By Tia Zeinab | Staff Writer
Eroticism and pornography have become a widespread pandemic in media, whether it’s on Twitter or genuine porn sites, the lack of censorship across all media platforms is highly evident. Literature, novels, and written media have not been exempted from this pandemic. The first erotic novel ever written was “Fanny Hill” by John Cleland, which took on pedophilia, prostitution, and child abuse and was published as early as 1748. Everything slowly started going downhill after that. People grew obsessed with porn, more specifically, porn books. They’re currently everywhere, and it would be challenging to find a romance book – even mystery books – without a few chapters of explicit sex scenes.
Sometime in the late 2000s, an application called “Wattpad” came out and took the literature world by storm. Wattpad is an app where anyone can write and publish anything they want, but you won’t find previously published books on there. Wattpad was all for the creativity of the youth, and it valued the expression of the self with words. With the rise of Wattpad, there was also a significant rise in fanfictions. In fact, Fifty Shades of Grey is a fanfiction that El James wrote for the characters of Twilight Bella Swan, and Edward Cullen where – as you can imagine – Edward is what we now know as Christian Grey and Bella is Anastasia Steele.
Fanfiction became extremely popular, and everyone was writing, or even drawing fictional characters in bizarre scenarios (this is a nod at Reddit Harry Potter fans) or even real people in highly well-written fanfiction. It was all in the light heart of fangirls and fanboys exploring their creative writing abilities and showing them to the world of other fangirls and fanboys. It was all fun and games until these girls and boys weren’t so little anymore and started getting slightly more explicit in their writings. A small peck turned into heavy soul kisses, holding hands turned into oral sex, and hugging became making love. This genre of fan fiction has a name to it: smut. Smut is the genre of stories that contains sexual material and explicit content, and the world of Wattpad ran with it to the very core.
My earliest smut encounter was the famous Harry Styles fan fiction “After” by Anna Todd. While it may seem like the average fan fiction where Harry Styles plays the character of a dark, mysterious, and very disrespectful man who falls in love with the damsel in distress, the purest girl ever, the lamb in a field of wolves, this fanfiction had extremely detailed sexual chapters. Besides the sex chapters, this fan fiction roped around the toxic male arc who changes his whole life for a woman, but he drags her through hell to get there. The lovers in the story had constant fights where he would turn into an alcoholic and abusive boyfriend who only communicated by screaming and breaking any object around him. Then they made up by sleeping together.
Because I, and many other girls, were presumably very young while reading it, it burnt into our brains that this is what true love looked like to us: screaming, fighting, breaking down, and then making love, and all’s right in the world. With this idea engraved in our minds, we started looking for love like that, only to get severely mistreated, so instead, we looked for it in books. “Enemies to lovers” trope was most likely a favorite, but it had to contain smut. Why must it contain smut? Why did we, as an entire generation, engrave porn in literature? Books, poetry, and novels should be an escape from the toxic epidemic of porn; why did it follow us to the world of literature? This is not in any way an attack on smut. I still appreciate something spicy in a book occasionally and when it makes sense to the narrative, but this is a direct attack on the way that we cannot read a book without expecting a hot sex scene from chapter one, or else most of us will get bored.
In a nutshell, this is just to say that we should all collectively agree to put Colleen Hoover down and pick up Khaled Hosseini, an author who spoke on politics and romance. While we all might have our preferences, I think there should be a balance between erotic books and non-erotic novella.