The Making Of A Smut Author
A long-form essay on purity culture in the early 2000s
By: Crystal M. Rose
Copyright © 2025 by Crystal M. Rose
All rights reserved. No part of this essay may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system - except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper - without permission in writing from the publisher. For permission requests, contact crystalrose.books@gmail.com.
For privacy reasons, some names, locations, and dates may have been changed.
The Proposal
On the evening of March 19th, 2014, I was at church. I was a youth learder in my early twenties, volunteering for a medium sized pentecostal church in central Indiana. After the sermon had ended the youth pastor called me on stage to ‘acknowledge me’ as an amazing youth leader in front of the kids. I knew that wasn’t what was really happening.
You see, when you attend a pentecostal church you know that as the pastor winds down his or her sermon he or she will call for a piano player to ‘set the tone’ for their closing message. On this particular night the youth pastor asked for Luke and Tim to ‘play some music’.
It made sense for him to call Tim on to the stage. Tim was a piano player. It didn’t make sense, however, for Luke to be called on. Luke was the drummer, one of four at the church, and also my boyfriend of seven months.
He casually walked on stage and as Tim started to play a soft alter-call song. Luke lightly tapped the symbol in an attempt to blend in. It was cute.
Pastor Joshua made a nice speech about how special I was and how much work I’d done to make the youth group a welcoming place for our teenagers. I think I would have enjoyed it if I hadn’t been excitedly nervous about what I suspected was coming next.
When he finished he called Luke forward so he could “acknowledge” him too. Except when Luke came to stand next to me, Pastor Joshua gave him the microphone. My boyfriend got down on one knee and made a short speech about how much he loved me then asked me to be his wife.
I said yes, and the entire youth group cheered. It was a great day. A day I’d been looking forward to my whole life. A day my upbringing taught me would only come if I were a good pure Christian girl. It turns that that wasn’t exactly true.
Fast forward a month or two later, and my fiance and I were in the church office on a Saturday afternoon for our pre-martial couseling session. We met with Pastor Wilce. He was the Pastor for the college aged members of the congregation and someone I’d looked up to for a long time. Him and his wife were about ten years older than my fiance and I which I thought put him in a great position to give us some relevant advice.
I wish I could tell you that I’d learned something profound and life changing during those pre-martial cousneling sessions, but the only thing I can remember is Pastor Wilce’s confession that his wife was displeased that he’d recently lost his ability to stay hard after an ejaculation. He also advised us that once we had kids, we would only have time for a quickie every once in a while.
Would I reccomend a pastor that you’ve only known professionally giving you anecdotes about his sex life as a form of cousneling? No. I could have gone my entire life not knowing about his abilities to perform in the bedroom.
Do I think pre-martial counseling is a good idea? Yes. Do I think untrained pastor’s should act as conselors and give advice to young unmarried couples? No.
It was during these counseling sessions that I’d been given a booklet on marriage that looked like it had been designed in the seventies and not updated once. It had the usual speal about how a wife should be submissive and how a husband was the leader of the house. None of this information was new to me. My childhood was infested with stories given from the pulpit about the importance of virginity and how Eve was designed by god to be Adam’s ‘helpmate’. She was made from his rib to be by his side. Not below him, but certainly not above him either.
Indoctrination
The first lesson I can remember learning about marriage and a wife’s role was taught to me when I was about eleven years old. I’ll never forget the night that Pastor McCury came to speak to the pre-teen girls class called Missionettes about marriage.
I remember how important it felt to have the lead pastor of our relatively large church come speak to our Wednesday night class about such an important topic. He had my full attention because whatever he had to say I knew I’d want to commit it to memory.
“You know what I had Dorthy do on our wedding night?” he asked us as he loomed larger than life at the front of the room.
No one spoke a word. We were too awestruck to speak and too nervous.
“I told her to put my pants on,” he continued. “Then once she had them on I asked her if they fit. Of course she said no, and I said ‘Good! They aren’t supposed to fit because I’m the head of our family. I wear the pants, not you.”
I’ll never forget the dissapointment I felt when I realized that instead of getting real advice, I’d been given a directive. To be a good Christian wife one must submit. Message heard, loud and clear.
About ten years later that pastor was kicked out of the church and denomination because it was found out that he was having an affair with a woman he was counseling. The last I heard, him and his wife were still together and he’d started a new church.
Unfortunatly, that wasn’t the most devastating story I heard in my youth. When I was in the sixth grade our wednesday night Missionettes teacher brought in a guest. I don’t remember her name but I’d seen her before. She was a youth pastor for another church and I’d liked her energetic personality.
At the time I was a very chunky middle schooler who felt entirely unloveable. It seemed to me that everyone in my school had paired off in the first two weeks of the semester and I was too fat, ugly, and awkward to get a boyfriend. I remember a friend of mine asked who I had a crush on, and I confessed that I liked Adam from band class because he had a handsome face. Later that day one of Adam’s friends informed me that Adam would never date someone like me. It was a real boost to my adolescent ego, let me tell ya.
