I’m sure there are many different reasons why women are into smutfic all people are different but as an all purpose explanation I thought she made a lot of sense.
And I didn't mean to imply that the girl was wrong and I was right at all so I hope it didn't get read that way. My intention was just to provide an alternative among the many possibilities out there.
Of course, even what qualifies as NC-17 or "smutfic" itself is a hairy question, which comes to get entangled in the reasoning of why people read why they read. The girl you quote seems to be talking about the Plot What Plot? phenomenon, which I think lands squarely in the definition of smutfic/erotica. However, fics that contain sex scenes past the PG-13 level are not all PWPs. I don't think that all of these can be defined by "smut" in the traditional sense (I'm recalling some of the debates I read in the nfic archive about what qualifies as nfic). I mean the rating system will label a long fic with one sex scene that crosses the line the same way as a fic focused on a tryst.
And I'm not harping on that before someone misquotes me and tells me we need a system. That much is obvious and it figures no system would be perfect. But's something to consider when thinking about genres. I'm sure some people don't touch fics labeled as NC-17, smutfic, lemon, etc, because they can only concieve of it as a PWP. It goes back to what someone posted about the connotations behind words, which can easily apply to genres as a whole.
