scarr

explicit

By

,

a confluence of situations on bluesky is responsible for this post

  • a post about sex scenes and craft was shared and discussed
  • people on bluesky shared Kickstarter’s terms of service regarding sexual content on the platform:
EXAMPLES What's supported by project type CATEGORY 01 Publishing & Comics ALLOWED Romance novels and erotic fiction with mature themes Erotic comics are allowed, but all project page imagery, including cover art and preview pages, must follow these guidelines Photography books presenting nudity in an artistic, editorial, or body-positive context Educational guides on intimacy, sexuality, or wellness
https://bsky.app/profile/rosalarian.bsky.social/post/3mllshuvz5c22

watching people talk about sex scenes in romance novels on social media causes my blood pressure drop. Suleikha Snyder, a romance author, writes in her post about sex scenes from a craft perspective – one I appreciate! She shared this on bluesky; authors and readers agreed about what these scenes are doing for story or shared specific scenes that, for them, stood out.1

what’s with the confluence? the posts about the Kickstart TOS did help clarify some messy thoughts I’ve had about how sex scenes in romance are talked about online or in academic papers.

my blood pressure drops when I read these conversations because some romance readers and authors will say sex scenes are important elements of storytelling then allude to, or outright say, “we’re not porn! we are better! we’re making art.” or, inevitably whenever sex scene discourse pops up, there are contingents of romancelandia that try to find ways to say, “porn is bad” or whatever, without having to say those exact words2. to be clear, I do not believe Snyder’s piece, or any of her comments, were doing this! she’s not interested in holding water for SWERFs and what I’m writing here is not a reaction to Snyder’s post.

I agree sex scenes are important to story and character development: poor pacing can render an otherwise emotionally revealing sex scene a jumble of body parts and unintentionally awkward dialogue. a bad sex scene can deflate narrative tension; it slows a book’s momentum. elements of story matter!

and/but I do not believe sex outside of romance, or erotica, is any less significant. bodies and unsimulated sex acts are part of storytelling in adult content:

screenshot from bluesky: Lorelei Lee @loreleilee.bsky.social • Thing is, when you say porn objectifies, all that sounds like to me is that you see porn performers as objects. If you actually watched our performances, you'd see we are individuals, with individual skills, performing styles, and aesthetics
https://bsky.app/profile/loreleilee.bsky.social/post/3lstgfhy3as2

the asinine belief that genre romance is real art, not porn, is not new; this shit is old and persistent. I see the reduction of porn in romance circles often. for instance, last week I saw a post by a romance reader about how romance and erotica are not like porn because pornography does not have artistic merit, it is the male/patriarchal gaze.

unrelated to the post I saw last week, this screenshot is of a post from over a year ago, written by a romance author:

Romance novels are literature. They are not pornography. Pornography is explicit sexual content made for the purposes of sexual arousal and 99% of it is made to sexually arouse MEN. This is not me judging folks who like pOrn. This is me repeating definitions. From those starting points, a nuanced, complex discussion that touches on human sexuality and what constitutes art can be had. In theory, that is. Here on Threads, not so much.

or whenever a romance sub-genre has a popular crossover or film/tv adaptation, the same tired promotional lines are repeated: that sex in romance is superior to sex in porn because porn is purely titillating, it objectifies women, whereas romance has the female gaze (this assumes women do not watch and enjoy porn and that all readers and authors are cis or straight women, “xyz gaze” is used to signify something better than men or ??)3:

From the New York Times, Sex Had Become a Chore. Then They Started Reading Romantasy.
And, in what should be an automatic coda to any article about women's consumption of sexual material, anything good in erotica most certainly could not apply to porn. For ... reasons. Sexy words: good. Sexy pictures: bad. Society has so many weird rules about how women get off.
I was talking to Hanna [Puley], our costume designer, about that exact thing. I was like, "Wow, it's predominantly women [who are already fans] from the book." Obviously, I think the gay men demographic has gone up because of the show, just because of the visibility and not [because they knew] of the book beforehand. But she was like, "Well, I think there's something about this type of story and this type of love and this type of sex that has a lot to do with this almost prolonged foreplay and yearning, which kind of differs from this more pornographic idea of sex, and I think that's what the female audiences are really drawn to." She was like, "I think it's more so geared towards a feminine gaze," which is super interesting because it's true. I

this piece of romance scholarship was written by an antiporn feminist. “pro-sex feminist” and “anti-porn feminism” are a few of the paper’s keywords. you cannot be “pro-sex” and “anti-porn”:4

