WHY WE DON’T TALK NEARLY ENOUGH ABOUT FAERIE PORN

by Thao Thai

It started one evening when I flipped through that trusty panacea of modern life TikTok. One after another, the algorithm served me 30-second clips of broody, centuries-old fae princes bedding mortal women; domineering mob bosses groping their lovers in the backs of limos; and a lush bouquet of dirty talk paired with tongue-in-cheek commentary from creators.

As I scrolled, I pictured a concierge in the lobby of a chandeliered hotel drawing back a red curtain as she purrs, “Welcome. You’ve made it to #SmutTok.” •

Smut is one of those funny words that straddles the line between cutesy and naughty like bum or knob. Interestingly, the word “smut” has its origins in the fear of dirt or defilement, applied to garments or objects that have been irreparably stained. Its more common definition can be traced back to the 1660s, when the word became synonymous with indecent language. It’s now typically applied to written content like erotica or fan fiction. When hearing the word “smut,” most might summon images of well-paged Hustler magazines thrust underneath a mattress, or even the kind of troublesome images found within the corners of the dark web.

For years, smut was seen as an attack on wholesome family values, often represented in the media as a combination of exploitative and vulgar content intended to corrupt. In the 1960s, conservative activist Mary Whitehouse earned the title “smut-buster” through her tireless critique of everything from television shows like Dr. Who to stand-up comedy acts and popular songs she felt demonstrated a “disregard for human dignity.” She was also a highly problematic figure often villainized for her sweeping stances against homosexuality, pornography, and obscenity. That same decade, Playboy began to take off. Its first issue featured a beaming Marilyn Monroe on the cover, wearing a halter dress with a plunging neckline. The magazine received its fair share of detractors labeling its pages as glorified smut, a criticism that hasn’t quite vanished over the years.

When internet pornography rose in the 1990s, politicians like Nebraska Senator Jim Exon urged that the existing Communications Decency Act be extended to web content. Even today, the troubling book bans across the nation can be traced back to a fear of obscenity and sexual content. In a June 2022 article tracing the rise of book bans, The Washington Post named a common cause for such challenges as content having to do with “sex, abortion, teen pregnancy, or puberty.”

The truth is that smut would not have so many detractors if it also didn’t have nearly as many fans. Among many, smut is usually seen as something to hide, a shameful secret that eats at the conscience, a sickly antithesis to squeaky-clean morality. The taboo nature of smut is inherent in the word, which might explain why its usage feels so subversive now.

But smut is nothing new. Much of classic literature is rife with steamy exchanges. Books like Lolita, Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer celebrate the restless pulsating, quivering, and swelling of the body. They don’t shy away from the sweaty underbelly of desire. One could say that the illicit nature of the body is the point of their plots. But these novels are mostly tragedies, decrying the consequences of giving in to one’s impulses. They are seldom seen as celebrations of sex.

Romance novels are another genre altogether, where the happily ever after setup (lovingly shortened among writers and readers to HEA) depicts sex with joyful permissibility and normalcy. Sure, sex can be a meaningful site of conflict between characters, but sex itself is not an inherently dangerous act. This, perhaps, explains why readers are gravitating towards a new definition of smut one that, in its healthiest incarnation, foretells a new era of personal liberation.

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On TikTok, there are different subcommunities dedicated to all sorts of hyper-specific interests everything from car detailing to designing the Southern Gothic dollhouse of your nightmares. One immensely popular community is #SmutTok, dedicated to celebrating the romance genre with playful videos overlaid on top of hit song clips.

The neon-lit corner of TikTok called #SmutTok is not what you think it might be. It engages in a full-frontal display of all the tropes, kinks, and dirty talk that make the romance genre so wildly fun. There, “wingspan” referencing a fae male’s wing size becomes a synonym for testosterone-fueled girth. “One bed” is a well-visited shorthand for a common romance trope (one bed, two lovers, oh my!). Penis puns are accompanied by an insider’s wink and a conflagration of flame emojis. #SmutTok represents a reclamation of erotic pleasure, both playful and salacious, a digital landscape that offers titillation without the usual taboos around sex. Pearl clutchers, beware: you can look, and you can even touch, but you cannot judge.

