Salon.com > Erotica

This isn’t “mommy porn”

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 22:00:00 +0000

These are no Anastasia Steele wannabes. The female protagonists in sex-blog Fleshbot's new erotica imprint are not pliant naifs; they know what they want and aren't ashamed to ask for it. They talk of going to the office bathroom to "jerk off" and coolly refer to past partners as an "incredible fuck." These ladies are nerdy and irreverent; they say things like, "It always blows my mind to touch the inside of my own body. It makes me feel like Carl Sagan or something."

While the rest of the world attempts to cash in on "Fifty Shades" fanaticism, Fleshbot Fiction is trying for something different. As CEO Lux Alptraum tells me, she's interested in courting "people who like good stories and good smut." She isn't concerned with appealing to a particular gender demographic (so far, the e-books have featured only female protagonists, but that will change soon) or certain fetishes, so much as publishing good writing. Alptraum believes that craft can trump particular kinks: A well-written story can make cross-dressing hot, even if it isn't your thing, she says. This pansexual, or trysexual, mind-set is no surprise, given that Fleshbot's distinguishing feature in the porn world is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side.

Stephenie Meyer says “traditional romance” books are “too smutty”

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:45:00 +0000

"Twilight" author Stephenie Meyer may have spawned a culture of mommy porn and a subculture of vampire fetishism with her trilogy about Bella Swan and vampire lover Edward Cullen, but that was never her intention. The Mormon mother of three told the Guardian's Kira Cochrane recently that she has not read E.L. James' erotic "Twilight" fan-fiction,"Fifty Shades of Grey" -- or even most romance books -- because they are "too smutty":

"When I ask Meyer whether she's read Fifty Shades, she quickly, emphatically, says no. She doesn't wish James ill at all, she says, but 'it's so not my genre. Erotica is not something I read. I don't even read traditional romance.' Why not? 'It's too smutty. There's a reason my books have a lot of innocence. That's the sort of world I live in.' "

Her own "less-traditional" romance has been just as polarizing, though, with detractors labeling it as "abstinence porn." (Meyer was taken aback by the "the massive amount of fans that I hadn't expected, and the massive amount of people who hated it, which I also didn't expect.") She insists, however, that "Twilight" is about "true love":

“Fifty Shades of Grey” coming in hardcover

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:07:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- "Fifty Shades of Grey" will soon be slipped under a new set of covers.

E L James' erotic trilogy is being issued in hardcover, the Knopf Doubleday Group announced Thursday. The novels were released last spring as paperbacks and e-books and have since sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. The new editions of "Fifty Shades of Grey," "Fifty Shades Darker" and "Fifty Shades Freed" each will have a list price of $26.95 and will be available Jan. 29.

Weird news: Site runs small penis contest

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 16:13:00 +0000

Small-penised men of Denmark, rejoice! A Danish website is hosting a competition for the smallest penis -- and the winner gets some Apple gear.

According to Agence France-Presse, erotica site Singlesex.dk is asking men to send in photos of their genitalia. The member judged the smallest will win an iPhone, as will an entry voted for by the site's female members.

"Everything has to be bigger, and bigger, and bigger ... It's incredible how the media has frightened people from showing themselves as they are," site owner Morten Fabricius told AFP. He noted that about seven photos have been posted so far, but more are "trickling in."

Spoiler alert! Fifty percent of “Fifty Shades of Grey”

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:02:00 +0000

Nobody can say I didn’t hold out for as long as I could. Eventually, though, what’s the point? If you can’t beat them, oh – that’s the point, you have to beat them. This week, I finally succumbed to the lure of Fifty Shades of Grey, so very much more to assuage my feelings of fraudulence during conversations about it than to get my freak on. Those conversations, by the way, have now polarised: in the one corner, those who greet sceptics with accusations of snobbery, of attempting to circumscribe women’s desires, and of failing to cheer a shot in the arm to a moribund bookselling industry; in the other, those who wonder why women are queuing up to read a series of inexpertly described soft-porn scenarios in which one of their sisters allows herself to be abused.

My approach is, therefore, simply to describe the first half of the first volume of the Fifty Shades trilogy in as-it-happened reactions, unadorned by ideology, preconception, snootiness and, quite definitely, jealousy that someone else should have had the idea first. Here goes: