Colleen Hoover was the best selling author of 2022, and TikTok led her to this title. Hoover’s 2016 book It Ends With Us was read, loved, and promoted by many users on TikTok in 2021, causing all of her books to blow up. Her steamy romance novels attracted a female, young adult audience, ranging from middle schoolers to 20 year olds and up. But Hoover’s books were not just steamy; they explored domestic abuse, unwanted pregnancy, infertility, and infidelity. These books seemed to be marketed as light, easy reads, but in reality explored intense topics. The issue? Hoover didn’t seem to handle these tropes well. A lot of her books send the wrong message about relationships and sex, which is very harmful to her young female following who are very impressionable to the messages in her books. I myself read almost all of Hoover’s books because of TikTok, as most of my friends and classmates were raving about her stories. But the more I read, the more I found real issues in the messages she was sending. There are many poorly-handled tropes to explore, but I want to focus on the unsafe and untrue messages she sends to young girls about sex. 

Hoover’s books are steamy and fun, but it is important that teenagers know the sex portrayed in these books is not always realistic. In Hoover’s sex scenes, both people always have an orgasm during sex. Both people also usually reach this climax at the same time. This is not the case for most women in real life. In a 2018 study conducted by the National Library of Medicine, only 18.4% of women reported that intercourse alone was sufficient to orgasm. Contrarily, 36.6% of women reported that clitoral stimulation was necessary in order to orgasm during intercourse. These books represent an overly simplified and unrealistic version of sex to young readers. This is the problem with Hoover’s books–they are marketed to young, impressionable teenagers, who could be made to feel sexually inadequate because of her glorified sex scenes. 

Another questionable trope of Hoover’s is that of unsafe sex. In her 2018 thriller/horror novel Verity, there is a scene between the two love interests, Lowen and Jeremy, that consists of sex without protection, and Lowen is not on any form of contraception. The two agree to have unsafe sex and to have Jeremy use the withdrawal method. In a study done by the CDC, they found that a fifth of U.S. teens reported only using the withdrawal method or no contraceptive. This method is not only ineffective, it is unsafe. For one, not using protection exposes teens–and those of any age–to sexually transmitted diseases. Even more, not using protection or contraceptives puts teens at high risk for unwanted pregnancies. Now, most of us have heard these lectures time and time again, but someone reading about casual unsafe sex in their favorite authors’ book undoes this. Hoover has a young audience, whether she wants/realizes this or not, and this portrayal is harmful to their views on what sex should be. 

The problem with the influence of Hoover’s books can be traced back to the inadequacy of sex education in America. Young adults are so impressionable from these books because they are hearing crickets in every other direction. We don’t have comprehensive sex education–or any sex education at all–in our school systems. And because of the stigmatized nature of sex, it is not rare for parents and role models to avoid discussing these topics with their children. Developing teenagers are then commonly confused about how relationships and sexual activity should and can look, so these books are their only source of information available. These fictional romance books should not be the place developing kids are learning sexual concepts, especially when the author lacks the necessary credibility to teach our youth about these vulnerable and sensitive topics. Although Hoover could convey her messages in a better way, if we had a better system in place these books wouldn’t have as big of a negative impact. 

To change this, we can contact our elected representatives using this email template provided by The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). The template highlights the need for a more comprehensive sex education curriculum. Just one email is a step towards improving sex education, so that everyone has a well-rounded understanding of what sex really is, and how to do it safely.