[Is] BookTok for Dummies[?]

Breaking my silence

You might think BookTok is a hashtag on the video app called TikTok where there’s no unifying ethos aside from “I like books,” but that is actually incorrect. BookTok is a community, and every member is committee-vetted. Not only do we fully endorse each others’ opinions, we have a singular, Borg-like hive mind and rock-hard abs.

Like any community, we have our rituals. Every year we gather all of the posters who are over thirty years old and make them participate in our version of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Instead of getting stoned to death, the lucky winner has to watch YouTube video essays about anti-intellectualism, then answer for our collective crimes.

I won this year. Like any good hag, I took the news quite gracefully. “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right!” I protested.

That reference was lost on them. I had forgotten the cardinal rule of BookTok, which is that we are only interested in the aesthetics of reading.

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Crime #1: BookTok is Anti-intellectual

What’s inordinately funny about anti-intellectualism discourse is that crusading against pleasure reading is not something an intellectual would do. (They are too busy studying medieval eel barter, or watching Signs directed by M. Night Shyamalan.) It’s like when Dane Cook calls himself a sapiosexual: if you feel the need to self-identify as someone who gets an erotic charge from a deeply-ridged cerebrum, you lack the self-awareness to ever be a part of that same (sexy, wrinkly-brained) group.

Nevertheless, the Video Essay Industrial Complex¹ soldiers on. I watched TikTok's Worst Book Reviewers Are INFURIATING by Rachel Oates, which includes a montage of approximately four young women on TikTok saying things like “There are too many words in this book” and “The paragraph was too long so I skipped it” over sinister music that I suspect is a riff on the Goosebumps theme.

I’ll be honest, I don’t understand what the problem is. I’m not horrified by strangers who have no power over me saying silly things on the Internet. I find it delightful; it’s like seeing a character from a Christopher Guest mockumentary in the wild. Life is a rich tapestry.

For Oates, this is a problem. Not just for these young readers, but for society. Never mind that the majority of the clips she reacts to are from a single BookToker named Yanna, who was near-universally mocked on that very same app for saying that popular YA book Six of Crows is too boring and wordy. Oates holds the majority opinion, yet still manages to deliver it with the solemn-yet-righteous world-weariness of a Boeing whistleblower. (It is important that you think of Oates as a victim here. She repeatedly calls Yanna aggressive, then says Yanna, a person she has never interacted with, seems like someone who would have bullied her at university.)

Maybe Rachel Oates is right, though. Maybe BookTok should stop slapping Ulysses out of the hands of burgeoning scholars and staunchly refusing to engage with the written word. Instead we should demonstrate our perspicacity by doing something truly intellectually rigorous, like making one specific woman emblematic of all intellectual decline, then find increasingly patronizing ways to call her stupid over the course of an hour-long, monetized video.

Crime #2: BookTok is Addicted to Porn

Romance novels (and genre fiction in general) are very popular on BookTok, likely because genre fiction fans have a shared vocabulary that easily lends itself to short-form video. Some romance readers rather cheekily call their books “smut” as a sort of in-joke, a signal that they are unbothered by the (growing, it seems) idea that their hobby is perverse.

The popularization of the word smut, which on BookTok can mean anything from a cute contemporary romance with one love scene to actual erotica, has set off alarm bells in the minds of a host of voyeurs who unwittingly do the work of Moms for Liberty for them. People are reading smut and talking about it on the Internet, these Peeping Toms collectively, repeatedly gasp, I’m uncomfortable with this type of content that I deliberately sought out.² They’re the real perverts— they’re titillated by their own exaggerated contempt.

Sometimes I think about what it must be like to sit in front of your camera, with the self-timer programmed, retaking shot after shot of your open-mouthed horror. All to call someone else a freak.

“So from what I’ve seen, there are three main types of posts on BookTok,” says RayLikeSunshine in his hit video, BookTok is A Fever Dream. “Number one, BookTok recommendations, this is where people recommend each other smut. Number two, BookTok memes, where people make memes about BookTok smut, and number three, my personal favorite, and what we are going to focus on in this video, are BookTok excerpts, where people write out their favorite smutty scenes. And share it online. With the public. For everyone to see.”

“At times it can be rather problematic,” says QueerKiwi in booktok is terrifying. “It’s okay to read spicy books, it’s okay to read smutty books, okay? There’s nothing wrong with that. However, there has come a point where there are people with genuine porn addictions at this point, and it’s kind of concerning.”

