Smut is not a dirty word. Well, not unless you want it to be (wink). What I mean is it isn’t a bad word. It’s not shameful to say it. As smut authors, we write open door romance. We titillate. We entertain. We arouse. We (sometimes) scandalize. And so we find ourselves, not for the first time, on the front lines of the book banning debate, our creative endeavors once again being used as a weapon to call us pedophiles, groomers, porn addicts etc. We are blamed for an anti-intellectualism epidemic that they apparently think started on BookTok, where people read broadly and often, and not (somehow) in the swamps of Reddit, or video game forums, or crunchy mom anti vax blogs, where the proudly uneducated like to congregate and congratulate themselves on not reading a book since they graduated high school. Now that Trump has been elected and Project 2025 is on our doorstep, we have become targets of their purity culture bullshit. In response, I understand the urge to run, to hide, to distance ourselves from the word smut, to deny it when they tell us we write porn, but we must not give in to that urge.
I firmly believe that to do so divides us from people who would otherwise be allies in our fight and gives validity to their outrageous claims that all sexually explicit material should be banned or censored.
There’s nothing wrong with creating work that sexually titillates the audience. We write stories for adults, stories that are aimed at an adult audience and shelved in the adult section of the store. Adults can read what they want, including explicit sex and violence. I freely acknowledge that there are arguments to be made about the ethics of pornography and its role in exploitation, but that is not the conversation these people want to have. They are not concerned about the rights of sex workers, they are concerned with controlling your mortality around sex. It stems from the same poisoned well of purity culture as their abortion bans, their anger about contraception, their determination to keep comprehensive sex ed out of the classroom, and their refusal to help poor families and single mothers. It is about controlling when, how, and with whom you are allowed to experience sex or sexual arousal. It's about punishing you for making choices they don't agree with. We must reject this at all costs.
It will be difficult to stand against them, but we must not give in.
They are prepared to fight dirty, using rallying cries that paint us as sexual predators and claiming our work is dangerous to children. It is not about the children, this is a ruse and a cover up. I will not give in to hysterics. Children are not being targeted by romance writers. Do teenagers sometimes read romance novels? Sure! But kids seeking our books does not mean that those books are being marketed to them, nor does it mean that they are being harmed by it if they do seek it out. They seek out horror movies and rated R thrillers as well, and when they do they learn about their own boundaries and how to regulate their own comfort as they consume media. This is part of becoming an adult. I would also argue that it’s perfectly normal for teens to be curious about sex and that they would seek it out less in adult spaces if they were given age appropriate representation of sexual relationships in YA books, but that is a conversation for another day.
I have seen some arguments that changing our working around romance and refusing to call it smut will help us avoid a ban, and I firmly disbelieve that idea. They want all explicit content banned regardless of what it's called. I’m not going to abandon people in similar work or creative pursuits in the hope that these harmful bans can pass by me. First they come for the porn stars working for big companies, then they come for the OnlyFans creators, then they come for erotica writers, they come for the kink, for the BIPOC stories, for the LGBTQ stories, then they come for everyone else. They will not let you skate by on a technicality forever, because again, this was never about the things they pretend it's about. You will never pass their weird purity test. It’s not going to happen. This is the same faulty logic that causes the kink at pride argument every year, when well intentioned but misguided queer people try to insist that if we only presented ourselves as more respectable that society would accept us and leave us alone. It doesn’t work, because you are always unacceptable to people who are determined to hate you. This is the same concept. Sexual pleasure for fun, that’s not centered on men, that is inclusive of all races, body types, sexual orientations, and relationship dynamics, anything outside of the traditional Christian marriage between a dominant man with a submissive woman partner is a threat to them. They will not let you pass.
We stand a better chance of fighting back against this infringement of our rights if we stand together. If we refuse to play the semantics game with them. It doesn’t matter if romance is porn, because there’s nothing wrong with porn, at least when it is ethically produced, as Romance novels are. Instead of trying to slip through the cracks, remind them how weird it is that they are obsessed with what goes on in a grown adult’s bedroom, in someone else’s library. My sex life is none of their business, and my writing choices are protected by the first amendment. I write smut. So what?
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