“But is there spice?”

Anyone who’s spent time scrolling BookTok — a TikTok community in which creators discuss and recommend books — has likely heard someone ask this. “Spice” is simply a less egregious word for smut: “obscene or lascivious talk, writing, or pictures,” according to Oxford Languages.

Put simply, it’s written pornography.

Over the last few years, BookTok’s popularity has become a driving force in the publishing world. According to a 2023 article in The Guardian, “TikTok recommendations are driving sales and launching authors’ careers as the social media app continues to reshape the industry.” Though they stand to benefit authors, BookTok trends have damaging influence on the types of books getting published, especially in the young adult genre.

On BookTok, trends manifest themselves through whatever trope the platform is currently obsessed with, and the publishing industry follows these trends. If “enemies to lovers” — a trope that spoils the love story by telling us that the characters begin as enemies but end up in love — is popular on BookTok, an influx of books with that theme appear on the shelves. 

Different literary tropes rise and fall in popularity, but the one underlying trend that doesn’t seem to go away is smut.

One might think people would have the common decency to keep the consumption of this kind of content private at least. After all, porn addiction is not something to be celebrated. 

But private doesn’t seem to be a word in BookTok’s vocabulary. Social media has given people license and opportunity to overshare, celebrating their consumption of sexually explicit material.

Written smut is more culturally accepted than visual porn — luckily, there aren’t large TikTok communities of guys recommending their favorite videos, but there are plenty of women online who brag about the explicit novels they consume. In fact, there are entire TikTok accounts, like @allygriffeth or @maya_reads_spice, dedicated to recommending books that are the “spiciest.” There are also people who will not read a regular book, like @yannareads, an account with more than 459k followers whose bio claims, “if it’s not smut, I probably won’t read it.”

These women claim that it’s empowering to explore their sexual preferences through fiction, calling people purist or even misogynistic who rightly identify this as porn addiction. But this accepted addiction didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the consequence of young adult  or YA novels becoming increasingly sexual.

Over the last couple of decades, YA novels aimed at readers aged 12-17 have increasingly included sexual scenes. The “Shatter Me” series, which has sold more than 10 million copies since it was first published in 2011, has multiple sex scenes throughout its nine-book arc. The “Twilight” series normalized the inclusion of vulgar content in young adult literature. 

While the “Twilight” series doesn’t contain graphic descriptions of sex, it dangerously romanticizes abusive relationships. E.L. James took this to extreme when she wrote the smut-ified fanfiction of “Twilight” that later became “50 Shades of Grey.” According to Bookstr, “One of the main ways that smut and romance were able to go deep into the mainstream was through the ‘50 Shades of Grey’ trilogy.” 

Now, this doesn’t mean romance has no place in young adult literature. It absolutely does. “The Hunger Games” and “Harry Potter” contain non-explicit romantic plotlines. Hillsdale alumna Ruta Sepetys ’89 writes clean historical fiction for teens. But today’s mainstream YA publishers don’t seem to understand or care that teens don’t, and shouldn’t, need sexual content to enjoy a novel. 

Though books like the “50 Shades” trilogy are marketed as adult novels, BookTok blurs the line between what is and isn’t appropriate for children and teens. Creators recommend explicit books on a day-to-day basis, using flashy buzz-phrases like “this book altered my brain chemistry” or “the spice was out of this world,” which pique the interest of younger viewers.

Because of this, school libraries have become more willing to include explicit books on their shelves. In 2024, “A Court of Silver Flames” was found on a school shelf in the Brownsville Independent School District in Texas. This book contains no less than eight graphic sex scenes.

In addition, according to a 2024 article from The Harvard Crimson, “studies from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that schools are placing less and less emphasis on the importance of critical thinking in literature; this decline in young teenagers’ ability to critically engage with the content, when coupled with teens’ increasing exposure to books dealing with explicit consumption, is concerning.” 

At Hillsdale, we pride ourselves on upholding virtue, intellectual rigor, and conservative values. We have the opportunity to support these ideals both online and in person. Porn in any form weakens the common man, and we can fight it by speaking against the trends that society wrongly calls empowering.

 

Jayden Jelso is a sophomores studying English.