Has erotic literature improved over the years? (Long thoughtful rant)

[themightyxloph]

Way Back When, in that glorious period between The Great Renaming (1987) and The Eternal September (1993), Usenet was the king of public Internet fora. Usenet access was pretty much restricted to the academic world (before AOL unleashed its atrocities upon it) which meant that mere mortals had to make do with Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) and Fidonet. (If you were born too late to remember this essential piece of computer and Internet history, be sure to Google it.)

The academic culture of free thought and free speech on which Usenet was based also provided a platform for sexual expression. Subjects like AIDS, safe sex, homosexuality, the benefits of sex education, sex toy recommendations and other things that were mostly taboo at the time could be (and were) freely discussed there. This almost inevitably led to the publication of erotic writings as well, for which a special newsgroup (alt.sex.stories, commonly abbreviated to, you guessed it, a.s.s or even ASS) was created. Many writings from a.s.s were copied to the BBS world and distributed through Fidonet. I ran a BBS from 1988 to 1995, and I remember them well. I enjoyed quite a few of them, as I recall. (There was also a ton of extremely bad Star Trek TNG fan fiction, but that was a sign of the times to be taken in stride, I suppose.)

Many of these stories have been archived in the alt.sex.stories text repository (ASSTR for short, see http://www.asstr.org for a now pretty much defunct website showing an obvious resemblance to Literotica) and on Textfiles.com (http://textfiles.com/sex/EROTICA/). Recently, in a fit of nostalgia, I decided to browse through the latter in search of some fond memories.

And what a shock that was.

There's no other way to put it: most this stuff, seen in today's light, is absolutely terrible. Granted, there are some exceptions that are worth your time. After all, no repository of about 5,000 files can be all bad, and there's even a smattering of Elf Sternberg's writing in there. I also did come across two or three good stories I remember from 35 years or so ago. But other than that, reading most of this drivel is very hard work.

Of course one must always keep in mind that all stories are products of their times and should be regarded within this context. At the time the academic world used computer systems with Usenet access mostly on a time share basis and often through serial terminals, while BBSes relied on dial-up modems and phone lines. Read: we're talking about slow, clunky text-based interfaces that one had to use either on a time budget or at metered costs (often both) which is a far cry from the always-on, slick and inexpensive click-and-consume online world we are now used to. Also, the 1980s were a continuation of the sexual revolution of the 1960 and 1970s, with many taboos being broken at the time, and erotic material making a transition from print and film to online content and video tape. It was therefore not surprising that, like when a child suddenly has unlimited access to a very large cookie jar, things did get a little messy sometimes. There was also little or no moderation in Usenet newsgroups like alt.sex.stories; in fact they were considered a more or less unsupervised playground for excesses that could be freely expressed there, rather than in other newsgroups where such things were considered undesirable.

Yet I can't help wonder at the very high percentage (at least 85% or so) of stories from that era that revolve around things like rape, gang rape, incest and bestiality, not to mention pedophilia, urophilia, coprophilia, necrophilia and worse. Granted, Lit rejects most such material for legal reasons based on current legislation, and has categorized the stories they do accept by subject, while the mortal remains of alt.sex.stories are entirely unfiltered (much of today's legislation wasn't in effect back then) and the posts are entirely unsorted which exposes one to the bad as well to the good. Still, I don't think that Lit has to reject 85% or more of all submissions, and after paging through the old archive lists for a few minutes one does get the picture: there is something very dark in those old writings, and I'm not sure I like it. No, let me rephrase that: I'm sure I don't like it. Raping minors, having sex with dogs, goats or monkeys, and non-consensual torture to the point of maiming the victim are not healthy activities, as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps I'm provincial and narrow-minded. Perhaps not.

But that's not the only thing. I just can't get over how really, truly and utterly badly most of this stuff has been written! It's full of grammar and spelling blunders that should embarrass an eight year old, with plot lines that can be adequately summarized as "The bitch looked hot so he banged her" or "We got together and we fucked". In the vast majority of cases there's little or no background, preamble, scene-setting or anything else a story really needs in order to be worth reading. Granted, the need to write and read these stories using a slow and clunky text interface was restrictive, but that didn't stop brilliant authors like Elf Sternberg from writing some of the best erotica ever published on the Internet that way.

And while porn has never been very realistic no matter how you look at it, this drivel takes the nonsense to its ultimate extremes. A chick you happen to meet in a hotel elevator suddenly starts taking off her clothes right there because she really, really needs you to fuck her? Nine year old girls being turned on by their daddies? Male protagonists routinely sporting ten, twelve or fourteen inch dicks? Women who go into an orgasmic frenzy when they have said impossibly large dicks rammed up their asses without any lubricant? Hmm... I don't think so. And don't even get me started about captain Jean-Luc Picard being ball-gagged and whipped by Q. (Great. Now how am I going to scrub that image off the inside of my forehead?)

