Pornography is a dangerous thing. Despite people defending it as "harmless" over the past few decades, the fact of the matter is that porn rewires your brain in unhealthy ways and effectively makes real-life intimacy more difficult. Moreover, porn gives you a dopamine high that you chase, and as you chase it, your brain requires novelty to get it, leading you down some pretty dark roads.
Porn is one of the largest struggles for men today, but if women think they're free of the pull of pornography, they're not. Their drug is just delivered through a different vein.
Everyone is aware of the cheesy romance novel, usually containing romantic stories that have Fabio Lanzoni on the cover. Women gobbled these books up, but nowadays, these books would be considered boring by today's readers. The "romance" genre has now been replaced with what amounts to pure smut, and like any porn addict, women have ventured into weird territory to get their fix.
The issue is, women are far less apt to recognize it as pornography because it's consumed through a book, giving them the impression that they're just consumers of literature. TikTok is filthy with women using the "#booktock" hashtag, where they openly talk about reading these smut books, give them "spicy ratings," and read passages to viewers to get them interested in reading the book themselves. The community isn't small either. These videos receive millions of views, and as a result, many of these books sell millions of copies.
As YouTuber "The Second Story" points out in her video about this trend, businesses have opened up "romance bookstores" that have effectively become stores where you can consume this brand of porn. Looking at pictures of these shops, they almost look like the exteriors of small-town bakeries.
As she explains, women prefer to have an emotional element to their book, or a way for the reader to feel "empathy" to connect and enjoy what amounts to literary pornography.
You saw this become a huge deal back when "Fifty Shades of Grey" became popular. The book's main character was described as someone an average woman could easily identify with, and as such, everything that happened to the main character was happening to the reader.
I don't think "Fifty Shades" was the gateway drug for every woman, but I do think it was the start of the smut tidal wave that would grow and grow until it reached the heights it's at now. Moreover, just like any porn addiction, women no longer seem content with a confident, rich man being domineering and controlling. The smut addicts are now venturing into the realm of mythical creatures and monsters to get their kicks.
You may have heard it mentioned on the internet, heard about it from a friend, or seen it featured prominently at Barnes & Noble or Target, but the book "A Court of Thorns and Roses" or "ACOTAR" features explicit relationships with muscular Faerie warriors who dominate women magically. It should also be noted that domination, sexual violence, and submission are common themes for these books.
"ACOTAR" was so popular that it kicked off an entire genre of monster smut, with the most popular book right now called "Morning Glory Milking Farm," where a down-on-her-luck millennial woman takes a job milking mythical creatures like minotaurs. By the way, all the creatures are male, so you fill in the blanks.
According to Evie Magazine's Sexologist Ivy Lipton, monster smut is incredibly popular, but it's destroying women's brains:
Why monsters? It’s simple psychology. Our culture teaches women to distrust masculinity, turning real male dominance into something to fear. But many women still crave surrender. So, they create a safe loophole: if the dominator is a monster, the risk is gone. There’s no real vulnerability with a Faerie king or demon lord because they aren't real. This fantasy becomes a "safe" coping mechanism for women unwilling to trust real men. But here's the thing: it's not safe.
Your brain on orgasms isn’t neutral; dopamine released during climax is a powerful conditioning agent. What you repeatedly fantasize about becomes necessary for arousal. If your erotic imagination centers around abuse, monstrous violence, and submission to non-human entities, your brain is reprogramming itself to crave just that. It’s not empowerment, it's neuroplasticity at its darkest.
So women are effectively tuning themselves to crave harmful things, such as sexual violence, through these books. As she later adds, women are rotting their brains:
Reading dark smut is rotting brains. Women are conditioning their brains and bodies to find objectively harmful and dangerous things sexually arousing. Women shame men for consuming porn (because it creates unrealistic expectations about sex and how women should "perform" in the bedroom) while proudly and publicly gushing over warped fantasies of magical beings with claws and twelve-inch d***s.
The solution? Put the book down and don't pick it back up.
Women are literally programming themselves, not just to crave sinister things for sexual gratification, but to distance themselves from real love and sexual health with real men.
