Bad Erotica

Patrick Doolittle

My name is Patrick Doolittle. I write bad erotica.

Yes, Doolittle is my real last name, No, I don’t publish my books under that name. I publish them under the name Sandra Wolf. People (I say people, I really mean women, which my publisher says makes up 90% of my audience) are apparently much less willing to buy bad erotica if it has a man’s name on the cover.

Bad erotica.

I know it’s bad. It’s intentionally bad. I used to write good erotica, but well-written sex doesn’t sell for shit. Well, I used to write legitimate literature; you know, the kind that’s about racism and poor people and all the other things university types like to pretend to care about, complete with all the non-existent layers of “deep meaning,” but that sells even worse than good erotica.

My agent – Michelle Field, a hell of a woman – made a great point after my first few manuscript attempts. Women want erotica. All women. It’s their porn. She called it “word porn.” When I hear “word porn,” I think of James Joyce. If you were actually going to jerk off to words, you would jerk off to Ulysses. The book sucks, but the words are positively orgasmic.

Anyway…

Michelle made the (very valid) point that if you want to sell a lot of books (and of course I did - as she put it, “if you really cared about artistry, you’d still be trying to play cuckold to John Steinbeck and teaching at the community college.”) you have to cast a wide net.

What that really means, in business terms, is that you have to write things that many people are interested in and capable of reading. In practical terms this means that most people are barely literate trash and you have to convince them that your book is more fun than a dime bag of shitty weed. In literary terms, this means that I have make creative use of a limited vocabulary comprised primarily of vulgar verbs and the pejorative words for penis and vagina.

I’ll give you an example:

Clarice felt her pulse quicken, blood rushing to her breasts and neck, precipitating into a field of tingles in her flesh, like many needles poking her. She sighed as Bartholomew ran his roughened hands over her shoulders and down her chest, intensifying the heat she felt both inside and out. His fingers lingered on her nipples, and a pinch of dull pain became an explosion of undulating pleasure.

Her desire, so long held at arms within her heart, was becoming manifested in the physical world, but not in the way she had imagined. When she looked at the man who strained her heart on previous days, she saw the life she wanted: comfortable; fulfilling. Now all that her mind could entertain was a visceral, carnal, coveting of his body.

See? I think that’s pretty good. In fact, reading it makes me a bit hard, which is weird. However, if Michelle were to see this (actually, she probably will if I ever publish this thing), she would point out the following flaws:

1) Too fucking long. People can’t read that fast when masturbating.

2) Metaphor. Lots of people would be confused and pause at the comparison to needles, ruining the scene.

3) Vocabulary. Most people can’t read words like “undulating,” “precipitating,” “visceral,” and “intensifying.”

4) Names. Who the fuck knows anyone named Bartholomew? It doesn’t matter that the story takes place in 19^th century New York, pick a better name.

Here’s something that would sell:

Claire felt hot as Brice grabbed her tits forcefully and pinched her hard nipples. She moaned in pleasure. All she could think of was how much she wanted his hot, sweaty cock inside her.

There you go. You can have that one for free.

Welcome to the Tax Farm!

A Handbook for New Immigrants to the United States

Dear prospective tax cattle:

Thanks for your interest in the United States. We know we aren't the best country in the world, but we certainly aren't the worst, which explains why you're here now. After all, the only people we expect to actually trade down in life are men when they get divorced (a bit of American humor; you’ll catch on soon enough). If you managed to navigate the endless impenetrable maze of paperwork to get here “legally” (another bit of humor, you’ll soon find that nothing is actually legal here, a source of pride for most Americans), then we’d like to thank you, as we regard immigration paperwork like the math problem from Good Will Hunting: not intended to be solved by anyone, but when it is, we expect the solver to be waxing the floors. If you decided to avoid that particular morass, we’d still like to extend our welcome, as you represent an important part of the tax farm: the cow that gives milk, and yet doesn’t ask you to feed it.

 We're happy to let you know that we have plenty of opportunities available for those will a willingness to work, a quality you will soon notice is lacking in our native-born population. Things like healthcare, “education,” social security, welfare, and (perhaps most importantly) war cost a great deal of money. We’d like to thank you for helping us offload this burden to your children while collecting none of the benefits of it.

