Some Thai restaurants print little chili peppers next to each dish on the menu. One pepper is mild. Five peppers will make you weep into your rice. The system works because the menu tells you what you’re ordering, so the person who wants it blistering and the person who wants it gentle can sit at the same table and both leave happy.
Now picture a restaurant where every dish arrives at five peppers, the menu brags about it, and the cooks have stopped caring whether the food tastes of anything under the burn.
That’s the argument a lot of readers are making about fiction right now, and one video made it louder than most.
The video is called The Absolute Degeneracy of Modern Writing, from Hilary Layne, who runs The Second Story, a YouTube channel about storytelling craft. Her case is that sex has become the selling point of a great deal of modern fiction, and that it’s been creeping in for a century. The quality of the books, she says, has dropped as the explicitness has climbed. She goes further than that, into claims about readers themselves that I’m leaving alone here. The craft and market parts are worth an answer.
Is explicit sex in fiction a problem?
No. Not by itself.
Sex is one of the things human beings do, and fiction is the record of human beings doing things. A novel about a marriage that pretends the couple never touch is a strange novel. People like reading it, too. That counts for something. Readers aren’t children who need protecting from the books they choose.
It isn’t my cup of tea. I don’t read for it and I don’t go looking for it, and that’s about my taste and nobody else’s. Freedom of speech means that if a writer wants to put explicit sex on the page and readers want to buy it, more power to both of them. Nobody is forcing anyone to read the five-pepper dish. So I part company with anybody who wants these books banned, shamed or pulled off shelves. That’s a road I won’t walk down.
The question worth asking is narrower. When does the sex stop serving the story and start replacing it?
What the video gets right about sex in fiction
Three of her points are sound craft, and I’d make them to any writer I coach.
The first is that sex is optional. No story requires it. A love story can build to a closed door and lose nothing, and some of the most romantic books ever written never open that door at all. Writers who claim a novel without sex is dishonest are defending their taste, and calling it a law of fiction.
The second is that a scene described motion by motion is rarely worth the pages it takes. Every scene has to move the story or reveal a character, and sex scenes are no exception. Once you’ve shown what changed between two people, the rest is choreography. A writer who spends four pages on mechanics and two sentences on what it meant has the proportions backwards.
The third is the history, and she’s right about that too. Publishers have used sex to sell books for a long time. Paperback covers in the seventies and eighties put bodies on the front of novels that contained a page or two of anything racy, because a hint of sex on the cover moved copies off the rack. Literary fiction carried a steady background hum of it for decades, often with less purpose than any romance novel. None of this started with romantasy.
Sex in a novel is optional. A scene described motion by motion is rarely worth the pages it takes.Share on X
What about the sex in literary fiction?
Her sharpest example isn’t from romance at all. She describes picking up a novel by a literary writer critics treated as a giant and finding, within twenty pages, a narrator who sizes up every woman he meets and characters who announce their sexual habits on first meeting. She calls it ambient explicitness, a hum of sex on almost every page whatever the book is about.
That’s a fair observation. It also undercuts anyone who calls this a women’s-fiction problem. Prize committees and serious reviewers have praised plenty of novels where the sex does less work than in an average romance. Nobody calls those books smut because they come with a literary pedigree.
The same test applies to both shelves. Does the scene change something? Does the detail tell us who this person is? A literary novelist gets no pass for filler because the prose is pretty. A romance writer deserves no criticism for a love scene that moves the story forward.
I’d go one step further.
Romance at least tells you on the cover what you’re getting. The literary novel often doesn’t.
How did BookTok change what sells?
On the market, she’s onto something real.
A big part of the current wave was pushed by BookTok. Short videos of readers crying, gasping and holding books up to the camera sell novels at a scale no review section ever managed. The books that travel best in that format are the ones with a hook you can say in a sentence, and “this one is spicy” is about the shortest hook there is. Bookstores now have tables labeled for BookTok, and those tables lean hard toward romance and romantasy with high heat levels.
