Sometimes Smut Is Too Good
Reading a “spicy” book can be a fun escape — that is, if your relationship is strong enough to survive it.
It was the chemistry between a bisexual Ph.D. candidate and a lovesick security guard that convinced Christina her own six-year relationship was over. Things weren’t working out for a long time, but she was struggling to figure out why. One night, unable to sleep and in bed in the spare room of the apartment she shared with her partner, she picked up Take a Hint, Dani Brown, by New York Times best-selling author Talia Hibbert. Typically, steamy books like Hibbert’s “The Brown Sisters” series helped the 39-year-old artist unwind. Not “Chapter Ten”: Zafir Ansari, a security guard with thighs as thick as “the walls around his heart,” is having a panic attack. Protagonist Danika Brown leans in to offer some support.
“You can probably tell this doesn’t come naturally. I apologize.”
“Don’t,” he said, “I like it.”
Christina highlighted these lines in her e-reader: “Three words, and the familiar ache of not quiet being enough vanished in a B-movie flash.”
It’s the kind of scene that is almost too small to include in a book summary but for Christina, it’s the scene that changed everything. “I was just bawling,” she tells me. “And just having this release and I was thinking, This is what I want. This emotional intimacy and support that just hasn’t been there.” That scene gave her the words to describe the angst that plagued her relationship. The feelings of emotional safety and security she was missing, feelings she knew she was capable of feeling in her own life, that did not exist in her relationship. She ended things shortly after.
Turns out the smut-book boom is about stirring up all kinds of feelings, not just the sexual ones. For people like Christina, they’re a reality check. The genre is one of excess — hypersexual, overly sentimental, intensely dramatic, fantasy-driven hyperbole. It can turn you out, emotionally, leaving as raw and throbbing as the characters at the end of a steamy scene. Its tropes, genres, and formulaic arcs guide readers through journeys of self-discovery, functioning almost as a tool to help us articulate, imagine, and demand a better love life.
But in these precariously sexless times of nightmarish dating, scaled-back bodily autonomy, and homophobic hysteria, smut, for some readers, can be a meet-cute for disappointment IRL. Online, readers have long joked about how smut ruined their love lives, because, as one social-media user put it, “the only kind of relationship and love i want and will most likely never happen bc bffr men irl will just never be like men in books.” Some people even rate books by how severely they’ve ruined their expectations of real-life romance.
“Up until now, I have been in the most ridiculous lesbian situationships,” Olivia, a 22-year-old artist from New York, tells me. “I was imbuing a lot of romance into situations that actually weren’t romantic,” because she was comparing her life to the smut she was reading online. At its worst, Olivia says, smut is like “a black hole” or “a void,” an endless stream of horny passages and happily ever after’s ready to help readers avoid reality. Olivia, who is now in a relationship with a partner who also reads and enjoys smut, knows her relationship to smut is healthy when she feels fed and titillated, instead of tired and “strung out.”
“There’s always a conversation that comes up with my friends,” 28-year-old TikTok creator Tanya tells me, “that we have too high of expectations because of the books we read.” She reads to feel what she’s not getting in her own love life, Tanya says, to escape and self-soothe. When Tanya first started reading smut consistently three years ago, she wanted to read the spiciest book she could find. She started by rediscovering the Fifty Shades series during the pandemic, then moving on to Three Simple Rules, by Nikki Sloane (set in an “illegal blindfold club”), and Q.B. Tyler’s Love Unexpected, a taboo novel. “I feel like the ‘addictive’ part of it comes from chasing that high when you read it the first time.” Now, she prefers as much storytelling between sex scenes as the sex scenes themselves, preferably with “female main characters who feel empowered.” The kind where the protagonists always fall in love and have amazing sex. “I love a formula,” she says.
Tanya gravitates toward works written by women and for women, where the men are hopelessly in love and worshipful, and the relationship simmers in angst and agony over a long period of time before erupting into explosive passages of erotica. In these fantasies, conversations are spread wide open and communication flows in abundance. “Because I feel like, in real life and real relationships, a lot of people don’t communicate what they want, which is where smut books come into play,” Tanya explains. “Because ten times out of ten, the FMC [female main character] is gonna get what she wants out of the experience.”
But fantasy and reality never seem to live up to each other’s promises. When Christina was first exploring smutty romance novels, she started following Vaginal Fantasy — a virtual book club that reads smutty romance genre fiction, led by YouTuber Felicia Day — where people talked openly and frankly about the reading material, which at one point included dinosaur smut. “There’s a lot more plurality,” Christina says, “and more versions of what sex is and what good sex is and what pleasurable, consensual queer sex is.” So much of what is intimidating in the bedroom is rendered so much more approachable by smut — and it’s liberating. “It’s made me a little hopeful for my next relationship,” Tanya says. “So that I can apply what I’ve learned from smut with how to communicate, how to be open, and how to be unapologetically me and ask for what I want.” Christina remembers the (not just literal) excitement of diving into the Smut Peddler books, anthologies of erotic comics. “To be able to pick up things that incite those kinds of feelings in yourself, to explore your own sexuality and what turns you on, what feels good or not?” She thinks of it as another form of sexual education and “explore things outside the mainstream bodice-rippers and what else is out there.”
When Tanya tried to bridge the gap between her fantasies and one of her real-life relationships — she wanted the same brand of “open and honest communication” she’d read about, she says, “I want to know what you’re feeling” — her mileage varied. “That didn’t quite work out for me; they were very closed off,” she laments. Some days, when she’s reading a romance book so good it makes her feel sad about her romantic prospects off the page, she admits she has to give herself the kind of pep talk you’d hear after a bad season of Tinder dates: “You just have to remind yourself that there’s 50 million people out there and maybe you just haven’t met them yet.”
But then there are those who take advantage of all that explicit detail, to try out some new moves in the bedroom. Reading and living are not mutually exclusive. It might even do a lot of good if smutty romance was less stigmatized, think of the possibilities: “Idk what my husband has been reading/watching, but he’s been doing things like the chin grab and I’m starting to get suspicious,” wrote one TikTok commenter.
“And sometimes, it’s just fueling the loneliness and the feeling of failure,” Christina admits. “I think that’s when it’s really hard, and sometimes you gotta cut yourself off.” You might call this a post-smut pang of sadness for yearning. The kind of wanting that can make you feel empty and trollish. It’s an experience that smut readers know all too well — you stir up your fantasies only to be left with the rubble of unfulfilled desires. But when it comes to smut, when it’s good it’s irreplaceable. Like Christina, Olivia thinks good smut works like a mirror. It turns our desires into words we can hold on to, think about, and maybe even act on. For better or worse, smut is very good at stoking those small flames of hope.