OM: Emily Writes is Obsessed With Smut
"It's an adult choose your own adventure, and every time I'm choosing the same: I want dudes f**king and falling in love, and a happy ever after."
*CW for descriptions of a sexual nature
Welcome all to the first ever instalment of Obsessions Monthly, where I interview famous / hilarious / cool people about the things they’re obsessed with.
This month, Emily Writes is spilling the tea on her secret/not so secret obsession with smut (mostly gay, always ridiculous, often hot).
Skim down to get straight to that!
First, a bit about why I’m focusing on Obsessions.
Obsessions are a universal experience: Everyone’s spent too much time obsessing over something - whether a crush, a hobby, a work problem or an awkward interaction.
Obsessions are driven by the brain’s reward system, the need for control, and the desire to escape… and so the things people choose to obsess over can be deeply revealing.
And finally, who doesn’t love to learn about random & fascinating things! If an interesting somebody is fascinated enough by something to spend hours and hours mulling over it, chances are there’s something interesting in there for all of us.
So without further ado, let’s get into it!
Emily Writes is Obsessed with Smut
Emily Writes sits on her living room couch in front of an impressive-looking bookshelf. The spines showcase a who’s who of popular writers from here and abroad: novels, short stories, poetry collections. Beautiful, important writing. The kind that make “Best of” lists and take out top awards.
But her Kindle tells a different story - and this one is more honest.
There’s Tink by Emmy Saunders, a poly romance about a twink called Tink (lol). There’s Necessary Evils by Onley James, a series which focuses on seven adopted gay assassins (!!), and A Forbidden Rumspringa by Keira Andrews, which Emily succinctly describes as, “Two Amish guys living in an Amish community who fuck in a barn.”
These are the books Emily actually reads, somewhat compulsively.
They’re ridiculous, predictable and horny, and they’re also therapeutic, a form of escapism that completely captures her attention, allowing her to leave the world - with all its pains and demands - behind.
“I would say that probably the only respite I have in my life is these books,” she tells me.
What is it about smut that captures her attention?
How did her obsession with these books start?
What are her favourites, and why?
Emily Writes is a very busy human.
As well as her popular newsletter Emily Writes Weekly, she’s an author, parent, community organiser and relentless advocate for the causes she believes in. She’s also frequently the target of enraged trolls and keyboard misogynists, who love to hate a loud-mouthed woman.
It’s no wonder she sometimes struggles to turn her brain off.
“I will lay down in bed and just be thinking about all the communities that I'm part of, the people I love, the people I care for… I feel directly responsible for everything wrong in the world,” she says.
Looking for ways to turn off, Emily tried “fluffy media”: stuff like reality TV that doesn’t require too much brain power, and where the stakes aren’t too high. But she’d just find herself half-watching, while the other half of her brain scrolled her email and various feeds, boosting worthy campaigns and setting up new fundraisers and events.
And then her bestie Gem introduced her to A Forbidden Rumspringa, the first in a series about forbidden Amish love.
“I just thought the premise was so hysterical!” Emily tells me, “I was like, I'll just read it to do a funny review on it, you know?”
But when she started reading the book, something magical happened. The world melted away.
“I read it for like two hours. And I've never been able to turn my brain off for that long in my life,” she says, “I was in that barn, Melody!”
In A Forbidden Rumspringa and other smut, Emily found a world where nothing was too complicated, where love always wins, and where the misogyny and vitriol that takes up so much space in her real life was completely absent.
“I can't go a day in my life without having an email or a comment on Instagram or Facebook … using a misogynistic slur or attack against me,” she says.
“I have to have one place where I go where it's light, where it's easy, where I don't have to work so hard.
When I open these books, there's no misogyny… There's no homophobia, there's no biphobia, there's no transphobia. It's healing! It's like going into this other world that is not the world we live in. And that's what’s so comforting for my brain.”
The other part that’s comforting, and which a lot of romance / spicy romance / “smut” readers love about these genres, is the use of tropes and themes, which allow readers to pick up a book knowing almost exactly what they’re getting, even while actual storylines differ.
Hardcore romance readers have a whole glossary of terms memorised, like HEA (happily ever after), F2L (friends to lovers), CNC (consensual non-consent), FF, MM and MF (female-female, male-male and male-female romance), which help them to find books that tickle their fancy.
“It's like an adult choose your own adventure, and just every time I'm choosing the same adventure: I want dudes fucking and falling in love, and happily ever after,” says Emily.
Emily identifies as queer, and is attracted to people of all genders. She thinks part of the reason she reads mostly MM/gay male smut is because with male characters, she’s not as likely to slip into the character on the page. She doesn’t have to get too emotionally involved, she can simply sit back and watch.
