When I was writing the cozy piece I wrote about three things which I claim glued people to a book. Those were tension – you want to know how it ends. Wish-fulfilment – you want to be in the book, which we talked about last time. Intellectual satisfaction – seeing a puzzle piece click into place. I said that there were more than this. One thing that occurred to me as a thing which makes people read, is… um. There’s no easy way to say this, so I shall just put it there: sexy times.

And thinking about the mechanics of that something else occurred to me, and it surprised me, so this is what I’m talking about today.

So. What, exactly, and using PG language, is the point of erotica?

I don’t think that it’s controversial to say that the goal is that the reader gets a certain emotion. Consuming smut gives our readers pleasurable feelings, different to the ones we’ve talked about before. It’s clearly very popular – look at the 50 Shades series – but it’s also a bit of a taboo because it’s grown-up and we don’t like talking about it so much.

Fine. I’m not here to moralise to you, in either direction. I’m here to talk about the mechanics of writing, and I think there’s something really interesting here.

A few essays ago I talked about expectations from different genres; how fantasy is a setting, mystery is a plot, horror is a timbre. Well erotica is a particularly interesting genre because its expectation is that people are going to… well… get it on. And that’s going to happen a few times, because that is the purpose of reading erotica.

It’s almost like romance is a plot genre, and erotica is a scene genre. That is, one genre dictates the shape of the big plot points, and the other dictates the content of the individual scenes. Because of that, these are mutually compatible (and obviously go together very well for other reasons, too).

But what other genres dictate things at a scene level, rather than at a plot level? Originally I thought that horror did that, because the expectation of readers would be showers of blood or whatever, but actually, no: the cosmic horror writers wrote almost zero physical horror. They described bleak universes which left you feeling sad and afraid. So horror doesn’t have that feature generally, although I think its subgenres probably do: some splatter thing is going to have immense gore, and that’s what defines it.

But the one genre which absolutely does have a scene-level expectation is the superhero genre. And in that sense, erotica and superhero are structurally indistinguishable. In fact, just to irritate you, I am going to claim that they are functionally the same, and I’m going to tell you why.

So! In order to make this work we have to make a few assumptions. I will admit right now that the things I’m going to say are not universally true but… indulge me. Let’s do this.

First, we’re going to assume that erotica is a subgenre of romance. Look I am a long way from being an expert on this (I’ve never actually read a romance, erotic or otherwise, so) but I don’t think that this is completely unreasonable? And we all know that romances have pretty well understood plots.

Well; we talked about it before but let’s just restate it for good measure. The Batman plot is almost identical to the romance plot. Initial meet, defeat, regroup, victory; each of these have parallels in the romance plot structure. Yes you can have variations on this, but you can have variations in romance too, right? The only Marvel movie that I can think of which doesn’t follow this general arc is Civil War, and I think that was what made that one so critically successful.

So at the macro, they are the same. At the micro? Also the same.

What is the point of superhero movies? The point is that men and women in lycra punch other men and women, also in lycra. The genre absolutely demands it. In fact, the whole thing is geared to that, and it happens at every possible opportunity, because otherwise it’s not a superhero movie.

And of course that’s like an erotic novel because… Yeah, exactly.

So you have a rigid macro structure; and that structure is geared towards a predictable, repeating event. They are the same thing.

Will you ever look at Batman the same way?

Are there other genres which do this? I think the teen slasher does. The plot arc of those is always the same: teens together, they’re killed one by one, the monster is defeated by the so-called final female (or sometimes not, there’s no narrative cozy in this genre). The slashing happens or it’s not a slasher, and again everything is geared towards that.

So.

We read different genres for different reasons. And in some of those genres we expect particular events to occur, and if it doesn’t, it’s not part of the genre. An interesting question to ask might be – how can I have, say, a superhero story, geared towards punching, where the Batman arc doesn’t happen?

And, the other question: will you ever look at a man in lycra the same way?

Indeed.

Sexy stuff

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