Loving Wives - Hitting a Nerve

[SimonDoom]

You've confused a bunch of issues here. One can be perfectly tolerant and still point out what is obvious about the world. I am not a believer in objective or subjective realities, and recognize "different strokes for different folks," but not to the point that I deny obvious cause-effect relationships.

But you seem to insist that "cause-effect relationships" are the same for everyone. They are not. You purport to cite "data" attempting to prove that nonmonogamous relationships cannot work, and in fact they're just opinions, not data. You keep insisting that changes to divorce laws have been bad, and you offer no real data, and in fact the evidence is against you. No-fault divorce is a huge improvement over the divorce laws that existed before. It is more civilized and more respectful of male-female equality and the rights of individuals to live as they wish.

So, none of the things you claim are "obvious" are obvious at all. At the very least, you offer no evidence that they are obvious. The world is complex and varied.

 

[desecration]

But you seem to insist that "cause-effect relationships" are the same for everyone.

They are. But the desired consequences are not.

 

[StarGazer58]

Some people who've been through a traumatic experience need therapy, talking it out among others who've had a similar experience. Soldiers suffering PTSD for example.

So, I see this LW situation as, not trolls, but some coming from broken marriages, and looking for that connection of "YES, that's how it feels!"

The poster of the comments on my story even recognized his over-reaction and LOLed about it. Maybe this is a guy who found a video of his wife in a gangbang, (consensual for her, but unknown to him) and they divorced. He might be reading LW stories to see if anyone else has such an experience and how they dealt with it. Mine might have struck that nerve closer than others.

I get what you are saying but I also don't understand reliving the trauma. For me it seems different for two people that have experienced something bad to talk among themselves and find some solace but to deliberately seek out a story that may anger or retrigger bad memories would not seem to be helping the problem. I have never gone through therapy so maybe that is how it works.

 

[StarGazer58]

People are often perversely drawn to that which disgusts them...

I guess so. For me, I am not into golden showers or hanging from the ceiling with a ball gag in my mouth so I would never search out those kinds of stories.

 

[TheSoaringCrow]

Some people who've been through a traumatic experience need therapy, talking it out among others who've had a similar experience. Soldiers suffering PTSD for example.

So, I see this LW situation as, not trolls, but some coming from broken marriages, and looking for that connection of "YES, that's how it feels!"

The poster of the comments on my story even recognized his over-reaction and LOLed about it. Maybe this is a guy who found a video of his wife in a gangbang, (consensual for her, but unknown to him) and they divorced. He might be reading LW stories to see if anyone else has such an experience and how they dealt with it. Mine might have struck that nerve closer than others.

Definitely agree with you there. My first story I posted in LW had so many negative comments the day it published, even from a fellow author. This author strictly posts in LW, and I read his latest one after he left a rude, negative comment: 4.8 rating, over 30 comments (mostly all positive), and the theme of the story... a man finds out his wife has been cheating on him, so he gets with his friends to stage a kidnapping. They catch his wife in the act, tie them up naked, drive to the middle of nowhere in the cold winter, and leave them there. Soooo many people were rejoicing the MC, and all I thought to myself is, "Do these sick fucks actually get off on this?" So, to your point, you have a great theory on the negative commenters.

 

[StillStunned]

We need an "My underaged Harry Potter rape story that was a sequel to another writer's story was rejected for AI" and cover all the bases at once.

Fixed it for you.

 

[lovecraft68]

Not good enough.
There has to be some cheating involved. We need to engage all the players...

Yeah but the cheating crowd is too gutless to create a handle so they can't reply anyway.

 

[lovecraft68]

Fixed it for you.

Even better. Now we just need to work in something about copyright and we have all the major bases covered.

 

[Lifestyle66]

I get what you are saying but I also don't understand reliving the trauma. For me it seems different for two people that have experienced something bad to talk among themselves and find some solace but to deliberately seek out a story that may anger or retrigger bad memories would not seem to be helping the problem. I have never gone through therapy so maybe that is how it works.

They're not necessarily reliving their own trauma.

Scenario: A guy finds a video of his wife cheating in a gangbang. He grows outraged, and they divorce. The ex-wife continues having fun after divorce, and the guy feels "wronged" in this scenario. He's feeling betrayed, while she's having fun. He thought the "love of his life" was faithfully monogamous, and she had an itch to scratch which she couldn't talk to him about.

IMO, that's what we're encountering in the LW hater crowd: A guy looking for stories of cheating wives whose husbands exacted revenge (regardless of how extreme and warped). They seem to LOVE (5s) stories of the innocent and naive husband getting extreme revenge on the cheating wife. And they can't comprehend how any husband could tolerate their wife having extra-marital sex. The guy felt weak and powerless when he saw his wife's video, and he just KNOWS men who allow their wives to have extra-marital sex ARE weak and pathetic. I read this attitude in their comments.

