In her article about reading smut, Zoe Williams discusses the difference between romance and erotica (My awesome reading week: Sales of hot books doubled—and I soon found out why, August 6). I think that misses the point. For me, it’s about the difference between “good” smut and… well, just smut.
I am a 54-year-old Cambridge English Literature graduate and I feel like I only just “discovered” the smut when I read Sarah J. Maas’ wonderful Acotar series (“A Court of Thorns and Roses”) earlier this year (incidentally, these are the SJM books that Williams should have chosen for her article, not the young adult Throne of Glass series, which has very little sex in it given the target audience).
Sure, the writing isn’t perfect; there’s too much “bobbing throats” and “vulgar gestures.” But the characterization is fantastic—no wonder there’s a whole cult out there that wants to be Feyre (the feisty human-turned-fairy heroine) and worships Rhysand (the main love interest) and his “bat boys.” And the plot is so nerve-wracking that I read all five books in a couple of weeks.
Yes, the sex is great and made me incredibly horny (my husband wasn’t annoyed at all, he was only too happy to benefit from it), but the reason I enjoyed the filth so much was because the characters were so important to me.
Compare that to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which left me cold – simply because the writing style was so bumpy and I didn’t care about the protagonists.
For me, this has nothing to do with a shift in attitudes towards respectability and shame (and I certainly wouldn’t be considered a Gen Z or Millennial), but rather the joy of reading about sex from a female author’s perspective, coupled with great characters and a good plot.
Jennifer Charlwood
St Albans, Hertfordshire
Thanks for a great article that seriously addresses the boom in smut literature. What Zoe Williams didn’t talk about is the connection to fan fiction. I believe the smut trend we see in publishing today is directly related to the rise of fan fiction.
With the advent of near-universal Internet access came global access to (often erotic) fanfiction. The first generation to benefit from this was Generation X, and many of the authors who write smut fiction today belong to this generation.
Raunchy fanfiction was easily accessible to them – and as women, they often had no other way to access erotic and pornographic material, as the traditional porn industry is geared towards heterosexual cis men.
Many of the tropes and genres Williams mentions have their origins in fanfiction, not least the Omegaverse, a well-known trope in fanfiction of the 2000s and 2010s. Fanfiction has proven to be a true cultural and creative catalyst for female writers, a force for good in helping women and girls no longer feel ashamed of their sexual desires and lust—and a boon to the publishing industry. I think that’s what you call a win-win-win situation.
Christine Lehnen
Exeter
Zoe Williams writes, “If there’s anything that’s happened… it’s that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or otherwise.” This “thing” didn’t just happen recently. Readers of romance novels have never cared about respectability.
What has happened is that, thanks to social media, people who would otherwise never have dreamed of picking up a simple romance novel are discovering how diverse and interesting the world of romance literature is, that romance readers and writers have their own amazing communities, and, most importantly, how much fun we have doing it.
I’ve found lots of great books through online recommendations or romance bloggers – books that don’t get reviewed in “serious” newspapers like the Guardian. Welcome to our world, Zoe. You’re late to the party, but it’s going really well.
Helena Fairfax
Shipley, West Yorkshire
There’s a whole new phenomenon of raunchy reading, isn’t there? I could swear that in the 1990s books under Virgin Publishing’s Black Lace imprint (“Erotic fiction by women for women,” commissioned and edited by the intrepid Kerri Sharp) were selling heaps and then some. And I should know: I was the publisher. I’d better not even mention the role our team played in rescuing Doctor Who from TV oblivion. Oh, how quickly the world forgets.
Peter Darvill-Evans
Southampton
As researchers specializing in popular culture, fan cultures, romance, and young adult literature, we were excited to read Zoe Williams’ article. Zoe covers the history of pulp fiction, romance, and erotica to a reasonable extent (especially given space limitations); however, we feel the article lacks an important context—namely, fandom.
Although the Omegaverse has nothing to do with furries, both are inextricably linked to long-standing fan practices, including cosplay (furries) and fanfiction (the Omegaverse and other tropes fans have adopted from mainstream romance or developed themselves). As Kristina Busse has suggested, the Omegaverse emerged online within the supernatural fandom around 2010, building on earlier werewolf-related tropes from fandoms such as Teen Wolf and Twilight, as well as the oft-maligned trope of “mpreg” (male pregnancy—an earlier, related genre discussed by Constance Penley as early as the 1990s).
Articles about the recent rise in the popularity of romance novels among the general public often attribute it to TikTok, a major forum for readers to find, discuss, and creatively respond to romance novels. But behind our current cultural moment lies a much longer history of women and other readers reading and writing about sex and romance, and much of that has taken place in fandom.
Romance culture, then, is not just about women consuming sex stories (although, as the article points out, that is important and worth supporting in its own right). At least some of its roots lie in a long-standing and collaborative storytelling tradition in which participants read, write, and respond to each other’s work, as well as collaboratively generating story ideas and new tropes (the idea of ”tropes” as a means of classifying romance may have come from fan fiction), often all at the same time.
It’s great that readers and writers are currently bringing romance and erotica further into the mainstream, but “horny reading” and writing is part of a long feminist tradition.
Erika Kvistad and Jennifer Duggan
University of Southeastern Norway