So how did I find myself in this sybaritic paradise? As a Vietnamese American woman raised in a conservative household (no nail polish! No boys!), the smuttiest thing I’d ever witnessed during my youth was a G-rated innuendo between the slick-haired Jesse Katsopolis and his wife Becky from Full House. If Jesse leaned over to peck his wife on the lips a common occurrence, given their sizzling chemistry I was expected to hold my hand over my eyes. I had to hide my paperback copy of Boy-Crazy Stacey, a Babysitter’s Club book that featured a lifeguard with shiny pecs who looked about 40 years old, gazing flirtatiously down at 13-year-old Stacey. The announcement of my first coed school dance was received with such apocalyptic panic that I feared I might be shipped back to the motherland on the next flight.

Needless to say, ours was not a household abundant in hugging, kissing, or any of the other terrifyingly American displays of familial affection. My parents didn’t even want me to know about sex. They’d opted me out of that age-old rite of awkward sex education in fifth grade. While the other kids were watching slide shows about eggs and wiggling sperm, I was sitting in the principal’s office, staring glumly at the wall, wondering what secret knowledge I was missing out on. For much of my life, the body was a thing to be ignored, seen as base, distracting, and even dangerous.

Yet, for all my family’s rigid surveillance, they rarely guarded what I read (Boy-Crazy Stacey, with its incriminating cover, aside). I think their assumption was that books couldn’t be dangerous; books were scholarly and enriching, sanctioned by publishers who could not possibly allow salacious content within the pages. They were proud of the fact that I was such a voracious reader. Little did they know that what I was actually consuming was tantamount to a DIY sex-ed class, with some very notable gaps in knowledge and practical advice. I think they would have, in retrospect, preferred the actual, school-run sex-ed class.

My first gateway into the world of romance novels came from the Amish bonnet rippers I devoured during my pre-teen years. Our small-town library boasted row upon row of these mass-marketed novels, catering mostly to Evangelical white women. The covers featured dewy-faced young women staring pensively into the distance, with titles like The Amish Candymaker and The Shunning, a wildly popular 14-book series by popular Amish romance writer Beverly Lewis. To be clear, these romance novels had no sex in them; they were, in fact, mostly about maintaining one’s chastity in a world of temptation. In The Prodigal, Lewis writes, “Patience is yet another virtue, one that grows stronger through the practice of waiting.”

But even at my tender age, I understood on some level that a denial of the body was very nearly the same as an obsession with it.

By contrast, an excerpt from Boy-Crazy Stacey describing the older lifeguard reads, “The sun caught his hair, making it gleam. He was gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. He turned back to his towel and I let out my breath in a shaky gasp.” Stacey’s shaky gasp was a sensation I knew all too well, having accumulated a long list of crushes whose names I murmured before bed every night, as a kind of yearning incantation. I didn’t just shake in their presence, though; I fumbled. I became mute with wanting. This wasn’t the innocent, mostly hypothetical hero-worship I felt for the cartoon Disney princes of my girlhood. That shaky gasp represented my first brush with desire, breathless and visceral.

Over the years, I continued to dive into romance novels, often at moments when my life felt too stressful to sustain another read of Middlemarch or Nineteen EightyFour. My initial forays into romance mostly showed me closed-door scenes, with a heated kiss here or there, though eventually the kisses graduated to heavy petting and panting foreplay. My adult feelings about Gone with the Wind aside, the way Margaret Mitchell portrayed Scarlett’s illicit kiss with Ashley Wilkes left me utterly weak in the knees at the time: “He bent back her head across his arm and kissed her, softly at first, and then with a swift gradation of intensity that made her cling to him as the only solid thing in a dizzy swaying world. His insistent mouth was parting her shaking lips, sending wild tremors along her nerves, evoking from her sensations she had never known she was capable of feeling.” Again with the shaking.

