Spicy Novels: Is Smut Bad For You?

EROTIC LITERATURE IS RARELY STIGMATIZED IN SOCIETY. BUT CAN IT HAVE SIMILAR NEGATIVE EFFECTS AS MAINSTREAM PORN?

I was just walking down an aisle at my local Walmart when I came across the book section. Being a book lover, I stopped to look—only to realize I should probably keep walking.

It was a shelf entirely devoted to romance and erotica novels.

Walking out of that Walmart, I found myself thinking: If that was a shelf for Playboy magazines, things wouldn’t go as well. And that got me wondering.

So I got home and started Google searching. (After making sure SafeSearch was on)

Over 80% of written erotica readers are women. No surprise there. The way I see it, written erotica (or smut) is to women what visual porn is to men. There are definitely overlaps, but I think this generalization holds up.

But it’s quite obvious that Playboy magazines and erotic novels aren’t stigmatized at the same level. So that begs the question: Why?

Additionally, could smut consumption have similar negative effects as porn consumption?

Let’s see what Google says.

Difference in research and coverage

Right off the bat, very limited academic studies have been conducted on smut consumption, let alone potential negative effects on the brain and relationships. Most studies in this area are focused on mainstream porn and men; even the growing number of porn-watching women hasn’t been looked at extensively.

Thus, I’ll have to turn to blog posts and non-academic articles. There, I had another interesting observation: the prevalence of writers arguing for positive benefits from reading erotica. From the first few pages of Google, there are more articles framing smut positively than negatively; and, the percentage of pro-smut articles is noticeably higher than that of pro-porn articles (yes, those exist).

So not only is there a huge difference in research and coverage, but there’s a difference in sentiment as well. The pro-smut argument generally takes the stance that reading erotica “empowers women to be in touch with their sexuality.” Okay cool, I guess.

Anyway, erotic novels are generally deemed harmless, especially when compared to mainstream porn. It’s more acceptable for a woman to be reading Fifty Shades of Grey on the train than it is for a man to be perusing a spicy magazine.

Obviously, we’re not exactly comparing apples to apples: the porn industry is vastly different from the publishing industry; real people are involved in the former, and human trafficking and abuse are part of its underbelly. So by comparison, smut is a lot more acceptable, and that can be one reason for the difference in levels of stigmatization.

But it isn’t really the reality of human trafficking that is the reason we don’t put Playboy magazines in every bookstore, is it? It’s about what they do to their viewers. And when we look at that specifically, porn and smut aren’t really that different.

Negative effects?

Turns out, as pointed out by the few articles that actually warn against (excessive) smut consumption, reading erotica can have similar negative effects as mainstream porn.

Just like porn, smut can:

• Give unrealistic expectations about relationships
• Objectify men
• Create a dependence on fantasy for arousal
• Form an addiction

Just as porn can give men unrealistic expectations of their partners (whether in body or in skill) and objectify women, smut can give women unrealistic expectations too and objectify men.

“But Nathanael, smut doesn’t objectify men! The stories describe their words, thoughts, and feelings, on top of their physicality. They’re not the same!” Have you considered that maybe you can objectify someone’s emotions too? Objectification is using someone instrumentally for one’s own gratification, so when one is encouraged to use someone else’s thoughts and emotions for one’s own pleasure, that is a form of objectification too.

Sexual objectification is also the demand that the other person perform to the standard of one’s own choosing, which smut definitely does.

Due to the lack of academic research on the topic, we have only anecdotal evidence to suggest that written erotica can cause women to struggle with their relationships and addictions as well. Take this one for example:

A woman wrote to Fight The New Drug (an organization dedicated to fighting porn addiction) about her struggle with “written porn”. Here’s an excerpt from her letter:

I started my little research being critical of how written erotica doesn’t get the same stigmatization as mainstream porn. But as I began reading stories like these, I became more sympathetic, because women can struggle with smut just as much as men do with visual porn, and the guilt that brings.

Another woman wrote to FTND, describing how she would “stay home ‘sick’ so I could read, uninterrupted,” and during a family vacation, “I found myself sneaking away, hiding in the bathroom, skipping nights out, skipping dinner, avoiding family time, etc. just so I could go read sexually explicit material. I was desperate for help.”

She wrote, “I want to say one thing. Porn is not just limited to photos. Erotica addictions are a very real and serious thing. But if I can overcome it, so can you. If I can kick it, anybody can.”

In conclusion…

I guess I have the answer to my original question. Written erotica is less stigmatized than mainstream porn, but it has similar dangers.

But the answer isn’t to increase stigmatization. It’s to increase awareness of the dangers of both and the struggles of those who consume them.

Sexual content created for the isolated gratification of an individual detracts from what makes sex the most fulfilling: focusing on the love each partner has for the other.

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Stay purposeful.

– Nathanael

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