Young women are reading again, but its smut of the weirdest variety imaginable

TikTok has brought back reading — in the weirdest way imaginable.If you’re encouraged that young people are picking up books and sharing them on social media, think again because many of the reads going viral are more porn than literature and make “50 Shades of Grey” seem tame.On TikTok, there over 88 million posts with the hashtag #BookTok.According to the tech giant’s own data, that translated to an estimated 59 million book sales in 2024 alone, as the masses eagerly purchased mind-blowing smut featuring everything from sex with mystical creatures like minotaurs and aliens to straight-up sexual abuse.Take, for instance, “Morning Glory Milking Farm,” a text with almost 25,000 reviews on Amazon, 80,000-plus entries on Goodreads and endless praise on BookTok.

It follows a graduate student as she moves from the city to the country to work on a farm that “milks” minotaurs — those half-bull, half-man creatures from Greek mythology.Note to reader: those are not female minotaurs being “milked.” In the fantastical world of the Ohio-based author C.M.Nascosta, who says in her bio that she’s “always preferred beasts to boys,” minotaur semen is apparently the key ingredient in a Viagra-like drug used by human men. These are the sort of stories that populate much of #BookTok, where predominantly female readers have popularized a “spice level” rating system to tell others how much smut to expect.

One pepper emoji (️) means the book includes flirting and kissing, two to three peppers implies some sex, and books that earn four to five peppers are filled with explicit and frequent sex.Other fantastically bizarre selections from this corner of the internet include Ruby Dixon’s “Ice Planet Barbarians,” which tells the story of a group of women who are abducted from Earth to a planet full of muscular blue aliens.You can guess where that’s headed.Even more bizarre is Vera Valentine’s “Unhinged,” the tale of a woman who falls for her...