But I loved the idea of love, so when I was presented with the opportunity to hear from a mature christian adult woman about the all important topic of marriage and dating, I was all ears.
This fun, energetic, youth pastor became very serious as she launched into the story of her friend who had found the love of her life. She loved him and he loved her.
I was immediately hooked. I wanted to be loved more than anything and was excited to hear about a couple who out of the billions of people on this planet found each other, and found love.
She went on to say that her friend confessed to her boyfriend that she wasn’t a virgin and so he broke up with her. He had reamined pure for his wedding night and he couldn’t be with someone who hadn’t waited like he did.
The youth pastor stressed the point that the boyfriend had every right to break up with her. How dare she have sex before marriage, and how could she ever expect a pure christian man to stay with her after that?
At the time, the idea of having a boyfriend was completely out of reach for me. So to hear about this woman who had everything I wanted and then lost it all because of a bad decision, had me terrified.
That night I internalized the message that I had to be perfect to get and keep a boyfriend, and that even if I were in love a man still had every right to break things off with me if he found me imperfect.
I wish I could tell you that’s where the purity culture indoctrination ended, but it was the early 2000’s and it wouldn’t be a pentecostal church if we didn’t hear about the value of virginity multiple times a year.
If you’re in your thirties and grew up in church you may be familiar with the chewed gum analogy or the used duct tape analogy, but the one I remember the most was the ripped heart analogy.
My youth pastor had five boys line up in front of the youth group and called on Anna to come forward. He gave her a paper heart, then instructed her to give her heart away to each boy. Every guy in that line ripped off a piece of her heart until she only had a scrap left for the final boy who represented her husband.
That analogy always bothered me. Why was she being called out for not having her whole heart to offer instead of the boys for ripping her heart in the first place? It seemed wholly unfair, but that’s the way it was. It was the girls responsibility to be attractive, but modest, fun but not flirty, smart but not a show off, and everything inbetween. I grew up believing that being picked was the ultimate goal, and if I wanted to be picked for marriage I had to walk the fine line of these contradictions, I had to be perfect.
It was about eight years later that my youth pastor was kicked out of the church for having an affair with a nineteen year old.
I was shocked when I learned the news of his affair. Christina was the perfect pastor’s wife. She was sweet, kind, funny, modest, beautiful, a size zero after having two children, and to top it all off she had the voice of an angel and led the youth group in worship ever week. She was the very definition of perfect, and yet she wasn’t good enough.
Of course, today I know that when a man cheats on his wife, it has everything to do with him and his lack of character and absolutely nothing to do with his wife. But at the time I remember thinking that If Christina couldn’t keep a man, then what hope did I have?
I’m happy to report that today Christina is happily remarried and my old youth pastor works for UPS.
Despite all the negative messaging I received, there were a few good statements the pastors at my church made from the pulpit.
It felt like a monumental day when the District Youth Director stood on that stage and declared that “Sex is great! You just have to wait for marriage.”
I have friends who struggle with sexual guilt even though they are married because of all the negative messaging they heard growing up revolving around sex.
I was happy to attend a church that was at least honest about the fact that sex was fun and good even if it did come with the caveat that I would be considered a bad sinner if I didn’t wait for marriage.
A New Identity
So what did all this indoctrination get me? Did I wait until marriage? No. I’d never been good at following rules that made no sense to me, and as a independent twenty-two-year-old woman I remember thinking the whole virginity thing just didn’t make sense for a biblical standpoint.
Jesus never declared that all must remain virgins until marriage, and it seemed to me that the only reason why virgins were important was because Jesus had to come from a virgin birth. Well Jesus had come and gone so what use did we have for virgins in our present age? In my opinion, there was none.
So when I started dating a sexy smooth-talking scorpio with tattoos and piercings I was excited about finally getting to explore this new aspect of romantic relationships…sex.
We’d dated for three months. He told me he loved me, and I believed him. He’d also told me that he hadn’t been with anyone for over a year, and like an idiot I believed that too.
This man was a walking red flag, even his own mother didn’t trust him, but I was young and inexperienced and delusional enough to believe every word he said.
I should mention that something I’d been fascinated by is the fact that when a man has sex for the first time, he likely won’t last long at all, which I thought was an amazing part of god’s design. It only made sense that since women experience pain with their first penetration that men wouldn’t last long. It felt like a win-win. Short sex equals less pain.
So you can imagine my surprise when I did have sex for the first time with my boyfriend who had assured me he hadn’t had sex for over year, and he lasted for a very long time…I knew then. I knew I’d been lied to.
