“Women Are Basically Reading Porn”

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In 2024, I discovered my love for fiction books, and since then, I have read around 200 books, mostly fantasy, romance, and thrillers. I also decided to create a TikTok account to talk about my love for these books, where I constantly recommend books to girls and share reviews.

One day, I posted a picture of a scene from a romance book I was reading. It was a beautifully written moment between two characters, emotional and intense, but nothing too explicit (there’s nothing wrong with that), and then I received a comment from a man that said, “Women are basically reading porn.”

That one comment perfectly sums up the way men view women’s reading habits, and here I’m going to talk about why this comment is not only wrong but deeply misogynistic, and why women who read romance and romantasy are constantly criticized in ways that men who consume similar content never are.

Nobody calls Game of Thrones “porn for men” even though it has the same explicit content as women’s books.

Here’s what bothers me the most about men calling romance books “porn for women”: they consume content with the exact same…