Big Ed's Place

So my wife and son were out of town this past weekend, leaving me alone to ‘bach’ it. It was a great weekend of writing, doing home repairs and other chores that had built up, and otherwise being a bum. Okay, not so much being a bum, but when you get to do the chores on your own schedule, it feels like being a bum.

And, as bachelors sometimes do, I also spent more time than normal surfing porn. What can I say? It was late, I was tired, the wife was out of town, I hadn’t checked out what was new on storiesonline in a while…

…and I promptly discovered why it’d been a while. Too much chaff for the wheat, even with Lazeez’s noble efforts to help make it easy to identify which is which.

What stunned me was that I started two longish highly rated serials which I just could not finish. They weren’t good. Now I happen to like stroke material from time to time, so I’m quite willing to tolerate crappy quality in small bites. And this weekend, I discovered that ‘in small bites’ is key.

A Penthouse Forum letter is a good example. It’s not sterling writing and is designed for one thing–get the reader hot so their imagination can take over and they can get off. But they’re also short–flash length as a rule, though occasionally a few thousand words (if it’s a feature in the Penthouse Letters magazine). Mercifully short.

So what mystified me was how long these crappy all-stroke serials were. As a reader, I was quickly bored, because it became clear that the only thing that the next chapter would bring is a new set of story codes. Or maybe a character with a new name and superficial differences from the current characters so that we could repeat the scenes written to date.

Fine. There are certainly readers that would be happy to consume these serials. After all, at some point it’s not much different than just going onto the next Forum letter. I can easily imagine a reader digesting them one chapter at a time, getting their ‘fix,’ and then moving on.

So for me the real mystery was why the authors wrote them. Writing is a ton of work. Even if you’re not editing, and not trying to write something good, it still takes time to get words down on the page. I can write maybe 500 words in an hour, though I know some authors that can easily double that. But even using 1000 words an hour, we’re talking days and days to write these stories.

Without them getting better.

Now, I’ve certainly been a proponent of writing purely as a hobby. My analogy used to be that writing was my golf equivalent. I just wanted to go out a couple of times a year and have a good time. I wasn’t interested in studying the videos or hiring a pro coach or getting obsessive about it (yeah, that’s changed).

But even then, I was interested in ‘playing a good game.’ I wanted to give it my best shot and do a little better than I had the attempt before.

Well, if these authors are doing that, I can’t see it. All I can see if a ton of words that really aren’t going anywhere. So maybe I’m missing something. Or maybe it just takes all kinds.

So I’ve discussed how including taboo in a story will increase the readership on storiesonline and other free sites. I’ve discussed how I believe part of that is the nature of the brain chemical speedball we get from the taboo. But those arguments are general, and there’s one taboo that seems to stand above the others in online erotica: incest.

Heck, the whole point behind my story 9.7 was how story codes influenced ratings. And it’s not “beast” that’s driving stories to the top. So what specifically makes the incest taboo so attractive?

My opinion? First, besides the speedball, I think that taboo has an inherent sociological lure. There’s a rush with “being bad” or stepping across the boundaries. It helps reaffirm that we’re not staid boring old farts. We can flirt with the places where there be dragons! If you can’t head for the physical frontier, you can find the sociological frontier.

I think that incest is a particularly good “frontier taboo” because it’s understandable. Not a lot of people can image why scat or bestiality would be arousing, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that an attractive woman has the name “mom” instead of “Susan.”

I also think that many guys remember those early years of puberty when the hormones were in complete control and any woman looked attractive. Boys peeking on their sisters or mothers is pretty common. Many incest stories tap into that and take it to an idealistic fantasy conclusion.

Aside: I think MILF fantasies come from that same era in a guy’s life. He was ignorant but full of hormones. Wouldn’t it have been great to have an older woman teach him all about sex? Maybe not in real life, but the fantasy has some serious grounding in past experience.

There’s of course the Freudian explanations for sexual attraction to our parents. I’m not sure how much I buy them myself. Is it possible to add a sexual attraction to an existing love interest? Sure, but it doesn’t seem causal. Besides, it’s fairly clear in hindsight that a lot of Freud’s theories were because he just couldn’t face the fact that there was a fair amount of child sexual abuse going on by the fathers in his social class.

But that, I think, is where the reason for the taboo shows up. Fantasies, and reading fiction however unrealistic, are one thing. Engaging in the act is another. While I believe that consenting adults should have wide latitude in their private sex lives, consent becomes trickier in familial relations (and note: “consenting” and “adults” are key parts of that sentence).

This is in large part because I’ve never seen a family that didn’t have underlying power dynamics. Even when all parties are adults, the ability to say yes or say no to one’s parents or siblings can be fraught with emotional baggage. My personal example is my grandmother–when she said “you’ll come over Sunday”, it wasn’t a request and all her kids, even the ones in their 50′s, showed up. Even near-age siblings can have such dynamics, making it dangerous water to add in a sexual component.

Which I think is the final part of the attraction. Not many of us grew up in families that were open enough and healthy enough about sex that we could walk into the living room, say “I’m really horny, what should I do about that?” and not freak out everyone else in the family. So the incest fantasy appeals not only for its sexual taboo elements, but for the idealized family elements.

