The Normalization of Female Sexual Degeneracy

The Porn Nobody Calls Porn

There is a disturbing explosion of female sexual degeneracy. It’s a real threat to the women we love and care for. And while its source is well-known, the danger tends to get downplayed or understated.

I’m talking about the normalization, and even celebration, of sexual promiscuity and degeneracy in “female literature.”

First, how does a middle-aged pastor come to research a subject like this? It’s a fair question.

I’ve had a general awareness of it for a long time. My mom used to read romance novels, often with a fantasy or horror edge. At one point I picked up one of Anne Rice’s novels and remember thinking it was pretty messed up. I think that convicted her, because after that she started reading more “Christian” romance.

Then my senior year of high school, I got really sick and missed a couple weeks of school. We didn’t have cable. After reading through my comic books a few times, I finally broke down and worked through a stack of those Christian romance novels, Redeeming Love being one of them.

Even as a brand new Christian teenager, I remember thinking: while these weren’t as explicit, they were clearly trying to help women scratch a particular itch. I’ll come back to that.

Just a few years later, I studied human sexuality more seriously at Northern Kentucky University, and became more familiar with the real differences between male and female arousal. I’ll come back to this too.

Then, of course, everything blew open when Fifty Shades of Grey became a massive bestseller. There were debates everywhere about it. But it didn’t come out of nowhere, it just made explicit what had already been there in softer form.

So, I have had a general awareness of the topic since high school and have, from time to time, exhorted women to flee from perverted literature.

But that’s not what brought this back to the front of my mind recently.

I intentionally subscribe to a wide range of YouTube channels, partly to avoid living in an echo chamber, and partly to keep my own vanity in check. I listen to a lot of content on writing and publishing. Two of the channels I follow are run by women who often delved into those topics: Joomi Kim and Hilary Layne. Neither, to my knowledge, are Christians. Both can be very insightful. And they’re also, on the whole, really honest and straightforward.

And recently, both of them spoke openly about this rising trend. I’ll be referencing a lot of their thoughts throughout so here are links to those videos: here and here. Layne’s video is especially insightful and loaded with lots of evidence to support her thesis.

Anyhow, that’s what finally pushed me to write this, something I probably should have done a while ago. I want to briefly do three things. Explain why this is a uniquely female danger, how this a growing problem, and why and how it’s being downplayed.

Female Sexual Arousal

Men and women are both sexual beings. There is overlap in what stirs desire, but the differences are real and they matter.

Research on female arousal consistently shows that women typically require what researchers call mental mapping before arousal takes hold. They are looking for a story: an emotional narrative with relational stakes, with characters they can invest in. Desire builds through context, tension, and attachment.

Men are far more responsive to visual stimulus with minimal context. This helps explain why online pornography consumption skews heavily male, and why the type of content consumed differs so drastically between men and women.

Even in studies where both sexes report a baseline preference for normal sexual interaction, the divergence shows up quickly. Women tend to prefer material that is less explicit and more relationally developed. They’d like there to be some sort of story. Men tend to prefer higher degrees of explicitness with far less interest in narrative buildup. As Layne points out, “Your simple, straightforward two people [having sex] video isn’t really going to do much of anything for a woman, generally speaking... a woman will want to know the whole story.”

Strong data also shows that women are more likely to engage erotic content through text-based or imagination-driven formats: fan fiction, romance novels, and audio erotica. Women are underrepresented in datasets tracking visual pornography use not because they’re disengaged, but because they engage through a different medium.

Explicit content aimed at women doesn’t primarily live on screens. Story is the medium best suited to the architecture of female arousal. That’s exactly what I stumbled into as a teenager reading those so-called “clean” Christian romance novels. They weren’t graphic, but they were deliberate. They built emotional tension, relational fantasy, and psychological immersion, scratching the same itch through a different form.

What we’re now seeing with the rise of BookTok and the explosion of modern romance publishing is not harmless escapism. It is the industrialization of that same dynamic.

Romance and erotica have surged dramatically in recent years. Self-published titles now make up roughly 70% of romance e-book sales. The genre accounts for about 20% of all book sales. Much of that growth is driven by increasingly explicit content, written to bypass the visual and go straight to the imagination.

The content is getting more graphic, more immersive, more addictive. It is engineered to do exactly that, in the form most effective for the female mind.

In her video, Layne points to author Sarah J. Maas as the clearest example of how this engineering works. Maas times explicit scenes to coincide with emotional climaxes in the plot, so that narrative release and erotic release fire simultaneously. The result, as Layne describes it, is that the story and the explicit content become inextricably linked, with the erotic material delivered in precisely the way most likely to capture the female reader’s infatuation. The fiction is a purpose-built arousal delivery mechanism masquerading as storytelling.