You will almost certainly be too busy living on our margins, flushing your money away into excessive rent and oppressive taxes, to have time to see your tax dollars at work. Because of these constraints, and because we certainly don’t want to impact the time you need to spend earning money for us and giving cheap labor to our cronies (sorry, “constituents”), we've taken the liberty of giving you a brief overview of your contributions. On behalf of the American oligarchy, we thank you for your patronage and/or votes (applies in democratic party districts only).

1) The Legal System. Americans have a great deal of pride in their police forces. Truly, there is no faster way for one of us to lose an election than to suggest we have too many police officers or compensate them too highly for their skills or work. You, coming from a country that is less adept at canonizing the cult of authority, will probably be more able to see our police as what they truly are: the violent enforcers of a dehumanizing system. You should be careful not express the truth, especially not to the enforcers themselves, or you may be forced to take part in our “legal system.”

It’s best to think of our legal system as a system of complex negotiations – with a mugger. We arrest you and take a nice little chunk of your earnings right away in the form of bail and lost work time, then we threaten you with what amounts to life in prison if you don’t confess to whatever “crime” our enforcers accuse you of. You proclaim your innocence, we counter with police testimony (remember how much they are worshipped here). You assert your “rights,” we tell you that rights only exist for American citizens. You ask for a lawyer, and you’ll be given the choice between an overworked buffoon and well-dressed expert who charges for a day what you make in a month. Pretty soon you’ll realize that it’s just easier to confess and get probation.

Please don’t make us take you to trial. We prefer to use the legal system as a cattle prod, not a cattle gun.

2) Roads. You may come from a culture that doesn’t properly invest in its infrastructure, and therefor wonder why we spend so much on ours. Driving is important to Americans, and that means roads. Jobs are also important, and building roads is a great method for employing those who can’t otherwise find work in the private sector, the way you can. It may end up costing ten times as much and taking twenty times as long as it would elsewhere, but we all get a great return on your investment in the satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped feed and clothe the executives of the construction companies that bribed us (sorry, gave us “campaign contributions”) for the contract. When the renovations on the I-405 are finished in 2026, you’ll understand for yourself just what a great investment infrastructure programs are.

3) Education. This is one area where you will receive an immediate an substantial return on your investment. You might come from a country that prefers to educate its children in the home, one-on-one, by the people that care most about the child’s success. Once you experience our education system, you’ll see such opinions as backward, or even quant. You’ll agree it is much better for everyone involved to force your children to sit in a chair in a single room all day long with other children who have only their age in common with your own offspring, listening to a fully “certified” spokesman of the state denominate our values to them. After all, you and your spouse both need to spend the time your child is in school working for slave wages to pay your insanely high rent and taxes.

Although the thirteen years your children will spend in school will not net them any skills you might understand to be useful (or the market, for that matter), you should trust us that a “free” and appropriate compulsory public education will contain all the knowledge necessary for the continuation of American “Democracy,” which is far more important that being able to make a living. After all, if you offspring is really in a bind at the age of eighteen, the military will be happy to provide them with a job to pay for the illegitimate children they will doubtless have conceived during their tenure at our facilities.

4) Welfare. This is probably the most efficient means of alleviating economic need, which is precisely why it is also the most unpopular. After all, it’s a bit hard for sociologists and bureaucrats to find their own jobs if money is merely given to those in need. The whole array of modern social programs, from food stamps to adult education, have the benefit of providing work to the middle-class and government elite, an advantage that direct payments severely lack. Just one well-motivated bureaucrat can write and sign the checks for an entire city’s needy population (that’s a bit of a joke again – there are no motivated bureaucrats), leaving all the many government workers who rely on welfare programs for their inflated salaries to find work in the horror of the free market.

  It seems like the one thing everyone can agree on (besides the continuation of a two-party system that crushes individuality) is that welfare needs to end. You may wonder why it hasn’t done so yet. It is doubtful that you are prepared for the proper American answer to that wonder, which is that we haven’t yet decided that it should end. This is because you were born in a place that allowed you to think your own thoughts. Don’t worry, you’ll understand the pure logic of our reasoning in the end.