Their therapy is reading stories of STRONG husbands who "burn the bitch" who cheated on them. And for those looking for such stories of extra-marital sex and revenge, where else would they go to find them? "Loving Wives"

 

[gunhilltrain]

People are often perversely drawn to that which disgusts them...

Thanks for liking my post #2 above!

 

[gunhilltrain]

Fixed it for you.

It would be good to get bestiality in there somewhere too. Didn't Harry Potter have animals in it?

 

[gunhilltrain]

There is no civil war except in the minds of those who believe that there is only one universal experience for all people and that erotic fantasy stories must conform to one rigid sense of reality. For those of us who are perfectly accepting of the fact that people are different and that people are entitled to their fun fantasies even if they reflect unusual or minority views in the real world, there is no civil war, and the idea of a civil war seems silly.

The "civil war" metaphor has been getting tired for a while, although it might get worse after that movie released last week. It makes little sense when applied to topics on AH. It's kind of early in the morning, so forgive a bit of thread drift and self-promotion. I do have a story called The Battle of the Crater which was a real event in 1864 although the story is set in 2017. It is also set in Virginia too, but not at the original site at Petersburg. Anyway, that's what real civil war looks like.

https://s329.podbean.com/pb/d35fc97...he_Crater_Image_-_Painting_By_Tom_Lovell.jpeg

 

[NoTalentHack]

I get what you are saying but I also don't understand reliving the trauma. For me it seems different for two people that have experienced something bad to talk among themselves and find some solace but to deliberately seek out a story that may anger or retrigger bad memories would not seem to be helping the problem. I have never gone through therapy so maybe that is how it works.

Part of it is the nature of the category. The structure of Romance, Erotic Couplings, Incest, Nonconsent, etc. is such that you have a pretty good idea what's going to happen in the story within the first few paragraphs, maybe even the first couple sentences. Loving Wives? Unless the title is something like "Cucked By My Wife" or the description is "I burned the bitch," not so much.

I've extolled the story's virtues before, but @vhs_kitten's An Evening at Crystal Lake epitomizes this. I'm just going to be lazy and copy from the afterword I wrote for Well-Intentioned:

One of my favorite things about Loving Wives is that you don't know what you're going to get when you start reading a story. Okay, admittedly, if it has the words "Cucked By" in the title or "I burned the bitch" in the description, you might have some inkling. But the best stories in the category, at least in my opinion, take you on a journey that you don't often see in most of the others. Regardless of whether it ends in revenge, cuckolding, hotwifing, romance, reconciliation, or any of the other possibilities, a good LW story should keep you on your toes.

That's why I want to recommend a newcomer today. vhs_kitten, while not a first-time writer, posted her first story on Literotica earlier this year, here in Loving Wives. An Evening at Crystal Lake is well written, but that's not the main reason I want to bring it to your attention. It is, frankly, one of the best pairings of category and story that I've seen here, in that the ambiguity of the category heightens the tension of the story.

It's only about 4,000 words long, so a little longer than a Literotica page. Go read it and come back. If you don't want to do that, I'll give a summary below.

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A photographer husband and model wife decide to do a horror-themed photo shoot for their portfolios. They contact a guy to play Jason from Friday the 13th, and when he shows up to the cabin by the lake they've rented for the shoot... things happen. Sexy things, for those concerned, not violence/drama, and it's a funny, happy story for the most part.

But.

Throughout the whole thing, there's an air to it that maybe it's not going to end so nicely. The guy playing Jason shows up in full costume with FX prosthetics and doesn't speak. He's carrying a sharp machete. The writer places a big emphasis on how accurate the costume is, how imposing the guy is, etc. The location, although vhs_kitten doesn't explicitly say it, looks very much like one of the classic F13 movies, down to the lone overhead light on the dock. The FMC smokes a joint to get into character. Just tons of nice detail that, until it takes a turn towards the overtly sexual, could signify something wholly different.

It would have worked fine in any other category it might have fit in: Erotic Couplings, Group Sex, maybe Exhibitionism/Voyeurism. If the story had gone in a bad direction instead--if the husband objected, or if the guy actually had been Jason--it would have done wonderfully in Fetish, Nonconsensual/Reluctance, or Erotic Horror.

However, putting it into any of those categories would be giving the game away; almost nothing "bad" ever happens in the former categories, and "bad" things are the default for the latter ones, Fetish arguably excepted. Making the story ambiguous at the beginning (and even, to an extent, all the way through, until "Jason" speaks near the end), would only work so well, because of that.