Now, obviously, these are only my opinions and speculations. I’ve never engaged in incest and the overwhelming majority of the people I know personally who have report that it was ultimately damaging for them. But fantasies usually aren’t about the realistic. And in the online world, the ideal, when mixed with a speedball, seems to draw the readers.

Lost Girls, by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, is beautiful, thought provoking, and a bit disturbing. A very thick graphic novel, it’s not cheap nor, surprisingly, a quick read.  The basic premise is that Wendy (of Peter Pan), Alice (of Wonderland fame), and Dorothy (of the Wizard of Oz) all stay at the same hotel in Europe in 1914.  It doesn’t take long for their paths to cross and then… things go through the metaphorical looking glass. read more »

The web is filled with free dirty stories. If you’re willing to wade through a swamp of crap, you can occasionally find decent freebies. But some sites make it easier than others and storiesonline (www.storiesonline.net) is one of the best. read more »

One of the side effects of story codes (blogged about here), I believe, is the growth of stories with taboo elements in them. I’m primarily referring to incest, bestiality, and rape stories here, since necrophilia and the various scat type stories still seem to occupy a very small niche. The reason is, as I mentioned previously, is that it’s now easy to search for codes. So if a reader gets a jolt from a taboo, they can easily find a lot more stories with that same taboo. Therefore, in a classic feedback loop, if a writer on a free site wants more readers, they need to incorporate the codes that people are searching for.

I.e., more searching for the taboo leads to more stories with the taboo.

Now erotica about these taboos is certainly not new. Bestiality, incest, and rape can all be found in Greek myths, Victorian era porn, and the various underground porn comics and novels available for most of the 20th century. Heck, your local adult news stand probably has letters magazines devoted to incest and Penthouse Variations even published some woman-dog letters in the mid-70′s.

So did the internet change anything? Yep. Availability.

Porn on the internet is easy to find these days. It’s easy to get just about any variant of porn with judicious googling or a willingness to wade through spam and sleazy sites. Heck, someone’s been googling “toddler erotica” and turning up my site (there’s an old blog post about me having a toddler that’s turning up and my stats tracker tells me how people get here). Furthermore, it’s easy to stumble across new types of porn. You don’t have to be looking for stories about the taboos to find them on the free sites.

So… those women-dog stories I stumbled across long ago and couldn’t find again if my life depended on it? Well, anyone can find a few thousand woman-dog stories with a few clicks of the mouse. And so if someone gets turned on… we’re in that feedback loop again. The internet will provide that for which people seek.

This is, of course, not limited to porn. The internet makes all niche areas easier to access, and communities easier to form. If you’re into yak herding or flying experimental helium balloons, you’re much more likely to find information and community online than in your local physical neighborhood. This is, in general, a good thing.

So… is the availability of taboo porn a bad thing? On the one hand, there’s an argument that increased exposure desensitizes. We’re less likely to be outraged over taboo acts if we’ve read a hundred stories involving them. Also, the constant “hit” can be addictive for some people (and that’s for a future post).

On the other hand… most people are perfectly capable of separating fantasy and real life. They can handle the idea of being turned on by a taboo and still never want to do it in real life. I’m also very suspicious of those who want regulations or laws that restrict the ‘most’ for the few that have trouble separating fantasy and real life. As soon as we move into trying to restrict the market and exchange of ideas, we’re perilously close to creating ‘thoughtcrimes.’ It’s not too far a slide down the old slippery slope to move from trying to criminalize discussions of rape fantasies to trying to criminalize discussions of fantasies about killing politicians to trying to criminalize fantasies about opposing politicians. Ask the Dixie Chicks what they went through for opposing Bush, and imagine the force of law and police behind it. As I wrote in my first post, freedom really starts in the bedroom. And that includes the freedom to fantasize.

Furthermore, I suspect the lure of the taboo porn will also prove to be somewhat cyclical. A lot of the attraction (discussed in a future post) is because it’s new. Based on my own experiences and those of people I’ve discussed porn with, it’ll fade. It doesn’t take too long reading those hundreds of taboo stories to realize that most of them are crap, and then to reach the point where quality is more important than the story codes.

At least I hope so. Because in my writing, I (generally) want to be realistic and capture sex as it is or could be. While I will occasionally touch on a taboo, it’s because I want to play with some related aspect of sexuality, rather than the taboo itself. Does that mean that I too am increasing the amount of taboo porn on the internet? Yeah, I guess it does. But maybe by having quality writing that also goes into the implications of the taboo, it won’t increase the desensitization. We’ll have to see.

This one, unfortunately, requires some history. When I first started writing and posting my stories, the storiesonline site (run by Lazeez) had a different rating system than it does today. Readers could give a story a rating between 4 and 10 and, after 10 votes, the average score would be displayed. The top stories on the site held ratings above 9.6. Stories above 9.7 were extremely rare.

Part of this rarity was a phenomena where anonymous readers would slam stories in order to reduce their rank. It was common for a highly rated story to suddenly get a bunch of 4′s, knocking it out of the top 20. It was petty and silly, but a fact of life.

