I do not write smut. Instead, I write about smut — a subtle but very real distinction. Still, like everybody who does not write a particular thing but who sees a lot of it and fancies themselves an educated consumer of it, I flatter myself that I could write that stuff, and maybe I even might do it one day soon, who knows? (Breath: never hold it in this situation, you will turn blue. Pro tip.)
Still, I thought Steve Almond’s Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto sounded relevant to my interests. And sure enough, it’s a fast and worthy read. My personal favorite of his fifteen reasons is #7:
Because President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did have sexual relations, and while I could care less about the big phony scandal that story became, I am interested in the sweet and deranged version of love that passed between them. Aren’t you?
On the other hand, I wish I could change Steve Almond’s mind about #13 by challenging all his wrong-headed assumptions about pornography that are buried in this densely misguided paragraph:
Because, though I watch pornography, and am terrifically involved with it for about two and a half minutes, I am most often made sad by pornography. Not simply because it involves the self-exploitation of people who probably have suffered a good deal of misfortune, and not simply because porn stars can perform in manners that often seem like physiological, geometrical, and even gravitational impossibilities (and thus make me feel like the abject sexual nebbish I surely am) but because porn stars are actors being paid, most often, to simulate pleasure. They drain sex of its single most intimate aspect: the vulnerabilities that bring us to the act in the first place, the drama of our imperfect bodies as we seek to make a communion of our desires.
But I can’t change his mind — and it would take a whole long ranty blog post just to try — so I’ll content myself with observing that accusing porn stars of “self-exploitation” is condescending and dismissive of their agency, which is not something that nice people do, even in the privacy of their own heads and sure as hell not out loud as part of an otherwise-intriguing literary manifesto.
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