Write Porn for the Plot: What is Anti-Erotica?

Response to 'Stop Writing Sex Scenes' by Liza Libes

Knock knock. The pizza delivery man is here. And, oops, you forgot that you just paid all your bills and you’re out of money. Silly you. Luckily you’re wearing that crop top and daisy dukes. Luckily the pizza delivery man is a bull stud. You know the rest. But the event itself is just the drive, it’s the doing of the job. It’s what must be done. Right? You crank the hog, Dj the service tunnel rave, whatever you wanna call it, then the story is over by the time you’re masturbating because the story ends when the main event starts. 

Only if you’re a schmuck.

I am present on Booktok, and for the most part, the circles in which I’ve found myself are pretty neat. There is, however, a wing of Booktok that is curious with one, and only one aspect of contemporary fiction: spice. If you rolled your eyes, I’m sorry. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re better for it, now allow you to make you worse. Spice is derived from the pepper emoji used to encode a particular subject that the TikTok algorithm is meant to identify and suppress. I suspect that initially, normal people recognized that the pepper symbolized heat, and then the worst of the internet converted it to what it is now. Spice is the sex scene. And there are whole demographics of readers who will not engage with a work unless it’s got at least one good scene of the ol’ fuckin’. The cultural impact of this has, of course, been blown out of proportion in some spheres. There are men who are butthurt about it, there are prudes who say it’s porno and porno is the devil. Most people don’t care, because who cares? Personally, however, I do not find the sex scene interesting enough to comment on in most contemporary fiction. To me, in most stories, it really doesn’t add anything. But my realization lately has been that, in the way pornography effectively extracts sex from fantasy, leaving only fantasy, the literary sex scene functions the same way. That does not mean the sex scene should be eradicated like a plague, however, it simply means we’ve lost the plot.

In her essay, Stop Writing Sex Scenes, Liza Libes throws the baby out with the bathwater. Her whole bit can effectively be boiled down to the perspective that sex scenes are cringey and serve no purpose. And to an extent that *can* be true. When thinking of books like Fourth Wing and Godkiller, the reader culture seems to revolve around the fuck scenes. With Fourth Wing there’s a sort of love-hatred of the camp of the smut, with Godkiller there was a lot of fury about a bisexual woman’s first sexual encounter being with a man. This is all very deep and interesting. And it seems to be first and foremost a fantasy problem. And perhaps that’s telling. The sex in poorly written contemporary fantasy is the fantasy, and the fantasy is just set dressing. In these instances, no matter how interesting the novel, the novel does not matter. Consequently, the sex scenes are about nothing, because at least culturally, the sex scenes are what is being framed by everything else in the book. In a sense, there is a case to be made to prune the smut out of your books, and that’s because of the virginal culture of the most mediocre illiterati who orbit these moments uber alles. It is true that the sex scene can suck. No one can deny that. But on the other hand, consider the value of a sex scene. Graphic sex, at its best, is festering with subtext. This is where Libes misses the plot, herself. Libes posits that a good sex scene cannot be written, and reading between the lines of her work, this is because she believes sex is about nothing but sex.

The tragedy of this perspective is its short-sightedness. It holds sex on a pedestal above anything else a human can experience, and certainly, the temporary oblivion of climax is certainly unlike many things, in fact it is perhaps nihilism; self in defiance of self that we seek the orgasm. It is not, however, so special that it carries no external value. In fact, I thought it was the new pseudo-intellectuals championing the phrase that “sex is not about sex”, but now it seems that the cultural response to this bumper sticker philosophy is just as boring and reductive. The “very deep” philosophy bros are more right, though. Sex is not about sex. And any discerning reader can tell by your writing if you don’t know that.

A few months ago, I began a project I’ve been calling the Anti-erotica series, wherein I try my hand at smut on my terms. The idea is precisely to combat the use of porn in contemporary literature. Now, let me clarify. Anti-erotica is not against erotica, in fact it’s quite for it. It is not a moral position on the state of smut and pornography. The name is simply a provocation. These are works of fiction that are intended to fertilize the grounds for what's to come. What do I mean by that? It seems that the entropic destination of all fiction writing platforms is either a reductio ad erotica or nonfiction. That is not to say that erotica and nonfiction are all that are featured on platforms like KDP, Vella, Wattpad, Medium or even Substack; nevertheless, these two genres make up a significant bulk of successful work. I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think this is good sales. But the aim should be to anticipate this force of nature creeping into wherever the writers are going, and at least steer it in a way that does not further degrade the literary scene. Libes does correctly identify that a lot of sex in fiction is gratuitous, a lot of smut is gratuitous. But she treats it as if this must always be true. In fact she did a whole study on 200 instagram viewers that found that 60% of participants thought sex scenes were unnecessary. My favorite part is that she concludes that this means *most readers* don’t like sex scenes. In my field they call that a conclusion drawn from bullshat data. But ultimately, my response is, what if this the sex scene is more than the sex scene? What if smut and ‘the sex scene’ can be saved? Culturally, I see how this is difficult. The people that admire the sex scene right now admire it because it is hollow, Anti-erotica is the intention to make an effort to save an arm of fiction that is wounded but has not yet withered and rotted off.

I believe that begins with writing sex scenes, gratuitous or otherwise, which are not about sex. That’s not to remove the fun of the horniness of a sex scene, but to remove the circularity of its purpose. A sex scene can be fun and can be a deception. It can be sexy and it can be a treatise on expression. It can be disgusting and it can be an expansion on the notion of love. It can be about the nature of a character. It can be about the nature of loneliness. Sex is not about sex. Porn is about sex. The empty thrusting, the closeup on the dick vein and vaginal discharge.  But sex is about nothing if it is not about something else. Sex is about the moments before, during and after that culminates into an event. A sex scene, like any scene, is a nonlinear funnel into a singularity. If you cannot write a sex scene, then you cannot write a regular scene.

1987’s Predator might be the best example of a movie that can be considered elevated smut by the metric I am using. At its heart it’s an action horror flick, meant to be enjoyed with your rowdiest friend group. But in reality, at its soul, Predator is both a profound celebration and critique of “traditional” masculinity and feminine civilization. Now, if you saw Predator and saw nothing but the set dressing, of course, you’re never going to enjoy it. In fact, one of the things wrong with the contemporary action movie is that they contain the same self-circularity as pornography and badly written sex scenes of a lot of contemporary fiction. Predator was made before this artistic degradation. But it is still considered low art. Godzilla, similarly, is always about Japan’s relationship to nuclear power. Jaws is an intimate study on the nature of fear. The Thing is so fundamentally Cold War / espionage era it’s almost laughable. Point is, these movies are not about what they are about, and it requires only the most mediocre analyst to come to that conclusion. They are, in essence, the sex scene. And if you watch these movies and get nothing from them, it is no wonder that you cannot see all that the sex scene can be. 

So if you’ve got it in you, Anti-erotica is not a literary movement. It’s not a movement at all. Right now, it’s one somewhat disinterested dude, writing to save a limb of contemporary literature he honestly doesn’t even really care about. But attempting to fix something you don’t care for is at least a nobler pursuit than rejecting it outright. I am talking to you directly, Libes.

Do not stop writing sex scenes.

Write them better. You, yourself (Libes) stated that your sex scenes were not accepted in your own work. 

Sex scenes are scenes.

Write better scenes. 

Write better sex scenes. 

Anyway, here are some of the Anti-Erotica pieces that I’ve written that I like:

CUM

The Master

Good Job