Why neurodivergent women can’t stop reading smut and romantasy

Did you know that women with ADHD consume explicit fiction at dramatically higher rates than neurotypical women — and there’s a neurological reason?

Dr. Erika Miley is a licensed mental health counselor, certified sex therapist, and author of the only dissertation published on ADHD and women’s sexuality. After surveying over 2,000 participants, one thing kept surfacing: smut. Romantasy, explicit romance, audio erotica — all of it.

In this episode, she explains why the ADHD brain is uniquely drawn to literary erotica, how smut raises the arousal threshold enough to sustain focus, and why neurodivergent women are using it for everything from processing emotional vulnerability to getting through household chores. 

Find Dr. Miley at erikamiley.com.

• Watch: ADHD and sex

• Watch: Too much or not enough: ADHD sensory challenges and sex

Cate Osborn: Hi everybody and welcome back to "Sorry I Missed This", the show where we talk about ADHD and all things related to sex, intimacy, communication, and more. As always, it's me, your host, Cate Osborn, and today we are getting spicy.

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Erika Miley to talk about the rise of smut as a way of self-expression and a way of accessing conversations around intimacy and desire, and how for a lot of neurodivergent women, smut is kind of the gateway into accessing a lot of these conversations in a way that they've never had before.

I think one of the things that I love the most about smut is that smut, literary erotica, however you want to refer to it, creates conversations around desire, around kink, around conversations that can sometimes be a little bit difficult and it makes it just a little bit more accessible to be able to bring something to your partner.

And even more than that, storytelling is a deeply human thing, and I love the fact that we as humans have taken stories and we've said, "But what if it was a little bit spicy?" And Dr. Erika Miley has done actual research on this and I find this to be fascinating.

(00:00) The role of smut in neurodivergent lives.

Dr. Erika Miley, you are a counselor, you're a certified sex therapist, you're a researcher, and you specifically you work with ADHD and relationships and sexual functioning. So, like, I see you, I love the work that you're doing. Do you see in your research that neurodivergent women as a whole tend to be consuming more romance explicit fiction at higher rates?

Dr. Erika Miley: I can definitely say anecdotally it's something I see in my patients everywhere all of the time. Most of my research has focused primarily on — because as you can imagine, there's not a lot of it about women and sex generally, and then there's very little about women and ADHD and sex.

So, when I did my dissertation four years ago, it was the one and only about ADHD and sex and women. I had over 2,000 participants overall and 1,500 of them gave me their words about how they felt like their ADHD symptoms were impacting their ability to have erotic experiences, enjoy erotic experiences.

But the thing that I notice that kept coming up again and again was many, many of those women talking about the things that they found to be erotic, the smut that they're reading, it being very, very difficult for them to shift from our regular transitions of life to transitioning to anything erotic. And I think smut is an incredible on-ramp to finding not only erotic selves, but having erotic experiences with partners.

Cate: What do you think it is about that genre that is alluring? Like, is it the predictability, is it the emotional intensity, is it the ability to come back to it when, you know, when your brain is kind of in a place where you can't focus? Like, why do you think smut works so well as an on-ramp?

Erika: I think it's like all of it in — all at once too. The level of stimulation our brains need to be able to attend to something is incredibly high. And romance, smut, sci-fi romance, any part in any micro genre has so many pieces happening all at once that the erotic is just one of them.

And so, I think it helps reduce the fears when you're trying to initiate any sexual experience, it reduces paralysis. I think it distracts from any of that rejection concern that so many of us have. I also think that we use smut not only just to get in touch with the erotic, but I think we also use it to get through tasks. There's a lot of women that I work with who are like, "You know what, if I need to clean the tub, I'm turning on the romance in my ear."

Cate: I do that. I absolutely — like, I'll put on my like smutty little story and I'll clean the bathroom. Why do you think that dichotomy works so well for us?

(05:00) How erotica provides a safe, controlled environment for neurodivergent women to explore intimacy.

Erika: If I break it down to the most simplistic answer, it's the stimulation. You're getting not only brain stimulation, but body stimulation and all of that stimulation brings that stimulation level way, way up. And so, we can attend. We can focus on something. Now does that mean we need to be masturbating to get through all the tasks? No. You're like, "Well, I can clean my bathroom but it's a really complicated process." Right.

Cate: Something that I hear a lot from just the community broadly is this sense of guilt and shame and embarrassment around asking for what they want or maybe, you know, I never learned what I want. And so, there's a lot of that wrapped up in attitudes around sex and eroticism and desire. So, I'm curious about smut as kind of a container for those big feelings and how we can utilize smut as a tool in that capacity.

