__  __      _        _____ _ _ _
|  \/  | ___| |_ __ _|  ___(_) | |_ ___ _ __
| |\/| |/ _ \ __/ _` | |_  | | | __/ _ \ '__|
| |  | |  __/ || (_| |  _| | | | ||  __/ |
|_|  |_|\___|\__\__,_|_|   |_|_|\__\___|_|
community weblog

SMUT SMUT SMUT SMUT

The Golden Age of Smut! One of the owners of Hopeless Romantic bookstore in Toronto talks about why romance novels of all spicy levels are such a hot trend.
I myself have not dipped my toe in this world but Hopeless Romantic is getting a visit from me next time I am in town for my tattoo appointment.
posted by Kitteh on Jan 22, 2026 at 9:18 AM

---------------------------

I somehow found myself down in the spicy romance rabbit hole toward the end of last year after my daughter-in-law suggested I read Butcher and Blackbird and, hokey smokes, I had no idea this was a thing. And the range of sub-genres are wild.

The "spiciness" is a really interesting aspect. Admittedly, I had never stepped foot into romance fiction before, but some of the "spiciness" in this genre is pretty graphic, if not pornographic at times.

Funny story...One of my best friend's daughter's friends is a librarian, and I like to chat with her about books and stuff. One evening, I sheepishly admitted to her that I'd started exploring spicy romance and romantacy. Her eyes lit up. And she asked about titles, and I told her my current fave was Lights Out. She immediately lit-up and high-fived me and we started blabbering about how fucked-up but so good the book was, going through various scenes and whatnot. Quite the odd bonding moment over, basically, smut LOL.

She also told me that they have several books in this genre at her library that are expressly marked as "Absolutely do not lend to anyone under 18."
posted by Thorzdad at 10:00 AM

---------------------------

I texted my best friend about this article (she who loves spicy spicy books) and even though she's in DC, I s2g I could hear her gasp of "FINALLY" and the cracking of her knuckles as she prepared to bombard me with recommendations
posted by Kitteh at 10:02 AM

---------------------------

Not being a romance fiction afficionado, I didn't realize there non spicy romance was a subgenre.
posted by Pemdas at 10:41 AM

---------------------------

As a lover of fantasy and sci fi, I've made my peace with romance, as the genres nowadays seem inextricably linked. I was turned on to a fantasy series by my girlfriend's oldest daughter (an english prof.), and was quite surprised at the severely spicy passages. I generally like my porn without extraneous filler like plot and character development. I did discover I could skip the spicy sections and it made no difference to the story.
posted by evilDoug at 10:51 AM

---------------------------

I had a week where I was going to be spending a lot of time in the car by myself, so I checked out the audiobook of Morning Glory Milking Farm on Libby. (To be clear, it's minotaurs being milked. For medical purposes.) There was a surprising amount of worldbuilding (at least to me) for weird romantasy. I didn't finish it, because that's not really something I'd listen to while carpooling.
If you're interested in browsing the genre, I strongly recommend taking a gander at romance.io. Their book finder lets you filter on spice level, genre, kink, what kind of pairings you're interested in and more. Even if you're not necessarily interested in finding something, the options are interesting.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:05 AM

---------------------------

I have no problem with the actual genre but it always strikes me as strange when stuff that's basically pornography (if not exclusively!) is considered... polite-ish conversation? Like you can just talk about it in the Paper of Record, admittedly not in detail, but way more than people talk about visual pornography trends in similar outlets.

Again, it's all basically fine, I just find it weird. I would, eg, personally find it completely mortifying to swap recommendations of porn videos with friends. I know it's a different thing, but it's not that different? idk
posted by BungaDunga at 11:23 AM

---------------------------

I'm fascinated by both this post and the previous one on their own terms, but for me the most important thing is that their being posted in a row is a step towards Metafilter hitting that magic ratio of being one-third porn.
posted by dick dale the vampire at 11:28 AM

---------------------------

like smut is often presented as practically a wholesome, above-board activity that you can partake of on the train but visual porn is at best suspect, and anyone admitting enthusiasm for it had better be circumspect
posted by BungaDunga at 11:30 AM

---------------------------

Let me just get this straight - there is a question as to why people like to read about sex?

