Are We Crossing a Line?

What happens when the least bookish person on the Lion team also has the spiciest TikTok? Not spicy like smut. Spicy like anti-smut. Rebekah Edwards and Seth Cordle sit down with Hayla, Lion's social designer, whose very first TikTok was her testimony and drew heat from both the LGBT community and Christians, telling her "Jesus made you this way."

They get into being bold online without chasing clicks, cross-in-the-bio Christians who bully in the comments, true hot takes versus heresy, and why Rebekah is done wearing rainbow glasses to blend in (she's taking back "spicy" and the rainbow, too). Then it's the book space: why "girls only want smut" is insulting to women, why "non-consensual" as a selling point isn't spicy, it's rape, and why that stuff has no business in the YA section.

Plus, the pro-life post TikTok quietly capped, and Hayla's beach read where the guy was dead the whole time. Big picture: we shouldn't govern what people read, but we can change what they're fed. We're flooding the market with better options, and if what we make sucks, we'll fail. If we're right, we won't.