Ladies Don't Want More In the Bedroom. They Just Silently Read Smut Books.

In this episode of That's Not Very Ladylike, here's a fun little lie we've all been sold: that if a woman's pulled back in the bedroom, she's just not that into it anymore and that's that. Meanwhile she's three books deep into a series with a cracked spine and a very specific search history.

So which is it? In this episode I get into what's actually going on, how shifting hormones, a nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight, and a brain that's running on fumes quietly turn the volume down on desire, and why reading smut is so often the tell. It's not that the want went away. It's that the want needs different conditions than it used to. Let's talk about it.

Music from #Uppbeat
https://uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/break-it-down
License code: 1S4TI94HJFOHIGSH

What is That's Not Very Ladylike?

That’s Not Very Ladylike is the podcast for every woman who was told to be polite, stay calm, or stop being so dramatic, meanwhile her hormones, boundaries, and sanity were quietly falling apart.

Hosted by Tracey Willingham, licensed social worker and the voice behind That Hormone Girl™, each episode starts with one rule: Ladies don’t…and then they do it anyway.

Together, we unpack the unspoken expectations, the emotional labor, the generational BS, and the hormone chaos modern women are carrying and we get honest about what it actually takes to feel like yourself again.

If you’re ready to question the rules, trust your body, and stop shrinking to make everyone else comfortable, you’re in the right place.

Tracey: 00:13

You're listening to That's Not Very Ladylike, the show where every week, we start with one rule, ladies don't, and then we do it anyway. Welcome back to That's Not Very Ladylike. I'm Tracy Willingham. Some of you may know me as That Hormone Girl. And today's rule is one that almost every woman in America is currently breaking and pretending she's not.

Tracey: 00:59

Ladies don't want more in the bedroom. They just silently read smut books. Okay? That's the rule. I'm so excited to do this episode today, y'all.

Tracey: 01:10

So that's the rule. And once we say it out loud, you're going to laugh because you know exactly what I'm talking about. Or you're going to laugh because you're sitting on a Kindle right now with a cover hidden by a generic black case and you don't want me to know what you're reading. But guess what? I probably already have read it.

Tracey: 01:29

So today, we're going to talk about the entire industry that women have built quietly to meet a need that they've never been allowed to ask for out loud. So we're gonna talk about why the smut book industry is exploding, what it tells us about women's actual desire, and why the bedroom you go to bed in every night and the one in your Kindle are definitely not the same. So the story that I want to open with this week is something that happened to me recently. So I was at my She Dares Collective. And let me tell you, girls, I talk about this in a lot of podcast episodes, but you've got to find a community of women.

Tracey: 02:09

So She Dares Collective is a local one here in Fort Worth, and it is badass progressive women who are either doing their own business or just shaping their life the way they want. But we get together and we talk about it. So, you know, we talk about what's happening in the world, what's happening in our lives, in our relationships, in just friendships. It's beautiful. I hope you all have a space like that.

Tracey: 02:31

And if not, maybe you're the one that starts it in your community. So here I am hanging at my She Dares collective event and we're sitting around doing our thing, going around introducing ourselves, who we are, what we do, what we like, the standard get to know you stuff. And then the sweetest thing, she kicked off. I mean, she opened a door and stepped through it. Like, the amount of women that connected through our souls, I don't even know if she knew that impact was gonna happen.

Tracey: 03:03

But the theme that connected all of us, we all have different careers, different ages, different life stages, different everything, but the thing that lit the room on fire, we were all secret smut book readers. Now, all of us, but I'm going to tell you, I think a good 75% of us were like, Same. Many of us, we are secret smut book readers, Quietly raising our hands like we're confessing to something and then laughing because then you realize we're all doing the same thing. So I try to read 150 to 160 books a year. Now, listen, I'm not I'm not trying to toot my own horn.

Tracey: 03:43

I love to read and I like to set a goal. If you're like, I tried to read 10 this year. Cool. Like, I just love to read. So I track them on an app called Goodreads, and I love it.

