What's your thoughts on smut?

To start, smut is a category of books that contains sexual scenes. These books are typically romance, and are centered around a love story of some sort. Smut is most popular with women.

I know multiple people who are close to me that read smut, that I just now found out about. In my opinion, smut is erotica, so it's on the same level as porn. It's just not the typical video format. I don't shame them for liking it, but I am vocal about thinking it's inappropriate and kind of disturbing. Specifically when I had someone go into detail about one of the books, which included rape, SA, and public sex. Like I said before, I don't want to shame people who like this, but it deeply disturbs me. Especially because of how normalized it is. I remember a few years ago I was in a math class, and some girl was reading a smut book directly in front of the professor. Then they started talking about the book, and other books by the same author. Like why is porn something that is frowned upon but smut isn't? The only difference is there is more fluff in between the sexual scenes. If people want to read smut that's perfectly fine, I just think it shouldn't be something that is a conversation topic or a public activity. Because if someone was watching porn in public that would be very inappropriate, so I think smut should be the same.

Thoughts?