The Problem with Smut in Modern Romance Books
Smut, the term used for books that feature explicit sex scenes, is currently in its golden era. Where our grandmothers and mothers had to hide their romance reading habits behind Fabio graced covers about coy maidens needing to be taught about their sexuality, our modern generation gets to enthuse about their favorite sex focused books featuring cutesy cartoon covers in thirty second videos on the internet. Book content creators on social media get popular by bragging about how much smut they can read in a week, debating dark romance versus fluff, rating books on “spice” levels (how explicit a sex scene can get), and reveling in the shocked looks from non-romance readers about the dirty scenes they consume in their free time. Given the popularity in the mainstream, it’s almost easy to forget that smut is essentially porn published through a more socially accepted format than video.
However, the popularity of smut has also created a massive problem in the modern publishing industry. It’s no secret to book nerds that book focused TikToks, or “BookTok”, is a driving force in publishing marketing. Barnes and Noble, the largest mainstream bookstore franchise in America, is even generous enough to report that BookTok alone increased their book sales by 50%. What BookTok wants, the publishing industry gets for them and since that thing is currently smut, pretty much every book being published these days for the BookTok community is including sex scenes.
But the increased demand to include more sex in books is creating a problem where none of these books know how to use smut correctly.
It’s fine to have sex in a book. Some books are built for just sex scenes. I’ve even included a closed door sex scene in one of my novels. Sex scenes are fine and people obviously enjoy them. But to force sex in a book that doesn’t require it can ruin the story-telling and pacing of an otherwise fine read and reduce the quality of the narrative. Take The Pumpkin Spice Cafe by Laurie Gilmore. This hot BookTok read was celebrated and promoted for its “spicy” scenes, but quite frankly the smut was kind of shoehorned in at the 75% mark and was as vanilla as the cupcakes the titular cafe sold for business. Without the sex scenes, The Pumpkin Spice Cafe read well enough as a cozy and wholesome little mystery with an added fantasy escapism of a woman able to quit her corporate career to run a bakery in a cute small town. The sex scenes frankly felt like an obvious forced addition to the story so the book could compete and sell against a saturated romance market, which it did so very successfully so I guess good call, publishing company, but still not needed for the story to be well executed.
Another personally read example of the forced focus on smut in romance books was The Kiss Curse by Erin Sterling. Erin Sterling is also the pen name for Rachel Hawkins, who I’ve read plenty of, and enjoyed all of her writing! One of my personal favorite authors, Hawkins/Sterling is known for being very sex-positive and open about women’s sexuality in her works. But for The Kiss Curse, it felt like the story was sacrificed in favor of including the smut. There was a scene where the leads had to break into a college to steal a file with the potential to alter the entire plot. When they introduced the concept, I was stoked for a bit of action in an otherwise character driven narrative. But when we got to the actual scene, it was a blink and you miss it paragraph about “oh yeah we used a spell and then got the file and that’s it” to then jump to two pages of the leads flirting with each other. Meanwhile, the cunnilingus scene took two chapters to complete.
The need for smut in books has even infiltrated non-romance genre focused books. Look at the fantasy genre where the demand for smut has even introduced a new “Romantasy” genre of novels taking the social media reading world by force. While A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas has defined the new genre, Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros is the culmination of the best and the worst of the genre. Action scenes are awkwardly placed between romance scenes where the leads grope each other desperately in an effort to prove their love after near death experiences, begging the question is the fantasy genre the forced element of these novels or is it the romance? Because neither are fully fleshed in any of the three novels in the effort to balance the demand for smut along with the need for a solid story.
Stories can be told without sex. Romance and love can exist without sex. The forced inclusion of sex in stories that don’t require it diminishes the emotional narrative and reduces the impact of the story while also being increasingly obvious that it was written to sell without any respect to the reader. If the sex is only serving as filler to sell the book, then it’s not needed for the story.
The thing is too is that there’s plenty of reasons to include sex in a book that serves the narrative. It can be used to show existing character traits (Icebreaker by Hannah Grace basically introduces both leads through how they enjoy sex), advance character development, it can further a plot, and hell it can even just be entertaining for a reader. We didn’t need all of the pages showing Harry Potter in his magic classes in the Harry Potter books, but it was fun to attend the magic classes with him. But if the story is nearly over, like in The Pumpkin Spice Cafe, with the characters fully developed and already showing connection to each other, then a sex scene feels more like forced filler to sell books than an actual benefit to the plot. If the narrative has to be sacrificed to fit in the smut, like in Fourth Wing or The Kiss Curse, then it feels like a more obvious plot to capitalize on a popular reading trend than to tell an actual good story that respects the reader.
I’m glad that readers no longer have to hide behind mass market paperbacks with the windswept Fabio and his immaculate abs and torn pirate shirts to enjoy smut. But if we could utilize the smut to actually benefit the story rather than serve as a cheap marketing tactic that reduces the narrative, then I will be a much happier reader and the books that feature them will be stronger for it too.