Friday Five: Gateway Smut
Friday, April 05, 2013
With one notable exception, we've never actually written about porn on Pornokitsch. Or erotica. Or any other sort of sexually-charged literature. And, all joking aside, this is a huge and diverse genre, and, to an outsider, more than a little intimidating. What's it about? What's good? What are the classics? Where do we start?
Fortunately, we've got Tiffani Angus, here to explain where smut begins...
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I read erotica. I write erotica. But as a young reader, I didn’t jump right in and start with Anais Nin. I built up to it, reading things that didn’t seem like smut. Gateway smut, if you will, where the sex scenes weren’t the most important parts of the book … but those few pages were always the most handled.
The summer I turned thirteen, my best friend and I spent hours lounging around on the couch, scanning through her mom’s stacks of Harlequin paperbacks to find the dirty goods. This was the early ’80s, when the Harlequin status quo of virginal heroine gave way to new imprints that allowed the girl to have ‘done it’ already. Sadly, my friend’s mom didn’t read those, so we were left with vague (and much too short) sex scenes.
Still, it was a start, albeit a disappointing one.
No Fifty Shades of Grey back then, being read openly on the bus. Your smut was either out there, in the form of Playboy, or it was buried beneath glossy dust jackets of ‘women’s lit’. But life finds a way, and the smut got found.
Here are five novels that that taught me about smut, and will probably continue to teach others as well...
Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews: Children hidden away in the attic of a mansion, two generations of incest, and filicide. The spawn of several sequels (the final one finished by a ghostwriter after Andrews’ death), Flowers was popular among my young teenage friends and me because the narrator is a teenage girl like us... only trapped in an attic with her handsome, sensitive, strong older brother. Hey, he wasn’t our brother, so we could understand the attraction. With each page the adult characters’ actions became more reprehensible — and unrealistic — but we couldn’t look away. We knew the incest was taboo, but that’s part of what made it so hot since the scenes weren’t terribly explicit.
Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel: Ayla, a Homo sapiens girl, is raised by Neanderthals; her story is full of herb lore, geologic goings-on, and early-human history. It’s ‘educational’. It’s also full of doggy-style sex, which is eye-opening for a teenager who doesn’t think that people ‘back then’ - our parents, their parents, people several thousand years ago - ever did the deed.
Turns out I wasn’t alone in my reasons for reading the series. My grandma read it around the same time, and told the story about a conversation she had with one of her best friends: Liz said, ‘I don’t like all that sex and stuff; I want to read about the landscapes and plants’. My grandma’s response? ‘I skip the landscape to get to the sex!’
Scruples by Judith Krantz: This doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. It’s the excessive 1980s, in your face with expensive cars, over-furnished apartments, and couture clothes, interspersed with sex scenes. It’s fantasy, a sort of non-BDSM Fifty Shades, more concerned with consumerism than sex. But with sex. In the over-furnished apartments and out of the couture clothes.
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. I read this when I was 15 or so. To be honest, I don’t really remember much about it except that there was lots of masturbation. And I got funny looks from all the adults who saw me carrying it around. That right there—that it disturbed grown-ups, but not enough for any of them to call me on it—told me that it was worth reading.
Fear of Flying and Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones by Erica Jong: The first is the more ‘serious’ of the two, the birthplace of the ‘zipless fuck’; the second is Jong’s take on John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, considered to be the first porn novel in English. I have to pair them because of Jong’s influence on sex writing in general, and her influence on my sex writing in particular. I didn’t get Fear of Flying when I read it - the politics didn’t make much sense to me as a teenager without much knowledge of feminism - but it had sex scenes in it, and it was something that smart people read.
Fanny, however, is smut with random capitalization. I didn’t find it on some hidden away shelf labelled ‘erotica’ but on the shelves of the library where I worked. It taught me that smut could be joyous and fun while being ridiculously dirty, in contrast to Nin (who I started to read at about the same time), who always felt too serious.
Honorable Mention: The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice): Yes, for all intents and purposes, this is erotica, so it’s not ‘gateway’ at all. I’ve included it because of when it happened. It has recently been re-released, but back when I first read it, it wasn’t well known. Despite her popularity, most people didn’t even know Anne Rice had written it, so it was still ‘secret’ enough.
Honourable Not-Mentioned: I never read Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and, had I done so, it would most likely have been a censored version and not made this list.
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Tiffani Angus is a Creative Writing PhD student and graduate of Clarion 2009. She's published fantasy at Strange Horizons and in the new anthology Tails of the Pack, and her smut can be found in Best Women's Erotica 2012. You can read more about her on her 'official' blog and her 'life' blog, and she's on Twitter as @tiffaniangus.