To summarize: barring some notable exceptions, the best of ASSTR is about on par with the worst on Literotica.

Of course not everything published on Lit is good, and all content there is moderated and categorized. Also, back in the 1980s access to all kind of erotic material was far more restricted, far more cumbersome and far more limited than it is now, so there was less opportunity to develop erotic writing skills, to compare works and to be exposed to really good erotica. These factors skew any comparison. But even so, it is nothing sort of stunning to see how much better today's erotic writings are, across the board, than what was published on Usenet and Fidonet 25-35 years ago.

So I can't help but wonder: even taking all the above factors into account, has erotic writing as a whole (not just on Lit) improved over the years? And if so, why?

 

[TadOverdon]

My guess from looking at the alt.sex forums on Google is that the aim of many of those writers was different than that of many literotica writers. This place is not just an online outlet, it has its own culture.

Writing just as strange and bad as asstr is being posted on the web to this day. I offer a guy named slutwriter as Exhibit A. And it's rampant in porn comics.

 

[MrPixel]

I recall reading barely a handful of stories on Usenet back in the day and throwing my hands up at the horrible literary skills on display - absolutely unreadable, a total waste of the then limited online time allotment. I vowed never, ever to tread there again, nor did I seek any other online erotica as the medium matured.

I really didn't. Fast-forward to forty years later. I discover LitE in a search, lurk for a couple of years, and come to the conclusion that this isn't my father's Buick.

So, yeah, in my world, vast improvement. Admittedly my sample size at each end is statistically insignificant, but at least I don't immediately cringe and want to throw my mouse at the screen these days.

YMMV!

 

[SimonDoom]

I've been reading online erotica for about 25 years, probably dating back to a year or two before Literotica was founded. I can't speak to the stuff that came before that. I vaguely recall that the best stories I read around the turn of the millennium were just as good as the best stories I read now. There were some authors who wrote then that I liked who no longer write. Probably the biggest difference is there's just a whole lot more erotica than there used to be. Far more people write it. There has been, from what I've been able to see, a certain amount of taming; it's not quite the Wild West it used to be, but that's true of the Internet in general. It's much easier today to find what you are looking for, to suit your taste, and it's also much easier today to avoid the stuff you don't want to see.

I'm not sure what is meant by "much of today's legislation," because to my knowledge no new legislation has been passed, in the USA, at least, over the last 25 years governing written online erotica. A very few criminal cases have been prosecuted against extreme instances of erotica (usually violent pedophilia), based on preexisting obscenity laws, but they're rare and it's not clear that all courts would apply the same standards because of the First Amendment. To the extent the online environment concerning written erotica is different, it's because of the evolving preferences of providers like Literotica and the influence of financial institutions that don't want to be affiliated with certain kinds of material.

 

[TadOverdon]

I've been reading online erotica for about 25 years, probably dating back to a year or two before Literotica was founded. I can't speak to the stuff that came before that. I vaguely recall that the best stories I read around the turn of the millennium were just as good as the best stories I read now.

Agreed.

You can find all the cringey stuff you want right here at lit. You just won't find the worst creepy subject matter that you can elsewhere.

 

[themightyxloph]

I'm not sure what is meant by "much of today's legislation," because to my knowledge no new legislation has been passed, in the USA, at least, over the last 25 years governing written online erotica..

Usenet goes back further than that. Child pornography, for example, was illegal some 35 years ago (AFAIK) but laws were less strictly enforced and written material was considered less of an offense than it is now. And with the world wide web giving such material far wider exposure than Usenet did, it attracts far more attention (and legal repercussions) than it used to. I'm no legal expert, but that's what I'm seeing, and the stricter policies about underage sex, bestiality and "snuff" on written material also reflect in Literotica's increasingly strict standards. Lit isn't publishing what it did two decades ago.

 

[AlinaX]

I think the readers here expect a certain basic quality, which means new writers have some pressure on them. I may bitch about stories on here being badly written, but my complaints are more like, "You can't open with a paragraph of supposedly hot sex and then immediately rewind to the beginning of the story!"

No, you have to seduce the reader, tease your way into their thoughts, and when they are open, willing to receive you, only then do you thr-

But let me rewind.

My first exposure to erotica was the Black Lace and Nexus novels. It was a habit of mine to buy one to read on the long coach or train journeys I was doing then. Some of those are not bad at all, and I even managed to find one recently that I loved back then.