....In the words of my BFF, when I once observed that she and I mostly talked about either sex or food - "well, when you think about it, what else is there you'd want to talk about?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:34 AM

---------------------------

As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense
To be smut it must be utterly
Without redeeming social importance

- "Smut", Tom Lehrer
posted by dragstroke at 11:58 AM

---------------------------

I was confused by the title. I wonder if huitlacoche is also having golden era though? That stuff is also great and often under appreciated.
posted by SaltySalticid at 12:38 PM

---------------------------

kitteh... if you like horror, Toronto also has an excellent bookstore dedicated to the genre
posted by kokaku at 12:51 PM

---------------------------

kitteh... if you like horror, Toronto also has an excellent bookstore dedicated to the genre

Oh pal, I have been aware of Little Ghosts for a very very long time and get a regular subscription box of horror. I didn't mention them because it wasn't relevant to the romance! (Though there are monsterfucker anthologies at LG.)
posted by Kitteh at 1:16 PM

---------------------------

So full disclosure that I have been on a romance reading kick for the last couple of years, after not having read on the genre since middle school (lol my public library had no issue letting 13-year-old me check out every Harlequin romance they had). So that is my bias.

It's pretty dismissive to refer to romance as "pornography" just because some romance novels include explicit sex. Romance, as a genre, is about the relationship, the happily ever after. If it does not have an HEA, it is not a romance novel. And romance, as a genre, features a huge range of the amount and type of sex scenes. In the best examples, the sex scenes advance something about the characters and/or plot (for an awesome breakdown of this, see this blog post by romance author and former editor KJ Charles). It's hard to do that really well, but I'm pretty sure you could say that about a lot of tropes in a lot of other genres.

"Smut" as a term, implies a perjorative, that the presence of sex in a book is bad or prurient somehow. If it's not your thing, then fine, read something else. As mentioned upthread, Romance.io is a good place to get an idea of what the spice level of a book is, and in indie romance especially many authors will include specific content warnings to help people decide if a book is for them. But I don't see any reason why people should be embarrassed about reading and talking about romance, including the sex scenes if that is what they want to do.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 1:50 PM

---------------------------

I read the title of this post to the tune of Monty Python's spam song. I have not read much of the genre, but have several friends who are all in and I can sure see the appeal these days.
posted by mersen at 2:52 PM

---------------------------

A bit of well-written smut is fine, but usually I'm just aggravated with another damn intrusion to the story. I'm with evilDoug:
I did discover I could skip the spicy sections and it made no difference to the story.

Once in a great while a sexy scene enhances the book, but a lot of the time it feels like padding for length. Repeated interruptions of the story with smut and lengthily pages of angst are two things that will turn me off an otherwise perfectly good book.
posted by BlueHorse at 3:52 PM

---------------------------

I have recently realized how great romance novels are! I used to be really snobby and judged a university professor of mine pretty hard (in my mind) for talking about how much she loved Danielle Steele. I was completely wrong. Sometimes smut is exactly what you need. It's not all I read but it's in regular rotation for sure. My personal faves are Ali Hazelwood, ACOTAR, T Kingfisher, The Idea of You by Robinne Lee (probably not technically a romance novel but high spice), and KJ Charles. I would love to visit a romance bookstore someday... Actually I'm spending 24 hours in Toronto soon so this might be perfect.
posted by carolr at 4:21 PM

---------------------------

Again, it's all basically fine, I just find it weird. I would, eg, personally find it completely mortifying to swap recommendations of porn videos with friends. I know it's a different thing, but it's not that different? idk

like smut is often presented as practically a wholesome, above-board activity that you can partake of on the train but visual porn is at best suspect, and anyone admitting enthusiasm for it had better be circumspect

Spicy/erotic romance is equivalent to R or NC-17 movies, not porn. I do have friends I swap visual porn with (though it's illustration rather than filmed), but would not be looking at it on the train. But I was just recently in a conversation, in public, with people I would never swap porn with... about Pillion.

Also, this has been a thing for more than a decade. As a random example, Orange is the New Black (2013). Lots of sex scenes exactly as explicit as any mainstream romance novel. It was totally normal to talk about seeing the latest Orange is the New Black episode. As mentioned in the article, now people do the same with Heated Rivalry. These kinds of depictions of sex have been acceptable to consume and talk about in polite society for a while, but that's different from actual porn.

I don't read a lot of smutty romance novels because Shousetsu Bang Bang is free, has a massive archive, and gets weirder than publishable fiction is often able to. But I'm honestly kind of surprised that its acceptability to talk about lagged behind TV for as long as it did.
posted by brook horse at 4:43 PM

---------------------------

As a lover of fantasy and sci fi, I've made my peace with romance, as the genres nowadays seem inextricably linked. I was turned on to a fantasy series by my girlfriend's oldest daughter (an english prof.), and was quite surprised at the severely spicy passages.