A deeper explanation is that in is an investment, like all our systems. This one is an investment in peace. You see, if we ended welfare, those who receive it would soon either starve or riot. Knowing the potency of American education, we thing the former is more likely than the latter, but we prefer to ere on the side of caution. They might also realize in that vacuum that their labor has value, and that would be a very bad thing for you, dear immigrant.

5) Universities. We use your tax dollars to directly subsidize these, among the most important institutions, through direct payments funded by you, the poorest of our beloved contributors. Alas, your generous contribution does not even come close to paying for the extravagance of our academic temples. The students themselves must pay the difference, making it seemingly impossible for many young people to attend (and then most likely drop out). For these naïve eighteen year-olds (sorry, “underprivileged youths”) we have a stack of low interest loans waiting for them, of quantities so large they could never pay it back (well, at least not with their degrees in women’s studies), and which can never be removed, even by bankruptcy. We are sure you will agree that underwriting these youths is an excellent investment (for us, at least), as  such fools will give us votes for the mere promise to remove their indentured servitude!

Although you will never see the fruits of the research we fund at universities, understand that its continuance is extremely important in order to preserve one of the most important welfare classes of the American caste system: the university professor. Ah, the university professor, one of the most delightful harlequins you will find in our “education” system. He proclaims the virtue of the proletariat to their own faces, decries their treatment by the rich exploiters,  and urges them to fight for their freedom (through peaceful protest, of course. We would never allow the promotion of dissidence that could actually change anything). He does all this while supporting and participating in the hegemony that enslaves them (we call it politics) and making 100,000 dollars a year with a golden pension. Did we mention that he can’t be fired? It is but one of the many benefits of serving the oligarchy. It is irony worthy of Shakespeare, who your children will be taught to hate through our “language arts” programs (see education, above).

If you are wondering how you yourself can take part in this generation-old rite of passage, have no fear. Your children will be natives, entitled to all the subsidies and life-long debt as others. They even have a one in 10,000 chance of hitting the lottery and becoming university professors themselves, provided they do the correct research (the kind that supports our system), and publish in the correct journals (the kind that criticize anything but the “virtues” we expound).

6) War. We have chosen to list this one last because, as the most expensive and horrific use of your tax dollars, we were really hoping you would have gotten bored with our entire letter and given up on it by now, or realized you were late to your second job. The justification for war is quite simple: as the last protector of freedom and democracy and one of the few remaining truly moral military states, the task of spreading freedom and democracy the world over falls to us. Opposing terrorism and communism is the duty of the world’s last super power, and through the ceaseless and thankless efforts of our uniformed heroes the country, and indeed the entire world, is kept safe.

If you believed the above statement, then you know you are well on your way to becoming truly American.

The great enterprise of war will also require additional sacrifice. You will be not only a contributor of valuable tax money, but a contributor of your blood, as you send your offspring to kill and die in wastelands you sacrificed everything to escape. Such investments do net return, however, as your children will be praised as heroes, respected as paragons of virtue, and have a nice popularity boost should they ever attempt to join the oligarchy in one of our elections. They may not be able to sleep at night, be racked by the guilt that comes with killing others, and be unable to walk outside without a fist-full of anti-psychotic medication, but they will have respect, and that is what matters most to a young person, at least if they learned anything at all from their schooling.

How you contribute. Once you get involved with American life, you may notice both of our major political parties talking about you and your tax burden. One party will complain that you pay no taxes, calling you a freeloader, while the other will continually proclaim that they will lower your taxes and raise those on the “rich.” Of course, most of the rich are part of the oligarchy and most of the poor are part of the tax farm. The double-think required to believe either of these statements will come to you once you pick an allegiance to one of our political parties and begin paying money and homage to your lords. It doesn’t really matter which party you choose to follow, as their leaders look, sound, and act identical, and their voting records are difficult to distinguish in the best of times. Most people choose their party based on the methods by which they are forced to pay for them: the Democratic Party for those whose money is stolen through union dues, and the Republican Party for those whose money is taken from stock contributions to big businesses. Note: We are aware of the irony involved in our party names; you do not need to point it out to us.

 It may be sometime before your allegiance to these ancient and indispensable institutions becomes obvious. In the meantime, here are the primary ways in which you pay for our beloved government:

1) Property tax. It is unlikely that you will ever be afforded the opportunity to own land, and if you are, it is unlikely you will be permitted to keep it. You may wonder, then, how you pay property taxes. Quite simply, you pay them through your rent, which you landlord passes onto the government. Why else would you think it is necessary for you to pay two-thirds of your income for a place to sleep between shifts?

