I know that erotica websites like lit, lushstories and noveltrove are busy places, but I’m wondering if erotica is on a longterm downwards trend with visual porn being the winner and the written word becoming a small niche, if it isn’t already. I have no statistics at hand to see growth numbers for different forms or erotic content, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the younger generation is turning away from reading erotica. What do you think? Do you (still) read erotica?
I’m not so sure.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/literotica.com
While it fluctuates, there’s no real sign of precipitous decline in the popularity of Literotica.
It’s easier than ever to self-publish. Tumblr has been a huge boon for erotica, as have DeviantArt and of course Literotica. All of these sites are extremely active. If they’re in decline, I’m not sure how you’d determine that without actual statistics, which I can’t really find and which you have not provided.
If visual porn was going to kill off erotica, it probably would have done so quite some time ago, when it became readily available for everyone. At least for me, erotica scratches a different itch from visual porn. It’s also a lot easier to produce and share than visual porn, animated or recorded, and makes it far easier to tap into certain fetishes that would otherwise be impossible. Nobody is going to be doing good, live video tentacle porn any time soon. That’s just not a world we live in. But erotica? Do you want yours with an OC, with Sherlock, with Captain Kirk, or with Vegeta? 
(Fimfiction is certainly in decline, but that’s probably got more to do with My Little Pony’s quality dipping significantly and people wandering away from that specific fandom, so it’s not a great example.)
Self-publishing is only one half of the equation. The other half is being able to buy and read the stuff without anyone knowing about it.
Back in The Day, the only ways to get erotica of any kind involved either getting it mailed to you (post-Comstock) or going to a store which sold it (no mean feat in some regions) and asking a person for it. Face to face. In public. Plausible if you were three states away from home for some respectable reason, perhaps, but otherwise…
The other part is, erotica looks like erotica. Schoolroom protestations to the contrary, the covers give it away every time. People can tell if you’re reading in on the bus or even at home, assuming you don’t live alone.
These days, you can buy Fifty Shades of Grey from Amazon and a Kindle being used to read that looks just like a Kindle being used to read literally anything else. The element of shame is gone. Buying and reading this stuff is more covert now than it ever has been.
Plus, ebooks could revive the midlist (or backlist), books which sell steadily but never break any top-seller lists. The midlist was decimated by a tax law quirk which forced publishers to value unsold stock at face value even if there was no guarantee it would ever be sold; in order to avoid big tax bills, the publishers scrapped a lot of books due to that. With ebooks, of course, there is no “stock” in the traditional sense, and digital files can be kept essentially indefinitely with near-zero additional costs to adding a new one. This is great for books catering to niche interests. OTOH, the rampant success of Fifty Shades proved that BDSM is hardly a niche interest among straight women…
The element of shame is not just gone because it’s easier to hide. It’s also just… well, gone. You see people walking around with Fifty Shades Of Grey. They seem neither embarrassed to be reading erotica nor embarrassed that it’s poorly-written dross that misrepresents abuse as BDSM and is awful even for the category of “Twilight fanfiction”. People seem to just not care. It’s really cool.
Basically the same thing is happening with the “visual arts”. Playboy going non-nude, and the virtual disappearance of the cinematic “erotic thriller” genre.
George Costanza notwithstanding, no one is going to sit through a two hour movie just because a woman might take her top off. People want to watch porn, they’ll watch porn. And the easy availability of same has eased the pressure on film makers to go softcore.
Men often prefer visuals and women often prefer erotica. Neither going anywhere anytime soon.
Any recommendations for a written erotica site with a reader-sourced rating system? I tend to use Stories-Online, but it seems 90% of what they publish is really bad SF about some Harry Sue acquiring a bevvy of brainless bimbos and god-like powers.
I miss Celeste and the Celestial Reviews she used to publish on alt.sex.stories back in the day.
Wow, I didn’t expect that many answers, but I’m glad everyone all of you did. I agree that it’s probably not clear cut downturn, but slow burning. I guess that erotica was extremely popular in the early days of the net, as bandwidth was more expensive and slower. Still, I hope I’m wrong, as I’m a big fan of the written word, even though visual art appeals to me as well.
I believe it’s true that erotica is more popular among women than men, especially when it comes to younger generations. On the other hand, a lot of women are more interested in romance, but the line is somewhat blurred.
@gaffa, what do you mean by reader sourced rating system? Noveltrove for example has a thumbs up/down rating system (and somewhat decent content 
), many other sites have a 1-5, 1-10 points scale.
Doesn’t Literotica do that?
