In her article on reading smut, Zoe Williams focuses on the difference between romance and erotica (My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled - and I soon found out why, 6 August. To my mind, that misses the point. For me, it is about the difference between “good” smut and … well, just smut.
I am a 54-year-old Cambridge English literature graduate and I feel I have only just “discovered” smut when reading Sarah J Maas’s wonderful Acotar (A Court of Thorns and Roses) series earlier this year (by the way, those are the SJM books Williams should have chosen for her article, not the young adult Throne of Glass series, which has very little sex, in light of their intended audience).
Sure, the writing is not perfect; there are too many “bobbing throats” and “vulgar gestures”. But the characterisation is fantastic – no wonder there is a whole cult out there wanting to be Feyre (the feisty human-turned-fae heroine) and worshipping Rhysand (the main love interest) and his “bat boys”. And the plot is so nail-biting that I finished all five books in a few weeks.
Yes, the sex is great and left me incredibly horny (far from being annoyed, my husband was only too happy to reap the benefits), but it was because I cared about the characters that I enjoyed the smut so much.
Compare Fifty Shades of Grey, which left me cold – simply because the writing was so clunky and I did not care about the protagonists.
For me it is nothing to do with a shift in attitudes towards respectability and shame (and I certainly could not be described as a gen Z or millennial). Instead, it is about the enjoyment of reading about sex from a female writer’s perspective when coupled with great characters and a good storyline.
Jennifer Charlwood
St Albans, Hertfordshire
• Thank you for a great article that looks seriously at the boom in smutty fiction. Something Zoe Williams did not talk about is how it relates to fan fiction. I believe that the smutty trend that we are seeing in publishing today is directly linked to the rise of fan fiction.
With the emergence of near universal internet access came global access to (often erotic) fan fiction. The first generation to benefit from this was gen X, and many of the authors writing smut today are part of that generation.
Smutty fan fiction was readily available to them – and as women, they often had no other ways of accessing erotic and pornographic material, because the traditional porn industry is geared towards heterosexual cis men.
Many of the tropes and genres Williams mentioned originate in fan fiction, not least of all the Omegaverse, a well-known trope in the fan fiction of the 2000s and 2010s. Fan fiction has turned out to be a real cultural and creative catalyst for female writers, a force for good that helps women and girls to no longer feel ashamed of their sexual desires and pleasure – and a boon for the publishing industry. This is what they call a win-win-win situation, I believe.
Christine Lehnen
Exeter
• Zoe Williams writes “if there is one thing that has come to pass … it is that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or any other kind”. This “thing” hasn’t just come to pass recently. Readers of romance have never cared about respectability.
What has happened is that, because of social media, people who would otherwise never have dreamed of picking up a lowly romance novel are finding out just how diverse and how interesting the world of romantic fiction is, how romance readers and authors have their own brilliant communities, and, above all, just how much fun we’re having.
I’ve found many great reads through online recommendations or through romance book bloggers – books that aren’t reviewed in “respectable” newspapers such as the Guardian. Welcome to our world, Zoe. You’re very late to the party, but it’s going strong.
Helena Fairfax
Shipley, West Yorkshire
• There’s a totally new phenomenon of raunchy reads, is there? I could have sworn that, in the 1990s, books under Virgin Publishing’s Black Lace imprint (“Erotic fiction by women for women”, commissioned and edited by the redoubtable Kerri Sharp) were selling by the bucketload and then some. And I should know: I was the publisher. I’d better not even mention the part our team played in rescuing Doctor Who from TV oblivion. Ah, how quickly the world forgets.
Peter Darvill-Evans
Southampton
• As researchers specialising in popular culture, fan cultures, romance, and young and new adult fiction, we were excited to read Zoe Williams’ article. Zoe covers the history of bodice-rippers, romance and erotica to a reasonable degree (especially considering the space constraints); however, we do feel that the article missed some important context – namely, fandom.
While the Omegaverse is not related to furries, both are inextricably linked to longstanding fan practices, including cosplay (furries) and fan fiction (the Omegaverse and other tropes that fans have adapted from mainstream romance or developed themselves). As Kristina Busse has suggested, the Omegaverse emerged online around 2010 within the supernatural fandom, building on earlier werewolf-related tropes from fandoms such as Teen Wolf and Twilight, and the often-maligned trope of “mpreg” (male pregnancy – an earlier, interrelating genre discussed by Constance Penley as early as the 1990s).
Articles on the recent mainstream rise in popularity of romance fiction often trace it back to TikTok, which is an important arena for readers to find, discuss and respond creatively to romantic fiction – but behind our current cultural moment there’s a much longer history of women and other readers reading and writing about sex and romance, and a lot of this has taken place in fandom.
Romance culture, then, is not just about women consuming sex writing (although this is, as the article emphasises, important and worth supporting in itself). It has at least some of its roots in a longstanding and collaborative narrative tradition where participants engage in reading, writing and responding to others’ work, as well as cooperatively developing story ideas and new tropes (the idea of “tropes” as a means of classifying romance could be argued to stem from fan fiction), often all at once.
It’s great that women readers and writers are currently taking romance and erotica further into the mainstream, but “horny reading” and writing is part of a long feminist tradition.
Erika Kvistad and Jennifer Duggan
University of South-Eastern Norway
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