I remember, much later, searching the Web for erotic story sites, and most of the stuff being pretty awful or tedious, with occasional discoveries. I went through a phase of buying Kindle erotica; some authors are very good. Ultimately, Literotica stood out as being a reliable source of interesting and generally well written stories.

 

[MrPixel]

Usenet goes back further than that. ...

Confirm. I started on Usenet ~1982. It was relative hell finding a local dial-up number that worked then as server portals were constantly moving around for the best telephone rates. Number portability? What's that?

 

[NotWise]

I can think of three reasons why stories would improve over that time: in some cases (including Lit), filtering by site owners has contributed; reader feedback is probably the main reason things might improve, and; the number of people involved now is vastly larger than it was twenty five-thirty years ago, and that helps the filtering and feedback work.

There are probably other reasons. Laurel has to have a better understanding than anyone here. It would be interesting to hear what she has to say.

 

[SimonDoom]

Child pornography, for example, was illegal some 35 years ago (AFAIK) but laws were less strictly enforced and written material was considered less of an offense than it is now.

It's a somewhat murky area, but it's important to remember that written stories are not child porn. Child porn is illegal principally because it consists of visual images of real children. It's not just obscene; it's a form of abuse. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that "child porn" laws only apply to images of real, actual children (as opposed to cartoons or animation). It's not at all clear how obscenity laws in the US apply to written materials, because 1) the US Supreme Court has not, to my knowledge, ruled definitively on the issue, 2) the prevailing Miller test for "what is obscene" relies on local standards, which is confusing, and 3) there are so few instances in which people actually have been prosecuted for obscene writings in the last 40 years (although there are a few).

Laws aside, there's no question there's much more regulation of underage content by the providers themselves, like Literotica, and by financial companies, than there used to be.

 

[purplishy]

Agreed with other posters that there is some great and terrible erotica today, just as there was 25 years ago!

I think what has changed over the years is the second-order effects. Social media websites have features -- follows, likes, comments -- that shape people's behaviors and become a feedback loop that reinforces those behaviors, for better or worse (mostly for worse, really).

A similar phenomenon might play out on sites like Lit: some authors are sufficiently influenced by the site's feedback and social features to consciously (or unconsciously) allow it to affect their work. Story contests and these forums add even more layers of complexity.

In other words, I think the best you could hope for from posting erotica in 1997 would be a handful of emailed comments - hardly any sites allowed public commenting at the time. But if you post erotica in 2022, you'd best be wearing a full flame-retardant suit.

 

[KeithD]

To each their own. I don't put much effort into judging and condemning anyone else's fetishes and content of choice as long as I can find places that tolerate and appreciate mine.

 

[oggbashan]

To each their own. I don't put much effort into judging and condemning anyone else's fetishes and content of choice as long as I can find places that tolerate and appreciate mine.

I have just had to delete an anon's long comment (half as long as the story) ranting about how the particular fetish offends him and what dire punishments he would inflict on the protagonists. He was triggered into rage by a fairly innocuous fictional version of that particular fetish.

 

[windar]

I never think of the late 1980s and early 1990s as "way back", which may be a sign of advancing age. If you go really way back, to the early 20th Century or even earlier, to the Victorian era, then I would say the average quality is certainly not better and possibly not as good. Back then, books were published by actual publishers who employed professional editors. They gave books not just a cursory screen to see whether they violated some rule of formatting or the age of the character, but actually read it and edited. Not just grammar, but style. And rejected manuscripts that were beyond salvaging. Today, virtually no one, whether on pay sites or free sites does that, as practically all erotica is self published.

Go back and read stuff from that era and most of it was pretty damn good and little of it was truly bad.

 

[MrPixel]

We need to go just slightly further back. Before online wiped out the genre, there were the pulp paperbacks in the porn shops that proliferated from the 1960s thru the mid '80s. The grimy books ranged from just nasty to OMG. Granted, because somebody was paying for printing and distribution, there was some attention paid to editorial style. I suspect actual proofreading was somewhere in the process; maybe twice if you included transcription from the typed manuscript to the Linotype slugs for the press.

However, the proofreading didn't account for fact checking, or realism. I guess this style may have been what drove the early Usenet stuff, but sans proofreading.

I have one such example in my "old porn" stash. Haven't sullied my fingers with the old ink in years, but I recall a couple of scenes describing encounters with a chimpanzee who possessed "a baseball bat". Uh... no.

 

[TadOverdon]

We need to go just slightly further back. Before online wiped out the genre, there were the pulp paperbacks in the porn shops that proliferated from the 1960s thru the mid '80s. The grimy books ranged from just nasty to OMG. Granted, because somebody was paying for printing and distribution, there was some attention paid to editorial style. I suspect actual proofreading was somewhere in the process; maybe twice if you included transcription from the typed manuscript to the Linotype slugs for the press.

