Karly

There are certain opinions you know, even as you’re forming them, would be much easier to keep to yourself, and this is probably one of them.

I’ve been thinking about smut, not because I’ve suddenly appointed myself the moral guardian of what other women read, nor because I think sex has no place in literature, quite the opposite considering some of the books we happily file under classics, but because I keep coming across a particular way of talking about sexually explicit books that doesn’t quite make sense to me. Readers will describe them as “porn in book form”, joke that they’re reading pornography in public, rate them according to their spice levels and recommend them on the basis of how explicit they are, and everyone seems perfectly comfortable with that description until somebody takes it literally.

Because if it is porn in book form, or at least if that’s how we’re choosing to describe it, why does reading it occupy such a completely different cultural category from watching pornography?

I don’t necessarily mean that it should be condemned, and in fact I’m not convinced condemnation is a particularly useful starting point at all. What interests me is the inconsistency, because we seem to have collectively decided that sexually explicit material consumed on a screen can warrant serious conversations about our relationship with sex, desire and intimacy, while sexually explicit material consumed between two covers is protected, to some extent, by the cultural respectability of reading.

Obviously, the two aren’t identical, and pretending they are would make this a much less interesting conversation. Pornography involving real people comes with an entire set of ethical questions that fiction simply doesn’t, including labour, consent, exploitation, working conditions and the circumstances under which something was produced. A fictional character cannot be coerced and nobody was actually required to perform the sex scene you’ve just read. There is also something fundamentally different about imagination, about language asking the reader to construct an image rather than simply presenting one to them, and those differences matter enormously.

But once we move away from production and towards consumption, the distinction becomes a little less tidy. If somebody seeks out a book specifically because they’ve been told the sex scenes are graphic, reads those scenes primarily because they find them sexually arousing and then recommends the book to somebody else on the basis of how sexually explicit it is, what exactly makes that experience categorically different from consuming erotic material in another medium? Is it the presence of a plot, the fact that the characters have names and occasionally go to work, the physical book itself, or is there something about reading that we instinctively consider more respectable, even when the thing being read is deliberately designed to arouse?

I think this becomes particularly interesting when you look at the language surrounding contemporary romance. We have “spice ratings”, chilli emojis, lists of favourite tropes and entire recommendation systems built around how much sex a book contains and what kind. People ask for books that are “spicier” in much the same way they might once have asked whether something was more explicit, except the language has become cute, sanitised and extraordinarily marketable. None of this is hidden, and quite the opposite is true when the sexual content itself is often part of the selling point.

And yet calling it pornography can provoke an immediate defence of its literary status, despite the fact that readers themselves may have been calling it exactly that five minutes earlier. I do wonder whether part of the answer lies in gender, because pornography has historically been imagined, fairly or otherwise, as something men consume, while the modern smut phenomenon, particularly in online reading spaces, is overwhelmingly associated with women.

One has accumulated the imagery of dark rooms, incognito tabs and vaguely shameful browser histories, while the other comes with pastel covers, annotated tabs, tote bags and aesthetically arranged bookshelves. One has been made to look seedy and the other has been made to look like a hobby, and that difference fascinates me, particularly because I’m not sure whether it represents a genuinely healthier approach to female sexuality or simply a more socially acceptable packaging of sexually explicit material. It may well be both.

There is something genuinely positive about women being able to explore sexuality without shame, particularly in a medium where nobody has to perform anything for them and where desire can be written entirely around a female perspective. Historically, women’s sexual desire has hardly been granted unlimited cultural space, and I have no interest in suggesting that the solution is to shame women back into pretending they don’t have any, but liberation from shame doesn’t have to mean liberation from criticism.

We can accept that something is pleasurable, consensual and perfectly legal while still being curious about the way we consume it. We do this with almost everything else, talking about our relationships with social media, alcohol, shopping, food, television and our phones without necessarily arguing that nobody should ever use any of them, yet sexually explicit material seems to become strangely resistant to that sort of examination when it arrives in the form of a paperback with illustrated flowers on the cover.

There is also a distinction I think gets lost whenever this conversation becomes too binary, which is that a book containing explicit sex isn’t necessarily an erotic product. Literature has always contained sex, and sometimes it’s romantic, sometimes disturbing, sometimes political, sometimes ridiculous and sometimes simply part of portraying human beings as human beings. The presence of a graphic sex scene doesn’t suddenly transform a novel into pornography any more than the presence of a murder transforms it into a true-crime documentary.

What interests me is something more specific, namely the books for which explicit sexual content has become a substantial part of the product itself. When the selling point is the spice, when recommendations revolve around the spice, when readers skip ahead looking for the spice and when everybody involved cheerfully jokes that they’re reading pornography, it seems slightly disingenuous to retreat behind the word “literature” the moment somebody asks what that means, because putting something between two covers doesn’t automatically make its consumption literary.

Perhaps that is the part of this conversation that makes people uncomfortable, because reading has an extraordinary amount of cultural prestige attached to it. We’re taught from childhood that reading is inherently good for us, that readers are intelligent and curious and that any reading is better than no reading at all. “At least they’re reading” has become an almost unchallengeable defence, as though the physical act of processing written words gives whatever those words contain an automatic cultural virtue, and I’m not sure it does.

That doesn’t mean I think people should stop reading smut, nor does it mean I think people who enjoy it need to justify themselves to me, the internet or anybody else. Adults are allowed to consume sexual material, they’re allowed to enjoy it purely because it turns them on, and they’re even allowed to read something with absolutely no literary ambition whatsoever and have a fantastic time doing it. If anything, perhaps admitting that would make the conversation more straightforward.

Maybe the question isn’t why we don’t condemn smut in the way pornography is sometimes condemned, but why we’re so determined to place them in entirely separate moral universes when, at least in certain forms and for certain readers, they can serve remarkably similar purposes. Maybe pornography deserves a more nuanced conversation, smut deserves a slightly more critical one, and reading deserves to lose the peculiar immunity we’ve granted it simply because words happen to be printed on a page.

You can enjoy something without pretending it’s beyond examination, even if it has a really pretty cover.