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 … front door. Trigger warnings listed on the author’s website include: door knob insertion, covert breaking and entering, secret underwear theft, allusions to an orgy with unprotected sex, gun violence, and wood putty use.

There’s a real, significant audience for all of this. BookTok has sent titles like “I Got Abducted By Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com” and “That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon” onto national bestseller lists.

Despite massive declines in reading across the board, one in four Gen Zers read a romance novel in the past year, per YouGov’s December 2025 polling.

Those numbers are relatively massive, considering that 39% of Zoomers hadn’t read a single book in the past year. Meanwhile, romance book sales rose 24% in 2025 compared with the year earlier, according to Circana. 

Publishing houses themselves are not shying away from hyping even extreme romantasy titles. Penguin Random House UK shared a promotional article about the “dark romance” genre in August that required trigger warnings for stalking, home invasion, BDSM, violence, and cannibalism.

That gets at an aspect of the genre that’s far more concerning than minotaurs and doorknobs: the fetishization of outright sexual violence and abuse that’s pervasive in this content young women are so voraciously consuming.

According to Penguin Random House UK’s promotional materials, one of the “tell-tale signs that a book falls into the dark romance category is that there is a power imbalance” that could result in “dominance and submission, controlling behavior, abduction and kidnapping, [and/or] ‘dub-con’ (dubious consent).” 

A great example is “Haunting Adeline,” which became an instant New York Times bestseller in 2024. It tells the story of a female writer who is dogged by a stubborn stalker who ignores her pleas to leave her alone. Trigger warnings on the author’s own website include non-consent, stalking, graphic violence, human trafficking, child trafficking, child sacrifice, mentions of child death and explicit sexual situations.

This taste for kinky violence is a strange proclivity for a generation of women who are overwhelmingly feminist and often have militant attitudes about consent in the real world. Inside their fantasy world, predominately written by women for other women, anything goes — including female subjugation, abuse and even rape.

It’s a distressing turn for society. We can’t get the kids to read anything — except for what is essentially porn.