no one wants to say this but the real issue with the "booktok" style of literature, isn't sex, it's capitalism
Porn addiction isn't real, just to get that out of the way, and if you're worried about bad and yucky "toxic" relationships being depicted in fiction and corrupting the helpless impressionable minds of women:
1) Romance novels being weird like that is by no means a new phenomenon "poisoning the impressionable minds" of young girls. Chances are, your mom and her mom had a stack of these hidden under her bed.
2)What we want in fiction doesn't necessarily reflect what we want in reality. Fantasy is a safe outlet through which to express more "taboo" emotions, especially for women who are sexually and emotionally repressed IRL. It's the same vibe as taking out your violent emotions by playing Doom. You are mixing up depiction and glorification.
The issue with booktok isn't the porn, it's the fact that it's ALL porn, and not good porn either. It's shallow, color-by-numbers, plain, boring "romance" 99% of the time. It uses tropes and fanfic-style tags as marketing terms instead of actually telling you what the book is about, which forces books to become repetitive, lame, and phoned-in because tropes are easier to market than actual content, and it doesn't take much effort or talent to make books that sell that fit that criteria.
Tiktok wants to sell you an image, an ideal, a person you can be, the "smart, well-read girl," and it wants to sell it to you cheap, fast, and easily.
I'm not saying every book promoted is the quality of a really bad Wattpad fic written by a middle schooler, and not in the "campy, so bad it's good" way, in the "just BAD" way. I'm just saying that the majority of them, especially the ones being advertised to you, are.








