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.

Why Smut Is So Hot Right Now

To be clear, smut isn’t a particularly new or newly popular subgenre.…