They're still for sale online, as used books and as eBooks. I know a guy in Georgia who's almost living off of the proceeds from his site.

The used paperbacks in good condition can fetch quite a price. It grosses me out to think about a used porn paperback. Ew. Probably more random spattered DNA than an NCIS: Los Angeles crime scene.

 

[Dingo_Triplesix]

I am sure that it is inevitable that quality will increase.

The area we are talking about here can be seen as a market with supply and demand. As the market grows, the services offered become more sophisticated. Providers (authors) have their learning curve and learn primarily from successful peers. Customers become more and more choosy as the variety grows. This leads to the typical spiral effect that can be observed in many fields. In the Usenet days, customers were happy to get anything at all. Today, correct style and spelling are simply expected as basic quality.

Of course, there were very good writers in the past, too. But the basic population is simply much, much larger today, so that - if the spread of talent and competence remains the same - there are also many more good authors.

 

[TadOverdon]

I am sure that it is inevitable that quality will increase.

The area we are talking about here can be seen as a market with supply and demand. As the market grows, the services offered become more sophisticated. Providers (authors) have their learning curve and learn primarily from successful peers. Customers become more and more choosy as the variety grows. This leads to the typical spiral effect that can be observed in many fields.

Sure. Because that's how supply and demand has worked with video porn. Not.

 

[SimonDoom]

I am sure that it is inevitable that quality will increase.

The area we are talking about here can be seen as a market with supply and demand. As the market grows, the services offered become more sophisticated. Providers (authors) have their learning curve and learn primarily from successful peers. Customers become more and more choosy as the variety grows. This leads to the typical spiral effect that can be observed in many fields. In the Usenet days, customers were happy to get anything at all. Today, correct style and spelling are simply expected as basic quality.

Of course, there were very good writers in the past, too. But the basic population is simply much, much larger today, so that - if the spread of talent and competence remains the same - there are also many more good authors.

I don't see this as necessarily being true at all.

Over time, a market, if reasonably free and uninhibited, will get more sophisticated about providing a product that people are willing to pay for. That's not the same as saying quality improves, or that the product, as opposed to the market, becomes more sophisticated. This trend has occurred, for instance, with the movie industry, which is now heavily focused on developing franchises that appeal to teen boys and then saturating the market with sequels. Thus, we get a gazillion tedious and childish superhero movies. Because that's what makes money. Can anyone truly claim it equates to improved quality? I don't see that. I think movies -- especially high-grossing movies -- are generally worse than they were 45 years ago, which is not to say there aren't great artists in film today. It's true that the population, and therefore the talent pool, is larger, but it's not clear that this equates to more great work.

Progress is inevitable in some things, like smart phones, high def TVs, electric car batteries, and computer clock speeds. It's not inevitable in culture.

 

[Wifetheif]

It is a mixed bag. Some vintage stuff published anonymously during the Victorian era and the early 20th Century still holds up. Often those were written by big names who, for a myriad of reasons, could not go public under their real names. We will never know who some of these people were but... Nero Wolfe wrote a lost world novel "Under the Andes" very early in his career. The heroine/love interest spends most of the novel naked and it is implied that she was "intimate" with certain members of the lost race of smelly Aztec dwarves. (I'm NOT making that up!) Wolfe being Wolfe, it's not badly written but a real change of pace from the Fat Man!"
Personally, I have improved as a writer in the decade-plus I've been posting here. Some of my early stories make me cringe but I refuse to edit and repost them. They remind me of where and what I was and keep me humble. I'm grateful that L.Com gave me a forum to experiment in and hone my craft. I came to erotica from the nonfiction world. I began posting here to work on things like dialogue and plot, which are less important in academic nonfiction.
To be honest, I think the quality on L.com has gone down considerably. Trolls have driven away all but the toughest-skinned wordsmiths from tackling "Loving Wives" which once had some of the very best stories at this site. The amount of incest stories here is really stunning. I've written a few myself but now it seems as though every third story is horny sons and mothers or whatever. There was one story from the old days on ASSTR that really fired my imagination and inspired me to write. Because of its content L.Com would never have touched it.
I find fewer and fewer stories here compelling and primarily get my "fix" elsewhere. In general, erotica is getting better in the sense that every kink is stroked today. As to the writing quality... the best writers have moved to Amazon or Smashwords and have Patreaon accounts. Great for them but bad for L.com.

 

[Erlikkhan]

So I can't help but wonder: even taking all the above factors into account, has erotic writing as a whole (not just on Lit) improved over the years? And if so, why?

