Its Mama Named it Romance, I’m Calling it Romance

Teal Deer (TL; DR)

Its Mama Named it Romance, I’m Calling it Romance

I’ve had thoughts brewing for a while about how the larger romance reading community categorizes books now. Author Shalaena Medford inspired a coalescing of those wispy musings after observing on Threads that smut is being used in lieu of erotica, as though the latter is “shame-coded.” See, I think shame is actually part of the titillation. Exclusively referring to higher-heat romance as smut allows for that element of “It’s sooooo naughty and we’re not serious about it!” plausible deniability and coyness. All the smut swag popping up everywhere may seem like pride, but it also feels like an announcement of “Look at me! I’m so subversive for reading trashy sex books!” Admitting you read erotica has zero element of taboo and shame in the reading of the genre itself. It’s just “Yeah, I read about sex.” It’s not wrapped up in infantalizing and judgmental language that you can giggle about and wear as a badge.

And the language really is a weird part of this whole phenomenon. Obviously, the word smut has been around forever. There are blogs like The Smut Report still very active! Who amongst us hasn’t said “This book is so smutty!” at some point? But the use of smut as a blanket term for sexual content and—in many cases—as a replacement for genre romance in general, has a lot of pitfalls.

This fairly recent crop of authors and readers loves to shout the word from the rooftops any time there’s sex in a story. (Sidebar: I once saw someone boasting that a book had “smut” in the first chapter and, upon reading the sample, discovered it was terrible sex with some rando that the female lead was suffering through. That’s NOT smut. That’s just lousy sex, FFS.) But then these same people who are slapping the smut label on everything from a two-minute man to a five-man orgy will get huffy when closed-door romance writers use “clean” to describe their own work. “When they call it ‘clean,’ they’re saying sex is dirty!” Folks, I’m going to sit you down and ask you this slowly: What do you think smut means? Or filth?

smut (noun)

1 : matter that soils or blackens

specifically : a particle of soot

2 : any of various destructive diseases especially of cereal grasses caused by parasitic basidiomycetous fungi (order Ustilaginales) and marked by transformation of plant parts into dark masses of spores

also : a fungus causing a smut

3 : obscene language or matter

--Merriam-Webster.com

Fungus is so sexy, isn’t it? In case it’s not obvious, definition 3 derives from definitions 1 and 2. Matter that soils. Meaning it’s dirty. People are using clean because it’s the opposite of the words already being used. That we, as a romance community, chose to normalize as labels. Now, I hate the “clean” descriptor with a fiery passion. But you can’t get mad about clean while gleefully labelling any sexual content as smut or filth. Okay, you can get mad, because obviously people do. It’s pretty silly, though. And hypocritical. At least acknowledge the double standard.

And that’s part of why I’m so irritated by how smut is eclipsing romance in terms of genre distinction. I think it distills an entire spectrum of books down to masturbatory fodder and how edgy it is for cis women to be reading it. Yes, my books are smutty and filthy, but the noun for what I write is romance, because that is the story being told. I’ve seen people say that calling all of these books romance doesn’t tell you anything about the sexual content. Well, neither does smut if some two-pump chump in chapter one counts under that umbrella. The heat and frequency of the banging is not any clearer! But you know what is? The sense of shame, of the forbidden and taboo. The idea that what you’re reading is somehow wrong but you’re doing it anyway. Fiction that gets your rocks off is 100 percent valid—and fiction that’s overarchingly about getting your rocks off, be it physically or mentally, is erotica. (See above.) If there’s a central relationship arc and a happily ever after, guess what that’s called? Erotic romance. Existing labels without any guilt or judgment whatsoever.

After decades of fighting for people to take romance and romance authors seriously, the smutification of the genre feels regressive and dismissive. I had someone tell me that BookTokkers are “reclaiming” the term. This is probably gatekeeping, but you can’t reclaim something on behalf of a community you joined five seconds ago, on behalf of books you just started reading. There’s more than 50 years of stigma to unpack. Decades of debates about sexual agency and feminism and forced seduction and enthusiastic consent. There’s fraught history involving whose voices are allowed to be heard and whether it even counts as a romance if it’s gay. So, yeah, sorry, throwing smut around without all of that context? It’s not “reclaiming it” from those who would use it to censor us. It’s essentially agreeing with them.

Especially now that federal and state governments have broadened the net and the label of pornography is getting slapped on queer citizens—particularly trans people—for just existing. Not to mention queer art, sex work and young adult books. Crowing about smut doesn’t help. It actually operates the same way clean does—as a conservative flag, playing into the idea of sex as something shameful that needs to be hidden and stopped. And, oh, it will be stopped. Make no mistake about that. They are coming for romance in any and every form—while entirely too many people are still tittering and blushing about humans (or vampires, or aliens, or monsters) having sex.

Yeah, I read about sex. I write about it, too. But it’s romance. It’s always romance. There’s no shame in that.