Romantasy has exploded at precisely the moment the internet has made sexual curiosity feel complicated. Pornography has become entangled with proof-of-age checks and a willingness to hand over your face to a database before you’ve even taken your trousers off.
Despite no fairies being harmed in the making of “fairy smut”, this subgenre of erotica is treated like a public contagion. Fairy smut is a derisive label often slapped onto the rapidly expanding genre of romantasy (romantic fantasy literature), but with more racy scenes. It was blasted into the mainstream by BookTokkers raving about Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) and Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing in 2023.
Romantasy’s roots lie in the dark, unhinged corners of early 2010s fanfiction websites like Wattpad. In this digital wild west, you could stumble upon anything from high-concept fantasy to alternate universes where your parents sell you to One Direction to be some kind of adopted sex slave. This was a space defined by raw, amateurish and often deranged yearning.
The sex recession of the post-pandemic digital age has gone so far that imagining a winged fae warrior’s “velvet-wrapped steel” (an actual ACOTAR quote) is more promising than opening up Feeld. While some women turn to depressingly swiping their way to brainrot, others are devouring sagas where five-book arcs and 600-page installments are the baseline. That may not explain the genre’s success on its own, but it does make the timing difficult to ignore.
But when millions of women all decide to like something, there’s a formulaic routine: it’s deemed an embarrassment. It’s a cycle we know off by heart from pop and rom-coms. Interests tolerated as guilty pleasures in private are treated as a public intellectual enemy the second women start enjoying them out loud.
Gentlemen’s hobbies such as superheroes, first-person shooters and football reveal a double standard. The discomfort surrounding romantasy is rooted in a long history of selective cultural snobbery. We live in a landscape where “lowbrow” culture is tolerated when the audience is male. We treat superhero franchises as cultural milestones and violent video games continue to be marketed to young men with few being especially concerned about their intellectual consequences. Even the ritual of sports is viewed as an essential social bond rather than a trivial obsession. When blokes lose sleep over a ref apparently sabotaging Erling Haaland’s goal, it’s labelled “passion”. Women congregating around a shared fictional world, however, is pigeonholed as a symptom of cultural decline.
That double standard follows us into the bedroom. Male consumption of pornography has long been treated as a standard, if occasionally problematic, rite of passage even as the clinical evidence of its desensitising effects continues to mount.
A man can spend an evening scrolling on the “barely legal” section of Pornhub and it’s regarded as an entirely unremarkable way to spend his time. A woman reads six hundred pages of fairy sex and suddenly there’s a national conversation about declining literary standards. This isn’t a neat division between men watching porn and women reading books. Thirsty-five per cent of British women consume pornography regularly, according to a YouGov poll. What’s striking is the different cultural response when women’s erotic interests become visible in a form that is unapologetically theirs, particularly when those interests have produced one of the most commercially successful literary trends of the past decade.
To be clear, none of this is a swipe at pornography or the people who make it. If anything, the explosion of OnlyFans suggests we’re becoming increasingly more thoughtful about how we get our rocks off, giving consumers a way to verify they’re paying creators directly while allowing many performers greater control over their own labour. But that growing ethical awareness has arrived alongside a much stranger shift: the internet has made consuming sexual content feel increasingly mediated, regulated and oddly bureaucratic for creators and audiences alike. There is a specific 2026 brand of surreal indignity that comes with having to look yourself governmentally in the eye, uploading a passport or performing a biometric face scan just to log into a porn site. It turns a private moment of horniness into a data-mining operation.
Choosing to read smut in this climate is less about low-brow entertainment and more about reclaiming a private, unmonitored space. While visual platforms have turned sexual consumption into a bureaucratic ordeal, the book remains a sanctuary of ghost-mode intimacy.
In a world of podcast bros who refer to women as “females” and queue to sleep with Bonnie Blue, a vampire who waits five centuries for your hand in marriage seems like the only adult in the room. The lusted-after werewolf archetype is wildly more complex than boys unwilling to provide the labour of pursuit beyond a “wya?” DM. Dating has become increasingly transactional and we are seeing dismal comedy in watching men mock “unrealistic” fiction while they inhabit a reality that is spectacularly broken.
You don’t have to audit a washy line of consent when the entire experience is generated within the safety of your own mind. As one respondent in my survey noted, the power of the book is that it allows the reader to “visualise the surroundings, the vibes, and most importantly, the feelings”. It’s the architecture of desire without the metadata. Fairy smut is a medium where a “forbidden touch of the hands” feels far sexier than a high-definition porno precisely because your own imagination is doing the heavy lifting.
If the cultural gatekeepers are worried about the intellectual consequences of a few wet-fingered chapters, they are conspicuously silent about the increasingly grim experience of digital consumption everywhere else. We are currently living through a quiet, mass-scale migration. Women aren’t fleeing from sex, they are opting out of a visual medium that is becoming harder to enjoy without an accompanying sense of ethical or digital dread. Instead, they are choosing the sanctuary of the page.
It’s a massive, untapped appetite for long-form narrative and one that people are desperate to dismiss because it isn’t sanctioned by a male-centric definition of prestige. But the transition from niche to global powerhouse has been complicated. Janice, a 26-year-old writer, recalls reading A Court of Thorns and Roses as a teen, sitting in a church pew, splitting her attention between the vicar’s sermon and several pages devoted to a “throbbing member”.
That initial, illicit electricity is what brought the genre into the light, but Janice warns that the industry is now cannibalising that magic. “I don’t have a vendetta against any particular genre,” she insists. “My issue is that romantasy has become an avenue for some cynical publishing habits. Publishers seem to use its popularity as justification for lowering standards, then present that as simply giving readers what they want.”
For Janice, the industry’s approach to the genre reveals a deeper, uncomfortable irony. “Genre fiction has long been dismissed as ‘low-brow’,” she notes. “And there’s undoubtedly a misogynistic dimension to the way romance and female-dominated readerships are treated. But I sometimes think the industry’s response has been equally patronising.”
She continues: “They’re becoming really comfortable with assuming that readers will prioritise hackneyed dialogue, plot cliches and aesthetics over strong prose and originality. In trying to legitimise these readerships, parts of the industry seem to have settled for flattering them. That’s a different thing entirely.”
By choosing to pathologise the escape rather than interrogate the reality these books are responding to, we aren’t just critiquing art. We’re policing the boundaries of whose joy is considered intellectually valid. In doing so, we’ve also become strangely incurious, far more interested in asking what fairy smut is doing to women than what it might be doing for them.
Romantasy is the sound of women reclaiming their own heads and finding imagination in a world that has become remarkably unimaginative about their needs.
