Perhaps you came here because, like me, you wanted something deeper.
Too many people being careless – on dating apps, at sex parties, in their discourse, in their fics… always the marginalised folks getting hurt the most.
Folks were carelessly splashing around in the shallows, not really knowing what they were doing. You needed to have the clear conversations before striking out for deeper waters. Not cautious or repressed, just thoughtful and considering. Alive to the power of negotiation, of words before deeds.
The intimacy of talking about it.
Here, we can give voice to anything we like without fragility and panic and the foolish idea that talking about sex is a passion killer. We will weave intensity with our words and find out how far they can take us.
Content note: briefly mentions abuse of minors, grooming culture, bdsm, and hypothetical sex with fictitious animals, allusion to pedophilia and bestiality
Queer spaces are awash with people having a huge moral panic about a new (and mostly imaginary) generation of puritans.
I have to be honest, in my line of work calling people uptight, puritanical or similar is generally a sign the accuser has done some boundary-crossing (or wants to) and doesn’t want to be called out for it. It’s one of the foundations of grooming culture. Sometimes done deliberately, sometimes unconsciously.
Let’s give a random example that crossed my dash again today:
Another post came across my dash within an hour of this that invites us to interrogate our disgust. I like this notion – not disregard it or follow it without thinking, but interrogate. So the question is – why might we feel uncomfortable about the idea of someone fucking Scooby Doo?
Well, here’s the thing: it’s implied in the show that Scooby Doo is owned by Shaggy and Shaggy can make Scooby Doo’s choices for him. That’s the usual dynamic between a human and his pet dog. Scoob can speak, sure, at a stretch we might think him intelligent and mature enough to have capacity, but there isn’t any indication that he’s anything other than a talking pet dog, as far as I’m aware. He even has a collar.
If so, no Scoob cannot freely consent, because Scoob is not a free being. If Scoob lives in a world where talking dogs are fully emancipated and on equal footing to humans, then that’s different. Scoob would need to have the means to feed and house himself, live independently of Shaggy and be fully autonomous.
This is also why minors cannot consent – because of the power adults have over them – essentially, until they reach majority we rule over them. Whether or not we agree with that, it gives us undue power in the world as it is.
Equally, animals can’t consent to sex with humans even if there’s good non-verbal communication and they seem to be into it – because the world is structured such that humans have dominion over animals from which animals cannot escape. Especially pets.
Anyone who’s practiced around kink and consent will know that even in 24/7 D/s and Master/slave relationships it’s essential that at any time the sub/slave is able to leave and choose to be a free, emancipated person, and has the means to do so, otherwise it’s not consensual kink it’s actual slavery/abuse.
So: Han can rail Chewbacca into next week if he wants it, and Smaug the dragon can be the object of your kinkiest fantasies and that’s totally okay, but… no, Scooby Doo does not pass the Harkness Test.
Ergo, you’re not a puritan for being uncomfortable with the idea of fucking Scooby Doo. You just needed to interrogate your discomfort.
Let’s just watch out for people throwing terms like puritan and purity culture around without clear detail on what they’re whipping up a moral panic about. They might, unwittingly or not, be contributing to grooming culture, overriding people’s boundaries and normalising acceptance of things that we should have a clear “no” for.
Here’s a reality people not in the know may be unaware of: Child abusers have been trying to bludgeon their way into kink, queer and sex pos spaces since the 60s, claiming they’re just another marginalised sexuality. They’re not. It’s concerning that some folks, and not just on the religious right, seem to have a problem telling the difference between consenting adult kink, queerness and child or animal molestation.
These are not lines that should be blurred. Part of what makes kink a safer place to play is we think about power imbalance very deeply, and are especially careful not to shame people’s disgust and resistance or try and push people to move past discomfort that could be telling them something important.
Yes, we absolutely do play with and challenge taboos in kink, but we do it mindfully, safely and consensually.
Content note: comparison of writing to BDSM, mild BDSM mentions, including spanking, reference to sensitivity reading and impact on marginalised readers.
Lately, I’ve come to understand that there isn’t a great difference between the process I choose to go through putting a fic up on ao3 or publishing/performing under my other name and the process of negotiating a BDSM scene. As the writer, I’m holding all the cards; I’m effectively the Dom in this scenario.
Within fandom, the reader’s expected to be quite astonishingly passive/submissive, other than to make noises of appreciation – on ao3 we’ve even created community norms where the reader can’t easily say ouch or no or you’re not being careful enough with me and people like me or this isn’t what we negotiated without being punished, shamed or condemned.
That in itself adds to our power as writers.