You might check and see if it's described as a "romantasy." This is a totally different genre, which is very popular! But there's many non-romantasy fantasy novels still. If you see the term "romantasy" on the cover/description, then you are not reading a fantasy novel as you would understand it.
posted by brook horse at 4:47 PM

---------------------------

It's pretty dismissive to refer to romance as "pornography" just because some romance novels include explicit sex.

It also plays into some iffy territory with accusations of books being pornographic often levelled at books written by people who aren't straight white men for the purposes of censorship. Not accusing anyone who's used the term in this thread of doing so intentionally, but it certainly stumbles around that same rhetorical trap.

It's also okay to dislike explicit sex in books, and not feel the need to justify that with calling anything with too much as pornography. What you like to read is what you like to read, and that's fine.
posted by eekernohan at 4:53 PM

---------------------------

Almost 20 years ago, back when I was briefly living in California, my mom came out to visit, and one night we had dinner with some second cousins that my mom knew, but I had never met. Along for dinner was one of those cousin's daughters, early high school age. She was tottering around in heels she didn't quite know how to wear yet, wearing makeup she didn't quite know how to put on yet, and was just so endearingly awkward.

Somehow the conversation got onto books, and she sheepishly admitted that there was this book that she was was really excited about, and had stayed up all night reading it the other day. I asked her what it was about, and somehow she got up the courage to answer "vampires", probably expecting me to make fun of her about it.

"Kid, I've been going to goth clubs since you were in diapers. Vampires are cool. And reading is too."

Note that I had not even heard of Twilight at the time, it was still brand new. It was only much later that I connected it with the book she had been talking about at dinner. Didn't matter anyway if it was fluffy and trashy, she was reading a book and excited about it. I read plenty of trashy fantasy in my teens too.

In the fullness of time, she grew into an absolutely amazingly beautiful knockout of a woman, with an equally successful career. Everybody gotta start somewhere.
posted by notoriety public at 5:01 PM

---------------------------

like smut is often presented as practically a wholesome, above-board activity that you can partake of on the train

The smut/pornography distinction is rooted in sexism, and in particular is a tool to attenuate men's emotional connections while providing a sort of moralistic camouflage for women's desire. It is complicated by the simultaneity of (a) opening up of the discourse around that desire and (b) opening up of the market around that desire.

It's really a terribly ugly thing and leaves us incapable of ever really talking about what people want, what they're sold, and what's good for them, because we always get stuck on variations of: "the thing I like should be acceptable, the thing you like is damaging and gross."
posted by mittens at 4:23 AM

---------------------------

It's OK to like different spice levels in books. While I'm not a regular, I'm a frequent visitor to r/fantasyromance, and requests for suggestions for books with no/low spice get plenty of suggestions, and no hate. (Heck, there are plenty of suggestions of regular fantasy that includes romance when people ask a generic "what's good?") I think that the average spice level of most of the recommendations is 3 peppers, which I believe translates to "open door." So some sex, but not huge amounts.
As a digression, it's common to shit on women in tech, but there's a bot in a lot of the Reddit romance subs that lets you tag books, and it'll pull the rating, spice levels and tags of the book and post them. I think that it's really cool, and helpful in a discussion group where people do a lot of recommendations.
posted by Spike Glee at 7:04 AM

---------------------------

The smut/pornography distinction is rooted in sexism, and in particular is a tool to attenuate men's emotional connections while providing a sort of moralistic camouflage for women's desire. It is complicated by the simultaneity of (a) opening up of the discourse around that desire and (b) opening up of the market around that desire.

Precisely! It seems to be the province of men who come out with "well, why do women get to get read their sexy sexy books on the train but if I--A MAN--want to watch two dudes plowing a gal on my phone in public, then I am a monster?" Well, no (though that is a wee bit odd if you think about it), but women are supposed to remain sexless and only interested in sex when a person (often a man) expresses in having sex with them. I remember getting shamed not too long ago by a female-identifying MeFite because I boldly declared that Pedro Pascal was super hot (he is) and I would objectify him all ding dong day.
posted by Kitteh at 7:29 AM

---------------------------

Basically, women are only allowed to be horny in private, never public.
posted by Kitteh at 7:30 AM

---------------------------

like smut is often presented as practically a wholesome, above-board activity that you can partake of on the train

It's different because you can read it on a train, and if someone is so close they can read what you are reading in a book, they are basically sitting on your lap. Visual is different - because you can't do that. It's an important distinction.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:30 AM

---------------------------

I also would have no problem with someone watching Pillion, Orange is the New Black, etc. on their phone on the train as long as they used headphones.
posted by brook horse at 10:26 AM

---------------------------