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In the past few months, I’ve started selling my books at physical markets with a little more intentionality. I’m doing the artist alley thing. Book events. That sort of thing. I’m not new to any of this. I’ve had to hawk my wares before, just in a different context.
At my booths, I mostly sell my panoply of second-world fantasy, but I also have my alien romance trilogy with me. Those are two separate pen names, so I usually ask what people are interested in before I continue the pitch. My fantasy ranges from slice-of-life to romantic, but doesn’t have any explicit scenes or meet the expectations for something like Romantasy (despite the genre’s current lack of strong definition). While my alien romance meets all the requirements of Romance as a base genre while also having explicit scenes.
People glean pretty quickly that they’re looking at two sets of books, and the fantasy is “no spice…”
…except when they don’t.
Because it does still happen where someone will look at the fantasy books and lead with the assumption that they’re “smut.” And they’ve explicitly used that word. It’s not in a malicious fashion, rather a cheeky wink wink nudge nudge.
My response is an equally cheeky “smut is not an academically useful word.”
What’s happened is this sort of smut revolution. Where primarily women have gone “yeah, I read smut, fuck you.” And that’s fantastic. But what I feel like I’m seeing is this affirmative movement collapsing in on itself until “spice” or “smut” becomes the focal point of the way we interact with the fantasy genre a a whole.
I saw an Instagram post (that I wish I had saved 
) that showed books and which chapters had explicit scenes in them. Now the idea of creating a database of explicit content chapter by chapter of a cohort of books is fascinating to me because weird data is my KPop bias. The graphic, however, said “Fantasy Books with Spicy Scenes.” Not romantic fantasy books or romantasy or fantasy romance. Just fantasy.
The language of this applies the expectation of explicit content to the entire fantasy genre whether it intended to or not. There’s a lot of ways to choose language in such a fashion where that implication isn’t there. It feels like a nitpick. But it’s semantics, and semantics are inherently a little nitpicky. Especially when in general fantasy reading groups I’m in, I’m seeing complaints from readers that they feel like they’re only being advertised books with explicit content.
There is something happening here in the way we word of mouth advertise fantasy books that’s starting to break social media containment.
And frankly, I take a little bit of umbrage in reducing even my alien romance to “smut.”
Because whatever reclamation we’ve done on the consumption of smutty content, that hasn’t really material changed the connotations of the word. Whether you’re in or outside the community in which it applies, smut still means the same thing, we’ve just created space to approach it differently.
Comic book movies are the most mainstream they’ve ever been, but it doesn’t stop them from being comic book movies with all the constructions therein.
So when it comes to my alien romance, I put a lot of thought and consideration into how I construct my explicit scenes. Creating interesting alien anatomy, physiological habits, how those might cross-anatomically translate, building emotions around these physical connections, and using the scenes in and of themselves as a place for character growth. I put a lot of time and effort into creating interesting sex scenes that worked within the greater narrative. And I know that there are a lot of romance novelists who do the same thing.
But if a person says “I picked up this smutty book at the store,” you’re going to assume it’s a romance novel (or a similar ilk) over a Stephen King or Haruki Murakami book despite both of them having weird, freaky sex in their books.
Because it’s only “smut” when the sex scenes are in books whose primary narrative focus is the formation of a romantic relationship. The genre/sub-genre/descriptor where it would make the most narrative sense to have naturally occurring sex scenes, is the genre that we most denigrate for having sex scenes.
And the half-assed pseudo-reclamation of the word “smut” is not actually fixing the problem and may, in fact, be making it worse.
We should be working to elevate romantic narrative with explicit scenes out of being “less than.” This doesn’t have to be high literature. There are other more “casual” genres like LITRPGs and progression fantasy that don’t get nearly the smoke that romance does, and I think we all know why. Liberal use of the word “smut” doesn’t do that situation because those negative connotations are still there, and they aren’t going away any time soon.
In my perfect world, we wouldn’t use the word “smut” at all within the book community because it’s not a useful objective descriptor.
That’s not a fight I know I can win.
But we can be more conservative with the word smut. It’s not pretension to collectively agree on some soft borders on the usage of a word, particularly when you’re in a mind to reclaim it. We’re allowed to say “hey, let’s limit the word smut to describe a particular relationship with sex and narrative and not apply to just anything that has more than one sex scene in it.”
That still absolves you of any shame for reading smut because everyone should be allowed to engage in self-indulgent shenanigans whenever they want. It’s not any one else’s business.
And leaning into something that starts to look like an academic definition might actually be the thing that helps it shake some of those negative connotations. Then we’ll just slide on down the treadmill, but at least it’s a start.
And maybe…just maybe…along the way we can get out of this weird thing we’ve devolved into where we’re placing any fantasy written by a femme presenting person into the assumed smut bucket.
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