Tracey: 03:54

And I'll tell you for years, I used to sweat it. I worried that people would look at my book list of the things I've read and think this woman is a psychopath. She is reading some deep ass smutty shit and I am. I like the really smutty ones. I'm saying it loud and proud so you can too.

Tracey: 04:14

The ones with the covers, I wouldn't even want my mother to see. That's why we all love the Kindle. But here's what I learned at the She Dares event. Most women are reading them. Most women are reading the same books that I'm reading.

Tracey: 04:27

And the difference is most of them are not putting them on their Goodreads. They're reading them in secret. They're hiding them from their husbands. They're buying them on the Kindle so nobody sees the cover. They are not adding them to their public reading lists.

Tracey: 04:42

They're not telling their friends. They're not even telling their book clubs, which is wild because half the books their book club is choosing are also smutty, but they're just dressed up in like literary clothes, right? You know what I mean. You know exactly what I mean. So we've built an entire underground economy of women's desire.

Tracey: 05:03

We have built a multi billion dollar industry on the backs of women who are not asking for what they want from their actual partners, but instead we're just reading about it. So let's go, ladies. Let's be honest about this because there is a cost to this rule. Because the cost of this rule isn't just, oh, unfulfilling sex. The cost is way bigger than that.

Tracey: 05:28

Romance and erotica is the largest single segment of the publishing industry by revenue. It's bigger than mystery, y'all. The other books I'm reading when I'm not in smut, it's mystery and I can't believe that's beating mystery out. It's bigger than literary fiction. And here's the one that really blew my mind.

Tracey: 05:51

I was like, are you serious? It is bigger than self help. Y'all have seen how many self help books are out there. So the romance industry generates more than $1,500,000,000 a year in The United States alone. And it is overwhelmingly written by women for women and read by women.

Tracey: 06:13

So we have built the biggest section of the bookstore in secret. All right, let's let that sink in. We have built the biggest section of the bookstore in secret. The single most profitable section of publishing exists because women have unmet desire and nobody will help them ask for what they want. Then there's what it does to your relationship.

Tracey: 06:38

Because when you're reading about the desire you wish you had in the same bed as the person you wish you had it with, that's a specific kind of grief. It can sometimes stem out of loneliness in a marriage, and that is loneliness sitting right next to the body of someone you love. Now, I'm not doing this to shame at all because guess what? I'm sitting in my bed next to the man I love reading this smut. So please do not read this a shame.

Tracey: 07:09

And I also want to talk about what it does to your body because suppressed desire, it doesn't go away. It just goes somewhere. So there's research on women in long term relationships with low sexual satisfaction, and they have measurably higher rates of depression, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and ironically, lower libido over time because the body learns. The body learns that wanting things is not safe. So eventually, it just stops wanting.

Tracey: 07:39

And here's a perimenopausal piece because y'all, I'm that hormone girl. I can't resist. So many women in their forties think their libido is gone. And yes, the hormonal shifts are real. I'm not gonna make light of that.

Tracey: 07:52

Estrogen drops. Testosterone? Bye. The physical chemistry does change. But what we don't talk about enough is that a lot of what looks like lost libido in a long marriage is actually thirty years of swallowing what you have wanted and the body finally giving up on asking.

Tracey: 08:13

So your libido didn't disappear. It's probably just tired. It got tired of asking and never being heard. So then it was like, you know what? I'm gonna go live in your Kindle.

Tracey: 08:25

Now I wanna ask the question, where the hell did this rule come from? Because the idea that women don't have desires of their own, that we're passive, that our pleasure is a side dish to a main course that we don't get to order. That idea did not fall out of the sky, my friends. So for most of Western history, female sexual desire was treated as either nonexistent or pathological. Pathological, guys.

Tracey: 08:50

The Victorian medical establishment literally taught that respectable women did not have desire, that sexual interest in women was a sign of mental illness, and there were doctors prescribing treatments for women who wanted things. Let that just hit. Is that not insane? The female orgasm was not even acknowledged as real in Western medicine until the twentieth century. Generations of women lived and died never being told that their bodies were capable of pleasure designed for them, not just designed to receive someone else's pleasure.