Celeste, who wrote more than 4000 reviews of erotic stories back in the nineties, was a pseudonym for a high school English teacher. She came up with a tripartite rating system - “Athena” (technical quality), “Venus” (plot & character) and “Celeste” (appeal to reviewer) on a ten point scale. By breaking it down this way, stories that were otherwise exceptional, but squicked the reviewer, would still get decent ratings in the end.
She had a significant impact on the quality of the stories, and her “Celestial Grammar” used pornographic examples:
-
APOSTROPHES. Don’t make a noun plural by adding apostrophe s ('s).
This rule applies to all nouns - including proper nouns.(The plural of Smith is Smiths, not Smith’s.)
The purpose of an apostrophe with a noun is to show possession.
Example: "Sue's pussy" means the pussy that belongs to Sue (at least
until she gives it to someone else).
Some confusion arises when you use plurals with apostrophes. For example,
the “Smiths’ orgy” refers to the orgy held by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. In this
case, write the plural (with the s) and just add the apostrophe (without
another s).
-
VERB TENSE. Stick with one tense, unless you have a reason to change.
Bad: “I was walking down the street one day. I see a girl who was
wearing no bra or panties.”Better: “I was walking down the street one day. I saw a girl who
was wearing no bra or panties.”
There are cases when it does make sense to change verb tenses. Just do so
on purpose.
- RUN-ON SENTENCES. When you are finished with a sentence, use a period
and begin a new sentence. Sometimes this becomes complicated, because
many sentences contain more than one idea (like this one.) The easiest
way to deal with this is to read the sentence and see if it expresses a
coherent thought. If you are uncertain, turn it into two or more separate
sentences.
I would love to find a site that adopted her rating system. By having only a single rating, well-written stories that don’t appeal to the mass get rated down - apparently, there is someone on Stories-Online who rates every story of an unfaithful wife a 1, and it pulls those down. In the same way, I’d like to encourage writers to become better (I could give a 0 “Athena” to the otherwise decent writer who insists “cummed” is a word.)
I don’t know if there was ever a time were Erotica was big. You get the occasional sexy novel that reaches some popularity here and there (Your “Fanny Hill”, your “Portnoy’s Complaint”), but nothing more relevant than nowaday’s mainstream.
If anything, there’s more sexyin the mainstream (hello, Game of Thrones) than any other time in history.
That’s certainly good to know. It’s time we developed healthier attitudes about this stuff.
This is something I’ve noticed myself. The classic “jiggle show” (Charlie’s Angels, Baywatch) is pretty much gone, and, in fact, I’ll go further: Despite the more hysterical claims from the early 1990s that the Internet was for porn and nothing but (looking at you, Marty Rimm), pornography efficiently self-segregates: There’s porn on the pornographic websites, enough to satisfy anyone who doesn’t have some serious problem, and there’s effectively none on non-pornographic websites.
For example, webcomics have as close to an absolutely free reign as legally permitted. There’s no editorial control over most of them, just the control of the creators themselves and, in an indirect sense, the control the audience exerts through feedback and going off to view something else. Most webcomics are not only non-pornographic, they’re probably tamer than most sitcoms these days.
I attribute it to simple satiation: Once you have enough, you stop hoarding and stop scrounging.
I used to think erotica was a dying breed until one day when I was shopping at the local independent bookstore. I had been unable to make a selection when a shapely young woman approached me and asked if I needed any assistance. I told her that I was looking for something a little different. She smiled and said she might have something I would be interested in. The store was about to close, so…
Ha! Exactly the same thing happened to me, except we had to wait until her twin sister had closed the cash register, and then…
Seriously - I think the internet has calmed down, as Derleth has said. Sure, there’s a billion porn sites - there’s also a billion non-porn sites.
I enjoy erotica for the same reasons I often enjoy books over movies. Sometimes, the best scenes happen in your head.
Indeed. One thing you get in written erotica that you don’t get in porn is romance. And of course there is a whole universe of stories that cannot be portrayed by a bunch of tattooed, pierced people. In spite of having a good sized collection of visual porn, I tend to actually turn to a few favorite stories for my jerk-off material.
Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think the Internet’s calmed down so much as that it was never as wild as some of the anti-Internet crusaders thought it was. Rimm’s work was famously bad, founded on dishonest math and a fundamental need to see the Internet as a vast cultural wasteland filled with pornography. People have been sending pornography over networks of various kinds since before the Internet existed, and none of the networks ever became saturated with porn to the extent people like Rimm fantasized about. It just isn’t something most people want that much of.
This is something I can fully agree with.
I personally think some animated narration would be awesome with a lot of erotica.
They should be ashamed, 50SoG is shite.
Lack of embarrassment about reading erotica is a healthier attitude. I’m not so sure about lack of embarrassment about reading poorly-written dross.