The genre’s trope taxonomy makes this plain. Male pornography is categorized by sex act. Female erotic fiction is categorized by relational dynamic: enemies to lovers, forced proximity, dark romance, morally gray love interests, forbidden age gaps. The escalation pattern follows the same trajectory documented in male pornography addiction. Women who identified as addicted to erotic fiction reported escalating tolerance, need for harder content, desensitization, depression, difficulty focusing, and relational damage. Some of this content is dark, weird stuff.

Things have escalated to the point that Layne quips:

“Barnes and Noble and every other major and independent bookseller, especially all those new romance bookshops, have now just become another kind of adult entertainment store and know that’s not a good thing.”

The cultural permission structure surrounding each is not. Men who consume pornography compulsively carry shame, as they should. Women who consume erotic fiction compulsively are told they are empowering themselves, and that is a profound harm. The research infrastructure reflects this asymmetry. Decades of studies document pornography’s harm to men. Almost none exist on erotic fiction’s harm to women. The feminist framing around the genre has made serious critical inquiry nearly impossible. Anyone who raises concerns is accused of attacking women’s sexuality.

The Removal of Shame

There is a strong move to remove both responsibility for and shame related to female degeneracy. You see this in books that recast female sexual immorality as an expression of liberation. In Joomi Kim’s video, she highlights this across several popular titles, beginning with All Fours by Miranda July. Kim explains that the main character ends up cheating on her husband repeatedly, with both men and women, and afterward “feels zero guilt about it” — thinking it was “the secret to everything, this bodily freedom,” that “promiscuity was my birthright as a woman.” Kim repeatedly points out that if such thinking were expressed by a man, he would be nearly universally condemned. Female sexual promiscuity gets recast as something normal and praiseworthy.

She also discusses how many of these books invert what critics call “the male gaze.” In Fleischman Is in Trouble, a newly single man notices women who are “self-actualized and independent and knew what they wanted, women who weren’t needy or insecure or self-doubting.” Kim notes the author finds five different ways to say “independent” — and argues no actual man would lead with that. It reads like a woman’s wish-fulfillment projected onto a male narrator.

Kim lists instance after instance of female characters committing acts of sexual degeneracy to celebration. That is what this literature is doing: removing shame. As Layne puts it, “Shame is not a bad thing. Shame is how our brains tell us we’re doing something that will harm us.” The effort to desensitize women to shame, she argues, has been more intensive than the same effort directed at men, because historically women led the charge against indecent and sexually explicit material.

The secular case is being made loudly and at scale right now, in the books, the content, and the cultural air young women are breathing: sexual promiscuity is strength, an expression of independence, a birthright, and shame about it is a symptom of oppression rather than a functioning conscience.

A parallel move inside Christian circles deserves the same scrutiny. It runs like this: yes, sexual immorality is sin, but through forgiveness and redemption the consequences are minimal, and in the end she still gets everything she wanted. The wound heals clean. Grace is real, but it costs nothing in the telling.

Back to Redeeming Love. I read it years ago and have no interest in revisiting it, but I remember it well enough. There are extended marital sex scenes written to be felt, not just narrated. The central plot involves a man who, out of supposedly godly love, kidnaps the woman, marries her while she is barely conscious, and holds her thirty miles from civilization until she falls for him. It’s weird. The book frames this as romance. Christian women have been handing it to each other and to their daughters for thirty years. It was subtle, but it was also years ago. Things have progressed down a crooked road.

Anyhow, the problem is not one novel. A great deal of what passes for Christian women’s literature traffics in the same tropes and the same arousal architecture as its secular counterparts, with a redemption arc bolted on. The explicit content is softer. The delivery mechanism is identical. And increasingly, none of that distinction matters, because many of our young women are not stopping at the Christian version. They are finding BookTok and going straight to the source.

Several years ago, a local controversy made the rounds. A handful of elders’ wives from a nearby church posted, proudly, that they were going to see the sequel to Magic Mike. This was a fairly conservative church. People were a little shocked.

More revealing was how many people rushed to defend it. It wasn’t a big deal, they said. Guys do stuff like this anyway. Harmless fun.

If the elders themselves had gone to see that kind of movie, it would have been a scandal, at least in this part of the country. But when women do it, a strange normalization kicks in. There are quick excuses, laughter, the whole thing reframed as innocent or playful.

The behavior is shifting, and so is the moral reflex underneath it.

Most of this isn’t arriving through movies. It’s coming through literature, through stories that dress up lust as romance and package sexual fantasy as emotional depth. Ignoring it is a choice with consequences.

We should care about what forms the imagination of our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our friends. What shapes imagination will, sooner or later, shape desire, and desire does not stay contained.

Porn is twisting our men. We are right to decry it. It warps their understanding of female sexual enjoyment, fetishizes sex, diminishes their self control, and encourages depraved desires. We should war against it. However, we must understand that what is being called women’s literature is twisting our women. It warps their sense of male romance, fetishizes sex, diminishes personal responsibility, and encourages depraved desires. And yet the cries are few and far between. This is a growing danger and one that deserves much more attention.