Vertical Dramas and the Cycle of Dismissing What Women Love
I was interviewed by Dexter Thomas PhD for the Kill Switch podcast this week, and he asked an excellent question: Are vertical dramas dismissed as art because they are largely consumed by women?
As a former bookseller, I’ve seen this happen time and again. Media and stories that women enjoy are dismissed as “not worthy.”
How Women’s Tastes Get Dismissed
In the UK, we all know the book reviews in the broadsheets are dominated by a select few literary voices — rarely reflecting what the public is actually reading. When I worked at one of the main booksellers, there was active resistance to stocking romance and “chick lit.” Male managers would sneer at books like Twilight — despite the fact that it brought a whole new generation of readers into bookshops. For years, what made it onto shelves was determined by “taste setters” at head office, not by what bookbuyers wanted.
Only with the advent of BookTok and the sheer force of demand have things started to change. Now you’ll see tables piled high with the titles people are actually buying, and this will include a lot of romance.
The pattern is the same across other forms of media: cultural forms dominated by women’s tastes are dismissed as trivial — until the money becomes too big to ignore.
Romance Novels: Billions, but Still a “Guilty Pleasure”
Romance is the most consistently successful genre in publishing. Globally, it was worth $21.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit nearly $28 billion by 2030.
And yet critics still call romance formulaic, silly, sugary, or escapist fluff.
Why These Dismissals Matter
Emotional work gets devalued. Stories that offer hope, joy, and catharsis are treated as second-rate. Are we saying that only art which is bleak or disturbing matters? Is there no room for a breadth of emotions?
It’s gendered. These dismissals are disproportionately applied to works by women, for women. When women’s emotional expressions show up in the media, they’re more likely to be discounted.It misreads the purpose. Predictability, happy endings, and emotional release aren’t flaws — they’re features. They give readers what they want: comfort, optimism, and representation.
Put bluntly: when you write off romance novels, you’re writing off what women (and indeed many men) value emotionally.
Boybands and Pop Superstars: Screaming Girls as a Punchline
The same dynamic shows up in music. One Direction’s 2014 tour grossed $290 million, the biggest of that year. Their 2015 follow-up added another $208 million. Yet coverage was laced with sneers: one Guardian critic described their fanbase as being fed a “nutritionally poor diet of McMusic.” (interestingly this is actually a female music critic)
But in my own house, One Direction was how my eldest daughter fell in love with music. Those songs got her through lockdown, connected her with fans around the world, and now she’s supporting independent bands and keeping the live music scene alive. Far from trivial, this was transformative.
Taylor Swift has weathered this for years. Her Eras Tour is the highest-grossing in history at $2.2 billion. The concert film drew an audience which was about 80% female. That is cultural and economic impact on a historic scale. Yet because her fandom is female-driven, the stereotype of “silly fangirls” is never far away.
Vertical Dramas: Today’s Target
Now it’s happening again with vertical dramas — short, serialised shows made for phone screens. They’ve exploded globally, drawing audiences in the hundreds of millions, with women leading the charge. They’re innovative in form, quick to produce, and changing how stories are told.
And yet, they’re dismissed as “soapy nonsense” or “cheesy” The message is familiar: if women enjoy it, it must be trivial.
The Pattern We Keep Missing
Romance novels are derided as guilty pleasures — yet they’re the lifeblood of publishing
Boybands and Swifties were sneered at — yet they’ve broken every record in live music
Vertical dramas are being written off — yet they’re shaping the future of entertainment
Each time, the pattern is the same: women’s cultural choices are powerful enough to shape markets, but they’re treated as second-rate until the profits become too obvious to ignore.
A Note to the Industry
My concern is this: that as vertical dramas grow, men in positions of power will step in thinking they know best. All-male teams of executives, producers, scriptwriters, and directors who believe they can “fix” or “elevate” a genre without actually listening to the women who built it.
The danger is that new players will strip out the very things audiences love. They’ll decide the stories are “too silly” and remove the billionaires, the werewolves, the towel drops and contract marriages. But those tropes aren’t flaws — they’re part of the joy, the escapism, the catharsis. They’re why women are spending money, why we’re here in the first place.
Yes the genre needs elevating - I have been very vocal about the problematic tropes, and we all want better pay for actors and crews.
But if the industry repeats the same mistake of mainstream media — men telling women what they should want — it will backfire. This audience is discerning. We’ll forgive low budgets and rough edges, but not bad storytelling or condescension. And with so much choice in apps and platforms, fans will simply switch off and move elsewhere.
If you really want to elevate vertical dramas, I really hope that you include women at every level of production. Listen first. Respect the audience.
Hope, joy, comfort — these are not trivial emotions. They’re part of how we make sense of the world. And women’s cultural consumption, from romance novels to vertical dramas, has always been a leading indicator of what’s next.