Who's Afraid of a Big Bad Wang? [008]

14 Feb, 2026

wordcount: 23.8k

In fall 2025, my youtube recommendations put a video into my feed titled "The Absolute Degeneracy of Modern Writing" by Hilary Layne. Despite/because of the eyebrow-raising title¹, I watched it... and found myself deeply disagreeing with Layne's cherry-picked examples and poorly reasoned arguments.

A brief summary of (most of) the video's major ideas:

1. American/English entertainment has become increasingly sexualized, particularly literature, with modern/contemporary books containing more explicit sex than historical works.
2. Explicit sex in books is the same as filmed pornography; explicit sex = erotica = smut = porn.
3. Sex in books is bad for literature because it diminishes the writing quality.
4. Sex in contemporary books is about money money money. Publishers know sex sells and they will use it sell books, regardless of quality.

Early on in her video, Layne compares two sets of books by women, lamenting the first group is presented as proof of the success of female writers while the second group is left out of the conversation [01:15–01:24]:

• 3 modern titles: Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros; Deep End, by Ali Hazelwood; and A Court of Mist and Fury, by Sarah J Maas.
• 7 historical works: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte; Rebecca, by Daphne de Maurier; Kristen Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset; Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott; The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu; The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff; and Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.

First, it's a bit funny to see Frankenstein on the list, given with discussion of the 2025 movie adaptation, I at least saw Mary Shelley's mentioned as the book's author, if not people talking in depth about how Del Toro did or didn't capture the atmosphere, characters, and themes of Shelley's original work. However, Layne did release her video before Frankenstein (2025) was released on Netflix (8/3/25 vs 11/7/25), so I can't fault her for not being a time-traveler. Still, the talk around the film does demonstrate Mary Shelley is in the conversation when it comes to books by women, at least in some literature/media-focused circles.

Second, when I've talked about romance/romantasy books with friends or acquaintances, these novels have never been held up as the sole examples of female literary success. If someone asked me about a successful contemporary female writer, the obvious example is JK Rowling: her Harry Potter series wasn't just the most successful children's book series of all time, but one of the most successful book series of all time. She has undoubtedly shaped the modern publishing landscape, for better or worse, and without any sexual content in the series.

Third, this comparison takes these books entirely out of their historical contexts and intended audiences, with Layne comparing three mass-market, "low" art books against seven classics of "high" art. Against 4 genre-influencing books of English/American literature (Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Little Women, and Frankenstein), 1 work considered not only the first novel written by a woman, but the first novel ever written, and which went on to influence Japanese storytelling ever after (The Tale of Genji), a Nobel prize winning historical epic praised for capturing what medieval Norwegian life could have really been like (Kristen Lavransdatter) and a beloved historical adventure for children (The Eagle of the Ninth), well........... no wonder Yarros, Hazelwood, Maas, and their books come out looking a bit weak! The same could be said about many, many modern authors, male or female, even those without any sex in their books. Why shouldn't women have the freedom to write both gripping, brilliant, genre-defining novels and forget-the-next-day beach reads?²

(Seriously, coughing baby vs. hydrogen bomb ain't exactly a fair match up.)

At the end of her video, Layne expresses surprise when people are shocked by how 'spicy' romance books can be, as "sex on the level we see in books like [Fourth Wing] and [Deep End] has actually been normal for a long time. Not just in bodice rippers, but in highbrow award-winning literature" [30:51-31:02]. The highbrow, award-winning books she shows on screen from 30:54-31:00 are:

• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• IT, Stephen King
• Game of Thrones, George RR Martin
• Ulysses, James Joyce
• The Terror, Dan Simmons
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D H Lawrence
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Steven Chbosky
• City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room; The New York Trilogy, Paul Aster
• House of Leaves, Mark Z Danielewski
• Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

Lots one could talk about here³ but I'll focus on one book in particular: The Terror, because I actually read it not too long ago and am agog at Layne's argument there's a gratuitous amount of sex in it.

TL;DR for the plot: The Terror is an alternate history of the doomed 1845 Franklin Exhibition. Franklin and his crew are trying to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic; instead, they find themselves freezing, starving, eating each other, and/or being eaten by a supernatural monster lurking on the ice.