From the perspective of a writer who’s also an ADHDer with bad RSD, I sometimes love that about ao3. That I know by and large the comments are going to be friendly, that I won’t be given a hard time. But it means there’s a lot of responsibility on me to consider how I might impact my reader without them feeling they can say so. To further the BDSM analogy, I have a non-verbal sub who I can do anything to in subspace.
This is where negotiating the scene becomes critical. If once we’re in the fic I can do anything, then the reader needs to know going in what’s ahead. And it would be awesome if I could just write 2000 words of smut, put it onto the internet without thinking about its impact, but the reality is, it’s very easy to miss a problem with consent, or fall into a racist or transmisogynistic (etc) trope that might unwittingly hurt someone.
Asking my beta readers to keep an eye out for missed tags, consent issues, and do a sensitivity reading is a part of what I do to make sure I prepared the space well enough so it’s truly safe, sane and consensual.
And I sit on fics for a while, so I can go back and look with a critical eye, hoping to get that negotiation right – my tags, my author notes, my carefully letting the reader know what I’m planning to lead them through.
This isn’t really about what’s happening to the characters in the story. It’s about what’s happening interpersonally between me and the reader. It’s about whether I took the time to gain their informed consent before taking them into a space that is intended to impact them. Whether I considered them and cared about them. Whether I took the time to ensure marginalised readers had as safe and good a time as everyone else.
If I didn’t want to impact the reader, I wouldn’t be writing. I want the impact to be positive, but I don’t want them unmoved and unchanged.
I can put my character through terrible things against their will and it will still be consensual if I asked myself for consent to write and share this fantasy and my reader for their consent to witness it.
For many readers this is not about “I don’t want to read that stuff” it’s about “I need to feel trust in the person holding the space before I proceed”.
So often we talk about content warnings as if they are purely there to help us decide whether or not to read on, but that’s only half their job. Today, a poet in one of my more literary spaces shared a poem about grief. Their content warning didn’t stop me reading the poem, but it did help me prepare myself for the emotions it inevitably brought up.
It’s like the difference between how pain feels if someone tells you “I’m going to spank you now” or does it without warning. And without warning is a perfectly valid option if you pre-negotiated it, of course.
The thing is, you can take a BDSM relationship far deeper with good communication and negotiation, and this is also true of writing. People can mentally check out if they’re jarred by a poorly negotiated space – they’re not really present or connecting with your words. When it comes to erotic fiction, that also might mean they’re less able to check in with themselves about self-consent. And that can mean the difference between enjoying the moment and feeling good afterwards (or thoughtful, or wrung out, etc., depending what the writer intended), or feeling the wrong kind of uncomfortable later.
Equally, it’s no surprise that the edgelords of this world create such a narrow and limited worldview – it’s impossible to go deep simply by shocking people, it takes a bit more care and finesse than that.
It’s possible to find responsible writers who can hold their reader well. I believe writers who do that can take them safely to very interesting and complicated places.
My name is Mas, and sometimes I write smut on the internet. What I write is intended to be many-layered – liberational, emotional, thoughtful, political and, oh gosh, gee whiz blush, what many writers and readers are oddly reticent to admit: arousing.
I’ve been writing for a long time, with other kinds of publications in another name. I have a deep-seated appreciation of the power of words. I write about all kinds of things, but sex? Sex is important to me. And so is communication.
I’ll let you into one of my secrets early on: communication is, in fact, my biggest kink. If you read my stories, you’ll find people negotiating and going to therapy amid all the kinky stuff. To me, that may be far more of a transgressive act. There are so many things stopping characters from becoming self-aware. Stopping us.
Speaking truths can be more terrifying than stripping in public, especially if we know what we’re supposed to say and the words fighting their way up from deep down are something different entirely.
I’ll let you into another secret: I added a line back there about how I wanted to make my readers feel and then deleted it, because there’s this weirdness going on at the smutty end of fiction writing – we can say the sometimes unsayable in our stories, but we don’t so easily talk about what we’re doing, or why.
My deleted line went like this: I wan’t to get my reader’s hand sliding inside their clothes… I am curious as to why it was so hard for me to admit this. The central deceit in all this seems to be that our words cannot impact people, we cannot say, as readers, that we were impacted.
But I know words have power. I want my reader to be moved by them, not only getting off to them, although I do put a lot of thought and care into making some of my stories arousing, but moved to tears or anger or deep thought. I also want to make my reader feel safe with me, to trust I’ll take care of them for the duration of the story, even if I take them to complicated places.
Words have power, and I take to heart the truism with power comes responsibility.