An unsolicited opinion about “booktok”/”spicy” discourse

I recognise that this has been one of the topics de jour in the reader community for the last half decade, but I've just had a very frustrating conversation with an IRL friend so I have decided to do the healthy thing and blast it onto Reddit.

I do not give a flying fuck about the demographic of (mostly women) readers who voraciously read smutty RF/fantasy romance. Let them do their thing. No one has any basis on which to moralise them or shame that genre.

That's the main body of the post. Stop reading here if you want to.

The argument I had today was about the substance of these books— that these readers are basically reading pornography. For starters I do not fully think that is true: even middling quality erotica still has pace and characters and themes, which mainstream porn absolutely does not. But even if that were true, who cares?

Literature is art. And like all art, so often we approach art because we want to feel something. We watch horror movies when we want to be frightened, we listen to orchestral symphonies when we want to feel uplifted and wowed, we watch cooking YouTube videos when we want to feel hungry. So what if people want to feel horny? Being horny is the point of being an animal. Frankly I would rather they read a book than watch a porno from some sketchy production house or pay into the exploitative Onlyfans ecosystem.

Fiction is made up. It's not real. It doesn't matter how graphic or vulgar or dark it is; the fiction is just some person sitting at a computer and squiggling symbols onto a page. So there's nothing in the real world to get mad at when a young woman gets into Sarah J. Maas or whoever. You don't have to personally like it. I am fine with some works being 18+ at public libraries and such, but if one believes that certain books ought to be removed outright from bookstores/libraries/the zeitgeist of TikTok/Goodreads/whatever purely on the basis of their content, then I think one seriously needs to consider whether one is engaging in anti-intellectualism. I certainly think that they are.

I honestly think that a lot of the reactionary pushback against this genre is misogynistic. I think some people are just really (consciously or subconsciously) offended by the idea of women exploring their own sexualities at their own pace in the safety and privacy of a novel rather than in servility to males. The idea that this ecosystem of female authors and female readers (especially in the indie world) is able to create sexual content mostly free of male influence is probably really infuriating to a lot of people. At least, that's the only explanation I can think of as to why there's this big stigma against erotic fiction that seems to be discussed even more widely than anti-porn stigma. That is so backwards to me.

If I may step back from the philosophical side and analyse the business side: publishing is a really dicey industry that has been 'in trouble' for my entire adult life. It is hard for authors and publishers and booksellers to sustain themselves and grow their businesses. So these whales, these readers who can slam 50 or 60 books in a year— who gives a crap if two thirds of their Goodreads is romantasy? It is through their patronage of books that the publishing market grows and allows more books to be published in a wider variety of genres. We must not discourage people from buying books, no matter how much said books might not be to our taste!