Decades later, I gave birth to my daughter at the age of 31 and found myself relating to my body in an entirely new way. I had become a merry-go-round, a stroller, a source of food and comfort. But I was not, at that time, a sexual object. I felt alienated from my own body, sometimes staring at it in the mirror with a total lack of recognition. Some women feel uniquely empowered by pregnancy and childbirth, but I found myself on another end of the spectrum, one marked by postpartum depression, where my body felt like a series of floating appendages meant for function rather than pleasure. The only things I passionately desired were a plate of nachos and a night of uninterrupted sleep.

But one afternoon I picked up The Hating Game, by Sally Thorne, a 2016 romance novel (later made into a movie) about two office enemies who have the kind of red-hot chemistry that makes you want to throw that HR handbook right out the window. In one particularly sultry scene, the hero mutters, “I want to slide in between your sheets, and find out what goes on inside your head, and underneath your clothes. I want to make a fool of myself over you.” Uh, yes, please.

I eventually found my way to more deliciously spicy novels, with all the rushed, heady, animalistic passion I’d been missing from my reading. Books like Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient (featuring an Asian, neurodivergent character having sex) allowed me to center my own eroticism. (A very silly yet very sexy quote: “You’re wet already, Stella. You’re like a Lamborghini. Zero to sixty in two point seven seconds.”) Spicy reading gave me a taste of Main Character Energy at least, when it came to my own sexual pleasure.

And I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen under the scintillating spell of smut. •

In the last two years, #SmutTok has become wildly popular among bookfluencers for reasons aplenty. With the prolonged period of isolation from the pandemic, more readers found themselves sequestered and eager for escapism in the form of spicy romance. Searching for community, they leaned on TikTok, known for its scrappiness and unfiltered, take-no-prisoners brand of humor. The hashtag #SmutTok has been viewed almost four billion times, making it one of the most popular on the app. The community is active, engaged, and extremely invested in this collective fantasizing. There’s an energy in the #SmutTok community that feels uniquely exciting in many ways. Exciting and completely inviting.

Around the same time, Kindle Un- limited, with its database of over two million titles, became a beacon for inexpensive yet satisfying reads that take only a couple of hours to fly through. There is something propulsive and addictive about the romance genre that begs for near-obsessive consumption. It follows that the community around that genre would also have a rapacious appetite for discussion.

When I first started watching #SmutTok videos my personal antidote to insomnia and a highly ineffective one I was immediately captivated by the prurient playfulness of the videos. It felt like witnessing a series of winks from your most audacious friend. In some TikToks, readers put spicy quotes to popular music, like this quote overlaid atop a Doja Cat song: “You know that I respect you right? Because I’m about to f*** you with nothing but disrespect.” The creator, Annie of @anitaslibrary, lip-syncs directly into the camera with a knowing smile, a silken scrunchy in her braided hair. It’s a low-fi video in almost all ways, yet it garnered over 1.8 million views in just a couple of days. Users echoed their appreciation for the video with comments like, “The way I’d simply pass away ”

Some creators like to use photo stills to present a kind of erotic storyboard of the steamiest scenes from books. Author Sanjana Nidhi (@authorsanjananidhi) posts a black-and-white photo of a young woman leaning over an attractive man sitting on a couch, their lips just a whisper away from one another’s, to illustrate a scene from her book Sinful Love, which is billed as an age-gap office romance. The onscreen text reads, “When he’s going down on her and says … ‘Look at me or I stop.’” The video ends with a clip of a person frantically bouncing up and down in

Little Prince and Covid Curves, from the Newspaper Diary Series, April 7, 2020

Inkjet print on paper

Courtesy of the artist a car seat, TikTok’s visual shorthand for a delighted jaw-drop.