Erika: One of the primary things that smut allows for us is safety because there's a lot of gates to get to the sexual experience or hearing the sexual experience in the book. You have to open the book. You have to choose the book. Then you also have to continue to read every single page of the book. You have control the entire way.

I mean to be honest with you, it parallels the structure of consent in kink scenes. And I think that there's there's a lot as — the more safe we feel, the more allowances that we give ourselves to have desire. And I do think a lot of these books might even challenge the things that we have found to be erotic or thought we found to be erotic and allow us a safe container to think about it because this place in here is — it's ours. Nobody gets to be in there with us.

Cate: That's one of the things that I'm really curious about is smut working as a tool in order to expand someone's emotional or sexual vocabulary, identifying desires for the first time. Do you find that that is part of it, I guess is what I'm trying to ask?

Erika: Absolutely. I'm working with a couple people right now that it was through our conversations about some of the books that they were reading, they were finding like, "Oh, like I'm actually like really interested in this kind of power dynamic." And they they come back to me and I told my partner and they got really excited and I didn't expect that.

Cate: Oh my god, I love this for them. Hooray!

Erika: Right. So, now not only have we figured out like, "Oh, this is incredibly erotic for this person," we've taken it and we've connected it to the partner.

Cate: Well, it's such a low pressure way too. I find that sometimes especially in neurodivergent folks who might struggle with communication or that perfectionistic desire of like, "I can't have the conversation until I can have it in the most perfect way," just be like, "Hey, listen to this Quinn audio really quickly and tell me what you think." Like, it just becomes like such a great way of deepening and strengthening a relationship with like a very like low stakes environment. Like, I love it. It's such a cool tool.

Erika: You can communicate with somebody through narrative. It's an entire theory of counseling, it's called narrative therapy. Because we've been relating to each other through story for millennia. So, smut being an anchor in that makes tons of sense and I — I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to sound like a smut dealer and that's fine.

(11:00) The differences between erotica and mainstream pornography

Cate: Do you delineate a line between smut and pornography?

Erika: As a scientist over here, the way that we think about — it's all sexual material to me. The thing I will say though is that a majority of visual sexual material pornography is marketed from a very, very what we believe to be the male lens. I think it's an assumed male lens because there's there's definitely a lot — to me a lot more complexity to that too.

But most women when they see that, there's no guardrails. It skips a lot of consent. It skips a lot of, "Do you even like this stuff?" Smut is much slower and again, you have a lot more control. Yes, in pornography you have control, but you can hit stop or play. That's the limit of your control.

It's not complex. It's not stimulating in the sense of like thinking about an entire environment on an entirely different planet like Ruby Dixon does for us in "Ice Planet Barbarians." Like I don't know about you, the last time I watched a porn video I was like, "Oh, I'm bored."

Cate: I always like to sort of explore the sort of opposite side of the coin, right. And so, I'm curious about is there risk around unrealistic expectations? Like expectation versus reality when you're, you know, like you come from smut to a relationship or using smut as a substitute for intimacy rather than a bridge to it? Do you see any of those issues?

Erika: No. This is something that we heard for many years too about porn — this worry of like people are going to replace their sexual experiences with it. I think our culture jumps ahead to worrying and putting anxiety into the future that just doesn't exist. I have not had one person. Not one of them, and I can confidently say I have not had a colleague come to me and say somebody is preferring smut to their partner.

Cate: And it's interesting because I know at least some of the stuff that I have seen around like ADHD and pornography, ADHD and masturbation, is that there's like you might be doing it too much, like it might become an addiction and you got to be careful. And it's like that is true to a certain extent, but can you talk about that a little bit and how those studies aren't necessarily — I don't want to say accurate but you know.

Erika: I can't roll my eyes harder. Even outside of ADHD, we have seen across the board there's no such thing as porn addiction. There's no such thing as sex addiction. There's no such thing as masturbation addiction. Now can people have problematic sexual behaviors? Yes. But those problematic sexual behaviors usually are connected to something else.

But quite often because our culture, especially American culture, is what it is around sex, the first belief is that the sex is the problem or the interest that you have in the sex is the problem. We focus on those things again to distract from the actual problem which people have never gotten appropriate — most people have never gotten appropriate sex education to begin with. Only 11 states, 11, require sex education to be medically accurate. Go off, go off queen.

So, like, you know, I'm not worried about like a woman reading too much smut. I'm — what I would really love is for her so she can find her erotic self, know that it's okay for her to even touch herself, and know that it's even okay that she enjoys sex.

Cate: What is interesting is that there is a lot of shame ascribed to eroticism around sexuality, especially if you are fem presenting. And I'm interested in the sort of intersection of where that hits neurodivergent women because so many of us are living with rejection sensitivity and we don't want to be seen as too much and we don't want to be seen as like weird or different or odd.

And so, there can be like this shame around consuming explicit content, but then at the same time it's becoming much more mainstream. We've got whole "hockey shows" now, you know, like and all these different stuff. So, I'm just curious about how those two things intersect.

(16:00) The intersection of purity culture and rejection sensitivity for neurodivergent individuals.

Erika: I think it's kind of interesting, the women I treat. It's almost like it’s taking a little bit of power back. Like they're walking around the grocery store and they got the smut in their ears. There's this almost like — it's like pride.

Cate: No, I get that because I do the same thing. It's like I feel like I'm reclaiming this ownership around my sexuality. I'm operating as a human being who has sexual wants and sexual needs and sexual desires but I also do need bananas.

Erika: I do think it's also creating some camaraderie around it too. This is just a personal experience but I see somebody across from me they got their Kindle out and it's got a "Fourth Wing" sticker on it and I was like —

Cate: You're like, "Ah!"

Erika: You're just like "In the wild!" I was like, "I love that book." And she's like, "I know, right!" Like and then we just have this whole conversation about smut in the middle of an airport with like 25 people standing around us. Nobody's telling us to calm down. Nobody's telling us to be quiet, but we can talk about these characters, we can talk about these things that we like, we can talk about the taboo in a way that is reachable and maybe even acceptable.

I do think that neurodivergent people generally, we've found homes in fandoms. And this is kind of similar in some ways, but the where I believe it's different is because of tackling this very specific shame around sex. Especially those of us who were raised in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, the the influence of purity culture was so steep, it made it into public schools. And so, it also meant that we — there was this thought police that was happening. Absolutely.

You couldn't think about like, "Oh, you know, I would like to be fingered in a Regency era carriage." Who doesn't Erika, who doesn't want that frankly? Come on. I mean the popularity of all of this shit shows us that we — when there is a new technology, when there is a way that we are going to consume something, we are going to make it sexual.

Cate: Dr. Erika Miley, how do I find the smut that's right for me?

Erika: I've been a Reddit user for a very, very long time and I love the subreddits that are romance or smut and people love to post their "must read" lists. That could be a good place to begin. And if you don't want to use Reddit, there's GoodReads. If you don't want to use GoodReads, there's tons of other places to look.

Also, ask your girlfriends and likely you're going to find something. You're going to at least get down the path to find what you like. I have a wonderful book club and we read smut regularly. We read other things too, but we read a lot of smut. And we get to have these conversations together that allow ourselves the — not only just to talk about our sexual interests, but talk together about the shared inability to explore sexuality.

And getting to have those conversations together in person is like — I know that there's a lot of my neurospicy people who are like, "In person, what are you talking about? I don't want to do that." But there's something to that that allows you to know so deeply that you're not alone. And it also — like it'll make your reading list real, real, real long.

Cate: Last hard-hitting journalism question to close the show. What are you reading right now?

Erika: Funny enough, it's not smut. I'm really stuck in Grady Hendrix's books, who wrote "The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires." But right now I'm reading his book called "How to Sell a Haunted House," which involves puppets and it's terrifying but excellently written. I'm also reading — because of course I'm reading like five things at once. But I just started it is "Dungeon Crawler Carl." Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, the smut is going to come back in because I just finished all of Carina Halle's series of "The River of Shadows" that is based around Finnish storytelling of like death and the underworld. The smut is pretty hot in that one, but I — we could be here all day talking about this.

Cate: Well, Erika, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Erika: Thank you.

Cate: Thank you for listening. Anything mentioned in the episode will be linked in the show notes with more resources. Have a question, comment, burning story you'd like to share? Email us at sorryimissedthis@understood.org.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.

"Sorry I Missed This" is produced by Jessamine Molli and edited by Jessie DiMartino. Video is produced by Calvin Knie. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright. Production support provided by Andrew Rector. Brianna Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. For Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson.

And I'm your host, Cate Osborn. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you again soon. I feel like we're just like — like smoking on the porch like "Yeah."