A new commission story has been posted! Thank you to the commissioner for being responsible and communicative, especially in my time of dining and dashing, as my previous blog highlights. Slight spoilers are ahead for the story in the post below, but to give you relevant context, it’s vaguely a teacher-student story.

Sometimes, writing these stories can get complicated, especially when having to balance what I write with the responsibilities of my day-to-day personal life. Sometimes I deny commissions based on their content or their morals, and sometimes I write stories whose morals I don’t agree with because commissions are commissions and rent is rent. Nevertheless, I can’t control what that does to how readers perceive and guess what the author is like as a person. If I wrote several incest stories in a row out of the blue, my readers would immediately clue in that I’ve, at best, had a change of heart, and at worst, been replaced with an alien. I’m not knocking those who enjoy their fantasy taboo stories, of course, but there’s parameters to what I’m like as a writer. Still, the life – even the online life- of an erotica writer is far from glamorous. I’m aware that on occasion, someone will in some way pretend to be Bashful Scribe and take credit for my writings. To those people I can only chuckle and say – have a ball, and enjoy your mild comments of “oh, that’s neat” and the perception of getting dozens – nay, hundreds – of views a month. Life in the fast lane.

Over here in reality, very few people – and only those I can fully trust – of those I know in real life are aware I write erotica, and most of the time, I express it in self-belittling ways. Part of this, especially in the past, was done out of necessity – I used to work in high school education. When you read the story I published today, for instance, you can understand why as few people as possible who know me should know about what I write. I don’t feel any shame or regret about what I write, especially what I write out of commission, for two key reasons:

Number one, I have this naïve faith that the type of person willing to read 2000+ words before my stories get anywhere remotely sexual have the media literacy to understand that just because I write this stuff – and often the riskier topics I write specifically because I have bills to pay – it doesn’t mean I condone these ideas as they apply to the real world. I believe strongly in two principles – A, that adults shouldn’t fetishize youth in itself as a concept, and B, regardless of what adults do after the fact, many of us were uncontrollable horndogs in our own teenagerhoods, whether we capitalized on it or not. I write to try to balance these, and to display these stories accurately. My first and (hopefully) riskiest ever teacher-student story contained a monologue about how harmful the dynamic can become, and a cowardly selfish act by the person in the authority figure. In my opinion, it would have been borderline irresponsible of me to portray the situation as resolving cleanly.

Number two, it does no one any favors to pretend the “teacher and student story” is uncommon. To many, it’s clearly very hot and enjoyable. People are going to be commissioning these exact kinds of stories long after I’m dead and buried. Not only do I not see the inherent act of writing the story as crossing a moral boundary, but I also think how the story is written needs more attention than it gets. In this way, I take on these commissions because I’m aware that if I don’t take this commission, another writer will, and they’re going to do it in a way that accidentally condones the behavior a lot more than I would. In the most recent commission piece, I chose to put in a lot of caveats and qualifying statements – evening the playing field, showing the student as somewhat aware of the dynamics, having the teacher ensure full consent, placing the taboo dynamic as “former” and even making the teacher seem as non-predatory as possible – but some puritans are not going to care. They’re going to, as they do with a lot of stories of this ilk, see the dynamic and use that to inform conclusions. I say this not out of malice but without wishing to lie: they do this because they don’t have media literacy, and were taught from early on to watch out for certain behaviors without being taught to critically think about what leads to actual bad behavior.

Given this, there emerges another element that puritans will see as another alarm bell to ring but I see as a helpful ally to write these stories more tastefully: I have a background in high school education. I’ve lived the system from both ends, and while I was teaching, I even knew of a teacher who was dating their former student (by some years – they reconnected about five years after the student graduated). That alone was kept firmly under wraps, although most of the staff members that did know clearly disapproved. In small ways, getting to observe both the secret relationship and its disapproval has helped me to understand the ecosystem better and write more “accurate” stories.

But this also allowed me to gaze into another element of puritanism: the social shame factor. When I went to high school as a student, the students were openly hypersexual, and didn’t bother to hide their interests in each other. I’ve made this comment before, but the 2020s, possibly influenced by a social stunting from the COVID pandemic, are so much more puritan on a whole. When I worked at the high school, only one actual event concerning sexuality happened to me when a sophomore student approached me, wishing to report their best friend’s partner for unacceptable sexual behavior. I misinterpreted the report as something serious, and asked if the student had any proof of unwanted or nonconsensual advances. The student then clarified that everything was completely consensual, but their best friend, in tenth grade, had a partner in eleventh grade, and that the two – cue the gasp – had sex. I gently pointed out that their personal lives were their business, that my area had laws allowing them to do that with each other, and that even if they may have been toxic (even then, citation needed), unless actual policies or laws were transgressed, the school had nothing to do with this.

