Imagine: A brilliant, kind, and compassionate heroine—we’ll call her Avery—has just gotten home from an awful date. This time, the guy had the nerve to talk mostly about his fantasy football team, and she caught him sneaking glances at her cleavage. What a loser! Clearly, this guy—and every man she’d ever gone out with (often the lone exception is the one who got away)—wasn’t worth it. In fact, men aren’t worth it. The answer to seeking true love, great sex, and, down the road, a kid or two, is to quit the other sex entirely.
Right?
Wrong. What the hell, Avery?
It’s not all heroines, just some. But their numbers are growing, and that alarms me. Romance novels, once built on the idea of love triumphing over differences, are increasingly populated by women who are done with men before the story even starts. They aren’t wary of bad men; they’re rejecting all men. They’re swearing them off, declaring them unworthy, treating attraction as an unfortunate glitch rather than a natural pull.
And sure, some of this is catharsis, a reaction to the ways men have wielded power unfairly. But there’s a difference between critiquing specific behaviors and painting half the population as beyond redemption. And don’t even get me started on the growing number of heroines who throw punches, slaps, or well-placed knees, framed not as assault but as empowerment. If it’s not OK for a man to do it, why is it OK for a woman? When did smacking a guy become a charming character trait?
Now, I get that many women want to smash the patriarchy, and, honestly, I’m mostly with them. But challenging a power structure doesn’t mean that everyone who lives in it—even benefits from it—is bad news. In fact, that approach is likely to fail, as most us vs. them strategies usually do. If the goal is change, drawing hard battle lines between men and women isn’t just counterproductive—it’s exhausting.
It’s not that every romance novel is built on this premise. But the number is rising, and the idea that men, as a sex, are unworthy of love is creeping further into the genre. That shift is worth questioning.
And beyond the genre, what message are we sending? Why would men vote for women if women keep telling them they’re awful? Why would they support policies that benefit women if women make it clear they see them as the enemy? Sure, men resisting gender progress isn’t new. But if we want to win hearts and minds—if we want to build a future where men and women work toward real equality—declaring one side the enemy is a losing strategy.
Likewise, why would women invest in making relationships work if they’ve been told their partner is rotten by default? Romance—real romance, the kind that thrives in long-term relationships—is about accommodation, about two people figuring out how to make a life together. If men are beyond redemption, what exactly is the point?
And if the answer is that there’s just one guy, our hero, let’s call him River—a man who knows exactly how to please in the sack, loads the dishwasher like a dream, and, of course, would never waste Avery’s time explaining, without any encouragement on her part, the intricacies of crypto trading—well, that’s a problem. Because that setup assumes that every other man is an asshat bro, unworthy of effort or consideration. If the only way a man can qualify as worthy is to be fundamentally unlike other men, what does that say about the genre? About the expectations being set for real relationships? And why, exactly, should men have to prove their humanity one by one?
This doesn’t mean women should settle for bad relationships. Being critical of power imbalances, of unfair labor loads, of the way attraction and respect function in relationships—that’s all fair game. But there’s a difference between demanding better from the people we love and deciding they aren’t worth loving at all.
And what’s the goal here? To have people be safe but alone? To avoid the risks of love by refusing to engage with it at all? To strip relationships of the one thing that makes them rich and meaningful—compromise? Because take it from me: there is no such thing as true intimacy that isn’t built on compromise. That’s not weakness. That’s the work of building something lasting.
And what’s the alternative? Women spending their time scrolling, dreaming of men who never offend, never mess up, never improve—because they were never given the chance? Are we really telling women that the best path forward is longing for a fantasy rather than working with a real person, flaws and all? And what about the women who want kids? Are we actually suggesting that the best framework for raising children is one where fathers, by virtue of their sex, are assumed to be the problem?
Sweeping dismissal isn’t just morally shaky; it’s also strategically foolish. If the goal is a better world—one where people understand each other, change for the better, or, at the very least, listen—broad-stroke contempt won’t get us there. And it certainly won’t resonate with the readers who love their fathers, sons, husbands, and friends.
Romance is about connection, about people figuring it out together. And that’s what we should be rooting for—not a fantasy, not an idealized unicorn of a partner, but the messy, frustrating, deeply satisfying experience of falling in love with an actual person.
* This post applies to m/f romance with cis/het leads.