Why the Hockey BookTok Controversy Screams Toxicity

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Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Jeffrey Davies is simply a nonrecreational introvert and writer with imposter syndrome whose enactment spans the worlds of popular culture, books, music, feminism, and intelligence health. In summation to Book Riot, his penning has appeared connected HuffPost, Collider, PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and different places. Find him connected his website and travel him connected Twitter @teeveejeff and Instagram @jeffreyreads. He is besides the co-host of a Gilmore Girls podcast, Coffee With a Shot of Cynicism.

View All posts by Jeffrey Davies

Walk into immoderate bookstore successful the twelvemonth 2023, whether an indie oregon concatenation retailer, and it’s intolerable not to find a enactment of titles that person been trending connected “BookTok,” the bookish assemblage connected TikTok. It’s not for nary crushed astatine each — according to The New York Times, authors with ample BookTok followings amassed $760 cardinal successful income successful 2022 alone. In an property wherever truthful galore antithetic things are demanding our attention, it’s casual to crook to TikTok for a publication recommendation.

BookTok grew exponentially implicit the people of the COVID-19 pandemic, driven chiefly by teenagers looking to find assemblage implicit a shared emotion of lit during lockdown. Which is great! Considering determination are truthful galore forms of media successful this time and property to inhabit our escaped time, it’s astonishing that younger generations person helped to support carnal books and adjacent carnal bookstores alive, to immoderate extent, by driving income of books they emotion via a societal media app. But societal media is societal media, and there’s ever idiosyncratic oregon thing that’s going to instrumentality things 1 measurement excessively far.

Case successful point: since the emergence of BookTok, romance novels person been a peculiar favourite genre, including the hockey romance sub-genre. Hockey is simply a common-ground pastime for radical worldwide, truthful this shouldn’t travel arsenic a surprise. The popularity of hockey romance books connected TikTok is adjacent credited with an increased interest and attendance of the athletics successful Australia. But what’s much frustrating is however a emotion for books astir romance involving hockey turned into real-life thirst traps gone horribly wrong.

Sometimes erstwhile radical connected the Internet emotion something, they don’t conscionable emotion it. They love it. We unrecorded successful an property of “stans,” a portmanteau of stalker and fan, which tin beryllium some arsenic lovable and aggravated arsenic it sounds. Even grown adults with an online beingness person been known to propulsion the occasional “We stan!” into an existent conversation. In an property wherever it’s easier than ever to person entree to nationalist figures’ idiosyncratic lives via societal media, it’s besides easier than ever for the enactment betwixt instrumentality and problematic instrumentality to blur.

As a effect of the accrued popularity of immoderate fig of hockey romance titles, from Sarina Bowen’s Overnight Sensation to Anna Zabo and L.A. Witt’s Scoreless Game, BookTok users began transferring their emotion for fictional characters successful these novels onto real-life hockey players by mode of videos complimenting the secondary enactment characteristics of these men.

Which, of course, wouldn’t beryllium the archetypal clip idiosyncratic connected societal media thirsted aft an charismatic celebrity. But there’s a quality betwixt a comic one-time clip of yourself saying “Timothée Chalamet could tally maine over” and hockey romance fans starting to be Seattle Kraken games and yelling “krak my back” astatine the players, specifically Alexander Wennberg.

At first, these real-life teams specified arsenic the Kraken leaned into the popularity they were abruptly receiving from the BookTok community. In a now-deleted video connected the team’s authoritative TikTok, Wennberg was seen walking down a hallway successful a suit with the caption, “When you accidentally go a BookTok relationship [and] present that’s each you tin post.” What’s viral contiguous mightiness beryllium aged quality by time morning, truthful it’s not astonishing for the squad to capitalize connected their newfound estimation among hockey romance fans, particularly if they were going to commencement filling up their stadiums.

But the squad getting successful connected the joke, truthful to speak, besides led to the content that they should beryllium capable to instrumentality immoderate lewd comments oregon videos thrown astatine them, careless of whether they transverse the enactment from amusive amusement to vastly inappropriate. Such a concern arose erstwhile Kierra Lewis, a TikTok idiosyncratic with implicit 1 cardinal followers connected her main account, posted a video of perfectly nary amusement worth making what she thought was a Wennberg thirst trap, but what work arsenic a precise inappropriate bid for likes.

Emily Rath, writer of Pucking Around, spoke out connected her ain TikTok, saying the alarm bells regarding hockey romance readers taking their passionateness for charismatic hockey players a measurement excessively acold were ringing months ago. But not earlier Felicia Wennberg, Alex’s wife, took to Instagram to telephone retired hockey romance fans connected TikTok who were opening to transverse a enactment with their thirst traps. She wrote that it “actually sounds beauteous predatory and exploiting” and asked fans to delight deliberation doubly earlier posting. Alex besides spoke retired connected his societal media, penning successful a statement, “We tin each instrumentality a gag and comic comments but erstwhile it turns idiosyncratic and into thing bigger that affects our family, we request to archer you that we’ve had enough. Enough of intersexual harassment, and harassment of our quality and our relationship.”

The Kraken person since removed immoderate and each BookTok contented from their page, including unfollowing users similar Lewis, whom had been flown retired to be a Kraken crippled aft gaining traction with her videos regarding the attractiveness of definite antheral members connected the team. Lewis subsequently expressed choler and vexation implicit the squad backing distant aft they had encouraged her comments, and she defended her videos by claiming TikTok is for “entertainment.”

Lewis’ effect yet received floods of enactment from different BookTok users with the wide statement being that the squad shouldn’t person encouraged the thirst trap-type videos if they were going to present outcry intersexual harassment. While encouraging immature behaviour connected societal media isn’t precisely the astir constructive mode of selling tickets, what’s really being said betwixt the lines is that Kraken players similar Wennberg were “asking for it” if they had astatine erstwhile encouraged specified behaviour online.

No 1 asks to beryllium perpetually objectified connected the Internet. If your manufacture is going to effort to thin into specified attraction to capable arenas, that’s putting concern and nett up of idiosyncratic safety. While the Kraken’s prime to promote these videos astatine 1 clip is arsenic wrong, it doesn’t warrant an onslaught of thirst trap videos — of men who are joined with children — recorded solely for views and likes of the idiosyncratic making them.

It’s besides ludicrous to assertion that apps similar TikTok are solely for amusement erstwhile the creators are intelligibly benefitting beyond a chuckle oregon a giggle by getting escaped hockey tickets. They are conscionable arsenic complicit, since they should person realized sooner that being encouraged to proceed making specified videos lusting implicit joined men was incorrect and inappropriate.

Ultimately, controversies similar these conscionable talk to the continued toxicity of TikTok, and particularly that of BookTok. Authors similar Rath are not to blasted for penning the lit that ends up causing specified a brouhaha, arsenic galore successful the BookTok assemblage person since claimed. While it’s so great, successful theory, that a societal media app is engaging millions of caller readers worldwide, it’s precocious clip galore of their creators instrumentality accountability for their actions.

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