The downfall of Literature

« His mouth is on mine again, hot and wet and I don’t even know what’s happening to me. I’m hurting so much on the inside, yet my body craves his apology in the form of his mouth and hands on me. I want to lash out at him and react like I always wish my mother would have reacted when my father hurt her, but deep down I want to believe that it really was an accident. Ryle isn’t like my father. He is nothing like him.

I need to feel his sorrow. His regret. I get both of these things in the way he kisses me. I spread my legs for him and his sorrow comes in another form. Slow, apologetic thrusts inside of me. Every time he enters me, he whispers another apology. And by some miracle, every time he pulls out of me, my anger leaves with him. » Colleen Hoover in « It ends with us »

For me, this is the downfall of literature and let me explain why.

Before anything, I would like to clarify that I am not judging anyone who enjoys reading Colleen Hoover type of books, the Wattpad style, smut books or anyone who is part of the Booktok community, as most of the people who read this genre of content share it on TikTok to create a virtual environment for the people who seem to enjoy it or in order to introduce it to other people. At the end who am I to judge people, especially when I know for a fact that if we were in the 19th century, I may have been criticized for enjoying the same plot: the ambitious young man who wants to escalate the social pyramid, falls in love with the wife of the man who gave him a home to stay at and develops strong feelings for that woman who is much older than him, married and lacks of affection and love from her husband, has an affair with the young man and commits adultery. The only difference is that I had a good time discovering great vocabulary and syntax and it spared me from irrelevant sex ‘scenes’, contrarily to today’s books. (In case you haven’t read any French books from the 19th century than here you go, I did for you).

Back to the point, my purpose is not to judge or give the impression that I have a better taste in books, the blog is a simple way of expressing how I feel towards the books themselves, not the readers, and I think they are trash, from a personal experience and perspective.

The amount of cringe that is impossible to process, the disappointment at the end of a book that you chose to read because it was recommended to you by many, just to find out at the end that it was only over hyped and misrepresented. The numerous sex paragraphs, both unnecessary and embarrassing for both the reader and the writer.

It is too much to handle, for what is supposed to be a relaxing time for me to enjoy and since I cannot just stop reading a book I have started, I find myself under the obligation of indulging the agony of reading it until it is finished.

« What forces you to read it? » someone might ask, well it’s the misleading, wrong impression and false representation that the Booktok community uses to advertise a book, mainly, but also the hope of proving that my realization of how empty nowadays’ literature is, is wrong and that there must be a newly published book that is good.

Filled with sexual content, toxic tropes such as falling in love with a mafia boss, ending up with a stalker or the idea that good sex can make you think of forgiving your abuser partner. It is clear that smut books are the new porn, or at least a way of reaching the population who does not to watch it for whatever reason.

I have also noticed that most of smut books readers are women, which obviously leads to the why question. Giving it lots of thought, the only rational and most likely answer to this question is that, unlike porn, smut books represent most of the times a woman who is wanted, treated as a human, worshiped and overall respected during the whole process of sex, unlike porn where women are sometimes dehumanized, treated disgustingly, sometimes raped, beaten up or forced to perform degrading and humiliating acts.

And this is not to criticize something that women specifically enjoy because no, this is not an internalized misogyny I have within me that is driving to write about something as if it was wrong just because women categorically enjoy it and no this is not an attempt into guilt trapping them for enjoying something that they like because the whole blogs isn’t a « women versus men » issue but only a simple discussion of how may be it is time to think that porn is porn and that it is only a matter of time until the « decent » representation of sex in books is going to evolve, backwards, just like pornography, into making women again objects that satisfy men’s needs, unless this representation already exists and I didn’t know about it yet.

Sexual content is sexual, whether you look down on it as it being cheap when it is portrayed in the pornography industry, one click away if you search for it on the internet or look up to it as a fancier product when it is being written about in books that you can get from a bookstore.

The downfall of literature is the need for our society to sexualize everything. I am not saying that sex is wrong but I am simply questioning the urge that pushes today’s writers into sexualizing every context, the same way you question a movie director’s intentions behind adding an unnecessary sex scene to a great movie that didn’t need it.

Is it appropriate to blame this, partly, on the publishing industry for promoting books that are, well; horrendous, repetitive, with uninteresting development, dull plots and storylines, cheap and weak to no decent vocabulary (I genuinely believe that the decline of literature’s robust health was introduced by allowing words like yeah and yup during dialogues between characters) and the list of adjectives goes on and on.

The downfall of literature is the downfall of language as well, as we became too lazy to listen and read. Words are degraded and the quality of literature has drastically decreased (in both traditionally pushed book and self-published books).

Or is the publishing industry innocent because it seeks profit, just like any industry, with no intellectual or moral principles in the background, hunting what seems to be a good opportunity to gain money without any sense of responsibility towards Literature and its actual value and depth?

Or blame it on the reader who is encouraging this type of contents? And what does this say about the reader? What image does it send?

But then again isn’t literature, just like any art, a way of representing a society in which we live in and witness its matters and issues, so it is only fair for it to change as society changes, and so for its criteria and standards that we use to judge a good work from a weak one, to change as well?

Following this reasoning, don’t we admit that our current society is publicly obsessed with sexualizing everything?

Does that mean that I cannot enjoy a new modern literature piece written by someone contemporaneous with me, without it feeling like I am consuming a ‘fancy’ pornography and erotica content?

And I feel like that would have been fine if that was necessary to reach a greater good or for the fulfilment of a specific context or for a character development but it now seems to be a trend to reach teenagers because apparently it is a consumable content, although it has no necessity at the end for the development of a storyline and may be this is all the result of trivializing sex instead of it being something intimate and personal.

I know that I don’t really have to understand everything and make it make sense, that if something is ‘enjoyable’ for someone and it does not hurt anyone, nothing else matters. But a part of me can’t help but feel sorrow and deep desolation for how dull our books have become.

However, it is great to notice that we have come to think that reading is cool. I love how everyone now is interested in books and how a lot of people are romanticizing things like book shopping and bookstores during autumn windy days with dead brown leaves on the ground everywhere, cosy cold rainy winter nights in bed with a book you enjoy and a cup of your favourite drink, being surrounded by flowering trees, blooming roses in the park feeling the fresh breeze during spring, understanding the pleasance of reading a book in the beach after a fun swim in a warm summer day or understanding the joy of spending time by yourself, listening to your favourite music while being transported into another world that allows you to escape your current one.

But it is important that we stop the new unneeded and avoidable toxic behavioural tendencies that state that in order to be a real reader you have to read every single day or night, consume 70 books every month and considering audio books as less prestigious way of reading.