They Want To Ban Romance – and It’s Not the First Time

Why Romance has always been controversial. Hint: It’s not because it’s obscene.

Hot Takes:

• Romance is—and has always been—a lightning rod for book bans.

• Book bans claim to protect the public from obscenity but more often work to silence books that challenge the social order.

• New laws - in Oklahoma and elsewhere - might change the definition of pornography and could affect romance.

• What protects romance? The 1973 Supreme Court Case—Miller v. California. Will precedent hold? TBD.

You might have noticed that book bans across the country are on the rise in public libraries and that state legislators (like in Oklahoma) could be working to make the stories we love illegal.

This is not just a movement trying to keep adult content out of children’s hands. I think we can all agree that kindergarteners shouldn’t read open-door sex scenes.

But that’s not what’s going on here. These bans want to take books out of libraries—for adults as well—and some laws want to outright ban pornography, period, and even redefine what it is.

Library book challenges to unique titles rose 40 percent according to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, and 2,471 unique titles were banned or challenged in 2022.

If you think your favorite romance novels are immune from book bans, I have bad news for you.

Here’s a taste of recently banned titles: A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah Maas, Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (2019), Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. And even Jane Austen’s books were banned in some prisons. That’s right. Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility – too controversial for inmates in New York.

Book bans come in many guises, but usually book banners say they’re trying to protect impressionable young minds from profanity or explicit sex, labeling such things as obscene.

In reality, book banners are really worried about the challenges some books pose to the social order.

It’s why, after all, Nazis burned books, especially those written by Jewish authors, in order to promote their misguided and intolerant worldview.

Today, many of the loudest voices leading the charge on book bans, are targeting Black and queer voices.

Today’s book banners are as concerned with censoring stories about race as they are about stories with sexual content. According to Pen America, a nonprofit that defends authors’ freedom to write, in 2021 and 2022, 40% of banned books featured main characters of color and 21% dealt with racial issues. Another 41% of banned books contained LGBTQIA+ content.

This is no mistake.

Book banners like to cloak themselves in all kinds of justifications, but in the end, what they want is to make sure no one challenges the people in charge.

And it’s nothing new.

More than a decade ago, Grossmont College English Prof. Lisa Shapiro discussed this on a panel in 2013, when she pointed out that when published in 1961, people worked to ban Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. She pointed out that calls to ban the book were directly related to the fact that it highlighted inequality in our justice system and was published during the Civil Rights movement.

Romance novels have always been targets of book bans.

They’re easy targets because they typically include sex—which some automatically consider obscene—but even more than that, they challenge social norms.

Romance is ALWAYS a target of scorn, because, as we’ve discussed before, Romance historically empowered women. That’s threatening to those who seek to control women.

Historically, Romance has been an easy target of book banners looking to curtail women’s rights under the thin guise of protecting society from obscenity.

In 1857, French authorities banned Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert because it dared to present an unhappy wife who sought happiness outside her loveless marriage. This book was 100% non-explicit, but just the idea that a woman should look for satisfaction elsewhere was shocking.

And this book wasn’t the only one.

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence was banned in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India and Japan because it was certainly spicier than Madame Bovary, but by most romance books today? Tame. What wasn’t so tame? The fact that a woman sought love outside her marriage. This time an upper-class woman had an affair with a working-class man.

You can imagine how the powers that be disapproved of a woman thumbing her nose at the oligarchy in the name of personal satisfaction and fulfillment. The book was published in the UK in 1960, only after it won a lawsuit (Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd under the Obscene Publications Act 1959).

And it’s not just sex that’s historically considered obscene. Just the biology of women’s bodies was once enough to be banned.

The very discussion of menstruation and training bras in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume landed it on banned lists in schools and libraries across the country. Apparently, a girl worried about when she might develop breasts was considered obscene in the 1970s.

You read that correctly. Adolescence for women used to be obscene.

Doesn’t the First Amendment protect Romance novels? Well, kind of.

In 1973, in Miller v. California, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that obscene content was not protected under the First Amendment unless it offered “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”.

Legal precedent says that romance novels—with their complex stories and character arcs—satisfy this literary requirement. But legal precedents are overturned all the time (Remember another precedent established in 1973—Roe v Wade—that protected abortion rights? It was overturned despite decades of precedent in 2022). So, it’s unclear whether romance novels will continue to be protected.

Also, you might have recently heard buzz about a state bill in Oklahoma, SB593, which seeks to make distributing pornography a crime. It targets visual pornography, so while it doesn’t apply to the written word, some worry this could apply to romance novel covers. Even more disturbing, it seeks to overturn the Supreme Court standard of what’s obscene by arguing that a sex scene could be considered separately from the work as a whole, meaning that character development and plot would be irrelevant if there’s an open-door sex scene in a movie or film.

Now, the Author’s Guild argues that the bill is unlikely to pass, and suggests that even if it did, the bill only targets visual pornography (film and photos). For romance novels, this means that they’d only be illegal if they had explicit covers, so it’s likely most romance novels wouldn’t be affected.

But new laws in other states pop up all the time, and seek to tighten the definition of pornography and obscenity and could target romance novels.

Obscenity, pornography, and the like have been a target of Project 2025, developed by the right-wing think tank, The Heritage Foundation, where they want to imprison anyone who creates what they deem to be pornographic. This includes librarians and tech companies, authors and publishing companies, and their definition of pornography is different than previous definitions of explicit sex. They also want to make “transgender ideology” obscene, which means even the mention of a trans or nonbinary person would be pornographic.

“The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society,” said Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic. “All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography.”

Grant goes on to argue that behind this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements. “It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order,” she wrote, “of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies.”

Project 2025 seeks to make even the mention of a gay or trans character pornographic, according to Maggie Tokuda-Hall, author and a co-founder of Authors Against Book Bans.

“Project 2025 is the single most expansive, extreme attack on our freedom to read that we’ve seen with ambition for federal government implementation,” she told Lit Hub. “It flattens all queer art into the nebulous category of ‘pornography,’ which at this point is well known code used to mask the flagrant transphobia and homophobia required to ban these books.”

These bans aren’t just for school libraries, but also public libraries, and the laws seek to target authors and book publishers, as well, meaning that this goes well beyond the scope of simply trying to protect young readers.

And many of the books coming under the cross-hairs of book banners haven’t even been read by the people who want to ban them.

“Now we're seeing organized attempts by groups to censor multiple titles throughout the country without actually having read many of these books,” said Lessa Kananiʻopua Pelayo-Lozada, president of the American Library Association at a 2023 White House event.

And if you think they’ll stop simply at banning LGBTQIA+ characters and characters of color but 100% allow your favorite open-door straight sex scene where women are respected and their needs prioritized, I think maybe we’ve missed the point of what Project 2025 is all about.

So what can we do to protect Romance?

• First of all, support banned books with your dollars or by checking them out at your local library.

• Join a group like Pen America, or Authors Against Book Bans, or Unite Against Book Bans, or the American Civil Liberties Union to help keep freedom of expression free.

• Keep tabs on your own local library board meetings, and anywhere bans might come up. Unite Against Book Bans offers help about finding meetings and how to help your opinions be known. Speaking up at this meetings or emailing your local representatives can have a serious impact on policy.

• Try to stay abreast of laws in your state houses that might ban romance or make open-door sex scenes illegal. Make sure you let your state representatives know that you vote, and you don’t want romance made illegal. This site helps you track book ban laws in your state.

• Keep reading and writing stories meaningful to you, even if they—and maybe especially if they—challenge the status quo.

  Some suggest romance novels should have a rating system, like video games, movies or television. What do you think? Let’s discuss.