Well, maybe not completely obvious. I need help, foks!

[AG31]

Absolutely. I wrote a 750-worder chock full of sexual imagery and innuendo, but no actual sex whatsoever. It couldn't go in EC because there was no coupling, but it also couldn't go in non-E because of all the imagery. The readers hated it. I figured that they would.

Did you post it? Can you give us a link?

 

[gunhilltrain]

I think I'm going to declare this the winner.

I don't agree with him, but that's my opinion. I still can't figure out why you brought this up. It may change over time (how long a story has been out), but in the end, it's your call for the ultimate view of your own work and what it means. Other people can give you feedback, but there's only so far we can take that. The final arbiter of that is you; if you like it or if you think you are getting better at it, that's the most important issue. That's something we (or at least I) can't help you with.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Would it be smut if they weren't sweaty? or lascivious? Just curious. Not that it speaks directly to the thread.

Are we not fading to black here? Explicitly described sex, certainly yes is smut.

 

[jomar]

Well, I guess I can relate. Character development and plot sometimes leaks through the seams of my stroke smut despite my best efforts.

 

[AG31]

I don't agree with him, but that's my opinion. I still can't figure out why you brought this up. It may change over time (how long a story has been out), but in the end, it's your call for the ultimate view of your own work and what it means. Other people can give you feedback, but there's only so far we can take that. The final arbiter of that is you; if you like it or if you think you are getting better at it, that's the most important issue. That's something we (or at least I) can't help you with.

I didn't bring it up in connection with my stories exactly. I brought it up in my quest to make a case for the possible artistic merit of anyone's stories in any genre where there is little attention to plot or character. What some people insist on calling "strokers." I brought it up because it dawned on me that some "simple erotica" stories are inextricably grounded in a character trait. In @ElectricBlue's case, intimacy and whatever traits are revealed thereby. In my own case, self-acceptance, although I'm not claiming that any reader would pick that up. I never thought of myself as trying to portray it. SO... I needed a more nuanced description than "pay little attention to..."

Does that help?

 

[KeithD]

Can something centered only, or almost entirely, on the sex act that's posted to Literotica have "artistic merit"? That's the essential question? Yes, it can. I've done that here myself, I think.

 

[VerbalAbuse]

All my stories are what I now call simple erotica, BUT!! They are all fundamentally grounded in a particular character trait exhibited by the MC. That trait is self acceptance, self containment, dignity.

I suppose masturbation stories would fit the bill nicely. Self acceptance? Check. Self containment? Check. Dignity? Check.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Can something centered only, or almost entirely, on the sex act that's posted to Literotica have "artistic merit"? That's the essential question? Yes, it can. I've done that here myself, I think.

Certainly it can. Just when you remove motive, character development, immersive setting and any theme besides carnal lust, you basically empty your gun to just one bullet so you have to make that shot really count. Difficult but still possible, absolutely.

 

[AG31]

Can something centered only, or almost entirely, on the sex act that's posted to Literotica have "artistic merit"? That's the essential question? Yes, it can. I've done that here myself, I think.

Yes, that's the underlying question. And you gave us a good link in my first foray into the case for "simple erotica" a few months ago. But this thread is focused on how to articulate the fact that "paying little attention" to character is inaccurate. And a quest for a better phrasing.

 

[AG31]

you basically empty your gun to just one bullet so you have to make that shot really count. Difficult but still possible, absolutely.

Too true.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I didn't bring it up in connection with my stories exactly. I brought it up in my quest to make a case for the possible artistic merit of anyone's stories in any genre where there is little attention to plot or character. What some people insist on calling "strokers." I brought it up because it dawned on me that some "simple erotica" stories are inextricably grounded in a character trait. In @ElectricBlue's case, intimacy and whatever traits are revealed thereby. In my own case, self-acceptance, although I'm not claiming that any reader would pick that up. I never thought of myself as trying to portray it. SO... I needed a more nuanced description than "pay little attention to..."

Does that help?

I guess not. Forgive me, but I don't care if people call it "strokers" or "simple erotica" or even smut. They can write whatever they wish and call it whatever they want.

I know from your biography that you first starting writing over five decades ago, probably when I was still in high school or college. If I may ask, why do you care and feel that you have to advocate for a certain genre style? If you like it, just write it as you see fit. No justification or definitions are necessary.

 

[AG31]

I guess not. Forgive me, but I don't care if people call it "strokers" or "simple erotica" or even smut. They can write whatever they wish and call it whatever they want.

I know from your biography that you first starting writing over five decades ago, probably when I was still in high school or college. If I may ask, why do you care and feel that you have to advocate for a certain genre style? If you like it, just write it as you see fit. No justification or definitions are necessary.

