I Like Big Smut and I Cannot Lie
Happy Mother’s Day!
To all the moms out there, thank you! To my mom, I’m sorry in advance for this article….
Now let’s talk about porn! Specifically, smut.
;)
12 -year-old me watching Robert Pattinson sparkle
Twi-Hard
As a kid, I loved Twilight.
When I say loved, I mean loved.
My preteen years were spent delivering impassioned speeches about why Team Edward was the correct choice. I went to the midnight book releases, read the fan theories, and listened to every playlist Stephanie Meyer posted on her website.
After school, I feverishly researched the cast of the movie. That Robert Pattinson got to play Cedric Diggory and Edward Cullen made him my perfect man.
I was a girl obsessed.
Before the series, my list of childhood crushes ranged from Johnny Depp to Jacob Hoggard. Problematic at best.
Edward Cullen was game-changing. I thought he was the pinnacle of romance, and I would gush about him to anyone who would listen. He was so mysterious. He loved Bella so deeply.
I could barely handle my excitement when the final book promised a sex scene. I just knew it was going to be perfect, and I was banking on it to show me the ropes. This was my intercourse crash course. When Breaking Dawn came out, I stayed up for almost 36 hours straight to read it.
Even then, I knew it wasn’t cool. I couldn’t help myself. My infatuation ran so deep that I was happy to be a loser if it meant also being a fan. In retrospect, I was probably obsessed because I wasn’t getting sex anywhere else. I discovered my sexuality in the pages of a Mormon author writing about vampires and werewolves.
That’s pretty embarrassing, but there wasn’t much else to lean on.
In school, we learnt that sex was to be feared. We heard about STIs and male orgasms. Never did we talk about desire. Twilight picked up where the curriculum left off. I absorbed chapters upon chapters of what it means to long for someone. I read about the thrill of tension.
The books taught me that sex can be feared and wanted. We were never sure if Edward would have sex with Bella or succumb to his urges and devour her. He wanted both, and that made him dangerous. Over four books, we braced ourselves for a gory climax.
Online, readers weren’t nearly as patient. Thousands of pages of horny fanfiction (smut) exploded into the corners of the web. Notably, Fifty Shades of Grey became its own, much more explicit book series.
To me, Edward’s chastity wove right into the catholic narrative being hammered at school. Waiting builds anticipation, and not knowing is sexy. I never found the x-rated pages on the internet, and I never went looking. To me, the lesson was to venture into the world as an inexperienced, impressionable virgin, and let a much older man ravish you to the brink of death.
How healthy.
Old men in my DMs
Enemies to Lovers
Understandably, my foray into intimacy was rocky at best. Coercion, assaults, and alcohol were the love triangle of my early sex life. I didn’t understand how anything was meant to be, and I was too insecure to think I had any agency.
In some respects, I didn’t want it.
As a preteen, I fantasized that a centuries-old hunk would come along to show me the ropes, so I thought I had nothing to worry about. Clearly, someone would coach me through the process
When that didn’t happen, I learned to dissociate. I ditched my YA romance books for porn to figure out the role I was meant to play in men’s fantasy: willing, loud, and there.
Easy enough.
I conformed and erased the views I had from middle school. I looked back on my Twilight phase as purely embarrassing. How pathetic I was to spend my time fantasizing about a vampire when actual men were available. I wasted valuable time of practice by indulging in nonsense.
No one wants to sleep with the grubby little bookworm
In real life, the dangerous men are, simply, dangerous. Intense addicts, comedians living in vans, partiers prone to manic episodes, depressed sweethearts with sporadic tempers, brooding band members who hit on high school girls...
I dated them all, thinking that their darkness equated depth. None of them wanted to court me. None of them sparkled in the sun. None of them wanted romance. The more I dated, the more the romantic pieces of my fantasy fell away. Sex became about sex, and love was something different.
Now, as a married woman, I’m grappling with the toll my early sex life took on me. I struggle to be present in bed and the term “making love” feels corny and gross.
To cope, I opted for therapy, trauma research, and “fake it ‘til you make it” tactics. I figured my girlish days of daydreaming about books were behind me. On some level, I resented the ideals Twilight had planted in my impressionable mind.
That is, until last month. Enough female friends told me to read A Court of Thorns and Roses that I finally caved. As of last night, I’m 200 pages into the third book.
This new world of magical faeries and war has rekindled my relationship with fantasy and romance. I’ve carved out more time for myself in the last month than I have all year, and there’s a joy in the escape that I haven’t felt since I was a nerdy girl on the bus to school. Plot points have made me giggle - genuinely giggle - and I haven’t felt this close to the wide-eyed preteen I was in years. It’s refreshing to reconnect with the part of my sexuality that first made me excited.
