A few days ago this Tweet, from a romance author, was retweeted into my timeline:

I was struck by the intensity of this writer’s response (burn with fire … fucking insulting) to having her sexually explicit stories characterized as porn. As of this writing  her Tweet has been retweeted 135 times and liked 909 times. So Davidson is clearly not alone in this sentiment.

I’ve been writing and publishing sexually explicit fanfic for eight years and reading sexually explicit stories for over two decades. For at least a dozen years, I have consciously chosen to characterize what I read and write as “porn” and “smut” as a deliberate intervention targeting what I see as the harmful distinction between “erotica” (highbrow, legitimate, artful) and “porn” (crass, illegitimate, gratuitous). Obscene and pornographic works — broadly described as works created with a primary goal of sexually arousing one’s audience — have historically been dismissed and derided because of their capacity to engage our bodies in a pleasureable way. Suspect on its own, this capacity to arouse has typically required an external justification — literary merit or educational purpose — to earn widespread (though far from universal!) approval or simply the right to exist and circulate in carefully circumscribed spaces. 

Pornography is so universally understood as creative endeavor of unseemly excess that we use it as an adjective to describe objectional leveraging of emotional response in contexts that have nothing to do with sex: trauma porn, ruin porn, disaster porn. We might be moved by these things, the phrases imply, with their juxtaposed language of depicted pleasure and real-world pain … but we will likely come away feeling gross and guilty for having enjoyed the experience. I believe this is an impoverished view of human sexual pleasure and an impoverished understanding of the way sexually explicit fictions (a.k.a. porn!) can bring us joy. 

So I responded to Davidson pushing back against her framing:

Davidson never responded to my question but other writers did. “Porn is about sex. That’s the foundation. There can be a larger story but it’s not necessary,” one writer argued, distinguishing this type of storytelling from her own erotic romantic narratives where sex is “an integral part” of a happily-ever-after plot. “It really hurts,” Davidson wrote in response to another commenter, when fellow romance writers “start flinging the term around. You expect erotic romance = porn from ignorant media or fundamentalists or whatever. But other romance authors?” “Erotic Romance stimulates the mind and ones imagination where as Porn doesnt,” chimed in another author. “Smut [and porn] has no literary quality to it. It’s gratuitous,” wrote another. “And also burn the idea that F/F romance is also ‘porn’ – have had this said to me more times than I care to eye roll,” wrote another.

It became clear, as I watched this Twitter thread unfold, that many people in romancelandia have very strong and negative feelings about their work being characterized as pornography. Part of this, I gather from the thread, is coming in reaction to romance writers who write less-sexually-explicit, fade-to-black, “chaste” romance trash-talking writers who choose to tell stories with more — and more detailed — sex scenes. I get it. I get the frustration over being slut-shamed. There is misogynistic policing going on here, with good-girl romance writers distancing themselves from the jezebels who are brazen enough to write sex scenes (“Chaucer! Rabelais! Balzac!“)

The problem is, responding to the charge that you’re writing porn by splitting hairs, hiding behind ideas about genre conventions or format (image versus text), and arguing that porn is “about sex” not a “larger story” (so … sex can’t be a larger story?) accepts the framing you’ve been given by your accusers. 

“Oh, but we don’t write sex like THOSE people over THERE …” is not a good look.

If we lived in a world where pornography and erotica and romance were located in roughly the same place on the respectibility continuum — where “erotica” didn’t have a history of being wielded as the highbrow alternative to lowbrow “porn”; where “romance” wasn’t struggling against the misogynistic forces that dismiss the entire genre as trivial and trashy because women — maybe … maybe … in that world we could have a valuable discussion about whether differences of genre and convention exist between romantic, erotic, and pornographic styles of sexual storytelling. But in the world we live in, staking your claim to the erotic while taking umbridge at the suggestion your work is pornographic supports a hierarchy of sexually explicit stories. It supports a hierarchy where stories labeled “porn” are dismissed and devalued in order to give you artistic high ground to stand on.

And I am not comfortable with throwing porn under the bus for the sake of respectibility. Because I think that throwing pornography under the bus means we accept the premise that stories grounded in — sometimes consisting entirely of! — human sexual expression are not really stories at all. It means we accept that writing and reading stories to turn people the fuck on — engage their embodied, sexual response as well as their hearts and minds — is categorically different (and more suspect) than engaging them as readers of fiction that elicits other types of physical and emotional reactions.

If it makes us uncomfortable to have our sexually explicit works described as “porn” or “smut” I really think the onus is on us to sit with that discomfort — maybe even to lean into that headwind — and get comfortable with that characterization even if it doesn’t feel 100% accurate in a fine-tuning subgenre sense. Because the alternative only fuels the politically powerful machinary of anti-sex sentiment entrenched in American culture, and that machinary demonizes and marginalizes — directly and materially harms — many of our most vulnerable.

If the price of defusing the charge behind the “insult” of labeling someone a pornographer is getting a little over-generous with our definitional boundaries, I say that’s an entirely acceptable price to pay.