I spent a fortnight reading nothing but smut and I don’t need to give you a reason. But since there is one, here it is: business is booming in the publishing world of love and sex. Aficionados draw fine distinctions – between romance and erotica; “steamy” and “smutty”; fantasy and saga fiction – and endlessly subdivide the genres, but the takeaway is that the stigma around what used to be called “books that women like” has gone. And, as the UK literary agent Alice Lutyens puts it: “The steamier the sex, the better the book does.”
I started two books simultaneously, which just happened to span the gamut, from the almost completely chaste The Stars Too Fondly, by Emily Hamilton, to the most pornographic thing I’ve ever read (and I’ve read De Sade): Heat Clinic, by Alexis B Osborne. So, I could give you a take on the difference between romance and erotica, but I would rather throw it to an expert. Leah Koch started the independent romantic bookshop Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles with her sister, Bea, in 2016 (they recently opened a second shop in New York). She says readers tend to assume erotica is sexier. “The technical definition is that, in erotica, character development happens from sexual situations. We stock both.”
Taking romance and erotica as a single publishing trend, its rise in popularity is extraordinary: sales of print copies in the US have gone from 18m in 2020 to more than 39m in 2023, according to publishing data provider Circana BookScan. In the UK, sales of romance and saga fiction (typically tales spanning decades, which needn’t contain dragons; Catherine Cookson was the original queen of the modern genre) have risen by 110% over the same period and are now worth £53m annually. Independent romance book stores are springing up all over the US.
Anyway: Osborne’s Heat Clinic. Welcome to the Omegaverse, a massive genre of erotic fiction, in which Osborne is but one of thousands of players. The world here is divided into alphas, betas and omegas. Alphas and omegas give off a powerful scent with which, if aligned, they attract one another inexorably. The alpha’s purr is soothing to the omega; the omega’s heat sends the alpha insane with desire to rut.
The betas don’t have much of a scent and don’t have the omnipotent genital knot that defines male and female alphas, but can get into a relationship with an alpha or an omega, if they want to live life as a serial disappointment. This primal dominant-submissive taxonomy is elevated, or complicated – or somethinged, anyway – by the fact that there is no determinism around gender or sexuality: there are male omegas who have self-lubricating anuses and can get pregnant; a fertile pack might build from a monogamous, male-on-male alpha-beta relationship. It’s a complete, self-contained world, by which I mean, just say out loud to someone: “Have you heard of the Omegaverse?” and you will get one of two possible reactions: blank; or: “Huh, that is not a question I expected from you, old-timer.”
About 300 pages into Heat Clinic, I noticed that my husband was getting annoyed, which he signalled by being annoying. He kept calling it my “furry porn” and apprising me of its whereabouts (“Your furry porn is in the living room”). I kept saying: “Furries are people with an interest in anthropomorphised animals. These aren’t furries – they’re humans. They just happen to rut in packs.” (If you are looking for furry pornography, I recommend Her Furry Lover, by Elijah Heartilly.) Then he’d go off and find someone on Reddit explaining why the Omegaverse was originally the creation of a furry with no self-awareness.
When I stopped to consider properly why he had a stick up his backside, I realised he was behaving a lot like I would if he sat around reading pornography all day. Which raises the question: why would I mind that? Is that just what couples do reflexively: shut down each other’s erotic imagination until they are reassured that neither is thinking about sex ever? “I think you should read more porn,” I told him. “I think you should read more porn,” he replied.
Back to that queer romcom The Stars Too Fondly. I need to offer an un-trigger warning and I’m sorry if this is a bit of a spoiler: it’s not unusual in a romance for no sex at all to happen until the last 10 pages. In this, a mashup of “forced proximity” romance (the characters are trapped on an accidental space mission) and “Stem-romance” (AKA “scientists get horny too”), I got to the closing chapters with the love interest still a hologram. They cannot have sex! Science is very clear on this. It was a pretty chaste, extremely wholesome, rather nerdy experience, with a lot more information on dark energy and how it messed with alternative universes than you would expect.
Just two books in, I had noticed a fascinating through-line that marked out everything I read: an escape from the constraint of capital, of making rent. Whether you are in space and all the food is 3D printed, or you are in a wood and faeries leave you food, or you are an omega and all you are hungry for is sperm (which you can definitely get for free), often the ways in which you don’t have to worry about money are themselves lasciviously described.
A decade ago, there was a dispiriting cascade in the Fifty Shades series, where the object of desire went from the billionaire himself (in book one) to all the MacBooks he could buy (by book three). “Fifty Shades kicked off an era of billionaire romances, which is kind of over, because we’ve realised there’s no such thing as an ethical billionaire,” says Koch. In its place, there is what feels like a concerted effort to separate the loving and sexual self from the market, and the tawdriness of hustle, altogether.
On those faeries: “romantasy” is huge. In sales, of course – Rebecca Yarros has sold 3m copies of her seven books and has more than 350,000 followers on TikTok – but also literally: the books could give you RSI.
Yarros’s novel Fourth Wing is basically “Dragons Jilly Cooper” – exactly the level of steaminess (medium), with exactly the same fundamental worldview: that life is full of gorgeous people who adore each other, and if they are ever in a bad mood, that is fine – it just makes them hotter. “The beautiful, easygoing smile that’s starred in way too many of my fantasies is far from the scowl that purses his mouth, and everything about him seems a little … harder,” runs a classic line from the empowered-yet-relatable female narrator, Violet.
It felt like young adult fiction. Violet is a fish out of water, forced by her narcissistic mother into a fiendishly perilous military role when she would have been much better suited to scribing, but she smashes it, and she is gorgeous, and her enemy is gorgeous. I even kind of had the hots for the psycho who tries to kill her for no reason at the start.
The bestselling romantasy authors are overwhelmingly women. TikTok and GoodReads users hypothesise a lot about whether this accounts for the relative authenticity of female protagonists’ strength, agency and desire. Instinctively, I resist the generalisation, then remember that Reddit thread, titled She Breasted Boobily Down the Stairs, where users share examples of male authors – from the highbrow to the low, Nausea to Game of Thrones – writing women. “The woman was still feeling her bosom existing in her blouse, thinking: ‘My tits, my lovely fruits,’ smiling mysteriously,” wrote Sartre. George RR Martin has a character remembering her deceased sister as “slender, high-breasted”.
You can see how men who think that is what women are thinking would find writing sex scenes incredibly hard. I guess you could counter this by asking why women would be able to write men any better. But then you would trick me into saying, honestly, what I think, which is that women notice things.
Sarah J Maas is, if anything, a bigger hitter than Yarros, and the main purveyor of the subgenre “faerie porn”. Empire of Storms, part of her Throne of Glass series, has sold 25m copies. While she is not on TikTok, others have created almost 650,000 pieces of #sarahjmaas content. If I tried to describe the plot, between tribes of multispecies compadres, plucky heroines going it alone and their hunters, faeries (AKA fairies), of course, and gods, I would make it sound insanely hard to follow, when it is not. I think I would classify Maas as erotica, although most people don’t: character is built through the body and its external relationships, but that doesn’t always mean sex – and where it does it’s not always titillating. Faeries are complicated and so are humans.
I should have started my fortnight with trad romantic fare: coming after all these fireworks, it was bound to be an anticlimax. The modern romance-reader loves this stuff – the friends-to-lovers, the enemies-to-lovers, the suspense-and-thriller romance.
In 2022, the prolific Colleen Hoover held six of the top 10 spots on the New York Times bestseller list. I have never been able to stand Hoover – it’s ball-rolling-down-a-hill fiction, you can see what is coming from space, and there aren’t even any holograms to cheer things up – but I did plough through her novel Verity to check that was still true (it was). The heroine, tasked with finishing a thriller the original author of which was left brain dead after an accident, learns some chilling details from Verity’s diary – was it an accident, reader? – but much more about Mr Verity’s penis, like, absolutely tons. I found it a bit melodramatic, one way or another.
Koch namechecks Emily Henry as the other huge romance seller. I read You and Me on Vacation (friends-to-lovers), essentially that evergreen idea (One Day, anyone?) where two friends navigate each other’s romantic tribulations before they realise, duh, it’s actually they who are in love. Too sweet for my tastes, I’m afraid.
Koch has noticed a couple of generational changes. The first predictable: “The younger somebody is, within reason, the less shame, stigma and narrowness they have around sex and romance.” The other is fascinating: “Millennial and gen Z readers worry way less about whether they can relate to the characters,” she says. “I see that much more in boomer and gen X readers: they can’t relate to a character because they’re gay, or they’re black. But it doesn’t seem to matter if they’re a werewolf.”
That is so true. Sem, by Cora Rose, has no sales figures, being self-published. It’s held up as a prime example of size-difference pornography – yup, exactly as it sounds, Sem is a giant and Magnus is tiny, and they shouldn’t get it on, but they do, and then that carries on, for ages. I would have assumed, being straight and not having a huge-tiny kink, male-on-male erotica would leave me cold, but that is not how erotic writing works. You don’t insert yourself into the scene like you are playing with a doll’s house.
If you want to understand how the shame has been stripped out of romantic and erotic fiction, you have to figure out how it got there in the first place. In romance, highbrow and middlebrow authors don’t like to be genre-fied. I would say the Girl at Lion d’Or, for example, is one of the most formally perfect romantic novels I’ve ever read, but Sebastian Faulks would probably have a cow if he found his book in Ripped Bodice. So, the genre became the realm of writers who didn’t think of themselves as literary – Mills & Boon, Barbara Cartland, even Jilly Cooper, were all characterised by an unprecious, churn-’em-out reputation. The democratisation of the academe (yes, I do mean TikTok) scotched all that, finding authors such as Madeline Miller (Circe, Song of Achilles), hashtagging them #romancebooks or #spicybooktok and destroying previously accepted distinctions between trash and treasure.
There is also an interiority to romance-reading. New York magazine’s the Cut, which loves smut, published a list of reading accessories, which was entirely pamper items: candles, bathrobes, slippers. In the same way that culture scorns single women who keep cats and enjoy their own company, or that new mothers get so much opprobrium for walking around, plainly in love with their baby and not caring about their own appearance, society demands women to be always looking outwards, always waiting. If she is at home reading The Duke and I (a Bridgerton novel, by Julia Quinn, “regency romance”), she is not suitor-ready.
Erotica is different, as it is considered by definition unliterary. Susan Sontag describes why this is in her essay The Pornographic Imagination. First, she writes, attempting to arouse a reader is meant to be “antithetical to the complex function of literature”; second, pornographic writing lacks a beginning-middle-end structure; third, “its aim is to inspire a set of nonverbal fantasies in which language plays a debased … role”; fourth, “it disdains fully-formed persons [and] is oblivious to the question of motives”. Sontag carefully dismantles all that using The Story of O, Story of the Eye and the troubling She-Devils by the Belgian writer Pierre Louÿs. But just using Koch’s definition, we can see that erotica can be literature: character is established through sex in the Fifty Shades novels, but also in All Fours, the latest book by Miranda July.
And, in the end, it doesn’t matter, because if there is one thing that has come to pass, maybe through TikTok, maybe just by the march of time, it is that readers no longer care about respectability, literary or any other kind. They don’t care if they are reading an Omegaverse novel in public; they don’t even care if someone mistakenly thinks it’s furry pornography. They don’t care if what they are reading could be mistaken for YA and they are not young. They don’t care if the patriarchy thinks they are silly. Which means, in the publishing world of – yup, I’m still calling it this – smut, pretty much anything could happen.