The student chose to get angry, trying to explain to me why their (one-year) age gap was inherently a power imbalance, that their friend had no idea what they were getting into, and that the older person “had an authority position that they abused.” I asked and the authority position was that the tenth graders tended to idolize eleventh graders by virtue of being older. When I reaffirmed that I literally could do nothing even if I wanted to, the student got visibly angry with me and I had to refer them to the principal. The student would go on to lead an attempt at a crusade against the school for “protecting predators” – a way-too-serious accusation that got them expelled. That meeting showed me three things: that the teenagers of the 2020s had a starkly different view of sex than my generation did, that some people were willing to use social shame and pressure to get others to agree with their sexually conservative views, and that to this view, any opposition/differing view can be used as proof that they needed to take this more seriously. This student did not take a breath and realize that, to my guess, their bestie got with a slightly older student that they disliked and this student had complicated feelings about what could have been going on. Instead, they made their own discomfort with another person’s seemingly-fine relationship everyone else’s problem. And they used the language and tactics of, forgive me, actual victims and people with actual grievances. They reported something they saw as wrong to an authority figure – good. They were concerned with making sure their friend was sexually comfortable and not being manipulated – good. They imagined harm in a relationship that had no provable harm – bad. They exposed the private life of their friend to authorities without consent and without talking it out with them first – bad. They imagined that they knew the whole situation and accused anyone not willing to immediately punish the imagined offender based on their word alone as a “protector of predators” – very bad.

I won’t lie, I’m more worried than ever about posting stories like this; not for myself, but because even just being willing to write stories like this seems to accidentally be taken by some as a symbol of “I, the writer, am entering this conversation, and I side against victims of grooming. Muhuhahaha!” In reality I am a former high school teacher that currently works a blue-collar position who, keeping things vague, made accomplishments in updating sexual conduct policies in my school’s district by virtue of understanding how these things happen. I have no doubt that if my former jobs found out what I write, they’d either get angry in the way that puritans that lack media literacy do, or they’d need to feign that concern to play the optics game that educators are currently obsessed with. I’ve even been told that things are just as bad in colleges and universities, from both the students and the teachers. People feel the need to perform purity, or risk ostracization by those who already decided that purity is the name of the game. Most importantly, as I highlighted, these people are impatient too. Anyone even willing to listen to an ally of an ally of someone who said “What’s the evidence this person committed wrongdoing” without immediately punishing the alleged wrongdoer, is now themselves a wrongdoer that deserves punishing. This is sexual conservatism, which is their own choice and not bad in of itself, but this in combination with the obsession with punishment makes for what effectively amounts to a purity cult, where deviance needs to be called out, punished, and left to disappear.

My core audience – you reading this – are not in a puritan position to judge about taboos in fantasy stories. In all likelihood, you do not give a single shit about a lot of this, but here’s the real message: you should. Why? Because this social change is starkly similar to the same sentiment fueling a lot of decisions regarding online erotica. We saw this in recent years with several online stores, including steam, being forced to crack down on art containing taboo sexual themes or risk losing support of credit card companies. More recently, several websites had to update their policies and possibly remove (or at least bury) some of your favorite online erotic stories. I do not want to detail how, but my own stories dangle on the dangerous edge of an increasingly eroded cliff. There is a non-zero chance that in the next five years, this website may not exist.

These facts do not coincidentally coexist with my story about this upset sophomore. They are one and the same. Heck, I am probably one of the most careful and caveat-inclusive writers of student-teacher erotica… ever? I’m clearly on the side of abuse not happening in real life, to such an extent that I make the content of my stories either as innocent as possible or clearly highlighted as awful and undesirable to recreate in real life. And yet, I still get the occasional email or comment accusing me of encouraging real-life predation. In case any first-time commenters notice their comment doesn’t immediately get posted, that’s why – I monitor all comments from first-timers and manually approved them, because some of the comments are not great. Heck, some of them give first and last names of the people they think I am, and one even included some stranger’s home address coupled with a disturbing open invitation included in their comment, thinking that this person was me. This is not argumentative internet comments; this is stuff that people have taken upon themselves to post, to incite tangible harm to happen to real people, in the name of some perceived sense of justice. Either revenge or even pre-emptive action done in the well-meaning intent of justice; but in reality, it’s just retribution. Even the person that manages my website had to take a temporary leave and is uneasy about coming back because they’re in university and someone noticed their ties to this website. Some people are just vigilant, want everyone to conform to their views of what is “acceptable” in sexuality, and are ready to burn down anyone who disagrees with them. And me even highlighting this accidental harm they’re causing is going to be taken by some as proof that I’m against them and deserve to be taken down too, but hey, with the subject matter I already write and my love of grey areas, we already knew I was relatively in the line of fire.