It's 750+ pages long and has two explicit sex scenes, one lasting 7 pages and the other lasting 3. Both involve the protagonist, Francis Crozier. The first is a flashback when Crozier lived in Australia, where he sleeps with a young woman named Sophia. Showing his good-intentions and deep naïveté, Crozier proposes marriage and Sophia laughs him off, saying Crozier was a fun diversion but she'd never marry him. The second sex scene takes place after the rest of the crew is dead and Crozier has been saved by a Inuk woman named Silna, who nurses Crozier back to health after his near-death. Unlike with Sophia, Crozier and Silna have a real connection; after they make love, Crozier then stays in the Arctic, marries her, has children with her, and learns from Silna how to become a shaman to hold back the monster, Tuunbaq's, wrath.

I guess for Layne, 10 pages of sex in a 750+ page book is enough put a book in the "insane amounts of sexual obsession in our fiction" [31:20-31:21] box, but it never felt gratuitous or over-emphasized to me.⁴ Layne's objection, I could imagine, would be something like, did Simmons need to include these sex scenes in his book? Well, no, but Simmons didn't need to include any particular plot point in his novel; did he need to include pages and pages of the characters being so cold and so hungry and so scared? One could cut swaths of these descriptions and still achieve the same effect: these men were woefully unprepared for survival in the Arctic and it would be absolutely horrible to freeze, starve, or get eaten to death by a monstrous polar bear. But removing the sex scenes would take away major signposts within Crozier's character arc.

Layne's whole video also begs the question of the decreasing quality of published literature. Twice, Layne confidently declares that modern storytelling stinks: "when I started this channel, it was largely because I had been noticing a broad decline in storytelling in general and literature in particular," [00:00-00:10] and "anyone who has tried to read a book off the shelf in Barnes & Noble in the last 5 years does not need to be told that the quality of Western literature is in decline" [33:35-33:42].

But Layne never defines what she considers "good" versus "bad" literature; doesn't do any close reading of the prose, structure, or storytelling of "bad" modern books compared to "good" historical ones, or show how explicit sexual content is a driving factor in that decline; does no analysis of when, why, or how she sees this trend moving through literary history; and ignores time's quality filter, where badly written books (and stories overall) are generally forgotten while good books stick around, creating the illusion that there wasn't as much bad storytelling in the past than in contemporary times.

Another assumption underlying her video is that explicit sex never ever ever has a legitimate artistic purpose. Although Layne technically says she doesn't think "all sex in fiction is bad" [35:48-35:50], this comes right after her saying explicit sex is never acceptable in books (bolding mine):

"The reality is that sex [in books] is 100% optional. And even then, there are times when the story might benefit from skipping the sex. And also, this bears repeating. There's literally never a good enough plot reason to describe every single action, motion, and sensation of a sex scene. There just isn't." [35:27-35:47].

Layne presents her idea that explicit sex never has a legitimate literary purpose as a fact, but it isn't. It's her opinion. If she wants to make a claim like that, Layne's gotta convince me! Present the evidence! Do the analysis! Show the audience specific examples of how explicit sex "means that the story doesn't have to be that great," of writers "[cutting] all the other corners" and people not "paying attention to the prose or the grammar⁵” [34:27-34:45]. But without doing that, I'm not going to agree with her just because she says something she believes in an authoritative tone. Yes, I still believe sex in literature can be artistic and meaningful, and she hasn't done anything to convince me otherwise.

To mention a youtube video I do really like: "Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism," by Jacob Geller. (Genuinely, you should stop reading my essay and go watch his vid, right now! It's great.)

In it, Geller examines negative reactions towards modern art and histories of art censorship. He begins by introducing Barnett Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue #3,”⁶ which was displayed in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam... until, in 1986, an irate man used a box cutter to slash up. Some people were aghast, while others celebrated the destruction. Before the attack, the painting had been “the reason for dozens of angry letters and phone calls to the museum,” with one person saying it made them feel “physically sick” [2:08-2:17]. After the attack, the museum received more correspondence, including that “this so called ‘vandal’ should be made the director of modern museums,” and “he did what hundreds of thousands of us would have liked to do” [2:23-2:34].

