Straight Men Read Romance — And Keep It Quiet — SkimNews
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- Mills & Boon reports that men account for only 4% of its sales, while less than 2% of the UK's Romantic Novelists' Association is male, according to an editorial director.
- Paul, a 28-year-old partially sighted school maintenance worker, reads five or six romance novels a month and communicates only with other users of a Discord channel called Romance for Men, fearing mockery if his habit became known.
- Romance for Men (RFM), a mostly self-published sub-genre featuring ordinary male protagonists paired with unusually powerful women, draws more than 10,000 weekly visitors to its dedicated Reddit and a thriving Discord community.
- Andrew, a 31-year-old tech worker who calls himself "on the feminist side," entered the genre deliberately by picking up Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing after tiring of male-only dialogue in sci-fi, and has since converted his wife's skeptical book club.
- Ali, a 54-year-old former investment banker who once interviewed Barbara Cartland as a student journalist at Oxford, studied creative writing at Kingston University and is publishing his first historical romance under the gender-neutral pen name Ali Murphy.
- Jonny Rogers, 33, a finance worker who suspects he is on the autism spectrum, has finished 90 books this year, two-thirds of them romance, after first seeking more of the feeling he got watching Titanic at age 11.
- Most of the men profiled would speak only anonymously or expressed worry about being misunderstood, with Ali noting a parallel to listeners who claim they tune in to Radio 3 when they actually listen to Radio 2.
Why it matters: Straight men remain statistically invisible in romance — just 4% of Mills & Boon sales and under 2% of the Romantic Novelists' Association — yet an RFM subgenre with more than 10,000 weekly Reddit visitors points to a sizable readership deliberately hidden by stigma rather than scarcity.
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