Okay, I have to admit that I’m ticked off and it’s all Lisabet’s fault. Well its not actually Lisabet’s fault, she just wrote a blog post Consent and Complicity that got me fired up.
If you haven’t read it, take a minute and look it up. You should be able to click the link above to view it.
My problem is simply this, why are writers of erotica treated differently than writers of any other genre and their stories have to conform to different rules than others.
My top peeve is the use of rubbers in erotic stories. Why do we need a condom, will you get an STD from reading? Do we need to promote safe sex? Why?
Did Dirty Harry use blanks in his 44 Magnum, well did he punk?
Are James Patterson’s characters all nice Sunday school teachers, well hell no!
So why can other writers write murder and mayhem without any thought to their character’s safety? Is it written anywhere that we have to play nice? I’m mad and I’m not going to take this any longer!
When you read a fictional story, most people read to be entertained and a means to escape to another world for a few minutes. Well, and if you read one of my stories, I hope you get off also.
I don’t have any lofty ideals about my stories, I write stroke, plain and simple but that’s not the whole story.
An erotic story by definition is to entertain and stimulate the reader, not to teach a lesson. Unless that’s the actual intent of the story.
I never use a condom in a story because I think that the reader needs to imagine the feeling of bare skin on skin, not plastic rubbing together. The story is not going to somehow infect us but if you’re worried about it try spraying your books with Lysol.
I doubt that you can find very many people who would rather have sex with a rubber than bareback. Especially in today’s world, where we are constantly concerned about some disease such as Ebola, AIDS, Hep C, or some other God-awful thing that might make your dick fall off.
By the same token, if the thought of pseudo-rape or non-con scenes turns your crank, then why can’t we read that? If Stephen King can torture and kill people in his stories without raising an eyebrow, why can’t we have someone put clothespins on our nipples?
Personally, I’m not into pain but I know a number of people who really get off on it. That doesn’t mean that you have to read/write a story involving a flogger but you should have the right if you want to.
According to authors who use a conventional publishing house and have to deal with editors, there is often the comments that the editor makes them tone down their story to be sure it doesn’t offend someone.
That’s why I like to satisfy myself and my readers, not some editor somewhere, which self-publishing gives you that ability.
“Freedom of speech doesn’t protect speech you like; it protects speech you don’t like,” Larry Flynt of Hustler Magazine.
Great quote from Larry Flynt.
I don’t really understand why the standards for literature that is sexually oriented are so different from other sorts of genre fiction. I mean, WHY does sex get people so upset? It’s healthy, fun, and occasionally mind-expanding. It’s natural! Yet it makes people SO uncomfortable, so angry, so judgmental.
Why can’t people just mind their own business? If I write smut, how does it hurt anyone? Anyone at all?
Sigh.
Agree, Lisabet, our puritanical upbringing makes us this way is the only reason I can think of. While I’ve never studied it, I would assume that the US of A suffers from more rapes, sexual assaults, and nutjobs with a gun than any other place. Well possibly with the exception of several mid-Eastern countries who are even more uptight about women.
Sex is dirty and nasty but that’s why I like it! Women have it and we guys need to get it and that’s the way it’s always been. Men are put on a pedestal for all their sexual conquests but women are labeled sluts.
When we first started swinging, it was weird to have a woman ask you for sex. I was always used to being the aggressor and not the target. Once my wife asked me why I partied with a girl as her comment was, “She’s not your type, did she do something special?” My response was, “I didn’t know how to tell her no.” LOL
Hey, Larry, you’re definitely preaching to the choir here. Agree with everything you said and love the Larry Flynt quote.
I have to say that I have zero tolerance for adults who strut around telling other adults (completely consenting adults) what they should or shouldn’t be allowed to write and/or read and/or do. They’re like parents who say, “I won’t have that filth in my house.” (Filth meaning anything they don’t like, whether it “Lady Chatterley’s Love” or “16” magazine.. (And yes, when I was in my mid-teens, my own mother ripped up my secret stash of “16” magazines, in front of me and threw them in the garbage, because they were “trash” and that’s where they belonged. My response, even now that I’m in my late 60s, to that same attitude is still the same — I want to smack them upside the head with a cricket bat and tell them to fuck off and stop trying to tell me that they know what’s better for me than I do.
Okay, that’s my rant response to your rant. Hot button issue for me, obviously. I’m so totally on the same page as you.
Rose 😉