Are romance novels porn? is a decades-old question, and an emphatic, defensive “No!” is not the right answer. Barbara Cartland called newly-released romance novels “soft porn” as far back as 1983 in the documentary Where the Heart Roams. This documentary, directed by George Csiscery, chronicles the rise of the American romance novel market, tracking authors and editors as they delineate what is sensual (acceptable), and what is crude (pornographic). It seems obvious to me that this tightrope, the struggle to stay on the right side of tasteful, is only necessary because their is overlap.

Before she painted the historical romance covers that made her famous, artist Elaine Duillo painted black and whites for men’s adventure magazines, which were precursors to pornographic magazines. Victor Gadino, who has been painting romance covers since the 1970s, showcases erotic art in his solo shows that are not a far cry from his commercial work. Charlene Keel, a former Romantic Times employee, became the Managing Editor at Playgirl where she (controversially) compiled romance novel reviews in the 1990s. Audio erotic apps like Dipsea and Quinn, expressly created as a masturbation aid, have narrators read stories that aren’t all that different from something you’d find on the racier side of Kindle Unlimited.

Is BookTok full of porn addicts? Well, first of all, porn addiction is not a real thing. But sure, maybe some of the romance novels that are popular on BookTok are pornographic, or are tacky, or are intellectually unstimulating. Why is this a problem? How is this making your life worse?

The answers fall, reliably, into two different categories: “Think of the children!” because apparently, Barbara Cartland and Tipper Gore are only regarded as reactionary weirdos because they were older women—taking up their mantle of this particularly asinine moral panic is currently de rigueur with the younger, more “enlightened” set.

The other is that BookTok’s smut addiction is ruining publishing. I will apologize for this, though: I’m sorry we staged a coup at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and demanded more on-page fondling. I’m sorry that Colleen Hoover took up fifteen spots on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list. I’m sorry Railed by the Viscount won the Booker Prize this year.

Shame

Crime #3: BookTok Doesn’t Read, Only Enjoys Aesthetics of Reading

Almost two years ago now, Barry Pierce wrote a controversial article in British GQ called In the shallow world of BookTok, being ‘a reader’ is more important than actually reading. At the time I called him a “wannabe iconoclast in love with the smell of his own farts,” but now that I’ve fallen victim to the Video Essay Industrial Complex, I can appreciate Pierce’s unrepentant snobbery. I’ve since seen countless video essayists regurgitate the points in his article from a disingenuous place of concern, all while trying to shy away from its inherent cruelty. For example, in his piece, Pierce is exasperated by a man “who says that one of his tips for learning to read more is to “romanticise reading” by finding a cute outfit to read in.” This complaint really cuts to the heart of the issue: people with tastes that he doesn’t respect are behaving in ways that he finds fatuous.

Pierce, Rachel Oates, and countless others have raised concerns about commercialism and overconsumption, albeit mostly as an aside. I covered this in BookTok, Explained: “The more serious allegation in these articles is that BookTok’s rainbow shelves and book hauls contribute to a culture of overconsumption… Under the layers of derision here, there’s a valid point about social media and commercialism. They’re just aiming at the wrong target.”

It’s true that publishing has infiltrated all forms of social media so thoroughly that organic conversations about art are drowned out by whichever frontlist title has the biggest marketing budget. If this was their genuine concern, why do they spend more time decrying people with aberrant behavior such as tabbing their books too much, or thinking Zodiac Academy is the best series in the world?

BookTok, Explained

Just to round this all out, I will apologize for BookTok poseurs, which are all of us, because we are all the same. To those that doubt my sincerity, please note that contrition is my aesthetic.

1. BookTok takedowns perform really, really well on YouTube, and YouTubers often mine BookTok for content. (Ex: booktok's #1 hockey romance almost broke me, i read that awful tiktok stepfamily romance so you don't have to 🌲🤠, i read the tiktok stalker romance so you don't have to 💀 🥀) YouTubers who do ad reads or have their videos monetized have a vested interest in sensationalizing BookTok; critiques are not made for your enrichment, but for easy content that helps their bottom line.

2. Almost every YouTube video that’s some flavor of “BookTok is CrAZy” starts with the creator saying that they downloaded the app the day before and just watched what the algorithm served them in order to make content. Very intellectual behavior!!!!