The ‘Smut’ Genre Is Anti-Woman
“'Tis a miserable way of pleasing, to scatter smut in all your stories, ” wrote the French writer J.B. Morvan de Bellegarde in 1706.
Hundreds of years later, I still agree. As an avid book devourer and regretful social media addict, the clashing of these two worlds inevitably led to my discovery of a book genre widely referred to on the internet as ‘smut.’ According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has been around since the 1600s and was once employed as a derogatory term for indecent or ‘immoral’ writing or speech. Today, it’s a celebrated genre on BookTok, the readers’ realm of TikTok.
Some hashtags you might seek on BookTok are #morallygreymen, #darkromance, and #spicybooktok. Users on BookTok ask one another what a book's ‘spice level’ is, and readers who prefer Facebook can join a group called the ‘Smuthood’. Subgenres of the smut genre include dark romance, erotic fiction, and historical smut, amongst others. Popular audiobook platform Audible (owned by Amazon) ruffled feathers last year when it advised a reader looking for ‘clean’ listening recommendations to “Embrace. The. Smut.” Although the company caved to backlash and apologized for the insensitive response, a brief scroll through its X feed reveals that for Audible, the smuttier the better.
There’s also a significant market for smut merchandise, geared towards a growing audience of women who are encouraged to indulge in what influencers market as a guilty pleasure as harmless as chocolate cake. Here’s a tamer sampling of products that the e-commerce site Etsy offers.
The movement to normalize smut, or pornographic writing, ties back to societal wounds like low sense of self-worth, easy access to internet porn, difficulty forming human connections, desire for human relationships, and the comparison trap of social media, to name just a few. These wounds were deepened during the COVID-19 years when readers, understandably, sought an escape when creating and maintaining human relationships was challenging. Destigmatization of smut and other sexually explicit content has become a key part of modern feminism’s attempt to expand sexual liberation towards the end of smashing the patriarchy, and ultimately gender itself. But does smut actually benefit women? I’m not convinced.
Here are 3 reasons why we need a movement of women saying ‘no’ to smut.
1. Smut perpetuates the notion that women are not intellectuals
The growing popularity of smut drags us back into the past, when shallow, mediocre fiction was thought to be exclusively reserved for women, and they were typically barred from formally academic or intellectual pursuits. It’s widely acknowledged that smut doesn’t particularly stimulate or challenge the intellect, yet it’s predominantly marketed towards women under the guise of indulging a “guilty pleasure,” or sexually empowering them.
The truth is, smut degrades all readers, but especially women. Frequently, novels in the smut genre are just softcore porn dressed in an appealing book jacket, focused on stimulating the base passions rather than the intellect. Reading content like this alters our brains, whether we’re conscious of it or not. One young woman shared with me: “I would pick a title that had a cute picture and [that] other women recommended…I initially thought [that’s] just what women’s genres were! But then I realized my mood would change while reading them. I truly believe this is female pornography.”
Smut doesn’t liberate women by exposing them to porn, appealing to prurient curiosity, and encouraging them to explore bizarre kinks. Widespread commercialization of the smut genre reveals just what corporations like Audible think of their female audience. Strangely enough, self-professed feminists don’t seem to be concerned about the prevalence of the genre, its commercialization, or its power to harm women and make allowances for true misogyny.
2. Smut hurts survivors of sexual violence and desensitizes readers to abusive behavior
Not everyone wants to be surprised with a graphic sex scene, and for many survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and rape, unexpected sex scenes can prove triggering and emotionally damaging. Since online communities like BookTok are primarily composed of young girls and women, there’s a real danger of readers becoming desensitized to abusive, violent, or otherwise concerning behavior in their own relationships, often at an age when the brain is still developing.
One prominent example of this is a duology that’s taken over BookTok by storm, Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton, which centers around Adeline and her controlling male stalker, the ‘love’ interest, Zade. Zade stalks, abuses, and rapes Adeline, but this behavior is justified and romanticized throughout the series (and, true to the universal female experience, BookTok has a special ability to ignore the red flags when the guy is hot). “This book literally gave me nightmares,” wrote one reviewer on Medium. Other readers have fully embraced the “morally gray man” smut trope as the type of man they’re attracted to, such as in this disturbing TikTok video tagged under Haunting Adeline. I found countless reactions just like these across Goodreads, Reddit, and other social platforms, and I can’t help but wonder how survivors feel when they see their trauma exploited for entertainment.
More frequently, we’re seeing books feature trigger warning pages for the smut inside, which is an insufficient attempt to do the bare minimum of protecting women and girls. But isn’t the abundance of now-compulsory trigger warnings a tell-tale sign that reading this content isn’t good for women?
As with most things, the more you’re exposed to something, the more tolerant you become. This is no less true for kinky, perverted sex and unhealthy relationships, as we see daily with celebrity sex scandals (two prime examples here are Andrew Tate and Kanye West). Once again, dear feminists, where are you when your rage is needed?
3. Smut is lazy writing
Smut is objectively not good literature, and it doesn’t require artistry to write a sex scene. Quality writing by talented writers communicates a meaningful message or a deeper theme, and it doesn’t use ‘spice’ as a crutch to do it. Good literature brings a fresh and artfully crafted perspective to the universal human experience. And while there’s certainly a welcome space for sweet, fluffy tales of love, X-rated content doesn’t need to be part of that. Smut, by its very nature, is locked in on gratuitous, kinky sex and does little but inflame the base passions, even damaging readers’ actual love lives.
Smut isn’t a clever plot device, it’s just the lazy way to arouse an emotional reaction within a reader. Yet, the growing popularity of smut on platforms like BookTok (all while overall book sales decline) sets an increasingly low bar. Women walk into a bookstore and naturally gravitate towards choosing smut because it’s popular on the internet, and they understandably want to be a part of a broader community. Smut is notorious for its low-quality writing, characters, and worldbuilding. The queen of BookTok herself, “romantasy” author Sarah J. Maas, has come under scrutiny from more discerning readers for prioritizing sex over literary style and structure. (The Goodreads reviews of her books are genuinely entertaining.)
A movement to reject smut isn’t about becoming the morality police, denying guilty reading pleasures, or advocating a return to a Victorian conceptualization of sexual ethics. But here’s the thing: Women owe it to themselves to refuse to ‘embrace the smut’ and collectively raise the standards for the books we read. And we shouldn’t be shamed for doing that (looking at you, Audible). Today’s self-identified feminists display a troubling inconsistency when they celebrate smut, instead of condemning it like many feminists have in the past. True liberation for women looks like surrounding themselves with healthy relationships, not just in their real lives, but also in the books they read and the media they enjoy.
So, what can a woman do? It can be as simple as just choosing not to read smut, sharing the real literature you enjoy with others (you can’t go wrong with Jane Austen for the perfect blend of romance and piercing insights on human nature), writing to corporations like Audible and letting them know what you want to see on the digital shelves, and maybe even creating some smut-free stories yourself, if you enjoy writing.
Women (and men, for that matter) deserve better than this insufficient substitute for literature, and real romance is infinitely more complex and rewarding than the cheap imitation that’s been marketed to us in the form of smut. It's time we stop settling for less.