Because it's in LW, though, the "safety net" of the other categories is gone. Not knowing the direction makes it a better story, and, I'd argue, a sexier one. When it turns out that it really is just a stranger in a costume having a fun time with a willing wife and a reluctant but ultimately enthusiastic husband, there's that sense of relief there, too: you're glad it's just three people having fun and not a prelude to murder

The best LW stories, IMHO, are like that: anything could happen. But anything could only happen because anything (within reason) does in that category; outright murder after the sex almost certainly wouldn't have flown, for example, and would have either not made it past moderation or would have seen it reported almost immediately. However, I could easily see a dozen different versions of that story that belong in there, all with wildly different outcomes. And the best bit is? The reader wouldn't have known which until they got to the end, just like in this case.

It's probably my favorite story I've read this year, even though it's not my kink, precisely because it does use the category's ambiguity to the best effect I've seen in a long time. Hopefully we'll see more from her soon.

The nastiest comments, in my experience, are not on the stories where the writer says up front, "this is going to be about wife sharing (or cuckolding or swapping or whatever)." They're on the ones where the story is ambiguous in its initial setup and takes a hard turn into nonmonogamy, especially if it takes a hard turn and the husband is forced to go along for the ride or, worse, is "brainwashed" for lack of a better term.

@bruce1971 wrote a great essay recently, LW Notes: The Amityville Whorer, which is an examination of the marital drama subgenre of LW as, essentially, horror stories. Here's the intro bit:

First off, apologies for the title. There's a point to it—which I'll get to later—but the shameful truth is that I'm a sucker for puns.

So here's the thing... after reading through a lot of cheating wife stories, I came to a realization: These stories, at their heart, are horror stories for grown-up men. Ghost stories. Tales to be told around a campfire. Tales to cause nightmares.

Right now, you're probably thinking "DUH!" and reaching for the mouse to close this window. But before you go, give me one more second. Because, while the central idea here is pretty obvious, its implications are complex and wide-reaching.

If we accept that these are horror stories, then the next question is what that says about the Loving Wives section—and, to a great extent, about men in general. What does it tell us about the insecurities that men have? The terrors that keep them awake at night? The ways that they view their dilemmas and the tools that they use to resolve them? The conventions and tropes that Loving Wives writers use? The readers who loyally work their way through often-sexless, often-grim tales on a site that is—on paper, at least—dedicated to sex and erotica?

It's a really interesting phenomenon, and I recommend the essay, but to bring this back around, the other thing that a lot of the wish fulfillment stories are is a romance. The ones that score best are not the pure BTBs--although revenge of some sort is still a common plot element--but the ones that end with the husband, battered and bloody but still coming out the other side happy and in love with a newer, faithful wife.

The guys looking for those kinds of stories will (mostly) stay away from a swapping/sharing/cuckolding story is clearly that "type" of story. But when it's not? Imagine going in to see From Dusk Til Dawn without knowing about the twist at the end of the first act. "Awesome, Tarantino-written, Rodriguez directed crime drama. Wait, fucking Aztec vampires?!" It might be jarring, but if you're a Tarantino or Rodriguez fan, maybe you're ready to roll with it.

Now imagine you turn on a random movie thinking it looks like a fun road trip movie. Two buddies backpacking through Europe, meeting girls, and having fun. "Awesome," you think, "let's tuck in for a little romp."

And then it turns out you're watching Hostel.

That's how it feels for some of these guys.

 

[lustychimera]

It would be good to get bestiality in there somewhere too. Didn't Harry Potter have animals in it?

Can't have a fan fic without werepeople. That's what makes it transformative enough for fair use.

 

[Lifestyle66]

Part of it is the nature of the category. The structure of Romance, Erotic Couplings, Incest, Nonconsent, etc. is such that you have a pretty good idea what's going to happen in the story within the first few paragraphs, maybe even the first couple sentences. Loving Wives? Unless the title is something like "Cucked By My Wife" or the description is "I burned the bitch," not so much.

I've extolled the story's virtues before, but @vhs_kitten's An Evening at Crystal Lake epitomizes this. I'm just going to be lazy and copy from the afterword I wrote on Well-Intentioned:



The nastiest comments, in my experience, are not on the stories where the writer says up front, "this is going to be about wife sharing (or cuckolding or swapping or whatever)." They're on the ones where the story is ambiguous in its initial setup and takes a hard turn into nonmonogamy, especially if it takes a hard turn and the husband is forced to go along for the ride or, worse, is "brainwashed" for lack of a better term.

@bruce1971 wrote a great essay recently, LW Notes: The Amityville Whorer, which is an examination of the marital drama subgenre of LW as, essentially, horror stories. Here's the intro bit:



It's a really interesting phenomenon, and I recommend the essay, but to bring this back around, the other thing that a lot of the wish fulfillment stories are is a romance. The ones that score best are not the pure BTBs--although revenge of some sort is still a common plot element--but the ones that end with the husband, battered and bloody but still coming out the other side happy and in love with a newer, faithful wife.