Tracey: 09:35

So it's not an accident somebody wasn't like, Oh man, I left that out. That was by design. A culture that does not want women to know what they want will make sure women are never given the language to want it. And then somewhere in the late twentieth century, women started writing what they wanted and they wrote it as fiction. They wrote it as romance.

Tracey: 09:57

They wrote it as erotica. And the publishing industry tried to call it trash. And I want you to think, let's just flip it on over to what the men love. And I'm not saying women don't, but we know a lot of men who love porn. And it's like, it's the manly thing.

Tracey: 10:13

Like, oh, you know, don't take it personally. They're just sexual beings. They just, you know, sometimes they got to they're visual beings. It's like held up and high and manly. We want to read something.

Tracey: 10:26

And quite often, it has a plot. Okay? Porn, take some notes. It gets called trash. They tried to call it not real literature, and then they tried to keep it in the back corner of a bookstore.

Tracey: 10:44

And guess what? Women found it and bought it anyway by the millions because we were starving. So I want to name this because it is true, the history of being denied sexual knowledge, it's not even landed evenly. The medical establishment's erasure of female pleasure has historically focused on the white woman's pleasure as the question. While women of color have been hypersexualized in cultural narratives and denied autonomy over their own bodies in ways that white women never experienced.

Tracey: 11:21

The smut book conversation is largely a white middle class conversation about access. The desire conversation is much bigger and older than that. So again, I'm not in a position to speak for every experience directly. What I can say is that women across cultures have been denied language for our own desire in different ways for different reasons, but the result is always the same. Generations of women hungry, ashamed of being hungry, until the hunger itself is the problem.

Tracey: 11:58

And this is the history that has shaped all of us. So if this were allowed to be said in your marriage, in your relationship, with the person you sleep next to every night, here are the sentences that we have not been able to say for generations. I want more. I want different. I want slower.

Tracey: 12:20

I want longer. I want to be touched the way the book describes. I want to be looked at like I'm the main character. I want to be wanted out loud. I'm tired of being the one who initiates.

Tracey: 12:38

I'm tired of being the one who never initiates. Whichever one I am, I'm tired of being the only role. I want to be asked what I want, and I want time to answer. I am allowed to say what I want without it being a critique of you. I'm allowed to want things you've not thought of.

Tracey: 13:00

I'm allowed to read the books and bring what I learned home. I'm allowed to ask for the thing I read about last night and the big one. My desire is not a problem to be managed. My desire is the most honest thing about me. And right now, it's been hiding in my Kindle for ten years.

Tracey: 13:21

So let's get to my new section, y'all. This should piss you off because right, here we go. This should piss you off because women have built a multi billion dollar industry to get our needs met around our actual partners, around them. We have created an entire economy of fantasy because we cannot bring the conversation home. It should piss you off that the same culture that calls women shallow for not initiating sex enough also calls us inappropriate when we ask for what we actually want.

Tracey: 13:57

That we are not enough and too much, that when we're quiet about our desire, we're frigid, and when we talk too loudly about it, we are inappropriate. We are demanding. It should piss you off that there is a whole genre of marriage advice telling women that the secret to a good sex life is making your husband feel desired, as if your role is to keep his arousal calendar updated, as if your own arousal is a project he gets to opt out of. It should piss you off that the smut book conversation has become a joke. Oh, ladies and their books, mommy porn, those silly romance novels.

Tracey: 14:42

Like the cultural fact that women have collectively built the largest section of publishing in secret is just funny. It's cute. It's a little kink we have. No. It's the symptom of a culture that has not given women anywhere else to put what we want.

Tracey: 15:03

We are not reading these books because we are weird or repressed or unsatisfied. We're reading them because we're starving and the books are the only meal that gets delivered. And the part that really gets me, most of the men in our lives have no idea what we are reading. They think we're reading thrillers. I mean, they're thrillers, but they're not the thrillers they think we're reading.

