Takes guts to own my smut

From Harry Potter fan fiction to Ana Huang’s Twisted series, this Sunday mid-day reader has devoured it all. Representational pic/iStock

Confession by a Gen Z reader

This is a bit embarrassing to admit, but I used to read a lot of smut. Like, a lot. And not in a cool, nonchalant, Kindle-under-the-covers way either.

I may be Gen Z, but I've never really understood the concept of e-books; I need a physical book in my hands. The book's weight and smell, the sensation of turning the pages, the ability to scribble in the margins and personalise it with annotations, that's what makes reading a whole experience for me. So all of my smut-reading happened the old-fashioned way: paperbacks stacked on shelves, hidden behind more "respectable" titles.

It all started with Wattpad though; the gateway for many of us serial smut readers. The Bad Boy Stole My Bra, The Boy Next Door, and other chaotic teen dramas - all written by 17-year-olds whose first language most certainly wasn't English - felt oddly addictive at the time.

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Then came webtoons and fan fiction, and endless rabbit holes on Reddit. I read Harry Potter fanfics like my life depended on them, fell into the K-pop world through EXO, Seventeen and NCT fan fiction, and got completely swept up in anime fanfics from Yuri on Ice and Haikyuu!! It was fun, unhinged, and kind of comforting. From here, my appetite eventually turned to full-blown smut.

At one point, these books were my main source of reading. Not kidding. I'd go from one spicy romance to another, annotate all of them like they were part of my syllabus. Nothing too deep; my annotations were things like, "He's so hot for that", "I'm dying", or just "LOL x 100". Still, I couldn't imagine doing any of that on an e-book.

By the time I had to leave home to go to college four years ago, I had way too many smut paperbacks at home, and most of them were completely riddled with notes. Now, here's a mini-confession: I'm really close to my mother - she's probably my best friend - and she had grown up reading Mills & Boon. So I made one simple request: the erotica needed to stay out of sight. We have a lot of guests coming and going, and for some reason, people always seem to eye my bookshelves. I hate lending out books, especially ones I've annotated, because they almost never come back. Thankfully, my mother made sure the arrangement stayed: all the spicy stuff was tucked away at the back of our home library. Honestly, I'm so grateful to her for that.

In college came Ana Huang's Twisted series. That's probably when I got into the more intense stuff. The drama, the chemistry, the tropes (enemies to lovers, and academic rivals have got to be my favourites), the 'cough-cough' spicy stuff - I ate it all up. I wasn't reading it for the literary quality; it just kept me hooked. That being said, I had my limits. I tried books like Haunting Adeline once and just couldn't do it. There's a line between dark romance and... not-so-consensual stuff, and that line matters to me. I like my smut fun, not disturbing.

The funny thing is, once I left for college, I pretty much stopped reading smut altogether. I got caught up in the idea that reading had to make me smarter. So I shifted to political theory, non-fiction, classics, and historical fiction. And I do genuinely enjoy those genres, especially philosophy. What do you mean, my man Nietzsche was out there thinking all those things and actually putting them into words? Philosophy blows my mind. But still, the pressure to always read something "meaningful" started to take the joy out of reading at times.

So every now and then, when I fall out of the habit of reading completely, I find myself picking up an old, smutty paperback. It's easy, fast, and familiar. Once I finish something light and fun, it's easier to switch back to denser stuff.

So no, I don't read smut the way I used to. But I'm not ashamed of it either. It got me back into reading in the first place. It kept me hooked when nothing else could. And sometimes, that's enough.

I still buy the paperbacks. My dad is absolutely fed up because, according to him, there's no more space in the house to store them (which I completely disagree with, by the way). He keeps trying to convince me to switch to a Kindle, but nuh-uh, sorry Dad, that's not happening anytime soon.

One day, when I have a place of my own, I dream of building a home library with cosy little reading corners, an espresso machine, and a dedicated section for my smut, out in the open, no hiding necessary.

As told to Spandana Bhura