed up late “poring over Google Docs”, desperate to meet a deadline, their roles becoming indiscernible as the editor lent paragraphs of her own. Desire does not have to be strictly a matter of deferral, of course, and good writing has been achieved under pressure, but when the hyperactivity runs commensurate with capitalism – Amazon favours writers with large catalogues and Kindle fiscally rewards writers per page read – I can’t help but feel a little pessimistic.

In March 2026, Hachette cancelled the US publication of Shy Girl by Mia Ballard after readers alleged that it had been written by ChatGPT. That a novel which reads like AI slop can reach the public in the first place is a damning prospect for a publishing industry already under threat from within. In an interview for Time, Maas said: “I want my readers to come away from my books with the knowledge that they can fight for what matters to them. […] My books have happy endings. They’re supposed to be hopeful.” Sycophantic, predictable and derivative, the line between human-authored romance and an LLM grows increasingly thin.

All of Valentyn’s clothes are by Dries Van Noten. All of Julia’s clothes are by Miu Miu.

This one-sided form of sexual consumption, be it porn or “spicy” literature, circumnavigates the stickier social sides of love and sex, and feels like a natural progression of the post-pandemic, post-#MeToo and post-internet social landscape, even as the right-wing media brims with complaints that young people aren’t having enough sex. The intersection of romance literature and politics came to the fore in 2023, when then-PM Rishi Sunak waxed cloying about his love of Jilly Cooper. Around the same time, The Sun ran “Bonk for Britain” – a call to fix the diminishing birth rate whilst cheerfully nodding to the “bonkbuster” genre, of which Cooper, who died in 2025, was the patron saint. When the reactionaries amongst us call for a return to good old-fashioned sex, they call not for a loosening of our attitudes to teenage pregnancy and the institution of marriage, but for a broader return to the political, economic and social contexts of a bygone era, where sex was less policed and therefore more available to them.

Sunak’s comments offer an interesting counterexample not only to the perceived apoliticism of modern romance literature but to its lack of feeling, as well as a blatant display of his reactionary mission. Generations of women before my own have consumed Cooper as fodder for their nascent sexual fantasies and earnest ideals of romance. A proto-Sex and the City for the pearl-clutching class, her obituaries lauded her brazen sexuality and glamour, and yet what is compelling about her writing is less the excesses of these worlds than the sincerity she stores within them. For Cooper, sex and romance are simultaneously embarrassing and invigorating; it defies the cosseting predictability of a story derived from countless source materials. Ian Patterson, an LRB stalwart and Cooper lover, commends her promotion of pleasure for the sake of it – “guilty pleasure, the pleasure of repetition and the problems of it.” In comparison, the pleasure of Maas is received as is. Modern romance readers continually stress the emotional and literary sincerity of their reading material, arguing that it is both too legitimate to be overlooked and too jovial to be treated critically. The speed at which it moves precludes it from the usual checks and balances, sacrificing sense for stimulation.

The politics of escapism and the question of whether fantasy can ever truly be “pure” loom over romance literature. Romance writers tend to be happily married women from comfortable backgrounds, and yet their protagonists are frequently poor, wayward teens. Their novels trade not only on the fantasy of fairies and riches, but of men capable of giving the reader everything she desires: luxury and privilege, an education in BDSM and a tender heart brooding behind a hardened exterior. To acknowledge that these fantasies respond to the dearth of economic and social agency experienced by modern women would be a natural landing spot for these authors, who tout their novels as empowering, yet one they never seem to reach. In ACOTAR, the protagonist Feyre begins as a nineteen-year-old huntress from a feckless, working-class family; through marriage, she eventually reaches wealth, aristocracy and immortality. That the arbitrariness of class may be countered by being young, talented and beautiful is not a premise unique to fantasy, yet the condition of the novel being fantasy prevents any soul-searching or consequence that such a premise usually invites. Would it kill her to do a little class criticism here and there?

Julia wears a coat by Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, shoes by Christian Louboutin and glasses by Julie Kegels.

For Cooper, a lifelong Conservative who rolled her eyes at #MeToo, there was no contradiction between the content of her novels and the claims made of them. For modern authors, this is a trickier task. In 2023, actor Gillian Anderson collated an anthology of women’s fantasies, following Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden (1973). The ensuing book, Want (2024), drew a line under illegal or dangerous activities, including non-consensual voyeurism, violence, rape or solicitation. This reminds me of Amia Srinivasan’s observation that “Sex is no longer morally problematic or unproblematic: it is instead merely wanted or unwanted.” This oversimplification of desire is felt heavily in modern romance literature, and often leads to awkward instances of love interests who act caddishly – if not completely illegally – with no consequence. In contrast, Friday’s decision to present frank descriptions of incest, bestiality and rape has remained controversial, and forces the reader to face much more knotty questions about the nature of desire. When romance fans assert that the novels are empowering or enriching, I can’t help but feel they are duping themselves. Ultimately, as the world backslides both politically and creatively, these novels feel less like a reaction against than a symptom of.

For the majority of her career, Cooper’s work was dismissed as bawdy, ridiculous and facile; a Daily Mail reviewer claimed that her novels smelled like “fag smoke and hairspray, wet dogs and sex”. Still, she saw herself as a serious writer with earnest ambitions and spent years on research for each book. Compare this plodding realism to Maas’s fantasy worlds, where reality is so degraded that even such basic things as conversation and bodily function are overwrought, and we are left with the question of how we situate sex in a world where almost all experience is virtual. Literature succumbs to pure entertainment, devoid of purpose and quality. All romance becomes romantasy. The Boyfriend Book Box may seem extreme, but it is only the natural progression of a medium that can no longer hold its weight alone. .