Intimacy is a word that means so many different things to so many different people. One of the first explorations we undertake as we come of age is trying to understand what our intimacy should or could look like. The sources we consult during this time would certainly make a research librarian blush, and yet we rarely seem to get out of it what we were looking for in the first place: a true understanding of intimacy that we can relate to ourselves.

When I realized I was a lesbian my junior year of high school, I endeavored to answer this uncomfortable question within the new context of gender and sensuality I now found myself in. But, unsurprising to anyone who knows anything about the way that sapphic sensuality is overwhelmingly portrayed in media, I quickly hit a dead end. Most portrayals of sapphic sensuality I found were made for somebody else — they were designed to get men off.

I felt fortunate that I had quickly developed an awareness of this, but wondered about the hundreds of thousands of young sapphics who might be trying to understand their intimacy in a similar way with only these resources available to them. This fetishization of sapphics not only ignores the physical realities of this intimacy but further ignores all sapphic bodies not conventionally desirable to men, including transgender sapphics such as myself, sapphics of colour and sapphics of different body types.What happens to us when all we have to learn from are the fetishized aspects of our intimacy? What are we left with? The answer is the literature of intimacy that we create for ourselves.

It is easy to view platforms like Wattpad or Archive of Our Own as a mix of awful and decent writing that people browse out of boredom instead of a need for serious reading. However, the sapphic communities that exist there have constructed valuable spaces where intimacy is openly written about from a variety of different perspectives, with the target audience predominantly being other queer people. When your sexuality is shunned, reduced to fetishization in the mainstream and branded as dangerous or taboo, it is only natural that anything that counters this pervasive narrative is looked down upon; young people engaging with their sexuality, especially queer sexuality, is seen as sinful or perverse. But the truth is, young people have always and will always engage with their sexuality, and they deserve to be able to do so authentically. Smut is an outlet for young queer women to explore their fantasies in a healthy way, to break from the pervasive representation and to create new examples of intimacy for other sapphics to learn about.

While not all sapphic smut is a good representation of sapphic intimacy, since the authors themselves are also subject to compulsory heteronormative biases, that is something that they themselves become aware of as they exchange their stories and experiences with others. It gives them an opportunity to grow beyond their biases and pull on a wealth of resources that barely exists in other places. Young people enter their first experiences of physical intimacy with a wealth of preconceptions, most of which are inaccurate, and these experiences serve to clear up these preconceptions and give us our first real understanding of that intimacy.

Therefore, as much as we cannot expect our initial research to give us a complete image of what our intimacy will be like, young sapphics deserve a much better primer than what the mainstream presents them with, and smut can be a valuable part of that. We must support queer smut, support the writers who are channelling their passion and sensuality to reach out to others, and demystify as well as destigmatize authentic portrayals of sapphic intimacy.

The status quo is unacceptable, and if you are not sapphic, your allyship has to include an awareness of and stance against this fetishization. Your actions speak much louder than your words, and if through your actions you choose to violate us, then it shows that you view us as objects of your pleasure rather than as the people we truly are.