The other phenomena that several of us authors observed was that the codes seemed to affect the story as much as the quality. Mr. Freeze made the comment at the beginning of the story in an online discussion group, and the quirky idea for this story showed up in my brain. I released it to storiesonline in 2004. In classic ironic fashion, it quickly became my most downloaded single chapter story. Whether that’s the humor or the codes, I’ll never know.

If you hover over the links to a chapter or story, you’ll get the story codes for that chapter. I have ambivalent feelings about story codes, largely based on wondering if they’ve outlived their original value.

Back in the usenet days, before the web, story codes were incredibly valuable. If you were reading alt.sex.stories, you had only a subject line’s worth of information to tell you if you should click and read the message. Since baud rates were slow (I was on a 1200 baud modem in 1992, which was considered good), it could be really frustrating to start reading or downloading a story to discover you really didn’t like it. So the codes evolved–MF, MM, FF let you know the general genre, and other codes let you know if there were things that might turn you off (like inc, beast, nc, etc.).

Of course, the web did come along, and story codes still serve a purpose on many sites. However, with faster data transfers and the ability to provide more “pre” story information, they’ve become less valuable. Here, for example, you have the teasers and the illustrations which provide a reasonable hint as to what the story contains. It also doesn’t take too long in reading my site to get a feel for the stories I like to write. Any ‘squick’ code will be the exception instead of the rule, which means your odds of getting a story you like while picking blind are pretty good.

So they’re not as necessary as a warning. And instead, they seem to have become advertising. For on the biggest ‘free’ sites (storiesonline, literotica, asstr), one can search by code. So if you want to read “FF group oral” you can.

It’s led to a couple of issues, in my opinion. The first is the proliferation of codes. Storiesonline now has around a hundred codes you can pick for you story. From a warning standpoint, “group,” “orgy,” and “swing” aren’t meaningfully different. From an advertising perspective, the nuances may be valuable.

In addition to the proliferation of the number of codes, the ‘advertising’ aspect also encourages stories to go ‘code collecting.’ If you want readers, put the popular codes in your story. I address this in my story “9.7.”

And finally, I think it has led to a bunch of the codes becoming meaningless. For example, “oral,” “exh,” and “voy.” Just about any story that includes full sex is going to include “oral.” So how important is it to include that code? Either as a warning or an advertisement? Similarly, my stories are so heavily exhibitionist/voyeur oriented that I’d have to include both codes on just about everything. That would just lead to numbness and a tuning out.

So, that raises the question–what are they for, these days? Would it make a difference if I didn’t include them at all?

I’m not sure it would, but I know I have enough readers who care about codes to not drop them completely. Besides, occasionally I will use a code that a ‘caution’ type code. So for now they stay.

If you look carefully, you’ll notice that none of my stories have the “nc” or “non-consent” code (codes can be found by hovering over the story or chapter links). There’s a reason for that. It squicks me and I won’t write it.

Ya see, I stopped counting the number of women I knew who’d been raped or sexually assaulted when I ran out of fingers and toes to count them on. I wasn’t even out of college when I passed that milestone. Several of my past lovers were included in that count and a few more would have made the list even after that milestone. Some had dealt with it and were doing fine. Others… the scars and wounds were there if you knew what to look for. And those wounds affected me and many other people in their lives.

The worst, honestly, was dating women who were daughters of mothers who’d been raped, but not gotten counseling or help for it. I could see behaviors that were consistent with having a past history, but it was second-hand. That made it much more subtle and insidious.

And based on my own experience, and in the reading I’ve done as a result of dealing with this history in many of the women I’ve loved, I’ve come to believe that the black and white line really is ‘consent.’ If someone doesn’t give consent, it’s rape.

Now, consent itself may have to be determined on a case by case basis. Most sexual encounters don’t have pre-arranged lists of acceptable activities that the parties have consented to do, like the bdsm community often does. In fact, I’ve never seen the awareness of consent/non-consent outside of that community. So the particulars become important and the miscommunication opportunities are vast.

For example, I know a woman (S) who joined a couple in bed, all nude. The guy was trying to talk the women into having a full blown threesome but S wasn’t sure and the guy’s partner wasn’t interested. So he rolled on top of S and penetrated her, before she had a chance to react or object. Was S raped? By my definition, yes. That doesn’t absolve her of some of the responsibility for getting into the situation, but she certainly hadn’t agreed to intercourse. And that’s where the miscommunication kicks in big time. If he’d said, “is this okay?” first, even though it wouldn’t have been sexy, it would have made a world of difference.

So with my experiences, I just can’t find non-consent erotic. It’s not a pleasure to read, nor to write. That fact that there are so many stories on the web that do center on rape or abuse, or blackmail is a bit disturbing to me, but my speculations on the authors who write these stories will have to be another post. Suffice it to say, I won’t be one of them.

Now I do have to throw in the caveat about the threat of rape or other violence. Discerning readers will note that there’s at least one story on this site that does have that threat. It was absolutely necessary for the plot and for the dramatic tension. I hope that it lacks eroticism, because that’s not what I was aiming for.