Once a Stranger

Which is which? Has a lot to do with the reader.

I wouldn't deny there're good Westerns out there (there's a particular reason I've only read the crap ones!), but I do think that it is a valid example of a genre that people who don't read it tend to (a) dismiss and (b) know very little about and care less. Like science-fiction and fantasy, Westerns (the crap sort) are also found in their own library ghetto (which, interestingly, Chick Lit is not, although "romance" is).

"Western" is an available concept for someone who wants to be derogatory, and that person is unlikely to phrase her sentence "It reads like a Western, an exciting work of art that raises challenging questions about masculinity, cultural history, and our relationship with the natural environment". They'll say, "It reads like a Western [implied: full of men called Jake, cliched cattle drives, storms, possibly an unconvincing romance with a pink-lipped girl, and read by elderly men and geeks called Graham]." So saying a book is Chick Lit is not essentially derogatory, with Marian Keyes' "Rachel's Holiday" having at least as much to say as Nick Hornby about adults having to come to terms with adulthood, but the implication of "pink cover, handbags, diets, lipstick, ending up with A Man, and fundamentally only of interest to women" usually is intended as such. A fantasy book may not have the handbags and lipstick, but I think that Chick Lit is still there as a negative comparison reading "all about womenz things, and icky romance, and not Manly, and so of interest only to women, and therefore rubbish by default even if not in fact".

I know that men write sentiment, good and bad, all the time. I have the complete works of J M Barrie on my bookshelf. But I don't dismiss sentimental books as inherently a bad thing. I suspect that people who do both have a narrow range of what they term sentimental (into which crying at a football match does not fall) and an intended target to their scorn that this definition fits.