This is an excerpt from an interview with Ruby McNally, author of Crash, a romance novel.  I love her answer!!!

RUMBLR: A few days ago, I was telling a friend about how excited I was to talk to you for The Rumblr, and he got this weird look on his face, like, ew, a romance novelist?? Do you encounter this from the people in your life? What’s it like, working in a genre that’s so — I don’t know — looked down on?

MCNALLY: Looked down on, absolutely! I’m in an MFA program in my other life, and it’s safe to say they’re not exactly coming up to me in droves at the bar to compliment me on my romance novels. The overwhelming attitude, both in literature and in life, seems to be that there’s something embarrassing about romance—that it’s girl stuff and therefore stupid, as if falling in love is an exclusively female act and so unworthy of being explored in fiction. And like, that’s bunk, clearly, but it’s also problematic on more than just an aesthetic level, because it’s how we end up in a culture where prestige television is way more likely to depict scenes of graphic rape than scenes of female pleasure, and a shot of a man’s face mid-orgasm will earn a movie a PG-13 rating while the same shot of a woman gets an R. Dismissing an entire genre as dumb lady stuff or  ”Mommy Porn,” as if there’s something inherently disgusting or shameful about women wanting to read about pleasurable sexual experiences, is a form of socially acceptable misogyny—full stop.

Are there dumb romance novels? Absolutely. But there are also dumb crime novels and dumb war movies and really dumb literary short stories that people submit to their MFA workshops (ahem), and at at the end of the day I kind of feel like, you know what? With all due respect to your friend who I am sure is lovely, a person who cannot find it in himself to appreciate a really well-written sex scene is not really a person I want to sit next to at a dinner party. Or, frankly, go to bed with.