Imagine you are the parent of a middle school girl, and you are shopping for her birthday gifts and also her next read. You open a book with a cute cover and realize that the context is incredibly adult and risqué. Unfortunately, this happens quite often and more books like those are appearing on shelves more often. That type of literature is becoming more normalized because of Booktok.
Booktok is a subsect of TikTok dedicated to books, poems, and other types of literature that people enjoy. With, according to thestudentnews.co.uk, over 60 billion videos and 200 billion views under the hashtag. However, it has evolved into something more for people to openly talk about their personal fetishes and the creepy behavior they like in books. It has gotten to the point where people who use Booktok admit that they cannot read a book without “spice.” With the normalization of this way of thinking on the rise, it has become a more subtle form of a porn addiction. It now has affected bookshelves in stores, the way people portray romance, and the minds of all ages of kids. The Australian Institute of Family Studies says that it can affect a child’s mood, behavior, and much more.
How this affects all those things, however, is more intricate. First, people and mostly kids, see these books on the shelves with these cute and cartoonish pictures on the covers They also include vague story descriptions and people innocently fall for the trap and sometimes become quite traumatized by the context. Second, it can mess up people’s view of romance due to the normalization. Being exposed to that kind of content at a young age can permanently damage you, your brain and your mental health in the future. for example, imagine getting into a relationship with someone very lustful and toxic but you are oblivious to it due to what you have been exposed to. These types of books influence not only this type of behavior, but this type of thinking. Third, kids, especially young kids, when introduced to this content, can have permeant brain damage. According to Carolyn Ross on physchologytoday.com, children show the same behavior that they could see by reading stories that contain stereotypes about genders and sex and pornography. At the end of the day, books like these should not be normalized and put on shelves and parents should be more careful about what kids read.
