Beautiful Smut

I recently spent a while browsing around Excitica.com. This is a relatively new storefront created by Selena Kitt to market taboo erotica. The site sells books that would be banned elsewhere, featuring themes like non-consensual sex, incest in a variety of flavors, abuse and humiliation, golden showers, and so on. The listings, in some cases, are not subtle. I won't quote them here because I suspect they'd offend at least some of my readers.

You want to know my reaction to this site, though? Honestly? I wanted to see my own books up there on that page. I had a fierce desire to write some totally outrageous taboo erotica--or smut, or porn, whatever you want to call it--without censoring myself.

I could do it, I know, though I'd probably need to establish a new pen name, to avoid alienating my more conservative readers. While many of these taboo themes don't appeal to me, some definitely do. They feature in my own private fantasies. I'd love the chance to write them down and share them.

Of course, anyone can write porn. At least that's the general view, though I'm not sure I subscribe to it. What I want to do is write beautiful porn. I'd like to create absolutely filthy stories that are so exquisitely crafted, so breathlessly arousing, that you forget, while you're reading, that they're stroke fiction. I want to sweep readers away, into the depths of depravity, without them realizing it. I want to corrupt you, to lead you into my world of personal fantasy and show you just how hot things you'd never dared consider can be.

Sound dangerous? I suppose it is. I guess I'm reacting to my years of living under the thumb of erotic romance editors. I just finished an edit of one of my legacy books for a re-release. The editor pretty much forced me to take out several taboo sections, sections that I felt were essential to the book. I thought about pushing back, but eventually I caved. I decided the publisher probably knows their market better than I do. Still, I felt I was betraying my original erotic vision.

I probably won't act on this impulse, partially because I have no time, and partially because I still have some discomfort about being associated with porn. Much of it is so badly written--but readers don't care. Plus there are some themes highlighted at Excitica that I actually disapprove of. Even I have to admit that's hypocritical, though.

And if I'm already embarrassed by people's reactions to my explicit fiction, how would I feel if I owned up to being the author of Banging My Brother or Raped by the Billionaire?  Erotic romance is (just barely) respectable. Taboo erotica has a huge audience, but you won't find anyone admitting they read it.

So for now, this will remain nothing but a fantasy--like the ones kindled by some of Excitica's titles.

Censoring Myself

I have a confession to make. I like rough sex. Well, I like to write about it, anyway. My sex scenes often tend toward the ferocious. Thrusts hard enough that they hurt, fast enough that you can barely catch your breath. Fingernails clawing flesh, even drawing blood. Relentless fucking that overwhelms the character on the receiving end. That's the sort of sex that turns me on, and that's the sort of sex I often write.

This preference is undoubtedly linked to my interest in dominance and submission. I find the notion of a lover "taking" me - taking me over, using me for his own pleasure as well as my own - to be highly erotic.

The sexual encounters in my M/M fiction, particularly, trend in this direction. My men are of course sometimes tender with one another, but at other times they're raging hulks of testosterone. This matches what I've seen in much of the gay erotica I've read - not erotic romance, but stories composed by gay men about their own sexuality. Men seem to enjoy more - shall we say, "forceful" - sex, even when they're with a lover as opposed to a casual contact.

So yesterday I was working on my M/M science fiction novel, Quarantine, and found myself writing one of those rough scenes I enjoy so much. Suddenly I froze. Was this too much? Was I going to turn off my target readers? Most readers of M/M erotic romance are women. Was my writing going to be too "raw" for them? Should I tone things down?

The thought pretty much halted any progress I'd been making. The scene in question involves virtual sex, basically futuristic porn. It's pretty brief, but necessary for the plot and for revealing character. I wondered whether I should ditch it anyway and find some other approach.

I started to worry about scenes between my two protagonists as well. Should I make them more gentle with one another? Was their hard loving going to lose me readers?

Then I realized then that I was censoring myself - and I know from experience that's generally not a good idea. If I were to scale back the intensity and ferocity of my sex scenes, I'd be faking it. Readers can tell when the emotion in a scene is genuine and when it's not. And long experience has taught me that scenes I find personally arousing are the ones that grab my readers, too.

Ultimately, I decided to leave the scene in. We'll see what the intended publisher thinks. If they want me to remove it, though, I just might submit the book elsewhere.

I'm curious about how my fellow authors feel about this issue. Do you censor yourself in order to get published? Do you think I should?