Can We Stop Devaluing the Romance Genre?

Happy International Women's Day! I happened to read a romance scene in an epic fantasy novel today that was terrible. Terrible as in--roll my eyes when the characters confessed their feelings and the sex scene was about as titillating as watching two people trying to figure out the rules to a board game.

Can we stop devaluing the romance genre?

Is it because shit rolls downhill? The literary folks look down on the genre folks and the genre folks say, "Well, I know romance is considered genre, b...