Other #SmutTok accounts act as makeshift booksellers, rating books with chili peppers to denote the spiciness of the scenes, and outlining standout tropes like enemies-to-lovers or grumpy-sunshine. In one video, romance author Shanen Ricci (@authorshanenricci) hands her boyfriend an excerpt from her own novel and films his reaction while he reads. As she watches with a mischievous smile, his eyebrows rise. He cocks his head and smirks at the pages, a sure sign of mounting interest. Then, noticing her watching him, he bites his lip and proceeds to pounce on her with undeniable amorous intent. The video itself only 15 seconds long is like a distilled scene from a romance novel. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that both the gorgeous Ricci and her boyfriend could play on-screen versions of romance protagonists.

It’s easy to see how these videos can lure viewers like myself in. They’re patently unserious, floating bubbles of desire without context. Sometimes, in my day-to-day life, I find myself wondering about the last time I laughed in a truly goofy, unguarded way. #SmutTok helps me find my way back to the lighter corners of my own mind, where a raunchy pun can, against all odds, help me gain some perspective.

After all, life can’t be all bad if there are places left to find that HEA. •

Aside from #SmutTok’s uniquely active community, the rise of this TikTok subgenre also indicates a revival of books and of reading as a whole. Due to the popularity of BookTok, Colleen Hoover climbed the charts of The New York Times bestseller list, with her backlist titles taking up four of the top 10 spots in late 2022. According to NPD BookScan, a point-of-sale publishing tracker, BookTok helped authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021, with at least double that rate in 2022. In summer of 2022, TikTok partnered with Barnes and Noble for the #BookTok Challenge, intended to promote the discovery (and sharing) of new authors on the social-media platform.

Brick-and-mortar stores were quick to see the profits from this reading revival. Younger readers are more willing to browse local bookstores, which have dedicated displays for #BookTok darlings, many of which feature some spicy scenes behind the deceptively cutesy cartoon covers. Authors are paying attention to pre-orders and embarking on large campaigns asking readers to hop on the wagon earlier than usual to build up the hype. The indie publishing community a popular site for romance and fantasy continues to blossom, with many TikTok authors turning to self-publishing as a means to sell their stories.

More than all that, it turns out that books are just cool again. According to an August 2022 study in Business Wire, the publishing market is predicted to grow $19.2 billion in the next four years. The study identifies indie and self-published authors as primary drivers of this growth. And on the other side of the pages, readers also command more power than ever. On Instagram, the hashtag #bookfluencer has almost 40,000 posts; on TikTok, there are over 86 billion views of the hashtag #BookTok. It’s clear that readers are eager to discuss the latest novels they devoured and the tropes they gravitate toward. These readers often filter down to the popular genres of romance, fantasy, and erotica in the #SmutTok community. With its centering on the female gaze and celebration of women’s agency, #SmutTok has shaken up the publishing landscape in the most unexpected and refreshing ways.

In addition to the rise of modern romance novels a genre that has been around for decades but is now imbued with new life thanks to writers like Jasmine Guillory and Emily Henry there is an increased focus on telling a wider range of stories, with protagonists representing different races, religions, sexual preferences, disabilities, and marginalized groups. Molly Gale of @mollyreadz identifies this positive trend: “We have seen a rise of inclusivity and diversity in #smuttok (which we LOVE ). This shows the market for more diverse books within the romance space.” Prominent BookTokkers of color include Talia Hibbert (@taliahibbert) and Nisha Sharma of (@nishawrites). Additionally, there are more LGBTQ portrayals and stories centering on protagonists with disabilities and neurodiversity.

It’s also important to note that, within the #SmutTok corner of the social-media-verse, there are significant distinctions in the subgenre. Fantasy romance focused largely on the worlds of faeries, as represented by Sarah J. Maas’s energetic fandom bleeds into paranormal romance, like the vampire court of Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Blood and Ash series. There’s also dark academia (Zodiac Academy by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti), alien romance (Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon), and your run-of-the-mill reverse-harem romance.