“Also we are yet to find good names for pussies,” she adds.
While the sex is hot, she’s not necessarily reading it to get turned on - though it can be a portal to that.
“I think it's a brain turn off first. And that allows me to get into a space of being turned on.
You're just so far away from the day to day of caregiving, of looking after your community, of making sure that… you're volunteering enough, that you're giving enough, that you're meeting your work deadlines.
A self-lubing arsehole* is as far as you can get from day to day.”
The self-lubing arsehole* is a reference to one world Emily dipped into, called the omegaverse: A subgenre of erotic fiction where humans are divided into a wolf-like hierarchy with dominant "alphas", neutral "betas", and submissive "omegas" (and which acts as a carrier vessel for MPreg, another subgenre where men can become pregnant). Omegas have “slick” glands, which produce lubricant when they’re in heat, allowing for easier and less painful sex.
Butthole pre cum, basically.
“The first time I read it I was like what the fuck!… And then fucking eight chapters in you’re like ‘Oh yeah! He loves it! Get him pregnant!” Emily laughs.
The omegaverse was a fascinating side expedition, but it’s not Emily’s natural home in smut. To find her faves, she’ll usually buy and sample a handful (it’s helpful that these books are usually very cheap to buy on an eReader) and then when she finds one that hits the spot, she devours the series and sometimes the spin-offs, before heading into that author’s back catalogue. Which is usually hefty.
“When you find an author you like in these genres, usually they've written 30 books,” she says.
Emily’s current fave is Emmy Saunders, a self-proclaimed “lover of love” with a soft spot for writing MM fiction. Emily discovered Emmy through her Plum Valley Cowboys series (“Come fall in love with Plum Valley, where the rolling hills are dotted with cattle and sweet-as-molasses men!”) There, Emily met Wyatt, who’d been pining over the same guy for decades, and Hawthorne, who was desperate to lose his virginity to a visiting porn star named Silver.
Emily then followed Saunders to the Elite 8 Studios series, a spinoff where porn stars get their own happy endings. Her favourites are Malibu, an age-gap romance between an older client and a younger escort, and Tink (the twink) who becomes embroiled in a MMM three-way.
But while most of these books lean into the ridiculous, never choosing to explain - for example - why every cowboy in Plum Valley is gay, or how a gay assassin can even fall in love if he’s truly a psychopath (“You stop being a psychopath with the love of the right man!” says Emily), they can also be really touching.
As far fetched as it might sound: even healing.
A Forbidden Rumspringer made Emily cry, in part because of how beautifully it dealt with the trauma of a sex-negative, religious upbringing. The one she’s reading now, Courageous Hearts, is an “MX romance between a man and the enby he adores, with … a very HEA”
“The premise is ridiculous… But the way they talk so openly about, like, ‘how can I love you and meet you where you are… and make sure that you're safe?’..
… We live in a world where trans people are never safe. So when I read these books, it's this hope for all of the people that I love who have been let down.
It's wholesome and healing.
And hot.”
Like with audio erotica, spicy romance can also bring another benefit to its readers: introducing them to things they might not have realised they were into.
Whether that’s self-lubing arseholes, polyamory or dom-sub dynamics, books are a safe place to explore the boundaries of desire. If anything gets too much, you can stop reading. Being exposed to something that wasn’t your thing on the page is usually less jarring than with video porn, and the handy directory of acronyms can also help you to avoid anything you know you won’t enjoy.
Whether smut, romance and spicy romance are your thing or not, it’s clear these books aren’t going anywhere.
Romance is the highest-earning genre of fiction, generating more than 1.4 billion dollars a year. BookTok has boosted a lot of different genre - but none more than romance. While these books used to be sit hidden in the bedside table drawers of middle aged housewives, now their covers are shared proudly on the social media accounts of young women around the world.
And it makes sense.
In a world that’s increasingly hard to understand, where just getting by is a struggle for the majority, where desire - especially the desire of women and gender minorities - is treated with contempt, and where too many are routinely denied the human right to just live their fucking lives, it’s not surprising that so many are turning to uncomplicated narratives where the main characters always end up happily in love.
And life is noisy. Relentless. We’re constantly bombarded by a slew of things all demanding our immediate attention. Any escape that truly blocks out that noise, if only for an hour or two, is a valid one.
If that place also happens to include “a fisting scene so wholesome it’ll make you cry*”, you can count me in.
Talk again soon friends! If you have your own horny recommendations, please:
Melody xx
*that’s in this one, if you’re curious