aurora light

author's note

in the following blog post, i’m going to be focusing a lot on “women” and “men,” often contrasting the two against each other. this is by no means an actually coherent understanding of gender, but most academic discourse on this topic contrasts these two groups as our “primary” gender groups in the west. my focus is also on how a harmful set of beliefs grows from a particular understanding of gender exported to the rest of the world through colonial interests. therefore, i think it’s helpful to focus on “men” and “women” as defined by those colonial interests.

significantly more could be said about how non-colonial understandings of gender play in and around these ideas, but this is not the blog post where i’m doing that. perhaps in the future!!!

politics, erotica, and you

the american election cycle is never enjoyable.

generally, americans are deciding between two war criminals who want to convince you that they’re going to do better war crimes than the other guy. it goes one way or the other, one side cheers and the other boos, and homeless people keep dying in the streets of heat stroke and starvation.

but this election cycle, we’ve started to hear a lot about project 2025, which is basically a bunch of GOP leaders no longer really caring about how they look to the average person, and saying a lot of historically-at-least-muted parts out loud: gay and trans people should die, homelessness is a moral failure, and women should just shut up.

there are a lot of issues addressed in this shared manifesto, and a lot of them are obviously insane to people who consider themselves progressive.

but one that stands out to me as less obvious is that of pornography.

far too often, i see self-described progressives siding with the project 2025 dossier, which says, “[pornography’s] purveyors are child predators and exploiters of women. [t]heir product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime.”

i see this same idea spread by so many people who consider themselves progressive. some of them even claim to support sex workers while still saying they believe the way they make their living is inherently evil.

sexual art is as important as any other art. let me explain why.

a (too short) history of erotica

stories, images, and general material meant to sexually stimulate or discuss erotic topics have been around for essentially forever. erotic art dates back to the paleolithic times; erotic literature can be found in the tanakh.

ever since the printing press was invented, people have consistently found erotica terrifying, especially in the west. these arguments have usually been about protecting women and children; if you’ve ever heard the “what if children stumble upon it?” argument, you are at least familiar with the consistent argument we’ve seen from the courts and, in growing number, from republicans today.

in the united states, these items have often been restricted under obscenity laws. while you may assume that these laws have been overturned in some way due to the fact that you can find erotica in most places, they actually haven’t; the definition of “obscenity” is just so vague that it can be hard to enforce, and lawyers have successfully argued that much erotica has enough artistic merit to no longer be considered “obscene.”

except for when it doesn’t, because “obscenity” as a concept is necessarily ever-changing and reliant upon the society in which you live.

identifying the obscene

“obscenity” is a tricky topic. but, as an erotica writer who writes kinks like guro, 24/7 D/s, dubcon/noncon, necro, and other Weird Shit, on top of writing solely gay and trans erotica, it is a topic i feel like we don’t talk about enough in these circles.

in the uk/australia, “female” ejaculation is still considered obscene and is illegal in porn. in the us, incest in erotic fiction is technically considered inherently obscene and is also illegal. it’s common for payment processors to push companies to reject certain types of sexual content they consider obscene: watersports, taboo pairings, noncon, etc.

despite fears of mainstream media being “pornified,” it is overwhelmingly obvious that only certain kinds of sexuality are in any way considered acceptable: men pursuing women in a way that is exciting to straight men. gay sexuality, trans sexuality, women-led sexuality, sexuality controlled by poc, hell, even fat sexuality are all still widely off-limits.

kink comes from social taboo. frequently, the people piloting these “obscene” works are marginalized: lgbt people, poc, women.

sexuality is incredibly powerful. having control over your own sexuality is an incredibly powerful experience. what more control can you have than writing a story that centers wholly around your own personal desires?

misogyny & erotica

it’s important to note that for erotica specifically, there is usually an element of misogyny to the issue. it has long been known that romance is primarily consumed by women, and erotica is much the same.

it is established that fears of widespread erotica are often linked to fears of women gaining sexual independence. in industrializing england, it was believed that women were inherently more sexual than men, and the only way to keep them in check was to make sure they never learned about sex—a cultural prerogative that erotica publication threatened.

today, we see the same, albeit in the reverse, in some ways. women are not “supposed to be” sexual, and the idea that a woman could be attaining sexual satisfaction, especially without a man involved, is concerning to the larger social dynamic.

we see this run rampant with the booktok hyperfixation on mocking smut readers; it is not a coincidence that genres widely enjoyed by women (erotica & romance) are often considered “entertaining” books, while genres more associated with men’s readership (fantasy, sci-fi, litfic) are often considered “intellectual” books. hell, we essentially created an entire new genre term (“romantasy”) to describe books in a traditionally male genre targeted primarily to women.

women are seen as less valuable than men, and the entertainment they enjoy is also seen as less valuable than men’s entertainment. erotica, then, is devalued both because of its connection to pornography and because of its connection to women.

erotica is literally normal

the belief that pornography (and erotica as part of it) is harmful is something that’s been around ever since erotica has been criminalized. notably, lord chief justice lord campbell, who proposed the obscene publications act 1857, referred to the london erotica trade as “a sale of poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine or arsenic” (go back to my quote from the project 2025 manual if that doesn’t ring any bells, lol).

but it’s not real.

absolutely zero public health organizations support the idea of pornography in any capacity being a threat to public health. the idea of “pornography addiction” as a real addiction was essentially invented by christofascists wholesale and is not backed up by reputable science.

you don’t have to like erotica. you don’t have to want to read it. you can read only books that never even reference sex forever.

but the way in which you talk about erotica is important.

erotica has value. pornography as a whole has value. in the same way you can critique any other genre, you can critique erotica as well. god knows we regularly criticize taboo erotica for doing it poorly and potentially causing real-world harm! but critiquing erotica, even taboo erotica, just for existing is feeding into a christofascist myth that we are seeing have real consequences.

sexuality can be liberatory

every element of writing is political. sexuality is also political. it is in no way surprising that the same political leaders who want to criminalize gay sex & women having control over their sexuality also want to criminalize pornography. it is in no way surprising that the same political leaders who want to age-gate books critiquing fascism also want to criminalize erotica.

it is a little surprising that some progressives agree with the latter half of those choices.

you cannot believe in the right for women to have control over their sexuality and also believe that sexuality in books is evil. you cannot believe in liberation for gay people and also believe that their ability to explore their sexuality in fiction should be limited.

in the same way that every generation has always complained that “this generation doesn’t want to work,” every generation since the printing press has freaked out over titillating content being produced.

gay and trans liberation requires the normalization of personal sexuality. women’s liberation requires the normalization of personal sexuality. decolonization requires the normalization of personal sexuality.

denounce fascism: embrace personal sexuality today!