Tessa Bailey (@authortessabailey), a prolific romance author and mainstay in the #SmutTok community, began joking with readers about writing a reverse-harem romance. In January 2022, she posted a video about the fantasy of being in relationships with multiple men at once versus the reality. In the fantasy portion, she hums appreciatively while reading a book. In the real-life version, she holds up a sock and looks around the room accusingly, asking, “Whose socks are these? Tobias?” Imaginary Tobias would later become a recurring figure in Bailey’s TikToks. In response, a commenter writes, “Soo… how would you feel about writing a reverse-harem?” Months later, the joke turned into a real novel when Bailey’s Happenstance, about a heroine who dates a coterie of gorgeous boyfriends she meets in a subway car, hit the shelves.

Perhaps part of the rise of #SmutTok is due to the willingness of romance authors to maintain an accessible TikTok presence and community, putting them in dialogue with readers in a more immediate way. As Bailey says, “Talking so openly about sex and our sexual preferences tends to break the ice!” That transparency is an antidote to shame, which becomes even more clear when you look at the comments hundreds on hundreds for an average #SmutTok post that comfortingly assert, “You’re not alone in your kink!”

Celebrated author Akwaeke Emezi recently published their debut romance novel You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, a genre departure from their other, highly celebrated work. In an interview on The Daily Show, they describe smuggling Fabio-emblazoned romance novels into Nigeria, where such books were banned for vulgarity. About their current interest in romance including paranormal romance! Emezi says that the genre “has so much representation in it. And it has so much hope in it. You can read these love stories about people society considers deviant […] and they get happily ever afters. There’s a little magic in that.”

Given the open-minded, unfiltered nature of this community, I was surprised to witness very few examples of outright shaming or harassment, as one can easily encounter from dissenters and trolls in almost any space on the internet. Though there are critics of the non-literary nature of the writing itself, particularly Colleen Hoover’s work, the feedback is mostly positive. Perhaps it’s because this community overwhelmingly identifies as women and remains fiercely, wonderfully outspoken about its right to exist. Eloisa James (@ eloisajamesbooks), author of The Reluctant Countess, tells me that “[r]omance is a very feminist genre. It has always been the genre that foregrounds women’s sexual pleasure and sexual power, in a way unlike any others.”

Or maybe #SmutTok is just self-selecting in that way. You don’t enter #SmutTok with your eyes squeezed shut. If you do, you’re missing the point.

Stacey McEwan (@stacebookspace) is a #SmutTokker-turned-author (Ledge, first volume of The Glacian Trilogy) who choreographed an arch series of skits around turning her husband into a fictional romance hero. In one video, she asks him if he’s ever kept a memento or token of hers a typical, swoon-inducing gesture from romance heroes. McEwan’s husband asks, “You mean, underwear? Or toenails and stuff?” Exasperated, she clarifies, “Like, something I may have given you. To make you think of me.” He replies in a deadpan voice, “Like syphilis? Or a mountain of debt? Or all the hair you drop all over the house? You’re like a Labrador.” This exchange is far more familiar to most of us than the flirtatious banter we read in romance novels, which is what makes the video so endearing. McEwan’s videos also offer a fun, metafictional spin on the reflexive act of idealization inherent in the romance genre.

Though McEwan’s videos are tonguein-cheek, they hint at something tugging at the back of my mind. What is the real-life implication of the proliferation of the #SmutTok community? Are readers truly having better sex because of romance novels? Or are the idealized scenarios (and characters) pushing us further from intimacy? Romance novels promise a HEA. But is that real life? I worried that there may be a dark side to all this joy, a kind of alienation between real experiences and those presented on the page.

