GrushaVashnadze
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2020
- Posts
- 222
I recently received this comment here on Lit, on my novella Young Cunts: "This... has a lot more depth of storytelling than most of what you read on this site." A lovely comment to receive, of course - but it set me thinking: What is "depth of storytelling"? Is it something smut writers can and/or should aim for?
One superb writer of erotica once joked to me about writing “porn that makes you think” – in relation, naturally, to a particularly thought-provoking story they had written – but even they seemed a bit embarrassed to pursue the possibility, retreating into: “It’s really gratifying to hear that my story made you think and ponder the possibilities beyond the story. Ooh, that was a bit deep. Think I’d better wash my mind out with porn
”
I suggest that smut (or literary porn, or erotica, or whatever you may like to call it) is, at least potentially, an art form, and so we should be confident of being able to discuss it in those terms. I would like to suggest an axiom to start us off: Art is about something. It has to be, or else it could not “make us think”. Specifically, I suggest, art is about us, and it is about our relationships, to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us and beyond us. It expresses what it is trying to say not through analytical text – for that would make it merely an academic essay – but through metaphor and gesture: physical, visual, auditory and verbal.
In smut and porn, those metaphors and gestures are sexual ones. But the stories can be about more profound things. In the same way that paintings are not about paint, and operas and musical theatre are not about singing and dancing, and ballet is not about entrechats, arabesques penchés, and petits battements serrés, smut is not always about sex. “Bukkake”, “tentacles”, “BDSM” or “cumfarting” may be the building blocks of a smut story, and in that way they may define the style of the story. But a sex story need not be, in the final analysis, about the sexual acts. Rather, it can use those building blocks as vehicles, as tools with which to carry out a higher purpose: to make us think (even as we flush our soiled tissue down the U-bend).
Some of my personal favorite examples of this, in the worlds of smut and porn, include:
- Radley Metzger's movie masterpiece The Opening of Misty Beethoven - all about class, identity, transformation and the possibility/impossibility thereof: Pygmalion with fucking.
- Paul Thomas's porn flick Throat: A Cautionary Tale - which explores issues of compulsion, addiction, exploitation.
- Jaymal’s story Lusts of the Flesh – a story of a young man caught between his sincere desire to live up to the moral demands of his religion and the irresistible demands of the flesh.
- CurvyGalore’s The Tribulations of Tobias - deceptively polite, yet the conclusion is quite startling and shocking. (Lest you think that only very rude stories make it onto my list...)
A couple of my modest offerings:
- The Cursed Cunt - a story about redemption: the world thrown off kilter by one man’s tragic flaw, and the struggle of that same world to right itself, even through death (and fucking).
- Alison Goes to London - a futuristic satire, but like all satires it is about us. Imagine a world where, thanks to the “New Enlightenment”, pleasure is everything, filthy sex is the pinnacle of social respectability, and therefore love is held to be worthless. Is this utopian or dystopian? What would happen to young people growing up in a world like this? Alison is an enthusiastic disciple of the cult of Pleasure – until she encounters love for the first time and her world is turned upside-down. NaughtyAnnie says of it: “Your mix of uninhibited filth and thought-provoking social comment is unique!” - which kind of echoes the comment with which I began this post.
So, back to my opening questions: Is "depth of storytelling" something you aim for? How do you incorporate it into your smut? Or, perhaps more appropriately, how do you incorporate smut into a profoundly felt, thought provoking story? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
One superb writer of erotica once joked to me about writing “porn that makes you think” – in relation, naturally, to a particularly thought-provoking story they had written – but even they seemed a bit embarrassed to pursue the possibility, retreating into: “It’s really gratifying to hear that my story made you think and ponder the possibilities beyond the story. Ooh, that was a bit deep. Think I’d better wash my mind out with porn
”I suggest that smut (or literary porn, or erotica, or whatever you may like to call it) is, at least potentially, an art form, and so we should be confident of being able to discuss it in those terms. I would like to suggest an axiom to start us off: Art is about something. It has to be, or else it could not “make us think”. Specifically, I suggest, art is about us, and it is about our relationships, to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us and beyond us. It expresses what it is trying to say not through analytical text – for that would make it merely an academic essay – but through metaphor and gesture: physical, visual, auditory and verbal.
In smut and porn, those metaphors and gestures are sexual ones. But the stories can be about more profound things. In the same way that paintings are not about paint, and operas and musical theatre are not about singing and dancing, and ballet is not about entrechats, arabesques penchés, and petits battements serrés, smut is not always about sex. “Bukkake”, “tentacles”, “BDSM” or “cumfarting” may be the building blocks of a smut story, and in that way they may define the style of the story. But a sex story need not be, in the final analysis, about the sexual acts. Rather, it can use those building blocks as vehicles, as tools with which to carry out a higher purpose: to make us think (even as we flush our soiled tissue down the U-bend).
Some of my personal favorite examples of this, in the worlds of smut and porn, include:
- Radley Metzger's movie masterpiece The Opening of Misty Beethoven - all about class, identity, transformation and the possibility/impossibility thereof: Pygmalion with fucking.
- Paul Thomas's porn flick Throat: A Cautionary Tale - which explores issues of compulsion, addiction, exploitation.
- Jaymal’s story Lusts of the Flesh – a story of a young man caught between his sincere desire to live up to the moral demands of his religion and the irresistible demands of the flesh.
- CurvyGalore’s The Tribulations of Tobias - deceptively polite, yet the conclusion is quite startling and shocking. (Lest you think that only very rude stories make it onto my list...)
A couple of my modest offerings:
- The Cursed Cunt - a story about redemption: the world thrown off kilter by one man’s tragic flaw, and the struggle of that same world to right itself, even through death (and fucking).
- Alison Goes to London - a futuristic satire, but like all satires it is about us. Imagine a world where, thanks to the “New Enlightenment”, pleasure is everything, filthy sex is the pinnacle of social respectability, and therefore love is held to be worthless. Is this utopian or dystopian? What would happen to young people growing up in a world like this? Alison is an enthusiastic disciple of the cult of Pleasure – until she encounters love for the first time and her world is turned upside-down. NaughtyAnnie says of it: “Your mix of uninhibited filth and thought-provoking social comment is unique!” - which kind of echoes the comment with which I began this post.
So, back to my opening questions: Is "depth of storytelling" something you aim for? How do you incorporate it into your smut? Or, perhaps more appropriately, how do you incorporate smut into a profoundly felt, thought provoking story? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
