“Perhaps my issue is that “spicy book” is being used to signify “romance novel,” instead of being used as a descriptor for a type of book or type of romance novel.”
100%! Not all of us write spice or even steam so people pick up romance novels expecting them all to burst into flame by chapter 2. The tantrum when a book “isn’t spicy” or “isn’t spicy enough” is insulting.
This post makes me want to review my social media posts for the words you mentioned and compare the reach of those posts to others.
In general, our culture (U.S.) seems to struggle with nuance. Plus, many people cannot handle [content featuring] love and other intense emotions. And the dreaded S-word? Heck no! (Unless, of course, it’s a “forced entry” aka non-consensual 🍆 scene in a literary novel or movie. Then, somehow, it’s considered brilliant.)
I wonder how much of the fear around spice/heat/love/seggs is thinly masked fear of 👯♀️🙋🏻♀️💁🏻♀️💃🏻 empowerment?
Throughout history, marginalized groups have found ways to communicate in code.
But now mainstream media is catching on to the appeal of romance novels and trying to contribute to the conversation. One problem is that so many media pros don’t know the definition of a romance novel and confuse it with a romantic novel or with 🌽.
Loved this! When I am scrolling through booktok videos I often come across discourse such as "it's spicy" -> "it wasn't that spicy" -> "I was disappointed that it wasn’t spicier" and it really highlights for me how, while "spice" may be shared vocabulary, there is no real shared definition other than "spice refers to on-page sex". There is no "spice scale" that everyone agrees on and I feel that this lends itself to misunderstandings.
It brings to mind the act of rating a book out of five stars -- to some, 3 stars is positive, while to others, it means the book was not good. 2 stars can mean "this book was okay" or "this book sucked".
More than that, people like and look for and react differently to different things, and this subjectivity also means that "spice" is at least somewhat in the eye of the beholder.
One last thing this made me think about is perception; I personally don't love the cultural saturation of "spice" as like a key metric by which to measure or define books (it's just not something I participate in), and I have thoughts about how this kind of labelling perhaps colours and shapes perceptions of the books and genres being spoken about in ways that feel odd/wrong to me. For example, people talk about the ACOTAR books in terms of spice, but in one book that is 400+ pages long there may be only two scenes of explicit sexual activity, and that feels like a very small element by which to define a book? Or maybe this is my autism making me a bit of a pedant for language, but I feel I wouldn't have this take if the conversation were "how spicey are the sex scenes?" specifically 😅
Loved this! I also make a distinction between a book being on-the-page sexy and one that has the sexiest of eye contact and forearms and slight touches - a la Mimi Matthews’s Belles of London books
I think what’s also fascinating is that “spicy” and “smut” are both terms that (as far as I’m aware) both originated in fanfiction and also had very specific meanings in those circles too, but are now used as large generalising umbrella terms for a whole genre. I feel like that’s part of why it’s made everything so confusing because their original uses get blurred into the vast genres they’re trying to cover.
OMG this is such a great piece. Thank you. My new psychological thriller book just came out. Sure, the mc writes romance under a pseudonym, but that's not the central conceit, no. Yet many reviewers fixate ONLY on the book within the book (PG-13--nothing explicit) and end up deeming the book SPICY--adding a couple of obligatory jalapeño pepper emojis for the sake of clarification. UG.
“Perhaps my issue is that “spicy book” is being used to signify “romance novel,” instead of being used as a descriptor for a type of book or type of romance novel.”
100%! Not all of us write spice or even steam so people pick up romance novels expecting them all to burst into flame by chapter 2. The tantrum when a book “isn’t spicy” or “isn’t spicy enough” is insulting.
Great topic, Andrea.
This post makes me want to review my social media posts for the words you mentioned and compare the reach of those posts to others.
In general, our culture (U.S.) seems to struggle with nuance. Plus, many people cannot handle [content featuring] love and other intense emotions. And the dreaded S-word? Heck no! (Unless, of course, it’s a “forced entry” aka non-consensual 🍆 scene in a literary novel or movie. Then, somehow, it’s considered brilliant.)
I wonder how much of the fear around spice/heat/love/seggs is thinly masked fear of 👯♀️🙋🏻♀️💁🏻♀️💃🏻 empowerment?
Throughout history, marginalized groups have found ways to communicate in code.
But now mainstream media is catching on to the appeal of romance novels and trying to contribute to the conversation. One problem is that so many media pros don’t know the definition of a romance novel and confuse it with a romantic novel or with 🌽.
Loved this! When I am scrolling through booktok videos I often come across discourse such as "it's spicy" -> "it wasn't that spicy" -> "I was disappointed that it wasn’t spicier" and it really highlights for me how, while "spice" may be shared vocabulary, there is no real shared definition other than "spice refers to on-page sex". There is no "spice scale" that everyone agrees on and I feel that this lends itself to misunderstandings.
It brings to mind the act of rating a book out of five stars -- to some, 3 stars is positive, while to others, it means the book was not good. 2 stars can mean "this book was okay" or "this book sucked".
More than that, people like and look for and react differently to different things, and this subjectivity also means that "spice" is at least somewhat in the eye of the beholder.
One last thing this made me think about is perception; I personally don't love the cultural saturation of "spice" as like a key metric by which to measure or define books (it's just not something I participate in), and I have thoughts about how this kind of labelling perhaps colours and shapes perceptions of the books and genres being spoken about in ways that feel odd/wrong to me. For example, people talk about the ACOTAR books in terms of spice, but in one book that is 400+ pages long there may be only two scenes of explicit sexual activity, and that feels like a very small element by which to define a book? Or maybe this is my autism making me a bit of a pedant for language, but I feel I wouldn't have this take if the conversation were "how spicey are the sex scenes?" specifically 😅
Loved this! I also make a distinction between a book being on-the-page sexy and one that has the sexiest of eye contact and forearms and slight touches - a la Mimi Matthews’s Belles of London books
I think what’s also fascinating is that “spicy” and “smut” are both terms that (as far as I’m aware) both originated in fanfiction and also had very specific meanings in those circles too, but are now used as large generalising umbrella terms for a whole genre. I feel like that’s part of why it’s made everything so confusing because their original uses get blurred into the vast genres they’re trying to cover.
OMG this is such a great piece. Thank you. My new psychological thriller book just came out. Sure, the mc writes romance under a pseudonym, but that's not the central conceit, no. Yet many reviewers fixate ONLY on the book within the book (PG-13--nothing explicit) and end up deeming the book SPICY--adding a couple of obligatory jalapeño pepper emojis for the sake of clarification. UG.