Tracey: 15:26

They think we are reading book club books. We're reading off Oprah's list, Reese Witherspoon's list. They have no idea their wives are walking around with entire fantasy lives running on a Kindle next to them in bed. And that gap between what we want and what we ask for is enormous. And it is not our job to keep that gap quiet anymore.

Tracey: 15:52

Okay. So how do you know if this rule has been running you? You read smut and you have not added a single one of those books to your public Goodreads list. Listen, it took it took me a while, y'all, but I'm doing it. You have a generic black Kindle case, so nobody ever sees the covers of what you're reading.

Tracey: 16:13

You have ever finished a book at two a. M. And looked over at your sleeping partner and felt something between desire and disappointment. You have ever wanted to ask for something specific in bed and decided it would be too awkward to say it out loud. You've ever said, I'm good, when you're not.

Tracey: 16:33

You've ever performed enthusiasm to wrap something up. You've ever read a sex scene in a book and thought, Wait, is that a real thing women experience regularly? You've ever assumed your low libido was a hormone issue or maybe just a medication issue or maybe it's my age before considering that it might be a being met issue. You've ever felt a flicker of guilt about how much your fantasy life lives in books rather than in your real life. You have ever told a friend about a book and felt your face flush halfway through the description.

Tracey: 17:13

You've ever wished even for a second that you could just hand your partner the book and say this, I want this, and then realized you would die before actually doing it. And some of us wouldn't. We would just be this, I want this. And if you said yes to at least one of those, you are not alone. You are part of an enormous collective of women who have built fantasy lives around the partners they sleep next to.

Tracey: 17:38

So here's what I want you to take from this. The smut book industry exists because we have not been given a language for our own desire. The books are not the problem. The books are the workaround. The books are women teaching themselves what is possible because nobody else taught us.

Tracey: 17:56

Reading SMUT is not a moral failing. Please hear me. Reading SMUT is not a moral failing. Reading SMUT is research. Reading SMUT is education.

Tracey: 18:09

Reading smut is your nervous system finally getting to imagine a version of intimacy that's not built around somebody else's arousal. And the work isn't to stop reading. Please don't stop reading. The work is to bring some of what you read out of the book and into your actual life. And maybe not all of it, maybe not all at once.

Tracey: 18:31

That might be a little hardcore. Might be a little shocking for your partner. But could you start doing little pieces of it? So what I want you to do this week is small. If you can, I challenge you?

Tracey: 18:46

I want you to add one of the smutty books to your public Goodreads list. You don't have to add all of them if you're like, Tracy, I won't be uploading 50 books. Maybe just one. And you can pick the tamest one if you have to. And then if you're feeling brave, I want you to pick one specific thing from a book you read recently, one moment, one detail, one ask, and bring it to your partner, not as a complaint, not as a comparison, just as a wish.

Tracey: 19:17

I was reading something that made me think of this. I wanna try this and see what happens. Because the partner who actually loves you wants to know what you want. They have just been waiting for the door to open. We have been holding the door shut from the inside, hoping they would knock loud enough while standing on the other side reading about someone who would.

Tracey: 19:42

And the next time somebody at book club mentions a romance, I want you to say out loud, Yeah, I read that, and I loved it. And I loved the bathroom scene. Wink. And watch what happens. Because half the women at the table are reading the same books, and the only thing keeping you all separate is the agreement to pretend none of you are.

Tracey: 20:03

So stop pretending. Talk about what you want and bring what you're reading into your home. And that's the most unladylike thing of all. Thanks for joining me today for That's Not Very Ladylike. If today's episode lit a fire, pushed your buttons, or called a little BS on the stories we've been sold, share it with another woman who's tired of being told to tone it down, smile more, or play nice.

Tracey: 20:33

And help a girl out by making sure you subscribe, leave a quick review, and catch me on Instagram at that hormone girl. And until next time, keep getting loud, messy, and raising hell because being ladylike is overrated.