Midway through Layne's video, she describes reading a few romance/romantasy books to get more familiar with the genre, but the experience ended up being unexpectedly emotionally sickening: "Despite the fact that I didn't care about these characters and despite the fact that they were all mostly happy endings and everything else, I was legitimately depressed during the few weeks when I was reading these books. I was having trouble focusing on my work. I was having trouble sleeping. I was even having trouble eating..." [16:26-16:39]. I don't doubt Layne's reaction, as extreme as it might seem. I will just say that, similar to her although for vastly different reasons, I rarely read romance novels, but I've never been depressed, distracted, or unable to eat when I've read them.

Later on in his video, Geller talks about Jesse Helms, an American Senator who crusaded against modern art over the 2nd half of the 20th century. For instance, Helms hated the art of Robert Mapplethorpe. Hated might not be a strong enough word; Helms didn't think Mapplethorpe's art was art at all, as in this quote which Geller uses to introduce Helms and his worldview: “Here we have ten or twelve pictures of art... but we don’t have any penises stretched out on the table” [5:39–5:45]. This quote was in reference to one of Mapplethorpe's photographs, many of which were exhibited by the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art in 1989 through a grant provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Helms, along with other members of Congress, were outraged. Pictures of penises, paid for by American tax dollars?! In response, Helms proposed an amendment to constrain the N.E.A. from offering grants dealing with works of art containing offensive depictions of sex-, pee-, and poop-related topics, which passed in September 1991.

Layne also talks about the scatological in her video:

"So many writers have repeated the same nonsensical argument that because sex is a natural part of the human condition, failing to include it in your novel would make it unrealistic or disingenuous. What strikes me the most about this argument is the lack of self-awareness. Bowel movements are also a natural part of the human condition, but I don't see people using bowel movement scenes to sell books. I also don't see that many bowel movements in Romantasy. For that matter, childbirth is also a natural part of the human condition. And while that's a bit more likely to make it into a novel than a bowel movement, it also doesn't get championed the way sex does. Gosh, I wonder why that is." [28:09-28:45]

First: I came of age during the Twlight craze; read the first book, thought it was boring, never read the rest. However, I heard a lot about Breaking Dawn and its apparently absurd plot where Bella and Edward get married; Bella unexpectedly gets pregnant; the fetus grows super fast, draining away Bella's emotional and literal strength; and then during childbirth, the baby mortally injures Bella and Edward has to give her an emergency cesarean with his teeth... Lots of people at the time laughed about it, myself included, but in retrospect it seems like a fantastical depiction of a high-risk pregnancy: women do still fall ill during pregnancy and do still die in childbirth, even in the 21st century. I don't remember if the pregnancy plot was a part of how the publisher advertised Breaking Dawn, but it was definitely a part of the novel's word of mouth marketing.

Second: count me as an odd-one-out, but knowing a novel focused on bowel movements would make me more likely to check it out -- sure, maybe it'd end up being total crap, but maybe not! The body, in all its hairy, oozy, gross glory could be a fascinating topic for a novel, particularly given how the American culture I'm familiar with shies away from acknowledging these aspects of being a living, breathing creature. (And my biases in coming from a religious tradition which leans into the reality of what it feels like to have a body.)

Third: Layne is frustrated by writers treating sex as something obligatory in stories. Just a little earlier, she says she's read so many "essays and articles and quotes written by men and women over the years who talk like sex is literally a mandatory element of fiction" [27:15-27:24]. On this one point, I agree with her: sex is not mandatory for stories. Sexual content is one element a writer can use in their story, but not something they need to include. Lots of great novels have no sexual content! What I disagree with is her assertions that 1) great novel are less great because they have sexual content and 2) authors who write about sex are only really doing it because they're horny... and not because they actually want to explore sex though a creative lens with their storytelling⁷.

