Smutscapade

Part of that infernal series. And yes, I was listening to a Janet Jackson video on YouTube when I came up with the title.

The university at which I teach has a well stocked library, and yesterday I withdrew several books. Two were fantasy novels by Gene Wolfe, one was about the development of the public sphere in early modern England, and one was a collection of erotic stories edited by a woman named Susie Bright. It had a bright pink cover, and on the cover was a curvy lady wearing nothing but black stockings and one strategically placed hand.

Stay with me, here.



I am writing about this for several reasons. I have a point to make about genre conventions, and I have a point to make about library shelves. I will make these points in reverse order.

First, although the bright pink book was in the PS section (Library of Congress style) along with all the other modern American literature, it was surrounded by a little nimbus of other books containing raunchy stories. This book was not, in other words, classified by author alone, or even by the fact that it was an anthology or collection. The raunch aspect had marked it off and caused it to be placed in a particular spot.

This is common. Things to which the label 'erotica' sticks, for whatever reason, tend to end up in the same place, however dissimilar they may otherwise be.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially given that the three novellas contained in this book were merely that - novellas. They had a fair amount of sex in them, but I didn't get the impression that I had fallen down some pink-rimmed rabbit hole of transgression. The last of the three stories, in particular, was more about South African politics than it was about raunch.

In a certain sense, the cataloging of smut by the Bleak University Library is parallel to the ratings writers often use to tag their stories, such as K, T, MA, NC-17, and so on. We have a lingering sense that if something contains smut, it ought to have a little warning-label on it. Fine. I really don't think myself that dirty stories are dangerous, but tags merely provide information, and hurt no one.

But the interesting thing about the way fanficdom operates is that the K stories and the NC-17 stories are mixed promiscuously together. Check the three most recent stories over on Survival Instinct and you're liable to get a fluff story about pink gel-pens, a weirdly contrived romantic interlude with some mild groping, and a full-on three-way involving Doc Cottle and a lot of lube. (I'm sorry. That story is still in my head. It will be gone soon, I promise.)

Or, hit The Lady's In Charge, and you might get Laura/Three bondage using a compass and some torn stockings, a little Tory/Laura angst interlude that anyone can enjoy, or one of Trialia's evocative little five-liners that says rather more than it appears to. Ditto over at LiveJournal, where the romance and the raunch and the deer and the antelope all play together. I am thinking in particular of our friends at bondage_rz, where the last story I read careened wildly from supperraunch to supersweet, and was entertaining as all hell. That is not a ship that I usually sail on, but I'll watch the regatta every now and again.

So, fanficdom is actively engaged, whether intentionally or not, in breaking down the line between the smut and the not-smut. You can even make the argument that fanfic smut does this by its very existence. After all, writing and reading raunch encounters is a way of nudging the canon and saying - this happened, too. Pocketwitch's untitled Laura/Kara series, links to which can be found here, and that chaste hug Kara gave the prez so long ago are part of the same text.

Which means that maybe, someday, collections of erotic novellas can be shelved alongside everything else, where they belong.