I'm not saying westerns are bad. In fact, I've read some good ones (given, the ones I've liked the most also teeter on the brink of the "trashy romance" category

). I'm just saying they're not usually literature. Most genre fiction isn't.
"Not literature" isn't an insult, it's just a statement.
Having typed this brings a Mark Twain quote to mind - "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."