There’s a website that I frequent occasionally — for research purposes — that publishes pornographic stories. It’s kind of the wikipedia of literary erotica, or maybe the eBay of literary etorica. Or maybe it’s like neither of those things and I’m just trying to glam it up by comparing it to them, but the point is that it’s free to read, anyone can publish a story, and you can rate the stories and thereby contribute, in a small way, to which ones make it onto the "Top Lists" of most-read and most-loved stories.
This open source-ness is significant because it means that the site, unlike your typical porno venue, doesn’t reflect a particular editorial vision or a market-driven speculation about the tastes of a particular demographic. It reflects, rather, the tastes and peccadilloes of its stable of hundreds of anonymous writers and thousands of readers. It’s democratic and idiosyncratic in a way that Playboy or Hustler or JennaJameson.com aren’t.
So it’s interesting to discover that of the top 10 most read stories on the site, all ten of them are incest stories, including such classics as "Sister Sucks Sleeping Sibling," "A Mother and Her Son," "Daddy’s Slut Girl Ch. 2," and "Built For One Thing Ch. 1," which features this opening line, perhaps the most iconic since Melville’s "Call me Ishmael."
I had wanted to fuck my gorgeous mother since the moment I learned what fucking was all about. Then, one summer night in high school, I finally got my wish.
It’s also interesting to read these stories and discover that for the most part they’re very tame. Not tame in the sense that they’re coy about the sex — all the standard variations are explored — but tame in exploring what’s most distinctive about incest, which is its utter forbidden-ness, the sense that if the taboo against it is broken then life as we know it could shatter. Instead, you get a lot of stories about various good-looking people who want to have sex with each other who almosst incidentally happen to be mother and son, or sister and brother, or father and daughter.
Insofar as eroticism is about transgression, danger and tension, these stories are foregoing their most potentially potent source of erotic charge. So while there’s always a moment or two when one of the characters has second thoughts about what’s about to happen, it’s gone so quickly that it essentially denies the possibility that there would be any consequences involved in busting the taboo. "Built For One Thing Ch. 1," for instance, deals with it this way:
It was sin, it was chaos, it was the stuff that had made Greek poets fear the sun would turn backwards in its course. A mother was passionately kissing her son. And they were about to fuck.
Mom heard my thoughts and flinched. She pulled her head back with a look of dismay and planted two stern palms on my shoulders.
"Oh, honey, we can’t do this. It’s crazy. We’ll regret it for the rest of our lives." She replaced her fallen bra strap.
"But it would be so good," I said.
"Oh, I know, baby, I know. You’re so young and strong, and I can already tell that you know what you’re doing." She looked at my bulging crotch. "I can also tell you’re hung like a fucking horse, Bobby."
"I wanna do you with it," I said, leaning down to kiss her neck.
She didn’t stop me. "No, honey, you’re my son." I kissed her on the lips again and she instinctively darted her tongue into my mouth before pulling away. But then her eyes beamed mine with pure lechery, and her lashes blinked some beguiling Morse code message of outlaw sex. "Christ, it would be fantastic, wouldn’t it? But no, we simply can’t."
This same dynamic — the refusal to exploit, or face up to, how dangerous and destructive sex can actually be in real life — plays itself out again and again in the other types of stories that the site features. So threesomes never seem to devolve into betrayal and recrimination. Adultery is typically comitted at the spouse’s encouragement (because he’s turned on by watching his wife with another man, or vice versa). Virginity is always lost painlessly, multi-orgasmically, and with a minimum of embarrassment (if there’s a premature ejaculation, for instance, the shame is immediately washed away by a miraculously resurrected penis and a subsequent longdeepdicking).
Mothers hand their daughters over to older men for lessons in the art of love because they’d rather have their daughters learn about sex from someone who knows what he’s doing, and who will be tender and caring, than have them learn the hard way from insensitive boys their own age. Teachers sleep with students and nobody ever gets fired or damaged. In the rare event that someone’s caught doing something "bad," the person who catches them usually ends up, after a moment or two of anger, joining in the fun.
It’s all about sex without consequences, which seems to me to be one of the defining male fantasies of our age (maybe of every age, I don’t know). It’s "pornutopia," as Nancy Bauer calls it in her recent (totally fascinating) essay in N + 1. She writes:
In pornographic representation, civilization, though it sometimes gamely tries to assert itself, always ultimately surrenders to lust. But sexual desire is shown to be a gentlemanly victor: rather than destroy civilization, it repatriates it. Civilization pledges to uphold the laws of the pornutopia, in which the ordinary perils of sexual communion simply don’t exist. Everyone has sex whenever the urge strikes, and civiilization hums along as usual: people go to work and school, the mail gets delivered, commerce thrives. The good citizens of the porn world, inexorably ravenous, are also perfectly sexually compatible with one another. Everyone is desired by everyone he or she desires. Serendipitously, as it always turns out, to gratify yourself sexually by imposing your desires on another person is automatically to gratify that person as well.
Here, we see Kant turned on his head. Rather than encouraging us to live as though in a kingdom in which our common capacity for rationality enjoins us to regard all people, ourselves included, as ends-in-themselves, the porn world encourages us to treat ourselves and others as pure means. And what’s supposed to license this vision is the idea that desire, not reason, is fundamentally the same from person to person, as though our personal idiocyncrasis were merely generic and reason could have no role to play in a true, and truly moral, sexual utopia.
In the pornutopia, autonomy takes the form of exploring and acting on your sexual desires when and in whatever way you like; to respect your own and other people’s humanity, all you have to do is indulge your own sexual spontaneity. No one in the pornutopia has a reason to lose interest in or fear or get bored by sex; no one suffers in a way that can’t be cured by it; no one is homeless or dispossessed or morally or spiritually abused or lost. When Daddy fucks Becky, she doesn’t experience it as rape. She comes.
Like Bauer, who expresses a certain cultivated befuddlement at the end of her essay, I don’t quite know what to make of all this. I can understand why the average literotica author shies away from delving too deep into his or her (mostly his, I’m pretty sure) incest fantasies. Incest, after all, is pretty scary even for the people who write pornographic stories about it. But why does the same cautiousness hold so often with adultery stories, or teacher/student stories, or workplace fantasies? Is it so hard to own up — anonymously — to lusting after a co-worker? Wouldn’t be it even hotter to tell a story that’s dangerous, in which the tension is slowly ratcheted up, in which each successive encounter raises the stakes?
Just to be clear: I understand why people fantasize about living in a world in which sex is free, emotionally friction-less, and available on-demand. That’s the dream, after all — at least for most men. What I don’t understand is why that’s the world that’s so often represented in pornographic fiction. Part of the point of fiction, after all, is that it allows us to have vicarious experience that’s more intense, more charged, more cathartic than what we experience in our humdrum lives.
It’s almost as if porn is more about gratifying our fantasies of emotional innocence — about living in a world in which we’re not constantly weighed down by the worries of family, money, parenthood, friendship, career, success, etc. — than it is about gratifying our sexual fantasies.