Bailey disagrees. “We’re not harboring any delusions that real life will be like it is in romance novels,” she says. “That being said, maybe we should expect more from our intimate partners. I think that a lot of the people complaining about romance setting unrealistic expectations would be better served learning how to meet higher expectations.” Insert fire emoji here. Indeed, romance novels can be a tool, not only to clear our minds of the daily grind of schedules and responsibilities, but also to provide concrete access to fantasies we may not otherwise express in those locked corners of the imagination.

Mallory Parsons of @mal_reads says, “My husband and I have been together for 12 years and I can confidently say that reading spice has reinvigorated our sex life. We have tried things in the bedroom that I wouldn’t have even thought of, had I not been convinced by the spicy books.” The role of fantasy in intimacy is well accepted, especially among professional sex therapists. Nikki Coleman, a feminist psychologist who maintains the website Dr. Nikki Knows, notes that “[w]e’re in a relationship revolution. And fantasies are really powerful mechanisms that we use to resolve our intense emotions.” She sometimes recommends that her clients explore their eroticism by sharing spicy books with one another, even reading scenes aloud. There may be discomfort at first, but the pay-off is an exchange of vulnerability, which is, at its heart, the root of the most fulfilling intimate interactions.

While writing my forthcoming novel Banyan Moon, I struggled with the amount of sex to include. It isn’t a romance novel, though there are love stories within its pages. I’d read too many memes about horribly written sex scenes (think: jiggling breasts, throbbing members) and worried that I wouldn’t be able to do justice to intimate moments between my characters. And to be frank, I blushed to think of my family and friends reading my thoughts on sex, some of which might be conflated with my private fantasies by those same readers.

Yet I couldn’t ignore the crucial role of the body in my story. My characters live life sensuously through cooking and eating, through working and sweating, and even in the act of childbirth and motherhood. And they have sex. They celebrate their corporeality; to them, a mortal, carnal life has always been the point. What I began to understand through #SmutTok and the romance community is that sexual intimacy can complicate a story and move it forward. Like love, sex is often messy, complicated, and more wondrous than we can express.

Slowly but surely, I began adding more texture and sensation in the scenes between my characters heat to the embraces, wetness to a stolen kiss. Writing a sex scene requires a certain level of mental choreography and imaginative dexterity. I learned to pay attention to my own body as I wrote, asking myself important questions like: “Would I like this feeling? Would I want more of it?” There’s the old adage that says, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader” in other words, a lack of feeling in the writing produces a dryness to the content. My take on that might be: “No titillation in the writer, no titillation in the reader.”

And with #SmutTok dropping new videos every day, I would say there’s no shortage of titillation, if you know where to look.

It’s not all sunshine and swooning, however. Coleman cautions, “There’s still a lot of sex negativity and shaming in our culture. Generally speaking, I think we’re not having nearly enough sex.” I think this is true. Some of the running jokes in my circle are about the lack of sex in our daily lives. When we talk about naughty indulgences, we’re more likely talking about an extra hour of binge TV, or a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos eaten under the covers. And even among younger generations, there’s a documented sex recession, though awareness of and openness to sexual experience is higher than ever. So maybe we haven’t quite arrived at our HEA after all. But perhaps this new generation of spicy bookfluencers, known for their audacity and gleeful freedom, will unchain us all from the conventions that prevent us from finding our individual brands of pleasure.

So, given that #SmutTok continues to climb in popularity, and given that the romance genre is a billion-dollar literary industry, what does the future look like for readers? More of the same, we hope. “I mean, we are in the golden age of monster erotica. Who knows where we go from here?” says Bailey. “As long as there is a happily ever after.”

As for myself, I’ll continue consuming all the bite-sized videos on #SmutTok, each reminiscent of a sweet morsel that melts quickly and satisfyingly on the tongue. And I’ll continue to find my joy in writing that is unfiltered, raw, and immediate like the best kind of sex.

Another Morning (sleeping houseguest ), c. 1972 Courtesy of the artist