The cover of Icebreaker is a cutesy cartoon. With a figure skater in a cute pink and purple dress next to a tall hockey player, the book is YA, right? Wrong. Between the cutesy cartoon covers is a story of a manipulative relationship, eating disorder, body shaming, toxic friendships, and graphic, sexually explicit content. Publishers need to stop marketing explicit books in a way that is misleading.
This has happened to me numerous times in many different ways. I’ve picked up a book that has hundreds of good ratings only to find that it’s sexually explicit, also known as “smut” or “spicy” on social media, and I never would have known. There are typically small content warnings for these books on the inside of the cover, yet it’s in small print, it’s hard to find, or girls don’t know where to look for it. In addition, it’s hard for young girls to differentiate the frivolous romance books from the “smut” books when they’re both in the YA section of Target, have similar looking covers, and are marketed the same.
Take for example, the covers of The Love Hypothesis and My Mechanical Romance, both romance novels. Can you tell from the covers which one is YA recommended for 13-year-old girls and which one is sexually explicit?
The Love Hypothesis is the sexually explicit novel and I, personally, would never have known just looking at the cutesy cover. Although we’ve all been taught “don’t judge a book by its cover,” we can’t help but to assume that the cover is a reflection of what’s on the inside. If a book has cutesy covers and fun lettering, it invites the reader to believe it is a fun, light-content story, not something that’s explicit. While I acknowledge that the cover of a book can be a factor of its profitability, publishers need to prioritize making the cover a reflection of the book and not a strategy for profit.
Young girls should be allowed to read whatever they want, and it’s normal for a girl to want to explore books with a bit of “spice.” Yet young kids need to be more educated in media literacy, and publishers need to change the way they sell books in order to try to fix the issue of misleading explicit books. As a young girl, I saved videos of book recommendations on Pinterest, but I now look back on the list and find that half of those books I would’ve hated reading because of their sexual content. The cute cartoon covers, combined with a lack of media literacy, mislead young girls into reading sexually explicit books. We must educate young girls in media literacy to avoid them stumbling upon books they don’t really want to read. It also will help them to think before diving into new trend they see on social media.