The real tragedy of all of this is that this sexual conservatism works wonders for an unlikely ally: predators. If sophomores are demanding blood for a tenth grader and an eleventh grader having a consensual sexual relationship – as in, if they’re demanding the harshest possible punishment for such a nothing-level offense – then this relationship looks “just as bad” as that one scumbag in university that constantly cheats on their partners and pressures naïve people into having sex with them. The person who asks consent every time and always allows their partner to back out, as long as there’s grey areas present, looks worse than the person who thinks consent is boring but chooses their partners a little carefully to ensure they never blab. The predator thrives in periods of sexual conservatism because the predator knows how to blend into the background – look at the fifties. The stories and data that came out about a period seen at the time as proper and rule-following looks grim, and yet it went mostly undetected at the time. We are repeating our mistakes of the past, in an era where the internet fuels the fire of cults demanding blood from increasingly specific sources. The most unfortunate effect from that sophomore meeting with me is that from that point on, whenever I heard a story about a guy in his late twenties “preying” on people five to six years younger than him, my default thought has been, “Okay, is there something actually wrong here or is this just a puritan?” And I truly do hate to say it, but in most cases there was no actual breach of consent, law broken, or discomfort felt by the actual person, and it really was just people who heard “age gaps are predatory” and nothing else choosing to continue their purity culture. If you do that, as I once almost started doing, please do ask yourself what you’re fighting for. Ask how the victim is feeling, what ill has been committed, and what the appropriate response is. If you’re feeling extra responsible, ask about when the response should end. Even with my relative safety, the fact my website could be shut down in a few years and my own website manager is thinking of quitting when, frankly, I have only become more responsible with the social themes of my writing over the years is, plainly said, ridiculous. To my Gen-Z audience, I want to state it openly: we’ve lost the plot. Our actions don’t help victims on a whole, and muddy the waters for the transparent goal of enjoying revenge. And now, online erotica is not only getting erased, but also migrating to riskier and darker corners of the internet, and risking exposing the next generation to worse content by virtue of the taboo and the unacceptable both only having one home on the internet. We’re reaching a point where, say, a fantasy incest or boss-and-underling story could be the gateway drug to being exposed to actual horrors, especially when they’re forced to coexist on the same website. I don’t want to live in that world.

In a weird way, I’m really enjoying living rurally. A lot of the world can be shut out when I don’t want to live in it. I just… move lumber. As time goes on, I get more and more worried living in this online erotica world, but I also know my particular bubble – this wonderful community – is full of people capable of thinking critically and challenging me in healthy, reasonable ways. I love my critics and my enthusiastic readers alike – heck, often they’re one and the same. But both online and in the real world, there has been a creeping force, nibbling away at our own right to fantasy, all while insisting they only want to protect victims. Odds are, there are particular people in your real life that, if they knew you even read erotica, would not only judge you, but want to report you somehow to someone in power. This should alarm you. And it’s not these people’s own faults – Gen Z, for example, didn’t wake up and decide to be conservative puritans that punished deviance like the Protestants in the 17th century did. We just… ended up here.

I will likely get into it on another blog since this one’s already much too long, but I don’t like a lot of arguments people give for why more… extreme sexual art should exist on the internet. As far as I’m concerned, if you write something risky, you carry the responsibility of writing it tastefully and responsibly. You can get annoyed at my politics or even relative soapboxing, but no one can accuse me of not walking the walk. I clearly put the effort in. To some, that’s not enough, which sends a clear message: they want all of this gone. They want everyone to see someone like me as a predator despite my warnings. They want anyone who ever got into a grey area – even one where no one was harmed – to be seen as a bearer of the Mark of Cain, to forever be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth. I hope this ideology doesn’t win out, because the protection this particular sect causes seems minimal and the damage is immense. Not only do humans deserve grace and nuance deserve to be treated as nuance, but victims of sexual violence deserve better than to be lumped in with “this one girl that got with an eleventh grader when she was in tenth grade” with no other damning factors.

Building anger, an incompetent and self-serving ruling class, a demonstrable effectiveness of shame, terminally online hate groups, and an astounding lack of media literacy have all bred a culture that makes my writing, and your enjoyment of it, increasingly difficult. How do we solve it? I don’t know. But what I do know is that while we stay silent about how pointlessly hateful, stupid, transparently self-serving, and plumb ineffective it is, their power grows. I don’t want to stand for that. I’ll talk to you all next week.

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