BookTok is hugely popular with young women, and the books it lifts reflect that audience. That’s not a complaint. Every reading community lifts the books it loves. The trouble is what happens to the rest of the market when one signal gets that loud. Publishers chase what sold last quarter. Agents ask for comparables. A writer with a quiet, careful novel hears that it needs more heat, and some of them add it whether the story wants it or not. The menu fills up with five-pepper dishes because the last ten customers ordered them.
I agree with her there. Explicit content isn’t the problem. A market where the heat level does the selling lets everything else slide: plot, character, prose, editing. Once the spice sells the book, nobody checks whether the cooking is any good.
I’ve written 113+ books under my own name, and I’ve watched trends like this before. Vampires had their decade. Dystopias had theirs. Every wave produces a few books that last and a mountain that don’t, and the ones that last are almost always the ones that would have worked without the trend.
If you write quieter books, that’s no reason to panic. A loud trend takes over the front tables, but it doesn’t empty the rest of the store. Readers who want a mystery, a war story or a family saga are still out there buying them, and plenty of them are glad to find a book that doesn’t spend chapter twelve in the bedroom. Find those readers and write for them. A heat level you don’t believe in produces scenes that read like homework, and readers can tell.
What should a writer do with sex scenes?
Decide on purpose. Plenty of writers drift into a heat level because the genre seems to expect it, and the scenes read like it. Ask what the scene does for the story. If it changes the relationship, reveals something about a character, or pays off tension you’ve been building for two hundred pages, it belongs. If it’s there because the last bestseller had one at the same point, cut it.
Pick a heat level and hold it. Romance readers are precise about what they want, and a sweet romance that turns explicit in chapter twelve breaks a promise. I go through heat levels and the contract they make with readers in what the romance genre demands. Which level you choose matters less than holding it.
Consider who else reads the genre. A thriller with a two-page explicit scene will lose some of the readers who picked it up for the plot, and it won’t win many romance readers in exchange. Genre readers come with expectations, and a scene that surprises them in the wrong direction costs more goodwill than it buys.
Write the emotion and trim the inventory. What a reader remembers from a love scene is what it meant to the people in it. Specific sensory detail helps, and I’ve written about putting a reader inside the scene, but a list of body parts in sequence reads like a diagram.
Label the book clearly, too. The chili pepper system works. Romance readers have built their own version of it in spice ratings and content notes, and those tools let a reader find the dish they want and skip the one they don’t. A writer who’s clear about what’s in the book loses no readers they’d have kept.
Does a book need sex to sell?
No, and the shelves prove it. Thrillers, mysteries, cozy fiction, epic fantasy and a large share of literary fiction sell well with little or no explicit content. Sweet and clean romance is a thriving market with its own devoted readers.
Look at what stays on the shelves after a trend passes. The backlist that keeps selling year after year is built from books readers press on each other, and they do that for characters, for endings and for the feeling the book left them with. Very few people hand a friend a novel and say the third chapter was explicit. They hand it over and say they couldn’t put it down.
Sex can widen a book’s reach in some genres right now. It can’t rescue a weak story for long. A reader who buys a novel for its heat and finds nothing else in it doesn’t buy the sequel, and a writer who leans on heat alone ends up writing the same scene over and over at higher temperatures.
Locally, the market is broad. Steamy Lit in Tampa built an entire store around romance readers, and it’s thriving because it knows exactly who it serves. Down the road, other shops stock everything from cozy mysteries to history.
That’s a healthy menu.
The menu, not the dish
The video gets to its conclusion by blaming the dish. I’d blame the menu. Explicit fiction has every right to exist, and plenty of it is written with real skill. The damage comes when one flavor crowds out the rest, when publishers chase heat instead of story, and when writers who don’t want to write it feel they must.
Write the book your story needs, at the heat level it needs, and say so on the cover. Readers who want five peppers will find you. Readers who want one will find you too.
For more on craft and genre, the Writing Hub collects everything I’ve written on building a novel. And if you’ve got a novel in mind and want a professional to write it at exactly the heat level you choose, my fiction ghostwriting service starts with that conversation.
A good restaurant can cook mild and hot. It just has to cook.
