By Emily Fox · Editor-in-Chief
BookTok has taken over the internet, and in a lot of ways, it’s a great online community. Readers from across the globe can grow in their learning and understanding of humanity through thoughtful conversation, and they can share perspectives they might never have considered without having engaged with other readers from different walks of life.
Readers can get recommendations for books they might not have heard of that just might change their lives. But like anything created by humans, there’s a harmful side.
Recently, many of the books trending on BookTok have glorified unhealthy relationships and pornography. One trope that I’ve noticed becoming increasingly popular is dark romance, characterized by its promotion of obsessive “love.” These books often involve a female protagonist who is pursued by a powerful man with questionable morals. His most “redeeming” quality is that he will do anything to protect the main character – and there are no limits to achieve that end.
The powerful man is frequently cast as misunderstood, and so we don’t hold him responsible for his behavior. He’s jealous and possessive, and readers excuse that in favor of his chiseled abs. He’s painted in such a way that slowly warps our understanding of what love looks like and desensitizes us to toxicity.
These books manipulate women into believing that these qualities are attractive, even sexy. Afterall, everything he does goes back to his “love” for the main character, for better or for worse. We empathize with him because of his tortured past.
Authors and publishers profit from our intense longing to be singled out, loved and desired wholly and completely, and they fool us into believing that love and obsession are equivalent.
What I don’t think we realize is that we’re romanticizing abuse and obsession. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we are influencing the way we view sex and romance, and what we read does change our expectations for a partner and how we approach relationships.
These novels can be a dangerous trap because we don’t believe that something we read for entertainment can have an effect on how we think and live. We’re deluded into thinking that we can separate reality from fiction, but our minds can’t sustain the double standard. We can pretend that there’s a distinction and that we can separate our standards for fictional characters from the standards we hold ourselves to, but we cannot. If we accept toxic behavior from protagonists and call it love, it’s only a matter of time before we accept that treatment ourselves.
This type of book is even more damaging for young, impressionable girls who haven’t yet discovered what real love looks like. They don’t have anything to compare romantic love to but the narrative these books present to them. And what’s worse is that authors and marketers are targeting young readers by promoting this kind of content in young adult books.
Not only is BookTok glorifying toxic and abusive relationships, but it’s also exacerbating pornography. Most of the books trending on BookTok contain graphic sexual content that the community refers to as “smut.”
In fact, these books have surged in popularity and been normalized to such an extent that the term “smut slut” was coined to describe women who frequently read this subgenre – and it’s a nickname that many boast proudly.
Many consider consuming pornographic images wrong, but justify smut because it’s not visual content and it’s a work of fiction. But arguably, smut is just as dangerous because it invites the imagination to participate.
As Christians, this content is damaging to us spiritually. It goes against the biblical model for love and marriage. Two become one flesh — not the two kind of become sort of united but leave room for a third. Smut also reduces our perception of people as the image of God because it presents them through a strictly sexual lens. Even further, it causes us to see our own value as coming from how sexually attractive we think others perceive us, which can cause serious struggles with body image.
Now, I’m not saying we should shelter or censor the content women consume as past generations did. What I am saying is that we should use the minds God has given us to weigh the consequences of the content we read against the Biblical standard. Pornography is an addiction that many people struggle with, even Christians, and we shouldn’t make it harder on them by encouraging them to read smut.