I don't get where you think I started writing 5 decades ago. I started almost exactly three years ago. Never wrote any fiction before then. I started fantasizing before latency, about 75 years ago. I'm NOT advocating for a style. People can write any style they wish. I'm advocating for respect for the possible artistic qualities of what people call "strokers," a term that is loaded with pre-judgement.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I don't get where you think I started writing 5 decades ago. I started almost exactly three years ago. Never wrote any fiction before then. I started fantasizing before latency, about 75 years ago. I'm NOT advocating for a style. People can write any style they wish. I'm advocating for respect for the possible artistic qualities of what people call "strokers," a term that is loaded with pre-judgement.

Okay, sorry, I did get your biography wrong. I didn't interpret "re-engage with erotica after some fifty years" and "introduced to erotica in the late 60's" correctly. (I do have some medical/dental/family/financial distractions beyond AH that have been pretty intense this season.)

Anyway, I have no problem respecting "strokers" or whatever one wishes to call them.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Works that make us cry are considered the highest of all art.
Works that make us laugh are considered much lower.
Works that make us come aren't considered art at all.

Deep, but alas too long to put on a T-shirt.

 

[SimonDoom]

Works that make us cry are considered the highest of all art.
Works that make us laugh are considered much lower.
Works that make us come aren't considered art at all.

It might have something to do with the expense of cleaning up the theater after the show.

 

[gunhilltrain]

It might have something to do with the expense of cleaning up the theater after the show.

I forgot which novel it's in, but Philip Roth describes going as a kid going to a burlesque show in Newark and masturbating into his baseball glove. Still better than the guy a few seats down who did it into his hat. I can't confirm it, but it feels like autobiographical truth.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I forgot which novel it's in, but Philip Roth describes going as a kid going to a burlesque show in Newark and masturbating into his baseball glove. Still better than the guy a few seats down who did it into his hat. I can't confirm it, but it feels like autobiographical truth.

I vaguely recall a similar scene using meatloaf in the fridge - Portnoy's Complaint. Some family meal, anyway.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I vaguely recall a similar scene using meatloaf in the fridge - Portnoy's Complaint. Some family meal, anyway.

I'm trying to keep this thread from drifting. I read Portnoy's Complaint a long time ago, but the first half is vivid enough that I remember a lot of it. Roth uses exaggeration for satire, and does a fairly good job with that. So yeah, Portnoy copulates with a piece of liver and also a cored apple. In one scene he ejaculates and hits the light fixture above him. Improbable but amusing.

 

[bejjinks]

I only just discovered this thread but to me, it seems backwards. To me, the artistic merit stories are those that do focus on plot and characters while the strokers are the ones that don't pay attention to plot or characters.

When I'm looking for stroking material, I often skim through the story ignoring most of the story until I get to the juicy bits. When I'm looking for stroking material, I couldn't care less about who or why.

However, when I'm looking for "simple erotica", that is when I pay attention to who and why and that is when I will read the whole story instead of skimming over it.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I only just discovered this thread but to me, it seems backwards. To me, the artistic merit stories are those that do focus on plot and characters while the strokers are the ones that don't pay attention to plot or characters.

When I'm looking for stroking material, I often skim through the story ignoring most of the story until I get to the juicy bits. When I'm looking for stroking material, I couldn't care less about who or why.

However, when I'm looking for "simple erotica", that is when I pay attention to who and why and that is when I will read the whole story instead of skimming over it.

First, all the folks who get angry with me when I assert that there are a lot of folks out there scrolling over your plot, take note.

But really, the poster's confusion over the terminology shows that all this 'simple' and 'pure' erotica is just AG's crusade for pushing personal euphemisms onto stuff that we already have terms for. AG writes stroke and feels the need to rename stroke so that they don't feel like they're looking down on their own work. It's much easier for everyone involved to just call it stroke and not feel ashamed since there is nothing wrong with stroke in the first place.

 

[WrongFrog]

Over the years I've made a case for the artistic respectability of erotica that pays no significant attention to plot or character. I started out by asking that we call such stories that aimed for artistic merit "pure erotica," instead of "stroker." Link here.

Thanks to people in that first thread in AH, I changed my term to "simple erotica," but I maintained the criterion of paying "no significant attention to plot or character."

I had to make a small detour to get some of @ElectricBlue's simple (but powerful) stories under my umbrella. And I did it this way: "EB tossed a small monkey wrench into my neat definition of "pure erotica", i.e., "stories that attend to arousal without paying much attention to plot or character." Because his notion of eroticism is inextricably tied up with intimacy, it's hard not to end up depicting vivid characters. After standing on my head, coming up with definitions that would accomodate his stories, I'm just leaving him as the exception that proves the rule."

The next step was what I thought was the final one. I claimed that artistically worthy simple erotica should be judged in the same way that we judge essays on the joys of surfing, or books of jokes. Just because they feature humans doesn't mean they need to be about humans. They can be about sensuality or danger or humor. That is, no need to judge based on plot or character. I titled the thread How Obvious! I still do think that artistically worthy stories can be written absent attention to plot or character.But...


