Exploitation fiction is a type of literature that includes novels and magazines that exploit sex, violence, drugs, or other elements meant to attract readers primarily by arousing prurient interest without being labeled as obscene or pornographic.
[1] It was popular "trash fiction" in the form of mass market paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s, when genuine, sexually explicit material could be seized as obscene.
These cheap novels exploited violence, drugs, and sex—especially promiscuity and lesbianism—but rarely delivered the kind of salacious detail their cover art implied and generally tacked on moralistic endings to satisfy critics who accused them of having "no redeeming social value."
They were often repackaged under new titles with different cover art, to resell to the unsuspecting public looking for cheap thrills.
As film production codes loosened in the early 1960s, exploitation fiction led to exploitation cinema (parallel to the development of Italian giallo cinema),[2] typified by Russ Meyer films.