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23268743.2025.2569337

anyway, the antiporn feminist romance author cites A.W. Eaton’s A Sensible Antiporn Feminism. this is an actual figure that appears in Eaton’s article lmao (not very sensible imo):

figure 2 - Feedback effects of pornography for individual users: Desire for pornography, pornography usages, sexist attitudes
the stupidest figure I’ve ever seen in my entire life
mother duggar says romance novels are pornography

I guess I should mention the “romance is now porn (derogatory)” posts, videos, and rants wherein readers lament how romance is nothing but tasteless fucking with no plot. people are upset by the amount of sex in books they learned about on social media, but this does seem like an easy problem to fix, no? read reviews written by people who have similar tastes to your own or spend five minutes reading a sample chapter. some of the authors of these posts write about that lack of narrative tension in the romances they have read, they blame this on too many sex scenes (or pornography ruining the world and melting people’s brains). the issue, then, is lack of craft or editorial support, not descriptive sex scenes. but even if there are “too many” sex scenes, it’s not a moral failure to write, read, or watch “too many” scenes of people fucking.

I do not believe genre romance is more deserving of a place to exist online than adult content, and I don’t believe romance is doing more important work than adult content. I believe they are both valuable forms of speech, worth protecting. sex scenes are craft, porn is art. I am making a statement that these things are art because I believe they are, but even if they’re not ART, they still deserve to be protected.

companies like Kickstarter, like Instagram, like Youtube, like TikTok, like Patreon, etc. etc. etc. will not distinguish between romance sex scenes and other adult content – do not believe otherwise. don’t stand by while sex workers and adult content creators (often queer and disabled folks) are kicked off every platform on the internet, or while age consent laws continue to be passed, state by state. the word “romance” is not a shield that can protect the art you love from book bans.

update: Kickstarter released an apology for their shitty updated TOS and announced they would be going back to their “previous rules” regarding mature content. I don’t trust them to not do this again, but I am happy to see they gave in to pressure from their creators to undo their outrageous policy change.

eta: since posting this, the place fka twitter had its own adult content discourse. a video of a woman telling her boyfriend she doesn’t like him watching adult content went viral. a lot of loser people think watching adult content is bad for relationships and women should force their boyfriends or husbands to stop watching (and I guess masturbating). this is SWERF + conservative shit.5 also, it is disturbing to exert control over what a partner watches, reads, thinks, or does with their body.

addendum: once again, The Chatner making sense of it all: A Chat With Sam Bodrojan: Thinking About Our Boyfriends Thinking About Porn

another addendum: Lorelei Lee wrote a post on their substack that I love they write everything I attempted to say here, only so much better:

What I mean is, too often we find ourselves defending a certain piece of art or writing by claiming that it is too serious a work to be “pornographic.” But what if we were to let go of that lexical defense? (A defense deeply influenced, I think, by the legal definition of “obscenity” – a word that is too often interchanged with “pornography,” but which has a very distinct legal meaning, and excludes any work with “serious political, literary, scientific, or artistic value”). What if we were to say that the serious can be pornographic and the pornographic can be deeply serious?

  1. some authors thought their work was superior to others, which is a strange and condescending way to market your work. ↩︎
  2. some will say it outright, keep reading ↩︎
  3. How Bridgerton Celebrates the Female Gaze – Keke Magazine

    https://rsdb.vivanco.me.uk/bibliography/private-pleasure-erotic-spectacle-adapting-bridgerton-female-audience-desires ↩︎
  4. I am searching for romance scholarship on the depiction of sex work in genre romance, I haven’t found much.
    I did, however, find ample romance scholarship on romance’s relationship with pornography. most papers I’ve read are doing some version of:
    * is romance porn?
    * romance is not porn, actually.
    * actually, romance is a special kind of porn.
    * does it matter if romance is porn?
    * romance should be less like porn (women have bad brains).
    future post still in the works.
    ↩︎
  5. “As Vance notes, it is now no longer acceptable to cast the dangers of sexual imagery as a threat to morality alone. In this context, the incorporation of anti-pornography feminist rhetoric provides an opportunity to modernize what is at heart an older conservative agenda (Vance 1993a, 39). The assimilation of feminist rhetoric, which began with the Liberals, was raised to an art form under the Tories.” (67)

    Bell, Shannon; Ross, Becki; Gotell, Lise. Bad Attitude(s) on Trial: Pornography, Feminism, and the Butler Decision. University of Toronto Press, 1997. ↩︎