Big plans are ahead. By November I hope to have launched the Annual Lusty Bibliophile Book List. (Oops, delayed until December!) I am busy collection titles for that. The hardest part will be planning the formatting and layout. The actual making of the list will be fun and hopefully not too overwhelming.
I am busy with other publishing and publicity projects — both for this site and elsewhere. I have also been collecting lots of very interesting books to review in my quarterly newsletter
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Tom Lehrer‘s Smut song (YT) is refreshingly honest and pro-sex. It’s kind of amazing for such a song to come out in 1965, when the Sexual Revolution was just getting started. In music you can get away with lots of silly lusty lyrics. I’m thinking of Fem2Fem’s Switch (YT) and Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-O-Lot (YT), but also Chuck Berry’s Ding-a-Ling (YT), The Loophole (YT) and A Song About Go-Karts and Masturbation (YT) by Garfunkel and Oates.
Perhaps the strangest musical group in the pop-smut category would be E-Rotic (profile) which sing upbeat comic techno-pop songs like Help Me Doctor Dick (YT) and Sex on the Phone (YT). Here’s the Bandcamp page for their greatest hits from the 1990s.
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Existential Smut 1 and Existential Smut 2 are finished, and now I am changing my identity from a writer of erotic fiction to a reader of erotic fiction. That’s for the best. That gives me time to work on the non-erotica projects I’ve been putting off. Even when I was writing erotic stories during my periods of maximum productivity, I jokingly said that at most I was only a 42% erotic writer. But I am eager to keep promoting the series and reading erotic fiction by other people and make little blogposts like this one. I’m still working on the Lusty Bibliophile book reports (still overdue), but the first installment should be ready soon.
Here’s an academic study in 2021 by Kraxenberger, M., Knoop, C.A. & Menninghaus, W. about what kind of people read erotic novels and why. (backup link)
Survey participants regularly read conventionally published erotic novels by traditional publishers and doesn’t include story anthologies or noncommercial web fiction. Also the majority of the people participating in this survey were from Germany and 94% were female. Most of their analysis hinges on what female readers say. 85% identify as heterosexual, 2% as homosexual and 9% as bisexual; 39% were married and 28% were unmarried but in a relationship. 80% of respondents read erotic novels often and 70% say that they are fans of a particular book series, volume or author. 41% said that they read erotic novels on a daily basis (!)
The great majority of respondents say that they talk about reading these kinds of books with others. They are mostly college-educated and not embarrassed at what they read. Among the values reported by respondents were “liberated feminism” and male lovers with higher socialeconomic status. The authors comment:
the novels often portray a pseudo-superiority of the female characters in terms of emotional stability, which they use to mould their male counterparts from merely sexual into affectively intelligent partners (while still being submissive to unyielding patriarchic structures). This would suggest that not much has changed since Radway’s (1984) study, which observed that compliance with patriarchic structures was often simultaneously perceived as a way of overcoming or escaping them….
One of the issues with this paper is that it assumes that the commercial universe of erotica accounts for most of what’s out there. People who read online erotic fiction tend to seek out certain kinds of stories that cater to a fetish or behavior which a reader is stimulated by or curious about. It’s tempting to say that online erotica is more superficial or extreme than conventionally published fiction. But in fact these erotic novels follow their own formulas and aren’t great fiction either. My problem with the titles mentioned is that they are too conventional and not really subversive (as Marco Vassi might have been said to be). I’d expect to find a lot more variety in online fiction or an anthology. (I wish for example that the study designers solicited participants from people who read litererotica.com for example).
I often have assumed that I write for a heterosexual male audience which is a tiny subset of people who read erotica at the moment. Existential Smut 1 and Existential Smut 2 are story collections with an overarching story frame, but mostly they can be taken apart and read individually. There is little or no suspense or psychological mysteries about the two main characters (Lisa and Charles). Even though Lisa and Charles chat a lot, they are just part of the story frame (and to be honest, I keep forgetting the name of the male narrator!). If I continue the story project with additional stories, the development of Lisa and Charles’ friendship is a matter of complete indifference to me. They are just reading buddies.
I’d like to think that females would enjoy my fiction — there are interesting characters and psychological issues, but who knows really? I am currently re-reading the novels of Milan Kundera (who was really popular with both genders in the 1980s). I am struck by the book’s essayistic features, the simple style and the fact that sex scenes are short and serve as interludes to the contrapuntal novel. But Kundera is the exception. For the moment I am also reading erotically-charged novels by male authors like Scott Spencer, Nicholson Baker and James Salter (and maybe John Updike?) to see whether a longer narrative can still be sexy and psychologically interesting and worthy as literature. At the same time, I am really curious about erotically-themed novels in the sci fi/fantasy genre, which often have interesting and radical themes are definitely friendly to readers of all genders.
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Image: Jeune femme allongée, Paul César Helleu (French, 1859-1927)
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