Since you’re the only male writer of fanfic I know well enough to talk to… When you read smutty stories, what does not work for you because you go all ‘Wait, my body does not work like that!’? I’m really curious, because I’m sure most female writers like me commit some those things, that actually don’t work or seem strange to a man. Don’t care if you answer in public or private, but I’d really like to know (and I’m not talking about the obvious ‘no lube’ stuff and such)

copperbadge:

Nah, I’ve never really had a problem with it, though it took me a while to work out why. I was reading this essay on the amount of shaming that sometimes goes on for people writing “unrealistic” sex, and the person who was writing it hit the nail on the head so to speak – it’s a fantasy. This isn’t journalism. 

Literary erotica isn’t about describing a sex act, that’s not its purpose. In broad terms, literary erotica is usually about creating a fantasy. People write about sex for lots of different reasons, and they create those fantasies with different endgames in mind (titillation, creating a sense of emotional intimacy, because they’re horny, because they have this specific fantasy and want to live it out on the page, because they want to explore a kink in a safely fictional world) but the upshot is that the sex is about something other than the mechanics of the sexual act.

I don’t care about realism when I read or write porn because realism isn’t why the porn is there. Realistically speaking, people often don’t smell that great and kissing tastes mostly like mouth and almost everyone looks ridiculous during sex. People don’t come at the same time and hairs get in places hairs shouldn’t be and sometimes there are amusing noises. 

But we know all that, and we can get it in real life, so we don’t need it in fiction. Fiction is a place where the writer controls everything and the writer says what’s real and what’s not, and if the writer wants to write “unrealistic” sex, that’s in service of a purpose that I find laudable, the expression of fantasy linked to sexual desire. Whether the audience buys into the unrealism or not is dependent somewhat on the writer, but I think the high level of buy-in we see in fandom says that as a culture we’ve decided fantasy is an acceptable part of the sexual act in fanfic. I’m not saying everyone has to, but I certainly have, which is why unrealistic sex doesn’t especially bother me as long as it’s well-written or I can see where it’s going. 🙂