Edit: The word "extraneous" keeps coming to my mind. But that's not fair to the stories that legitimately pay lots of attention to plot and character. Just trying to prime the pump here.
But today, thanks to the contributers to my thread about impersonality I had an epiphany. All my stories are what I now call simple erotica, BUT!! They are all fundamentally grounded in a particular character trait exhibited by the MC. That trait is self acceptance, self containment, dignity. I don't address this explicitly, and maybe it doesn't come across to my readers (I'd have to fix that), but I can no longer just consign EB's stories to the exception that proves the rule. All my stories are exceptions. Now I have to really revise my definition of "simple erotica," to be something like "Erotica that doesn't pay significant attention to plot or <this particular kind of attention> to character. That's where I need help from those of you who got it in the first place. How do I say this elegantly????

The og term is PWP which stands for Plot? What plot? It's literally a story that has absolutely no point beyond the sex.

Back in the day, I made a killing from places like Penthouse Letters and Aussie People writing 500-1500 word sexcapades that had absolutely no merit beyond being dirty and deviant. There was a period of time when my first marriage imploded when the stuff I originally wrote for that category here on Lit paid my mortgage and kept my kids in shoes.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that category. It's fun, and for some of us, really easy. It doesn't have to be deep, thoughtful, or take months of editing. It has an audience of people who like to picture their fantasies instead of being spoon-fed by visual aids like videography. For me, it's relaxing and invigorating to write these kinds of stories between banging my noggin against my mainstream romance projects.

Lots of people in my life HATE my PWP stuff. It's disgusting, vulgar, low brow gratification. It's porn. I'm so much better than this. Ha. They wish I was above it. I'm a middle aged soccer mom with a murky past, and if they had any idea where all those "vulgar" ideas come from they'd run screaming down the road.

Just write, enjoy, and move on. You don't have to make everyone happy.

 

[bejjinks]

I reread through this thread today and realized there is something that I hadn't noticed before: a quest for respectability. So let me tell you my story about my quest for respectability despite the fact that I've been writing stroke smut for decades now.

Puberty hit me hard at the age of twelve but my quest for respectability actually began several years before that. Both my mom and dad were kinda man bashers. They both repeated the message that women, by their very nature, were more like angels while men, by their very nature, were more like brute beasts, that men had to put much more effort into being respectable than women did.

When my parents separated when I was little, it seemed to me like they were getting divorced. They didn't get divorced and so I wasn't supposed to have any feelings because I was supposed to know that they weren't getting divorced (even though it seemed like they were making me choose to either lose my mom forever or lose my dad forever). I was also not supposed to have feelings because I was a child. I was also not supposed to have feelings because I was disabled (primarily my hands making writing difficult). I was also not supposed to have feelings because I was male. I was SHAMED for having feelings.

When I turned twelve, my penis suddenly came to life and had a mind of its own. When it found its way out of my clothes in the middle of class, I felt ashamed. Fortunately no one saw it but I still felt ashamed to discover that I had a brute beast attached to my body living inside my pants.

It didn't help that my sexuality was decidedly gay and, at the time, into watersports. I grew out of my interest in watersports but I never grew out of my homosexuality. This pressure to be respectable split me in two. During the day, I was a respectable Christian but at night, in secret, a sex crazed fag. Of course this was during the eighties, the AIDS crisis.

I also had PTSD because of having been molested when I was five but when I sought help for my PTSD, I was shamed because men weren't supposed to be victims. No one could accept that I had been raped when I was five.

I was working on writing respectable literature for a while and when I wrote stroke smut, I would hide it and distance myself from the stroke smut that I wrote. Many of my stories from that time have since been lost and those that survive are often out there under an anonymous author. My respectable literature got sabotaged by my ex wife. I still think she gets most of the blame for the divorce partly because she knew I was gay before she insisted on marrying me.

It was a real struggle to come to accept who I am, that I have feelings, that I have sexual desires, that I can cry and I can laugh and I can get horny and I can be intelligent, that all of those are a part of me. They're not opposites or contradictory. They're just different sides of the same me.

I do see sometimes that other writer's of porn or erotica or stroke smut struggle with their own feelings of shame. Society has taught us this standard that is inhuman and if you can't live up to that standard than you are supposed to feel ashamed. I say, "Fuck that". We all have feelings and we all have sexual desires. It's not something to be ashamed of. It's just who we are.

 

[AG31]

Hi, @bejjinks,

Thanks so much for this reply. It rings true.

Yes, there is a quest for respectability, but it's of a literary nature. One of the things that has intrigued me about my own sexuality is that I don't feel any shame about writing and reading erotica and having S&M fantasies. I had a very unusual experience that unleashed a lot of libido at a late stage in life. And it was a totally positive experience. See my bio for more info.

But I emit silent cheers that you have come to self acceptance. Self acceptance is a constant in my stories. I find it very erotic.