Geller talks too about another vandalized painting: Rothko's "Black on Maroon." As he describes it, "in 2012, a man painted his own name and a slogan in the corner [of "Black on Maroon"]... He tagged it. And, according to that man, he had fairly grand motivations. He said: 'Contemporary artists simply produce things which aren't creative in their essence or spirit... Art has become a business, which appears to serve only the needs of the art market.'" [10:09-10:37]

The vandal's lament that modern art is about the contemporary art business over genuine creativity is striking similar to Layne's argument that publishers care more about great profits than great literature: "the number one reason anyone has ever tried to normalize this kind of, you know, explicit content, is money" [03:58-4:03], that "...the largest group of people who have worked so tirelessly to normalize the consumption of erotic media are people whose sole motivation is profit. They do not care about female empowerment. They don't even care about female health. They just care about female money" [36:05-36:18], or for an even longer quote (bolding mine):

"...sex has become increasingly centric in literature for the last century, going as far back as the likes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and James Joyce's Ulysses and even further back to Fanny Hill and let's not forget our boy the marquis [de Sade]. Of course, these older examples tended to get themselves a tiny bit banned. While Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses both tried to make some kind of ironically righteous first amendment case for erotica being a super important form of art or whatever. But again, who do you suppose benefited from the legalization of explicit content in books, human society or publishers? The debate about whether or not wildly explicit material is protected by the American First Amendment has been renewed in recent years. But I do find it interesting that those who argue the strongest for it are making a shocking amount of money." [30:02-31:01]

But Layne sets up a false, either/or dichotomy between publisher profit and societal benefit. These two categories do not have to be in contradiction with each other. (And at least give us the numbers! How much moula did Ulysses make, or Lady Chatterley's Lover, as compared to other works?) Her assumption also calls to mind another question: who get to define what human society will 'benefit' from?

There's an infamous quote from R v Penguin Books Ltd, or the 1960 obscenity trial which eventually led to the legal publishing of the uncensored Lady Chatterley's Lover, from Mervyn Griffith-Jones. In his prosecutorial opening remarks (bolding mine):

"...urging the jury to decide if the book was obscene under section 2 of the Act and if so whether its literary merit provided for a 'public good' under section 4, and... inviting them to consider as a test of whether it would deprave or corrupt he asked 'Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?'"

Griffith-Jones's questions are dripping with moral paternalism; fathers should decide what their wives, children, and servants can read, with his implicit understanding that high status men are somehow less affected by 'obscene literature' than women, children, and their social inferiors and so should be allowed to censor art as they see fit... for the sake of society, of course.

When quoting Layne above, I also bolded a few particular sentences, because they really stood out to me. If you haven't watched it, Layne rolls her eyes and takes an incredibly flippant tone when she says it. Personally, it sounds like she can't even imagine someone genuinely thinking erotica could be art. (And yet such a person is writing this post.) Her condescension is disheartening, because she's heard people say, I think X story with erotica/explicit sex is an important work of art, and... she has totally rejected that these people are speaking honestly. It echoes Helm's disdain that a penis stretched out on a table could ever be art, or the disbelief by people that anyone could actually enjoy looking at swaths of red, yellow, and blue of "Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue #3." For an artist, writer, and critic herself, it's a deep failure of Layne's imagination. You can certainly disagree with someone, but shouldn't that disagreement come from a place of trying to genuinely understand how they think and feel, instead of your own assumptions of how they must be thinking or feeling? It's about looking for the truth; how the world actually is, not how one thinks it should be.

After all, humanity is wondrously strange, and as a stranger to so much of it, I'd like to give it welcome. Aren't there more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your, and my, philosophy?

A final, final suggestion/thought (maybe a bit idealistically for if Layne ever ends up seeing this post, and as a reminder to myself with my own writing): Layne should talk more about books she loves than writing she hates. I'd never heard of Kristen Lavransdatter or The Eagle of the Ninth, and now they're on my much-too-long to read list. It sounds like Layne has read a lot of older, obscure novels; she could highlight her favorites, talk about what makes them so good, and bring them to an audience who likely hasn't heard of them before.

By gum, the internet is full of 'X Thing Sucks!!' videos and essays and what not.

It could really use more of 'X Thing Rocks!!!!'

Until next time & wishing you ease,
Cordelia

#art #books #criticism #history #youtube