Hello. Yes, I’m addressing you, the reader. You’re going to be a good girl and read this article for me, aren’t you? *smirks arrogantly and starts breathing heavily through my mouth* You’re going to be daddy’s little girl and murmur appreciatively when I make a thought-provoking argument, aren’t you? *raises a suggestive eyebrow and sidles over to you, licking my lips and howling like a baboon*

Maybe these words turned you on, and I have succeeded in buttering your muffin, or maybe you’re too much of a “puriteen” to find them titillating (your loss!). As the last week has shown, this style of literary introduction is not to everyone’s tastes. Following a recent controversy in which fans of a smutty novel harassed a real-life hockey player and his girlfriend, BookTok erotica is back in the discourse. The title pages of two novels both went viral on social media, the first of which reads: “*leans in close to whisper in your ear* Aren’t you such a good girl. Go on and read this book with your legs wide open for me… ” and the second of which reads: “To all the girls who fuck the villains. open your mouth wide and take it like a good girl.”

In response, lots of people on social media did open their mouths wide – but only to denounce these novels as filth and the people who read them as porn addicts. The kind of dark erotica popular on TikTok was widely criticised for encouraging women to romanticise abusive relationships and sexual violence, and so helping to perpetuate the oppression of women. Others felt the backlash was too censorious, and argued that women have the right to explore their fantasies, however unpalatable they might seem. In a lot of ways, the debate was a blow-by-blow reenactment of the ‘Sex Wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s, when radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin campaigned against pornography as a tool of male domination, and their sex-positive counterparts like Ellen Willis argued that feminism should be opposed to puritanism, authoritarianism and any attempts to suppress free speech. The current discourse is basically that, but with more novels about sucking off werewolves.

When you look at some of the “smutty” books being recommended on TikTok, it’s hard not to conclude that the haters have a point. You’ll find novels where the protagonists fall in love with their stalkers, men who have kidnapped them, obsessive psychopaths, serial killers and violent gangsters. In Promises and Pomegranates – billed as a modern retelling of the Hades and Persephone myth – a woman is kidnapped on her wedding day and taken to an island by an evil Mafia doctor, where she manages to “chip away at the layers of ice surrounding his heartened heart”. In The Sinner, which boasts Satan himself for a love interest, the protagonist has “always craved the darker side of love. The kind that left bruises and scars”. While the allure of abusive men seems to be a common theme, there is plenty of smut for the Sapphic gals: in The Revenge of Lyla Van-Alst, the protagonist is tortured by the sex demon ghost of a girl she bullied to death back in high school – hubba bubba!

According to some of these books, the most romantic scenario possible is winning the affection of a horrible man who hates you. Obviously, this is not a lesson which should be applied in the real world: in fact, the best piece of relationship advice I’ve ever learned is that if something is not easy and enjoyable from day one, you should sack it off as quickly as possible. Why bother with the hassle of chipping away at the icy heart of a psychopath (and ladies, I’ve been there!) when you could instead date someone who is fun and nice? But while these novels might be imparting certain ideas about what is desirable, they are not intended to be read as dating manuals. It seems patronising to assume that young women are so impressionable that they’ll read one book and start risking it all for a member of the Mafia or – heaven forbid – an evil vampire.

The animating desire at play here seems to be more about belonging to someone, being praised by them and treated as a precious possession, rather than being abused or treated badly. In a dating world so often characterised by indifference and fickle attachments, it’s understandable why the fantasy of someone who cares so much they want to control everything you do (in a manner that you find enjoyable) might be preferable to a lived reality of being ghosted on Hinge or the slow death of a three-month situationship. The men in these novels might be villainous, but they suffer from an excess of caring. Of course, when men are jealous, controlling and obsessive in real life, it tends to be tedious, exhausting and in many cases dangerous – not an erotic journey into a world of forbidden pleasure. But again, I don’t think it should be assumed that fans of smutty books are incapable of telling the difference between fantasy and reality.

Does romanticising abuse or sexual violence make you more likely to actually experience them? There’s arguably a danger in being encouraged to eroticise what should be viewed as red flags, but this line of argument risks putting the responsibility for abuse back onto women. Some men are going to be violent and controlling regardless of what their victims read, and you don’t need to have fallen prey to any particular ideology to be vulnerable to this. It’s also relevant, I think, that these novels are almost exclusively being written by women for an audience of women. This doesn’t mean they are unimpeachable, and of course women can uphold heterosexual norms just as men do, but it’s a different dynamic to Dworkin’s critique of pornography as a male-dominated industry that exploits real women and encourages men to fetishise violence. On the other hand, Dworkin argued that one of porn’s effects is to encourage women themselves to eroticise their own subjugation, so it’s hard to imagine she would be a fan of novels in which the protagonists fall in love with their stalkers and yearn for the kind of love that leaves a scar.

If we are discussing whether these books might be a ‘bad influence’, we need to be careful to avoid falling into arguments of causality. “It’s hard to prove that engagement with media causes anything, but I think what is at stake here is the circulation of a discourse that identifies abuse as having an erotic dynamic”, Emma, a feminist academic who researches sexual violence, tells Dazed. “It’s not that violence and eroticism are mutually exclusive, but that it seems these novels depict abusive power dynamics that are reliant on social phenomena of men’s violence against women, rather than just exploring power dynamics in themselves. Whether that poses direct harm is questionable – that it circulates a harmful discourse about the erotics of abuse, on the other hand, is more convincing. Certainly, it seems like these books don’t pose any sort of challenge to sexual or gender norms in their narratives.”

We can think about the sexual politics of these books and the messages they might be imparting without turning into Mary Whitehouse. A lot of their content does honestly seem kind of disturbing, but I don’t think anyone deserves to be shamed for reading them – the sad fact is that a lot of people will figure out for themselves, if they haven’t done so already, that there’s nothing romantic about jealousy, possessiveness or violence.

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