3) Income tax. We have faith that you will be an excellent producer for the American economy, which means that you get to contribute a portion of every dollar you make to us, so that we can serve you in the many ways you are incapable of serving yourself. The harder you work, the more you get to pay, and therefore the more patriotic you will become, as you gain greater pride for having paid for a larger share of American greatness.

3) Sales tax. Taxing trade is a great invention. Taxing it during production (the trade for labor) and consumption (the acquisition of the products of others), is doubly great. It allows us to publicly proclaim relief for the poor from taxes while taking a nice chunk off of even the homeless. The best part is that sales tax falls more heavily on the cattle than the farmer (actually, it doesn’t fall on us at all, since we just pay it back to ourselves anyway).

4) Payroll tax. We may be inclined to give you an income tax refund every year. If you are poor enough, you may see all of your money returned to you. However, you are still a valuable contributor through the payroll tax, which requires your employer to pay a chunk of your salary to us. We even get to claim that it is a tax on big business, even though it is impossible for ideas such as “business” to pay taxes. The milk, as always, comes from the cow.

5) Inflation. We have found that getting people to part with legitimate currency like gold and silver is exceedingly hard, and once somebody has possession of their money and has put it in a safe place it is nearly impossible to take any of it as additional tax. In response to this we developed what is called fiat (otherwise known as imaginary) currency, arguably the biggest leap forward for our power since the abolition of (private) slavery. This concept, which in America is applied through the private and public banking sectors, allows us to pay for whatever we want by printing more money. Our budget gets to become effectively limitless, and allows us to transfer to ourselves the value of the money you have already earned, rather than just taking a cut of trade and production. Instead of having your money sit idle in a bank, gaining value like in the old days of gold currency, it gets to be put to good use by us.

So now that you know how you will be contributing to the great country that serves as your new home, and just for what you will be paying, we’d like to thank you again for your presence and continued productivity.

Sincerely,

Bureaucrat #6026961

This blog is provided free, without intellectual restrictions. You are welcome to re-post, save, distribute, edit, or otherwise use this material as you see fit. I only ask that you correctly attribute whatever it is to “Stucifer” and/or link back to this blog. Thank you. 

Tentacle Rape and the Quest for Sexual Novelty

Before I start, let me just say that this is what you get when you ask people for topics in an open-ended manner and promise to deliver. I actually didn't set up any system for deciding what topic, but surprisingly (to some) I have a lot to say about tentacle erotica.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tentacle_erotica

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can check the Wikipedia article above, or if you are adventurous, you can Google it for images and video.  Be warned: things can get awful pretty fast in the world of Hentai. Additionally, please make sure such images are legal in your place of residence.

Tentacle Rape, Tentacle Porn, and Tentacle Erotica are all part of one large subset of Hentai, which is a style of pornography mostly associated with Japan, made from artistic images rather than live “actors.” Hentai can exist in the form of Manga (a Japanese comic book or graphic novel), single images, or as animation. There are particular artistic styles associated with it, but most of these are congruent with the styles of less explicit manga and anime (Japanese animation).  Hentai also has many genres within it and a quick cruise over to 4chan will reveal a number of these if you are still feeling adventurous. Gay, straight, male, and female are all targeted with different varieties of Hentai porn.

Why don’t the Japanese watch normal porn?

First of all, “normal” isn't a very definitive word.  “Typical” American porn, which might include depictions of a variety of acts highly atypical of most Americans, is technically illegal inside of Japan.  These laws might have changed slightly recently, so don’t take that as an absolute, but for a very long time the live depiction of genitals, along with particular other private areas (notably pubic hair), was not legal. Of course, markets don’t respond to government controls by giving up demand; the Japanese demanded porn, and porn they got.  The legal prohibitions on displaying genitalia did not apply to art, which included pornographic images penned rather than filmed, and thus Hentai was born.

