Transfer: This post was originally posted on our first site. The site that predated other author’s joining the page.
Literotica, at least at first, was the home of my long-form stories.
Home though it was, I learned quickly — like a night in, that it is not necessarily a safe place to receive feedback on my writing. Not because I am unable to take criticism, as I think all of you know, I go out of my way to mold by writing to what fans in this community — our community want. But instead, because that same community, is not the Literotica community.
As night one and on, I got comments and messages like:
“Seek counseling.”
“You’re messed up in the head.”
“There is something wrong with you.”
Not because I had told a bad story, or because I told a good story poorly, but instead because my fetish was not their’s.
Now, I totally get it, this fetish for female fighting and competition that I have — that we have, is not what most people are excited by. And to someone who doesn’t enjoy it, it must seem weird, sexist (which is funny), and even cruel.
Understand that though I do, I also know that humans are animals, advanced though we may be. Consequently, we have desires, lusts, and brains that are formed to want sexual excitements and enticements. And this fetish — this excitement, just so happens to be mine. And if you’re reading this, it also seems to be yours.
And though originally I planned on writing some kind of diatribe about everyone having their own darkness, and the norm, being in no way the right, I will refrain. Refrain and explain that though I love feedback, covet it, wanting to know exactly what makes my reads shiver and gasp as they read my words, I want that feedback to be from someone who understands. Someone who considers themselves my audience, even if at first we disagree on what the entertainment I provide should be.
Guided by the above, I turned off all feedback allowance on Literotica — banning votes, comments and messages.
And though I have slept better since making that decision, I have still gotten very useful feedback from those who found my works there. For the true fans of our genre persisted, clicked through to my site, and sought out how to email me, just to give me the feedback they couldn’t give on Literotica.
Have I missed out on useful comments, needed critiques, and even positive reinforcement? I have no doubt. But for me, it was the only call I could make, to avoid being kinkshamed on the regular.
Freud said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “The only sexual perversion is doing sex by yourself”. Of course, take that with a pinch of salt, he was convinced women are envious of our penises at an era when it was an accepted assumption, that menstruation cycles flood the brain with blood that makes women hysterical, to mean here, their loud objection being treated as children and as loveless sex objects are the ramblings of an unhinged mind.
The English fetish literature is a very interesting one, in that past the Golden Age of Porn it got accepted that kink beyond BDSM is that of the devil and must be killed with fire.
That’s all the more interesting in light of the fact that Marquis de Sade was a revolutionary writer. For one, he wrote dark erotic stories about the sex parties he attended (and in fact his works are a roman à clef, meaning meta fiction based on real people where activities reveal who it’s supposed to be) that most nobles could only dream of, but just as well through word of mouth, even the illiterate peasants learned about, despite bans based on offense to culture.
There’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot of characters to introduce beyond bored suburban (mostly white) housewives, simply because just as fetishes differ, so diverse is the community itself. Recently I pointed out to a member on Hostboard how in Southern Europe it’s pretty much a given to know about the Italian domestic standoff between north and south and how passionate Italian women are. If somebody is lucky enough to have seen Claudia Cardinale’s and Bridgitte Bardot’s fight in Blu-Ray quality, now that’s a close replica. Even before them, pitting Lollobrigida against Loren or Loren against Jayne Mansfield was pretty common (though the latter happened at a time when being a sexual fight fetishist was literally persecuted).
The overall point is, that by the law of big numbers, the fight fetish community grows every day, which means change, both in scope and also in areas of interest. Opposing that is like driving a train blind, it’s possible but never ends well.