With COVID19 in full swing and my job being more demanding than usual, my posts have gotten more sparse. My apologies – believe me, the person who wants these changes the least is myself.

I’ve done this before in other stories, but my number one goal in Chasing Faith was to include no numbers to boost sexual value. Cup sizes, the number of inches to a guy’s dick, even age. I normally will know every detail of a character before writing a story so normally, even if I don’t mention it, I will know details that the audience doesn’t. It doesn’t mean anything, since a story is only as deep as what it tells its audience, but I think it’s worth saying that in Chasing Faith, I have no clue how old either of the two characters are. They could be high schoolers, for all I know they could be middle aged. I know what I pictured them to be, but I won’t say it here because any interpretation is as valid as my own.

I can’t imagine I haven’t written a blog about this before, but I find the first thing an amateur erotica writer does when they want to increase a sexiness factor without putting in the actual work is to play ‘the numbers game.’ Age is fetishized. Breast cup size is mentioned, and very rarely if cup size is mentioned will boobs be smaller than a C. Same thing with penises – if the size is mentioned, the penis starts around seven inches. If it’s less, the story is hammering home how not being large is okay (which, for the record, I’m not knocking as much, it’s a valid message and deserves to be in erotica).

I’m guilty of doing it in my first story, if not my first few. Not only is it ridiculously easy to mention, but it makes an author feel like they’re making their story better by including more details about the characters – it feels as natural as mentioning someone’s eye color, right?

Not necessarily. There’s a huge difference here. Eye color comes with a preference but there’s no real fight for supremacy – there’s no ‘superior’ eye color, it’s all down to personal taste. When eye color is mentioned, it feels like a neat addition to the character. But when cup size or dick size is mentioned, it feels like, at least to the writer, sexual ability is riding on that number. It doesn’t feel like a guy’s eleven inch penis is a neat detail about the character – it feels like the author’s stated reason why the character is a god at sex or why he’s more attractive than guys smaller than him or something.

This can obviously have an effect on smaller guys where they feel inadequate or lesser, or even abnormal. If you’re reading sex stories and the only sizes of dicks measured start at eight inches, you could have a seven-inch dick (which is above average size) and still think you’re small.

This also has dangerous consequences for larger guys too. If their size is normalized without precaution they might be less careful than they should be during sex or view consent less critically without taking their size into consideration. Speaking as a guy who has a larger-than-average penis, sex with some people can hurt. A lot, if preparations weren’t made. I’ve been flat-out denied sex because of my size before – sometimes because they were intimidated, sometimes because bigger penises weren’t what they were into. This is a very real part of sex that The Numbers Game seems to conveniently forget.

The last reason all amateur authors start out with listing numbers is because I’d say at least 80% of all other sex stories do it. It’s a big reason why I’m trying so hard not to. I’d like to think we can… use sex stories for their desired purpose without needing to know exactly the shape and size of the guy’s penis or the woman’s breasts. I get size fetishists exist, and I’m not advocating sex stories never again use measurements, however, a lesser emphasis on size will not only make stereotypes less harmful in the real world, but they’ll also make erotica stories better because hack writers will have to rely on more than made-up large numbers to convince readers that what they’re reading is sexy.

Hopefully this story accomplished that, but that’s not up to me. That’s up to you, the reader. I’ll be thinking very hard about when and more importantly why I put measurements into my stories. I hope the writers reading this will as well. I’ll talk to you all next week.