My writing certainly has improved. Some of my earlier works, even the ones still rated highly, were poorly written. I was inspired by many of the earlier authors on other forums, and thought their stories were well written and very graphic. Is it better today? Perhaps, but we are talking about stroke stories and not great literature. I still read many of the older stories and find them extremely stimulating. Is sex with a fat woman better than sex with a swimsuit model? It depends on how well she fucks. Same with stories. It depends on the sex content.

 

[Wifetheif]

It is a mixed bag. Some vintage stuff published anonymously during the Victorian era and the early 20th Century still holds up. Often those were written by big names who, for a myriad of reasons, could not go public under their real names. We will never know who some of these people were but... Nero Wolfe wrote a lost world novel "Under the Andes" very early in his career. The heroine/love interest spends most of the novel naked and it is implied that she was "intimate" with certain members of the lost race of smelly Aztec dwarves. (I'm NOT making that up!) Wolfe being Wolfe, it's not badly written but a real change of pace from the Fat Man!"
Personally, I have improved as a writer in the decade-plus I've been posting here. Some of my early stories make me cringe but I refuse to edit and repost them. They remind me of where and what I was and keep me humble. I'm grateful that L.Com gave me a forum to experiment in and hone my craft. I came to erotica from the nonfiction world. I began posting here to work on things like dialogue and plot, which are less important in academic nonfiction.
To be honest, I think the quality on L.com has gone down considerably. Trolls have driven away all but the toughest-skinned wordsmiths from tackling "Loving Wives" which once had some of the very best stories at this site. The amount of incest stories here is really stunning. I've written a few myself but now it seems as though every third story is horny sons and mothers or whatever. There was one story from the old days on ASSTR that really fired my imagination and inspired me to write. Because of its content L.Com would never have touched it.
I find fewer and fewer stories here compelling and primarily get my "fix" elsewhere. In general, erotica is getting better in the sense that every kink is stroked today. As to the writing quality... the best writers have moved to Amazon or Smashwords and have Patreaon accounts. Great for them but bad for L.com.

 

[themightyxloph]

Interesting discussion here, with some very good points made that i had not previously considered, especially the one about how the medium influences the quality of the material. Victorian written erotica being, on average, much better then Usenet porn is especially relevant, I think, in that it illustrates how filtering and feedback play a role in maintaining certain standards. (Not always, of course, we're talking averages here.)

So I suppose the main take-away here is that the world wide web as a publishing medium acts, to a certain degree, as a catalyst in the development of writing skills and the exposure to other material that sets the bar at least somewhat higher than ground level, things that were comparatively rare in the heydays of Usenet.

Websites being maintained by operators who tend to separate the dross from the gold to at least some degree also is a far cry removed from the entirely unsorted, unfiltered and unmoderated alt.sex.stories posts.

So yes, erotic writing standards have varied over time, I think, mostly as a result of the publishing and distribution medium having evolved.

Thanks for all the insights and opinions! It's greatly appreciated.

 

[TadOverdon]

I don't see this as necessarily being true at all.

Over time, a market, if reasonably free and uninhibited, will get more sophisticated about providing a product that people are willing to pay for. That's not the same as saying quality improves, or that the product, as opposed to the market, becomes more sophisticated. This trend has occurred, for instance, with the movie industry, which is now heavily focused on developing franchises that appeal to teen boys and then saturating the market with sequels. Thus, we get a gazillion tedious and childish superhero movies. Because that's what makes money. Can anyone truly claim it equates to improved quality? I don't see that. I think movies -- especially high-grossing movies -- are generally worse than they were 45 years ago, which is not to say there aren't great artists in film today. It's true that the population, and therefore the talent pool, is larger, but it's not clear that this equates to more great work.

Progress is inevitable in some things, like smart phones, high def TVs, electric car batteries, and computer clock speeds. It's not inevitable in culture.

Yes. To say "Quality will increase" is misleading in that it suggests that the proportion of skillful-to-amateurish will change. It's true that the number of better-written stories by skilled writers will increase, but so will the amount of bad stuff.

There's no mechanism of selection on the web to weed out or discourage poor writing. I think that most people still have trouble getting our heads around just how big the Internet is and how fast it's growing. There's no real competition for readership or viewership among free sites.

 

[themightyxloph]

There's no mechanism of selection on the web to weed out or discourage poor writing.

Not quite true, in my opinion. Literotica's 1-5 star rating mechanism is a good example of one, as is Google's ranking mechanism that favors popular web pages over less popular ones. Granted, it's far from perfect, but it does to some extent reward good writing with a larger reader audience.