I wouldn’t wish that kind of betrayal on anyone. He knew I was a virgin. He’d told me what I’d wanted to hear and he got what he wanted. But I pushed those lingering feelings aside after we’d done the deed to bask in my non-virginess.
There had been so much pressure and value put on my virginal state growing up that I was surprised to find the world was no different now that I’d had sex. I looked out my window to see cars driving by and people going about their business as if nothing had happened. But something had happened. I’d had sex. My world was different wasn’t it?
It turns out that wasn’t true either. I’d had an experience. I’d made a choice and even though my identity had changed from virgin to nonvirgin, I was still essentially the same person.
The only real change I would experience that day was one I didn’t even realize had taken place. When my boyfriend left my apartment for work and we said our goodbyes that was last time I’d ever see him.
The next day that I got a call from my friend and co-worker Sandy. We worked together at a jewelry store in the mall. She’d picked up an extra shift at a different location and reconginzed my boyfriend as he looked at jewelry with another woman on his arm.
She called him out on it. He got frustrated and left. Then she called me, and I ended my relationship with Mr. Sexy Scorpio over text.
That day I’d become a single non-virgin youth leader grappling with this new identity all on my own.
It Doesn’t Matter
It was one month later that I started dating my now husband and six months after that we’d become engaged. The youth pastor asked if we’d be a part of a panel for the teenagers to ask us questions about dating and waiting to have sex until marriage.
I agreed. However, I felt like I had to come clean to my fiance about the fact that I wasn’t a virgin before I could participate on this panel. I’d hinted at my lack of virginity a few times, but I’d never just come out and said it. I knew he was a virgin and the story that youth pastor told me as a middle schooler came flooding back to me. He hadn’t been raised in the same church as me but that didn’t mean he hadn’t learned similar lessons about finding a pure wife and waiting till marriage.
So I called him. I needed to get it over with. I needed him to know the truth. I confessed that I wasn’t a virgin. I hastily explained that I’d only had sex once, hoping that would somehow help.
Luke didn’t hesitate a moment before saying “It doesn’t matter. I love you all the same.”
IT. DOESN’T. MATTER. I couldn’t believe it. According to the church I’d grown up in he had every right to call things off with me, but he didn’t. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. The phrase kept running through my mind.
All this time, all this stress to be virginal, submissive, and most of all perfect, none of it had mattered. Luke didn’t love me for my perfection, he loved me for me. That day I learned that one cannot experience true love until their partner sees them fail and and looks at them and says, “It doesn’t matter.”
Since then, we’ve created a space for mishaps in our marriage. If I make a mistake he calls it a “Crystal Blunder” we laugh and move on, because everyone makes mistakes and it doesn’t matter.
Wedding Night
If this were a Christian book, I’d have a very long chapter dedicated to how wonderful my wedding night was with my perfect Christian husband. But I’m not a Christian and virginity is only as important as you want it to be.
So I’m not going to write about my wedding night, because marriage is no longer the goal of my life. I no longer live to be “picked.” I am flawed and loved and there’s nothing better than that.
A House Built on Sand
So what does all this have to do with becoming a smut author? Everything.
After my husband and I got married we spent a year in Indiana before we decided we wanted to move to Ohio to be closer to family. In order to save on a down payment for a house, we lived in his brother and sister-in-law’s spare bedroom for a year.
I was still very much a Christian at this time, but my new brother and sister-in-law were not. They were proud atheists which bothered me until I realized that they were doing more actual work in their community to help those in need than I’d ever seen a Christian do. They exhibited more kindness and generosity than anyone I’d ever met, and they didn’t need a religion to tell them to do so. They were just good people.
This was the first block that fell in the foundation of my religious beliefs.
The second was the 2016 presidential election. Even though I’d moved out of Indiana, it wasn’t until that election that I felt like I’d lost my Christian community.
People who I’d had long and engaging theological debates with, people who I had considered to be extremely intelligent were suddenly sharing posts on facebook about statistics that weren’t at all based in reality and posting about historical “facts” that weren’t at all true.
It felt like I was living in some kind of nightmare as I argued with relatives about how we should treat people with kindness in the comment sections of their facebook posts. But it was no nightmare, and unfortunately we are all living that reality again right now.
The third and final blow to my religious beliefs came from the Bible itself. I was doing my devotional time with God, reading my Bible like the good Christian woman I was, when I came across Numbers chapter 5.
11 Then the Lord said to Moses, 12 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him 13 so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), 14 and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— 15 then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah[c] of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offering to draw attention to wrongdoing.
16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. 20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
Up until this point I believed that god was against abortion. I’d personally struggled with my own views on abortion for a long time. On one had, my pastor said it was murder, on the other, no woman should have to bear a child she does not want. I sat on that fence for an embarrassingly long amount of time before I decided a woman should always have control over her own body.
