Most people know the term “fanfiction.” The definition is in the name: Fan-fiction. Fanfiction is fiction written by fans, stories that explore the unshown aspects of a work of media. Fanfiction comes in all shapes and sizes, and exists for even the most minute fandoms. Movies, TV shows, books, comics, sports, podcasts, two gas stations on the same corner — they all can inspire fanfiction from their audience. These “fics” can explore scenes between characters, alternate timelines, or even what would happen if two or more fandoms were to cross over and meet each other. What I want to explore in this article is the concept of “smut.”
Smut is defined by Merriam Webster as “obscene language or matter” and is colloquially known as sexually explicit literary material. Smut can appear in fanfiction, and in any media. In published literary works, smut is sometimes also called “spice.” In TV shows or movies, it is more common to refer to smut scenes as pornographic. (Note: Smut in visual media will be referred to from here on as “pornographic material” and porn will be “porn”).
So now that everyone is on the same page about what smut is, what is it for? Well primarily, it’s for pleasure. It’s something to entice the reader, and turn them on. Smut and porn are very similar in this regard, and there are some books that can be classified as outright porn. The difference between porn and smut is a very fine line, and it mainly comes down to how the plot is used in any given media. In porn, the plot is used entirely to justify sexual activity. It is a tool used to keep the audience’s attention, rather than something meaningful. With smut, the smut is an addition to the plot. There is a fully fleshed out story with plot points, unrelated to sexual activities.
Smut is also usually more realistic than porn, or at least, consistent within its setting. While we can’t necessarily achieve the mind blowing orgasms that are depicted when someone meets and finally has sex with their “Fated Mate” (a common trope) but smut can be useful when learning about sex. That may sound a little alarming at face value, but let me walk you through this.
Sex education in the U.S. is incredibly lacking. According to a study published in 2025 on the state of sexual education in the U.S., only 19 states “required sexual education to be medically accurate in any topic area, although 5 only required medical accuracy for specific topics, such as abstinence, HIV, or contraception failure rates.” These findings show that even if there is some sort of sex education in K-12 schools, it’s not necessarily accurate. Not to mention private schools do not fall under these requirements.
This lack of information, and sometimes blatant misinformation surrounding sexual activities leaves people lost, confused, and can lead to dangerous accidents, just because they don’t know better — things like STIs and teen pregnancies. It can also mean people push their bodies or their minds into sex sooner than they want to, because they don’t know a healthy way to go about sex.
Smut can be supplemental knowledge for sex education, but only if you are reading a lot of it, and a lot of different variations of it. Picture a graph for a second: if you put all of the smut scenes from books, movies, and fanfiction onto this graph, ranked by how healthy the relationship is and how realistic the sex is, you’ll start to visualize a trend line. The more smut you read, the easier it becomes to reconcile the normal and the absurd. This trend line, or reconciliation, can provide a really good concept of what healthy and realistic sex looks like. On the other hand, if you are only reading one genre of smut, take werewolf smut for example, you’ll get a really skewed view of what sex looks like, but you might also get a really good view of how a healthy relationship works. By combining that with another genre, your picture of a healthy sexual relationship can start to stabilize. Additionally, smaller details are commonly left out of smut, like the reapplication of lube during sex, and these are things that must be learned either through experience or advice from the people in your life or other trustworthy sources.
Smut and fanfiction are also useful for minorities to find representation in sex. Porn has no trouble showing gay and lesbian sex in addition to straight sex, but it’s a little hard to find anything with more nuance than that. Because the smut is just an additional plot point in a larger plot, it’s easier to find that nuance, where maybe one character is transgender or has a disability. It’s a lot easier to tailor smut to what an individual wants to read because there is so much more variation in what the characters can do.
This leads us to the biggest flaw of using smut as a supplement to sex ed: it is not confined to realism, so sometimes things that are achieved in smut are not functionally possible in reality, and can be dangerous to try. I speak specifically to the BDSM category of smut here. For BDSM, reading fanfiction is not usually enough to understand the concepts of what’s happening in a situation like it is for regular sex. Even something as well-known as choking or being choked during sex can turn dangerous if not done correctly, and it’s impossible to learn how to do something correctly from a source that will sometimes leave out key details on how to do it. Fanfiction can be a great starting point for what to look for if you’re interested in things, but it is advisable to go search up more trustworthy sites for more intense sexual acts.
Smut can be a learning tool, just like any other. It should not be the main tool, but can be an effective source of supplemental knowledge. It can provide a baseline of what healthy and safe sex looks like, more than porn can, and it can inspire curiosity around the topic of sex and relationships. It also provides minority representation and examples of how they can enjoy their bodies with partners, regardless of gender or ability. Smut is, at the end of the day, for the people, by the people.