The guys looking for those kinds of stories will (mostly) stay away if a swapping/sharing/cuckolding story is clearly that "type" of story. But when it's not? Imagine going in to see From Dusk Til Dawn without knowing about the twist at the end of the first act. "Awesome, Tarantino-written, Rodriguez directed crime drama. Wait, fucking Aztec vampires?!" If you're down for both a crime drama or a horror movie, it might be jarring, but if you're a Tarantino or Rodriguez fan, maybe you're ready to roll with it.

Now imagine you turn on a random movie thinking it looks like a fun road trip movie. Two buddies backpacking through Europe, meeting girls, and having fun. "Awesome," you think, "let's tuck in for a little romp."

And then it turns out you're watching Hostel.

That's how it feels for some of these guys.

Those are good examples for what the LW hater audience is looking for. But there many of that crowd who don't care about tags, warnings, titles, or descriptions. They seem to read EVERY LW story and react accordingly.

You can write a story titled "I Watched and Enjoyed It", with the description "Husband watches his wife fucking another guy." They will still open the story, jump to the last page, click a 1-star and write a scathing comment.

I've seen on several stories and even received such comments on my own saying "I didn't even read this cuck-shit. 1 star!!!"

This is one of the reasons I've concluded they are there looking for kindred spirits. It's as if they're going to a pick-up bar after finding out their wife cheated, and calling the women there "whores" and "sluts". They KNOW where they're going and what's happening around them. They are just looking to lash out at someone.

EDIT: Last year, I wrote the LW story:
My Wife wants a Hall Pass
Former boyfriend asks her out ... Okay, but with conditions!

Now who doesn't know what that story is going to be about? Over 54k views, 594 votes and after the site 1-scraping,it has RISEN to 3.12. And you should read some of those 33 comments!

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Seriously though, what happened with all the AI rejection stuff? Did Laurel find some more reasonable approach or did people simply stop complaining, seeing it's all in vain?

 

[desecration]

For me it seems different for two people that have experienced something bad to talk among themselves and find some solace but to deliberately seek out a story that may anger or retrigger bad memories would not seem to be helping the problem. I have never gone through therapy so maybe that is how it works.

Sort of, but it depends on where they are in the cycle. Sometimes they are simply trying to process what has happened.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Can't have a fan fic without werepeople. That's what makes it transformative enough for fair use.

 

[desecration]

The ones that score best are not the pure BTBs--although revenge of some sort is still a common plot element--but the ones that end with the husband, battered and bloody but still coming out the other side happy and in love with a newer, faithful wife.

I agree. There seems to be a cycle: disbelief, rage, sadness... then RAAC... but then recognition of betrayal as enemy action... and then finally BTB, but eventually, realizing that just cutting your losses and running is the only way to deal with the actual emotion, sadness for what has been ruined. Eventually they realize that what was ruined was mostly in their head because they married a thot 'cause she was hot and then she did thot shit.

 

[MyBareTorso]

I guess so. For me, I am not into golden showers or hanging from the ceiling with a ball gag in my mouth so I would never search out those kinds of stories.

Yep, me neither...no judgement, of course...

 

[Midsmale69]

I think it must be very difficult to get a good rating unless you are writing an incest story!
Lit seems to be based on incest for some reason, just look at all the top stories.
I guess it’s big in the States?

Incredible amount of incest content.... instant turnoff!

 

[StillStunned]

Incest/taboo gets you views, not necessarily a good rating. My lowest-rated story (3.92) is in I/T.

 

[Rob_Royale]

Incest/taboo gets you views, not necessarily a good rating. My lowest-rated story (3.92) is in I/T.

Having read that story, I'm sure you'll agree there some unusual aspects of that story that set it apart from the average momcest story.

 

[TheLobster]

Incest/taboo gets you views, not necessarily a good rating. My lowest-rated story (3.92) is in I/T.

I mean, that story is basically a thousand-word excoriation of the reader's particular fetish. Yes, incest stories thrive to on the fact that it is taboo, but the characters are supposed to eventually get over the guilt of breaking it and then transition into actually relishing the forbidden nature of their relationship. Otherwise it's a bit like, say, writing an E&V story where the reader, or the character that substitutes for reader, is being called a lecherous pervert throughout.

 

[StillStunned]

Having read that story, I'm sure you'll agree there some unusual aspects of that story that set it apart from the average momcest story.

But... but... she has a hairy bush! What more could anyone want?

But yes, I agree it's not a traditional example. But the point remains, I/T doesn't necessarily get the highest ratings.