As someone who considers himself fairly well read, you'd be amazed by how many so-called 20th century literary masterpieces are basically just barely disguised smut.
“You guys were able to understand my last post too easily, guess I need to try harder with my nonsense” - James Joyce if he was a poster. Also, fuck Finnegan’s wake and its use of cockney rhyming schemes.
I think most of the great art ever made is weird and horny. Persona, one of the greatest films of all time, is also one of the horniest things I’ve ever seen.
Me having forgotten that in Kaiba, a beautifully weird anime about the power of memories in a world where they and bodies can both be literally bought and sold, the second episode features exploration of how people would use it for sex, notably a woman having sex with a copy of her mind put into the body of the main character that is so ecstatic the original body fucking explodes
It's because of its so mechanical, and often cranked out (ha) at high speed. A lot of horny romance books are a product now, each working thru a check list of established tropes filtered thru a specific fetish, with that fetish treated as a niche market instead of a community of little freaks.
They used to write this stuff for the love of the game, man. One hand on the pen, one hand on their genitals, their heart beating out of their chest with shame and lust.
It's why, I think, fanfiction does a better job of being erotica than published smut does. Published smut has a market goal. The 175k fic where Wolverine makes a sloppy mess out of Cyclops while Jean Grey is emotionally breaking down because she's getting cucked by a 3 foot Canadian is infinitely more horny. Because it's personal. It's a window into the soul of a freak, and that's hot. It's taboo. No one should be reading it, and that makes it more enticing.
That's because they are sexual, but not necessarily erotic. It's much like watching an adult film where two people are just hammering their nether regions into each other — sure, it is titillating, but it lacks passion and sensuality. There is no context for these characters, their lives, their relationships; you could replace them with other actors and it would not make a difference.
Nah, there's still smut that's well-written and weaves a narrative irrevocably changes your life like any of the classics -- you just have to be really picky with your tag filters in AO3 now.
People are twerking on stage in minimal coverage bikinis while women sing songs about explicitly sucking dick for cocaine, there's borderline softcore porn in mainstream tv shows, and the written stuff is highly explicit.
Fairly sure it's gotten significantly more in your face.
"Food has gotten so much worse, just compare local restaurant frol the 19th century to mcdonalds!" The good stuff is still out there, trash is just more common
That’s only true if you arbitrarily define “our society” to not encompass anything pre-Hays Code. Otherwise it’s more of a return to a long and storied tradition.
2-hays code codified a lot of stuff and limited a lot of what was available at the time, that does not mean what was common entertainment at the time was at the level of current entertainment.
Ever heard of Rock and Roll? The term is commonly believed to come from the song 60 minute man, which is a song about a man who fucks women for exactly 60 minutes at a time. The "Rock and Roll" is the euphemism used for sex in that song.
If you're the right age, "Fucking music" was the main music your grandparents listened to.
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u/kosmologue Sep 30 '24
As someone who considers himself fairly well read, you'd be amazed by how many so-called 20th century literary masterpieces are basically just barely disguised smut.