Once Upon a Mattress

We live in a world shaped by porn. It touches everything: from the technology we rely on and the art we consume to how we relate to one another and structure our boardrooms, and all the way to a “grab ’em by the pussy” president. Porn has pushed boundaries and taught generations of women that the only power they wield is sexual. It has altered brain chemistry and facilitated the mycotic spread of the manosphere. It has made consensual and non-consensual choking common foreplay. As Sophie Gilbert observed in The Atlantic last year, porn’s tropes and aesthetics have “filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason.”

In an erotic empire built on the male gaze and money shots, female pleasure has often come second — if at all. But a reckoning is happening in the kingdom of desire. Smut, often written by women for women, is now propping up the fiction market. With online ratings on a scale of 1 to 5 chili peppers, titles range...