By Aaliyah Medawar
On the Superficiality of Sex:
Relationships are not the only victims of this phenomenon. Technical skill too seems to be suffering in the modern writing landscape. Sex in literature is normal. It has been around since language was invented. There is graffiti from Pompeii discussing intercourse, the size of
genitalia, and more. Sex, or even the lack thereof in terms of asexuality, is normal. We are not one homogenous hive mind of sexual interest, and it means many different things to many people. Sex can be for humor, for story progression, for the exploration of trauma, or even simply to contextualize a relationship. Sex serves many purposes in writing, and while anybody can write it, it takes a great writer to make it meaningful.
Erotica is not shameful. Some of the greatest works of art have some erotic hue to them. Dontalleo’s David or Fragonard’s The Swing allude to ancient nudity and love affairs respectively. The Picture of Dorian Gray has such deep homoerotic undertones that it was used to prove Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality when he was put on trial for it. The
Kama Sutra is a famous manual instructing couples on how to improve their intimacy and experiment with different situations. Erotica has been around for centuries and we, mere slaves to impulse, will continue to find a way to incorporate it into art. That is not the problem. The problem arises when oversexualization infects the merit of a story that is not intended to be pure and utter erotica. When a story does not own its label, it can send a conflicting message. Am I reading this for the plot? Or am I reading this for the ‘spice’ or ‘smut? While there is no shame in reading for either, when a writer tries to be something they are not, they often sacrifice quality or do not take risks.
Colleen Hoover, a romance writer who gained popularity because of TikTok, tends to fall into this strange realm of not-quite-porn, not-quite-plot. In one of her most popular works, Ugly Love, we have a gratuitous amount of sex scenes, but very little development for the
characters. The main protagonist, Tate, hardly has a discernible personality other than “in love with Miles Archer- a pilot who refuses to have serious relationships due to trauma from his past” and “nurse.”
Meanwhile, Miles is borderline alcoholic, emotionally cold, and sexually driven, resulting in an altogether unhealthy relationship between the devoted Tate and borderline neglectful Miles who is still worshiped despite bringing nothing to the relationship other than sex. While the book highlights how bad his actions make Tate feel, they are ‘justified’ by his past and Tate seems quite sympathetic towards him even though he is mostly using her for sex. While trauma can certainly influence the way we behave, it is not an excuse.
Even so, the book seems more focused on developing the sex between Miles and Tate without actually developing a reason why they are attracted to each other. Tate is forced into the “I can fix him” role that many women are trapped in, both in reality and in fiction. Is it not the responsibility of a woman to fix the mental health of a man. A man should want to do that on his own. Miles feels guilt for treating Tate poorly, but he only ever makes the effort to stop doing so once he gets the “go ahead” from where his trauma started- his stepsister Rachel, who gets more development in the story than the person Miles ends up with.
They were in love before their parents got married, though did not tell their parents, and continued to have a forbidden sexual relationship. The result was a baby, one who died in a car crash that nearly killed them both. The story attempts to make you care about these characters, but the climax of the book- the crash- is heralded by the sentence “We both laugh at our son's big balls” followed by a baby dying. Now, contrast can work in a book. But having a serious moment like this be signaled in by sexualizing a soon-to-be-dead baby is not the way to go about setting a tonal shift.
A good example of this reverse-Bathos would be in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. At one point during the story, Viola- disguised as
Cesario- is recognized as her missing twin brother Sebastian by his companion, Antonio, who was being arrested by Duke Orsino’s guards. But what heralded this scene? In no simple terms, it was the drunken carousing of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, who were attempting to convince Cesario to duel Andrew, and upon seeing Sebastian, once Viola leaves, started to fight with him. Humor preceding revelations or important moments is as old as time. But here it involves the genitalia of a baby, one who is about to die. The last thing that baby heard was his parents commenting on his testicles.
Ugly Love uses trauma to further the plot, rather than have a plot wherein trauma unfolds naturally. The only real depth comes from sex. This is not the only book that Hoover, among other authors, has this issue with. Oftentimes, it is emotionally abusive and domineering men who get all the development while the women are either saved by them or are saviors of them on an emotional level. Sex sits at the forefront, rather than plot, because of society’s conditioning once again.
Somehow, erotic books like these can be inherently sex-negative. Oftentimes these stories perpetuate the idea that sex is something dirty and shameful, making the taboos of sex something that should be hidden and not talked about upfront and openly. Tate hides her relationship with Miles because it is only sex. One could argue there is a degree of misogyny here, both from how the women are portrayed and by how women are taught they cannot like sex and need to hide behind these fantasies of domineering men they have no control over because they are not supposed to be sexual beings.
