Introducing: Consentacles
Monstrous Thoughts On Ethical Erotica
On the horizon, the bright orange light of the setting sun is interrupted by strange tendrils of darkness. You stand on the shore with ocean waves licking your feet, squinting to make sense of what you are seeing. Whatever it is, it seems to be getting closer, moving far faster than any animal or ship you’ve ever seen. And far, far bigger. As it approaches, your eyes finally make out great black tentacles rising from the deep, each limb dotted with dozens of round suckers. They look almost…soft.
The tentacles pulse and writhe and you find yourself oddly entranced by the sight. As if they’re calling to you. As if they need you. Your mind can not comprehend what exactly that need could be except hunger, but your body knows. You take a step deeper into the ocean, pulled by the force of desire low in your belly. One long, thick tentacle slithers across the surface of the ocean, as if it can track your need like it tracks the ships it eats.
It’s almost to the shore, just inches from where you suddenly and unexpectedly long for it to touch. Then, just when you’re panting for a mere graze of its slick skin…a bland voice from the depths humbly and politely asks to touch all of your erogenous zones and genitals by their scientifically accurate names.
Writing erotically while also writing “correctly” is hard. On the one hand, it’s important not to continue to romanticize harmful or just wrong information about sex, orgasms, and consent. On the other hand… that’s not always very sexy. The more I read and write erotica, the more I’ve started questioning how you find that balance. I’ve read some egregious examples of “DON’T PUT THAT IN THAT HOLE” and of “did you HAVE to call them mammaries?”
I went looking for some sort of guide to writing erotica. There’s thousands of writing books out there, I thought surely someone has addressed how to write ethically and erotically. But so far I haven’t found anything except a lot of those scammy Amazon books proclaiming you can make six figures a year if you can somehow crank out 5,000 words a day of erotica.
So, I guess I’m going to write it.
But it turns out if you want to write a book about something this complicated with integrity, you have to do a lot of research and meander down a lot of side avenues you didn’t expect. There’s a lot of questions to seek answers to, and even more that pop up as you research. Questions like:
What’s the line between responsible writing and censorship?
What’s the history of trigger and content warnings?
What do philosophers have to say about the erotic?
What do scientists have to say about sex?
What does consent actually even mean and how do we just wrap that up in a neat bow so we can get on to the fun stuff?
As anyone who has written a term paper knows, you end up reading a lot more than you actually use in your paper as you form your thesis and arguments. In a class setting, you’re content to leave your random findings by the wayside, perhaps picking one inane quote to put into your paper so that you can count it towards your minimum number of required sources. But everything I am reading on this topic is so fascinating that I don’t want to leave any of it unremarked upon!
So, I’m starting a series here about the wild and wacky world of sex psychology, erotic philosophy, and erotica writing to help me synthesize my research. Beginning in 2024, I’m going to share interesting tidbits from various books and articles I’m reading, explore the questions these readings have inspired, and do some digging into the history of how we got to the erotica publishing landscape we live in now. And I’m calling it Consentacles, because I love monster erotica, which tends to lovingly ignore things like proper anatomy or human kinds of consent (he’s a slavering werewolf on the full moon, his jaws can’t even make speech! He can smell that you’re into it! Let him knot!).
Mark Twain said, “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” So I’m embarking on a journey to collect those facts about erotica, writing, and ethics, and try to make some sense out of all the information out there to create a cohesive argument. Whether you’re a writer or reader or just want to think more critically about eroticism and pleasure, there’s going to be interesting essays here for you. Join me as we get our facts super straight so we can thoroughly enjoy our tentacles, aliens, shapeshifters, and eldritch horrors gayly (or straightly, if you're freaky like that).