The year 2020 can be marked by several significant events: the housing boom, a surge in Black men learning about investing, and the rise of the toxic podcast movement. With lockdowns forcing everyone to sit with themselves, many found new or different ways to engage with the world around them. The same was true for me.
As a young girl, I was probably introduced to Danielle Steele way too early in life. And in 2020, I returned to reading romance novels. After spending months devouring books by authors like Alexandria House, Tia Williams, and Christina C. Jones, I looked up to see what men were doing with their sudden spurt of free time due to lockdowns. It seemed they had all purchased podcast microphones.
Every social media channel I turned to featured podcast bros of all ages spouting senseless nonsense about men, women, love, and relationships—and it was maddening. After spending eight years in the self-help space with my husband, helping thousands of women unlearn toxic relationship habits, we decided that we had no desire to engage in whatever was going on. That was when I gave myself permission to escape into romance. When I stumbled upon the bookish community on TikTok, something else hit me:
For the last 20+ years, I had been reading self-help books to help me “level up,” become a better version of myself, and heal! I even co-wrote a few with my husband. But what were the men doing? Based on the podcast landscape we see today, many of them did absolutely nothing!
While society spoon-fed women lies about how we were imperfect and needed fixing, men were led to believe they had nothing to fix at all. The result? Men have basically floated through the past twenty years believing they were born deserving of women, but usually only those at the end of our “level up” journey (insert an aggressive eye roll here).
It has become painfully clear that no matter what women do to become better—even the best—the unspoken, unwritten rules of the patriarchy suggest that hypocrisy will always be the standard. While women have been striving to become the best versions of themselves, not only have men done nothing to enhance their “value,” but they have also made women’s progress their enemy. Many men in American politics have gone as far as writing laws to “bring us back under subjection.” As a result, women have doubled down on their disgust with how they are regarded and treated and have chosen book boyfriends instead.
This sentiment isn’t true for all men, however. Since I began reading and writing romance, my husband has taken it as a challenge, using the stories and scenarios as fuel for bouts of role-play and even connecting with some of the male characters. I’ve heard similar stories from other women with more open-minded partners.
However, many of the other women I’ve connected with since embracing TikTok’s “BookTok” community, say they enjoy the escapism that romance provides when the men they encounter are nothing like the men in the books they read—caring, considerate, empathetic, protective, and sexually generous. Even when they’re not perfect (and by not perfect, I mean morally grey and willing to kill somebody for you), these men provide something for women today that many have been missing for quite some time—the bare minimum.
Most women could care less about the competition men seem to have (in their heads) with celebrities and rappers (whom they would likely never live up to). Instead, we’d be enthusiastically grateful if they competed with the men in romance novels. They’d win by default because there are literally millions of playbooks out there for them to follow.
However, many women would overwhelmingly prefer they go back and read the same self-help books that they’ve been using to help them level up—Or go to therapy. In the meantime, many of us women are falling in love with our book boyfriends, one BookTok recommendation at a time because they’re giving us something that the world seems to have forgotten for us: safety.