These stories use those principles and then throw in an arbitrary plot to disguise the inherent sexual motivation of these stories. Once again, sex is seen as shameful and forbidden, when there has been nothing to truly set it up as something meaningful for the plot. When plot is forgotten in place of badly portrayed sex, then the book can simply become what is known as a nothingburger- that being something lacking in substance.
The Murder of Critical Thought:
Trope signaling is another way that shallow storytelling can manifest. Oftentimes, a story can be advertised simply by singular scenes or concepts, rather than by the merit of its narrative. Anti-intellectualism has encouraged ‘easy reading’- a horribly byproduct of Fast Fiction. There is nothing inherently wrong in wanting a lighthearted story. Not everyone wants their brains challenged all the time. The difference there is usually that simplistic stories do not try to tackle themes of high emotional and mental maturity. They are uncomplicated and usually lack nuance.
But these parameters are being applied to stories of all genres, be they Young Adult or Dark Romance. While romance, be it dark or not, seems to be the most common genre this simplification infects, it can happen throughout any type of story. That being said, when it is applied to the
romance genre, it can begin to bleed into the harmful stereotypes described prior. Love, especially darker iterations of it, require nuance and tact. A good example would be Morticia and Gomez from the Addams Family.
While they are dark, passionate, and certainly not ‘vanilla,’ they genuinely love and respect each other. Their love is not a patriarchal power trip masquerading as a ‘spicy’ sexcapade, but rather a true romance wherein the parties are both healthily and mutually ‘crazy,’ yet still have a deeply felt, though still caring and tender, devotion for one another. But if a book is weighed by the merit of its tropes, then it can lack the deeper meaning needed to make those tropes work. Tropes are not inherently bad, they are oftentimes funny or endearing.
The Even Evil Has Standards trope comes to mind. Be it The Joker fearing the IRS and hating Nazis, or even Gru from Despicable Me leaving a tip for the barista after freezing the entire coffee shop, tropes
can be used for good and can be used in a self-aware context. But if one is writing tropes and plot becomes incidental, then a story can seem shallow or poorly planned. Many times I have seen books being advertised simply because they meet criteria like Found Family or Possessive Alpha, but lack any substantial description of their plots.
People are being encouraged to read not for the surprise and engagement of a story, but rather that a story meets a rule that they knew was coming. There is no challenge to the art, it is simply presented to readers as is, oftentimes with no nuance or expansion upon the trope. It is taken at face value and is simply meant to check a box, not provide substantial impact to a storyline.
This concept of easily marketable writing has led to an influx of writers who are writing for profit, not for the sake of writing. While making money is good, writing for the sole purpose of financial gain or normalizing unhealthy views of sex can make a work seem soulless or bland.
The Aesthetic of Being “A Reader”:
Self-publishing is a wonderful thing. It gives authors who may have been denied the opportunity to belong to a major publishing industry a chance to share their art.Plenty of excellent books have been self-published. Paradise Lost by John Milton was one of the earliest records of a self-published story. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen was self published because the industry did not want to endorse Austen due to her gender. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol too was self-published, as was Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
Self publishing is nothing to be ashamed of, and many authors who are self published are incredibly devoted to their work and their stories. But sometimes, there are writers who cannot take critique or take ‘the easy way out.’ Anyone can be a writer, but it takes great skill to become an author. Self publishing, while ultimately a net good, can lead to works that fall under this term of Fast Fiction, leading to stories that lack substantial quality or are easily written and distributed on a mass manufactured scale.
Anti-intellectualism and ‘shortcuts’ seriously can harm the literary
world. Cheapening writing into being some overly sexual or ‘easy’ way of making money makes the art of storytelling seem trivial. Readers are being conditioned into liking low-quality works so they do not know what they are missing, while writers are being taught that so long as you can throw in the right tropes, you do not need to try. In a world where AI is stealing from actual artists and the arts are being done away with in favor of “important subjects” which are limited to male-dominated STEM fields, we need the arts more than ever.
To cheapen art, to sneer at intellectualism, to glorify a harmful status quo, is to make writing into a marketable commodity, and not the beautiful expression of human nature it ought to be. Humans are the only thing on Earth that have the power of sapience. Rather than try to nourish this gift, society is trying to kill it in favor of unfeeling profit.
Readers, I implore you, look for books that challenge you. Try a new genre. Do research and educate yourself on what you see when you read. Writers, I ask you to do that same. Put in effort. Fight back against the corporatization of literature. Write for you, not for money. If we lose literature, then we lose a part of humanity. So please, work to keep it alive. Without it, who knows where we would be?
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