I guess I was meant to be with erotic fantasy novels all along.
Catholic school system at work
Sex Education
Revisiting romance as an adult, I see the lessons that I missed as a kid.
Women’s pleasure begins in the brain. Setting the scene is as (if not more) important than the act itself. Too much stress, not enough sleep, or trauma can all distract from that sexy feeling. Erotica knows how to coax open your legs by playing with your mind.
Porn likes to get right to the point. A stepmom comes home early, a delivery boy needs to be paid, or there’s a camera in the corner of the party. That’s it. That’s the whole set-up.
Since these films are made with men in mind, the camera angles leave much to be desired. It’s hard to stay in the zone when there are quick cuts to aggressive blowjobs. The whole narrative is controlled by a horny director who wants nothing more than to shove a camera at someone’s butthole. We watch bodies entwine, but we don’t care about who they belong to. One boob is as good as any other, and I spend the whole time wondering if the woman even wants to be there.
By contrast, romance novels enhance the slow burn that porn is missing. Page after page is spent building unyielding tension. It took over 30 chapters in the second A Court Of Thorns And Roses book for the characters to get it on. By then, I was practically combusting.
These page-turners are complete panty droppers
Moreover, I had come to enjoy the people I was reading about. I invested time into their relationship. I knew their flaws, their dreams, their history. I saw them slowly and unwillingly fall in love with each other before anyone got handsy.
It’s like reliving the best parts of an early relationship from the comfort of my marital bed.
Having struggled with my understanding of sex, erotica is giving me a new avenue into a sexy headspace. It allows room for imagination and takes away the pressure of being in the moment. I can linger on detail, gloss over something that feels wrong, and add my own flare wherever necessary. The fact that it’s written by a woman helps guide the scenes in ways that I find sexy.
And, if winged dark lord faeries aren’t your vibe (fair enough), there’s something for everyone. Men might rule PornHub, but the romance section of the bookstore is filled with misfits. There are books featuring various body types, sexual orientations, economic status, and physical abilities. There is space for so much more nuance in what is deemed sexy through words than through a camera.
If your particular fantasy wasn’t published, the internet has it. I promise you. Smut abides by the same rule as video porn: if you can dream it, someone has already jerked off to it. Want to read about the sexual exploits of Bill Nye the Science Guy? Done. The Care Bears? It’s out there. The Suez Canal? You betcha.
As part of this article, I found myself searching for Criminal Minds fan porn about Spencer and Derek at 8:30 am on Thursday.
For work purposes only. I swear.
Online fan forums often lean on characters we already know and love so they can dive right into the action. Why mess with tension that’s already available? Specifically, fringe characters exploring queer experiences that never would have been cleared for network television are a huge part of smut culture. Women and the LGBTQIA+ community have found ways to make their fantasies come to life, and it’s kinky as fuck.
Written porn acts act as a kind of bibliotherapy that can positively enhance sexuality in those who read it. It’s immensely gratifying to see yourself portrayed in an erotic light, particularly if you’ve always felt like an outsider. From boosting body confidence to reducing shame around fetishes, fanfiction is helping people around the world not feel alone in their desires.
It can also help boost your sex life. Low libido is the most prevalent sexual concern among women. Around 40% of women experience low sex drive due to an endless list of possible causes. In a 2016 study, 27 women were given books to help with their arousal. Half got self-help books and half got erotica. Both saw increases in libido, lubrication, orgasms, and pain reduction.
Which group do you think had more fun learning?
12/10 would read
Aftercare
Anecdotally, I’ve found several other women thanking erotica for the impact it had on their sex lives.
From finding the space to be themselves:
My second reason for reading erotica is something I didn’t know I was looking for, but so desperately needed. Self-acceptance. A feeling of not being alone. A reduction in shame and taboo.
Thanks to some anonymous writers on the internet, I have a sex drive again. My marriage is totally indebted to those thankless toilers, who sit around trying to think of creative, but not too creative, synonyms for “penis” all day.
To a new-found love of their bodies:
As my reading list grew and my desire to explore more characters of varying shapes, sizes, and abilities developed, it wasn’t just my perspective on literature that changed.
I started to see myself differently, too.
Today I’m excited to re-embrace my loserdome. Reading from the perspective of women who lust and have their own desires is unbelievably freeing, and I’m past the point of being embarrassed about it.
Twilight ruled, and you know it.
So, when you see me pounding through romance novels on GoodReads, feel free to ask for recommendations.
