Marilyn served as the catalyst for everything. Marilyn Monroe was a famous person, but to the general public, she was only ever represented by a collection of photos - the photograph of her voluminous Seven Year Itch outfit, the ones showing her covered in clean white sheets. They were essentially all variants on the same Escort 94 theme: "she's hot." However, at the time, observers found one particular subgenre of the Monroe visual canon particularly striking: pictures of Monroe looking gorgeous while reading. The star was seen in pictures with her collection of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, absorbed in her ex-husband Arthur Miller's An Enemy of the People, and, most notably, Eve Arnold's series of Monroe reading James Joyce's Ulysses while wearing a striped swimming suit. Being spotted reading while hot (RWH) has never been simpler than it is these days, and celebrities like Gigi Hadid, Kendall Jenner, and Kaia Gerber have all been captured doing it. During her peak, many disregarded the idea that a woman could be intelligent and successful, and they frequently disagreed on whether Marilyn Monroe truly read the books in the pictures.
Today's Hot Girls are primarily praised for their bookish interests (see: "How Kendall Jenner Became the Patron Saint of Alternative Literature," "Bella and Gigi Hadid Make Books the Hot New Accessory of 2019"). However, that trend hasn't completely disappeared. It's not because hot girls are by nature readers; it's because they read. Hot Girl Books are a new book genre that has evolved in tandem with the rise of women RWH. These books—the literary romances by Sally Rooney, the female alienation novels by Ottessa Moshfegh, the essay collections by Jia Tolentino, and even unexpected treasures like Escort 94 are loved by millennial and Gen Z women and aren't only trendy because of who is seen reading them.
The characters are sexy
Hot Girl Books typically feature slender, cisgender, literate women as the main characters who engage in copious amounts of sexual activity. But what really makes them stand out from other attractive ladies is that, like Marianne from Normal People with her long bangs or Camilla from Donna Tartt's The Secret History, they are the kinds of women who other women find attractive. They are not prom queens, cheerleaders, or the girls next door. They are the Winona Ryders of the world: attractive not as objects of want for men to gawk upon, but rather because they are cool.
There’s a lot of sex, but it isn’t always sexy
When sex is shown in popular culture, it's usually as a fantasy or a combination of standard poses that ineluctably leads to both persons showing up, usually at the same time. However, sex in Hot Girl Books is frequently messy, emotional, and even worrisome. Take Lisa Taddeo's Three Women, for example, which explores the private erotic fantasies of three different characters: a juvenile girl being shaped by her instructor, a housewife who gets dickmatized, and a lady who enjoys cuckolding her husband. In Luster, a film about a Black millennial woman who marries into an open marriage for the third time, our more aggressive impulses are explored through Edie's enjoyment of getting choked and punched during intercourse.
Genre: YOUNG ADULT NONFICTION / Activity Books