Whether you’re like me and go slack-jawed for Shane and Ilya fanfiction, or prefer to feast on the well-hung faeries, dragons, and wizards of romantasy, or get three orgasms deep in the speculative subgenre that is Omegaverse, your love of smut is far from atypical. The core hashtags #SmutTok and #Smut boasts an impressive 4+ billion views and counting, fanfiction emporium AO3 averages around 125 million page views per day, and romance print sales have more than doubled since 2021, with the genre becoming the leading growth category in the entire U.S. print book market in 2025. But even if you’re fully riding (er, reading) the smut train, you might be wondering why the heck so many of us are head-over-heels for smut right now.
The short answer is that it's seriously improving your sex lives and general well-being; the longer answer is ahead. To be clear, smut isn’t a particularly new or newly popular subgenre. Still, there are reasons smut may be hitting particularly, ahem, hard right now.
For starters, a spicy story is a delicious way to escape whatever fresh hell your real life (or newsfeed) is serving up, Philadelphia-based ASSECT-certified sex therapist and clinical licensed social worker Melanie Greenberg, LCSW, CST, MEd, founder of Pulling Threads Therapy, tells Cosmopolitan. As Greenberg shares, “Starting with fanfiction about Harry and Draco when I was thirteen, smut has been an escape for me,” she says. Smut can also serve as an antidote to stress and its libido-lowering side effects.
Stress is one of the top cock blocks for desire because a whoosh of cortisol (the stress hormone) has been shown to signal to the body that it has more pressing matters to attend to than getting horny. Reading smut, then, may offer a two-for-one punch: Research has linked recreational reading with reduced psychological distress, while all those saucy scenes can help get your erotic wheels turning. As Greenberg puts it, “when stress makes engaging in sexual intimacy off the page feel inaccessible, reading about it can be an accessible way into desire.” There can be shame-squashing benefits to reading smut, too, according to Greenberg.
Indeed, just three states (California, Oregon, and Washington) require comprehensive sex education to be taught in all schools, while 38 other states plus D.C. require schools to emphasize abstinence if any sex ed is provided at all. When information about sex is as absent as a safeword is in 50 Shades—or when all the “education” is basically just a lecture series on why you shouldn’t be having it—it can be easy to internalize the idea that sex and wanting it are shameful, she says. Smut, fortunately, offers a counter-narrative.
This can be especially true for LGBTQ+ people who may have had even fewer opportunities to see their desires represented positively in the sex education and media they grew up with, she says. And, of course, people also read smut for reasons that have zip, zil, zilch to do with the ongoing fever dream of 2026. When you’re reading, it’s just you, yourself, and the words on the page,” which offers a sense of privacy and containment that can make exploring desires that feel new, taboo, or otherwise intimidating feel lower-stakes, says Greenberg.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
