Meet Olivia Dopp of Pico Robertson

Today we’d like to introduce you to Olivia Dopp.

Olivia, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
The human experience and how life unfolds for individuals has always fascinated me.
From my earliest years, I was drawn to stories about other people’s lives, but when I was five, we found out that I was dyslexic. This made reading challenging for me. As a result, the most natural way for me to consume stories was through film, TV, and theater. I quickly fell in love with acting, and I took that passion to college, where I studied theater and film at the University of Southern California. Not only was I able to hone my skills as a storyteller there, but it also opened my eyes to all aspects of storytelling

Eventually, I did find my place in the world of books. After college, I stumbled into the world of smut and erotic writing. There I found a beautiful and rich corner of human existence that was so often neglected in my education, and I found a passionate, curious community of readers.

Now I find myself as not only a storyteller, actor, writer, and producer but also as a smut journalist and researcher of sorts.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Resilience always gets tested when you embark on a new path. Once I started my SMUNTH social media presence, I genuinely had no idea where this would take me. I just had this inkling that it was something unique and interesting. And so I launched into it. However, creating innovative work is always accompanied by doubt. And so I often wake up thinking that everything I am doing is devoid of meaning. On the upside, I’ve learned to accept doubt as part of the process and have learned to work with it.

Each day, my business of content creation and research evolves and morphs. So I just try to embrace that fluidity. When I am struggling with an idea or a piece of work, I appreciate the ever-changing nature of my work and take it as a mechanism for growth.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I run an online presence called SMUNTH, which stands for “reading a month of smut”. SMUNTH was a reading challenge I assigned myself in April of 2024, and it bloomed into this ever-changing thing that has smut reviews at its center.

After college, I was working at a bakery and was using books as my escape. In the middle of spring, I found my fantasy and literary fiction books to be too much. I yearned for a month-long deep-dive into solely spicy stories in hopes of giving my life some levity.

However, the end result was much more engaging than I had expected. I was fascinated with the sexual empowerment represented in the pages of my books. I started to talk to anyone who would listen about all my newfound questions and opinions these stories were inciting.

I felt like it was the first time I was genuinely getting an education about pleasure and desire, and it was happening through the experience of the characters in my books. It was no different than learning about empathy from childhood cartoons. Reading smut helped me grow as an individual because taboo topics were finally laid bare in front of me.

I was struck by the realization that sexual intimacy was often glossed over in my storytelling education because of societal norms. I felt robbed. Why was the emotional growth of characters that formed through sexual intimacy any less important than any other? So, I slowly set out to continue my education and foster a discourse around the human experience that lives within the sexual moments of a story.

Today, I have a website and blog where a lot of my research and writing/reporting lives. My social media engagement mainly happens on TikTok, where I interact with people about these stories.

What were you like growing up?
As a child, I was the one who was always talking your ear off about literally anything! I just loved talking to people. You could find me in the midst of a three-hour-long conversation with a peer or someone 10 times my age.

I am not sure if it’s the way I was hardwired or if it was the way I was raised, but I think I always understood that to be human was to live in two states: 1. being connected to the collective unconscious, and 2. no one else has the exact same cocktail of lived experiences. This gives me a reverence for other people, how they are different from me, and how we are the same. And this ultimately has pushed me to study the human experience.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.smunth.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/its.smunth/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivia-dopp-3a4300283
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@its.smunth

Image Credits
Photos by Chloe kaminski and Olivia Dopp