A short history of smut (and why women's desire has always been 'too much')

The first BookTok bestseller list has landed, and female-authored romance sweeps the board. Heated Rivalry, Fourth Wing, ACOTAR and the Boys of Tommen series all feature, part of a surge in ‘Romance & Saga’ book sales which helped UK fiction revenue reach £1bn for the first time ever. While they might not be considered ‘smut’ by everyone (definitions vary a lot) they’re the figureheads of a booming trade in more explicit, erotic fiction that platform unfiltered female fantasies. Think Butcher & Blackbird, Wolf.e and the recently famed Ice Planet Barbarians.

Sounds like a viral trend, right? Social media fervour, check. Rapid commercial success, check. New authors and titles emerging every day, check. Judgey onlookers decrying the depravity of it, big check, big sigh.

But smut has a storied history going back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Defining the first instance of smut is tricky - applying modern cultural concepts to old or ancient texts is a clumsy venture. But we know for certain that humans have been writing about sex since the 3rd and 2nd millenia BC, when ancient Sumerians wrote poems about Inanna, goddess of war and sex.

In terms of erotic fiction, Daphnis and Chloe often emerges as the first example, written by the mysterious male poet Longus around 2nd century AD. 

This trend continues for centuries, with men authoring and publishing smut for other men, though often at the expense of female characters who were objectified, humiliated and abused. Women’s education and expression has been suppressed and secondary to that of men across many cultures and many different time periods, so their lack of historical representation in smut is no surprise.

That is until the 19th century. Pride & Prejudice provided the blueprint for the modern romance novel, and Jane Eyre caused scandal with its forthright and rebellious heroine. Erotic they were not, but they paved the way for more female authors writing about desire and independence from a woman’s perspective.

They also came at a time when ‘hysteria’ was a common diagnosis for women who didn’t fit rigid Victorian societal norms, and ‘rigorous intellectual study’ and ‘novel reading’ could see your husband or physician commit you to an asylum. Pseudoscience that asserted women and girls who read were diverting vital resources away from their reproductive organs was rife among physicians and popular among the public. Women were meant for domesticity and motherhood, nothing else.

Fast forward to the 1940s, when the world was at war but desire and pleasure still flourished. Anaïs Nin wrote her series of erotic short stories, Little Birds, as part of a group of writers who wrote ‘pornography for a dollar a page.’ Many of the themes drew on Nin’s own sexual experiences which included abuse, and for years she never revisited them. But in re-publishing them decades later, she reflected that, ‘My own voice was not completely suppressed… it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men.’

Then, the publishing names that launched smut into the spotlight: Mills & Boon. Their romance legacy started with their first publication in 1908, took off during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s with authors like Roberta Leigh and Violet Winspear, and reached its pinnacle in the 1980s under the editorial direction of Vivian Stephens. She wanted female protagonists who were over 25, doing normal jobs and living normal lives, but experiencing extraordinary romance and sex. By the mid 1980s, Mills & Boon were selling around 250 million books worldwide. Smut had unashamedly arrived in the open.

Seeing the potential of women writing for other women’s desires, Virgin Books launched its Black Lace imprint in 1993. It only printed erotica written by women, for (heterosexual) women, and started to explore themes such as BDSM, group sex and even the paranormal–the modern precursor to the dark romance genre.

No sooner had Black Lace shuttered in 2010, one book launch sparked the next generation of smut girlies and kink-curious women: Fifty Shades of Grey. Originally a Twilight fanfiction, E.L. James’s dom-sub story unfolded exclusively through the female protagonist’s point of view: the female gaze.

There are vocal and valid critiques of James’s portrayal of kink dynamics in the Fifty Shades series. But it was a game changer for both readers and the romance genre.

Finally, we find ourselves firmly in the BookTok era. No single author or publisher as a driving force, but female readers creating and engaging in smut discourse online. We now have thriving subgenres with feral followings, and widely discussed tropes and microtropes that readers seek out and authors signpost in their marketing. We also have richer representation from Black authors, Brown authors and queer authors, more LGBTQ+ characters and more nuanced views of sex and relationships across cultures and subcultures. 

With smut now firmly established as both cult media and commercial success, what could possibly stand in its way? Sadly and predictably, it is, and always has been, the patriarchy.

The idea that women’s brains and wombs compete for resources is thankfully absent from mainstream medicine and the wider population. But the notion of women’s desires being a threat to the status quo is not. Sparing you a deep dive into the manosphere, dear reader, the sexual double standard continues, and women’s freedom to write, make their own money and express their desires without filter remains incompatible with the patriarchy’s needs–submissive and compliant child-rearers. Truly the stuff of A Handmaid’s Tale.

While the fight isn’t over, we can take strength in the sheer numbers of women across the world writing, reading and engaging with books that centre their pleasure. And we can seek out and revel in the spaces that celebrate smut as self-care, like our very own corner of the internet here at Ladies Who cLit.