From there, the artists within the genre developed their own styles and expressions, and the mechanisms of the market delivered ever more varied, and sometimes disgusting, products. The great advantage of drawn images over live actors is that you can draw literally whatever you want, or more accurately, whatever the market demands. You can draw characters that are physically flawless, or of impossible proportions.  Huge breasts, tiny waists, giant members, and crazy positions are all possible without the difficulty of hiring an actor that meets those specifications, if some such person could actually exist.

The only limit is your imagination, and the human imagination is very powerful indeed.

So how do we go from huge breasts to tentacle porn?

Sexual Novelty and Pornography

Quite simply, the human sex machine places a high desirability on novelty.  This is especially true of the male of our species, whose sexual experience tends to revolve around seeking out and pursuing mates, rather the female experience of selection and preservation of a mate. Novelty, in evolutionary terms, often represents genetic diversity and stronger offspring. Even in a long-term relationship sexual novelty can be present in variation of the act itself as a way of maintaining mental excitement.

Pornography has the capacity to hijack this response by presenting the user with an unending supply of fresh faces and bodies to tickle their craving for novelty.  Pornography compulsion (or addiction, depending on your terminology) is considered by many to be a real and challenging problem for modern teens and adults, who have almost unlimited access to its use online.  “Use” is the proper word, not just “view,” as most people masturbate when viewing pornography, which provides the mental stimulus that is necessary for completion of an orgasm. People (almost always men-let us be honest) who use pornography heavily often suffer sexual side effects including being unable to achieve an erection without porn and being unable to have orgasms while engaged in normal sex acts.

So, the offer of pornography is not just seeing what is normally taboo, though that is undoubtedly part of many excitements, but seeing something fresh, new, and novel. This breeds market pressure to produce materials which contain not only new faces, but exceedingly novel acts and presentations. Eventually these acts become less taboo or original to the market and new ones must be conjured up, such as the shift in the acceptance of anal sex in porn and the American population since the 90’s. If you are reading this and don’t really understand what I’m talking about, consider yourselves lucky.

In Japan, this quest for novelty was no less powerful in the market of hentai, but hentai, unbound by the need for physical actors and their physical (and ethical) limits, was able to create novelty of its own with images.  This combined with the fact that you can move beyond typical real-world taboos into areas that are either impossible or totally illegal to produce a host of strange content, some of which is explicitly illegal in parts of the US.  Hermaphrodites (futa), murder and gore (goru), pedophilia (lolicon), and our subject, tentacle rape, all became genres within Hentai with real, ongoing market demand.

I’m sure there are many more niche genres that I don’t know about (believe it or not the author of this article doesn’t know that much about hentai beyond passing discussion), but for all of them the driving force is novelty and, especially in the lolicon area, taboo.  It’s probably safe to say that a great deal of the hentai that gets translated into English for markets in the US falls into some of the more extreme categories for the same reason: it is competing with real live actors and has to deliver a novelty of its own that live porn cannot.

A brief moral discussion

Is tentacle rape evil?  Wrong?  What about lolicon, which depicts sex with children? What about the individuals that view these materials? Will they become inspired to rape, murder, or molest children?

The article thus far has focused on markets, market demands, and how consumers respond to the material they are consuming. In this model it is always the market that creates the material, objectionable or not, and not the material that inspires the market. There is little to no evidence that pornography inspires rape or other psychoses (actually, the availability of porn tends to be correlated with lower rates of rape). Though there are personal and interpersonal consequences to pornography abuse, these rarely are affective beyond the individual or his life partner.

Some types of hentai (usually lolicon) are technically illegal in various parts of the US under law. If you are reading this and considering looking for it, please consult your local or state laws to see if it is legal for you to view it.  Arrests have been made, people have gone to jail for possessing lolicon.  The novelty is not worth the risk.  The strong reaction against lolicon is likely due to our desire to protect children, but I will say that drawings are not children. Child pornography is deplorable not because it enables the viewer to carry on a paraphilia, but because a child is victimized in its production.  This is not so with any hentai, whether it depicts children, rape or murder.

How should you feel about pornography? This is probably a discussion better had with your minister, rabbi, or parents than on the internet. Pornography is legal and widely available in the US, tentacle rape included if that interests you. How you use or abuse it is up to you, but be aware of the cycle of novelty; if you find yourself getting excited about a cartoon damsel having sex with a tentacle it might be time to take a break.