When I discovered that god not only didn’t give a shit about abortion but he allowed forced abortions simply because a husbands feelings were hurt was insane to me.
I’d been taught for decades about how wrong abortion was and how it was murder, and I’d struggled with those beliefs. So to discover that none of that was true was earth shattering.
It was on that day that I vowed never to serve that god again. I made an oath in my own heart that I’d rather burn in hell that worship a god like that.
I fully expected to be struck down by lightening when I said my oath out loud, but nothing happened. I treaded carefully that entire day thinking some ill-fated accident might cross my path and take me straight to hell, but again, nothing happened.
I’d forsaken god, and it did not matter, and for a second time, I’d made a choice and changed my own identity. This transformation would open doors for me that I couldn’t have possibly imagined.
Doors such as writing books about aliens and humans finding love and having lots of good sex. I don’t think I would have ever picked up a romance novel had I still been a christian, and I certainly would never have picked up a pen to write a whole ass smut novel if I’d still been that good submissive Christian woman.
As our hopeful presidential candidate once said, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live, and what came before you.”
All of this, my entire past, my experiences with purity culture, my decision to leave religion all have an impact on what I write today.
I enjoy writing characters who are flawed and make mistakes and are loved anyway. I enjoy writing cozy romance because falling in love should be simple and honest and easy, but in reality it so rarely is.
And I enjoy writing sex scenes where intamcy flows off the page directly into the reader’s heart. I do it all because I can, because of who I am today.
I graduated from Indiana University with a degree in Creative Writing in 2014, but it wasn’t un 2022 that I was actually ready to write that first novel.
The person I was in 2014 is completely unrecongnizable from the person I am today. That person needed to fade away for me to become the who I am now, a cozy author, writer of smut, story teller of alien romances.
These all might sound like silly story ideas to you, but to me they represent massive transformations that have taken place in my life. Transformations that took me completely by surprise, but I’m thankful for nonetheless.
So here I am today, Crystal M. Rose, sci-fi and fantasy romance author, wordsmith, smut writer and damn proud of it.
Booktok and Ice Planet Barbarians
So how exactly did I get into smut and sci-fi romance? Good question. I used to have a very long commute to work and it was making my crazy. I complained to a coworker about it and they told me to get an audiobook app. I did, and the first book I decided to listen to was How To Date Your Dragon by Molly Harper. I had no idea a book could be so fun and cozy and that there were books with actual sex scenes in them. I was in love.
Later I kept hearing about a book on tiktok called Ice Planet Barbarians. Over and over again, I kept hearing about these sexy blue aliens on this cold planet and the humans who crash-landed there. I eventually gave into my curiosity and read the book and I felt like my world had changed yet again.
This, this is what I’d needed. My two favorite genre’s in one book. Sci-fi and romance. It was everything I’d ever wanted a book to be and more.
It wasn’t until I read IPB that I’d even considered writing my own book. I had this notion that if I couldn’t come up with a story that had the potential to be the next great American novel, that I shouldn’t even try. But this was different. This book had given me joy during a dark time in my life and I wanted to do the same for others. For the first time since I graduated with a Creative Writing degree, I was actually considering writing a book.
I kept telling myself that there was no way I could be as good as these authors though. They were far more talented than I could ever be, and I believed that lie for a long time until I read the book series that would piss me off like no other.
I won’t say the name of the book or the author, but she had the concept of her main male characters all having a rut, and I loved that idea. I read book after book in that series just waiting for her to cash in on that concept and let the FMC ‘help’ the MMC through his rut, but SHE NEVER DID! I was beyond pissed.
Then I read a book by a well-liked sci-fi romance author and I hated it. So I let go of my limiting beliefs and realized that if she could do it so could I.
Thus Lunar Paradise was born. My very own cozy romance with an anxious MMC going into a rut/heat and the sex-positive human who helps him through it.
I put it out into the world, readers loved it, and I’ve published nine books since then.
And that is how you make a smut author.
THE END.
Author’s note
Thank you for reading my personal essay. If you grew up in purity culture like I did, I hope you found some healing as you read my story. Virginity, purity, perfection, none of it matters, but you do. You matter. You are loveable. Period. You don’t need to be perfect or hide your flaws. You are allowed to be yourself and loved at the same time. You deserve that.
Where to find my books
If you are interested in reading some cozy alien romance stories, you can find my books on Amazon and for free on KU. My modern alien romance series begins with Lunar Paradise and my barbarian alien romance series begins with Tarak’s Torment.
Other sci-fi romance authors I’ve fallen in love with are Ella Maven (Drixonian Warriors), Ella Blake (Lords of Destra), Honey Philips (Seven Brides for Seven Alien Brothers), Ursa Dax (Cowboy Colony Mail-Order Brides), and of course Ruby Dixon (Ice Planet Barbarians).
Happy Reading!