men's desires are art, women's desires are embarrassing

Men's desires are art, women's desires are embarrassing. Take the rom-com. It peaked in 1999 at over $870 million at the box office. In 2024, that had dropped 90% to just $86 million. And the industry is calling it a demand problem, that women don't want rom-coms anymore. But the world of romantasy is telling an entirely different story. Rom-coms, even when they were made by women, they were still filtered through the lens of what men imagine women wanted. And what women want is a different product entirely. Nowhere is this more apparent in what we define as literary masterpieces like smut. Take Sarah J. Maas, who has sold tens of millions of copies of her books, Throne of Glass, ACOTAR, Crescent City. She is largely keeping like the publishing industry solvent today. Her work is routinely dismissed as fairy corn. Her characters are largely women who are morally complex, angry, sexual, brave, kind. You compare that to somebody who is her contemporary like George R.R. Martin, who is depicted 214 grapes in his books, and he is called a serious literary voice. Both are writing fantasy, both include explicit content. One is literature and one is smut. The difference is not craft here, the difference is whose desire is centered. When women's desire is the subject, it's something to be embarrassed about. When men's desire is the subject, it becomes culture.