Cookies and smut

Chocolate Chip Cookies - WikipediaI’m not a huge fan of the chocolate-chip cookie, but every now and then I want one.  My local drugstore had an amazing sale the other day, with a box of cookies at about half the price of the name brand, so I picked some up.  You know the rest of the story; when I dove into them they were perfectly serviceable cookies, but only had about 2 chips per cookie.  Which was not what I wanted when I purchased chocolate-chip cookies.

What got me comparing cookies to smut?  This week a friend of mine, a writer, announced her intention to write good smut.  None of this ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ stuff, she declared.  She was going to write good stuff, with character development and plot; and immediately my mind flashed back to that box of cookies and my depressing search for chocolate chips in a wide, flat, doughy expanse of … character development and plot?

At one time I read a lot of smut.  I didn’t search it out; I was searching for Harry Potter fan fiction, but I certainly didn’t filter out the NC-17 stuff that popped up on my fan fiction.net screen.  And I developed the chocolate-chip cookie theory of smut.

In this theory, a cookie either is a chocolate-chip cookie or it’s a sugar cookie.  A good sugar cookie is a wonderful thing, and almost all the books on my shelves are sugar cookies.  Not a chip in a carload.  But put one chocolate chip into the cookie, and it becomes a chocolate-chip cookie; either a good one, with lots of chips, or a bad one, with not enough chips.  Every mouthful one takes after finding that first chip will be judged on whether it contains chips or not.

And that’s where I think the traditional concept of ‘good smut’ falls apart.  It’s a holdover from a time when any smut was thought to be a bad thing, and smut could only be justified at all if it was embedded in something that would hold the reader’s interest without the smut.  Does anybody really need to maintain that fiction any more?  Perhaps the people who would are off in the lounge, reading Playboy for its articles.

Now, someone could argue that mine is an immature approach to sex and smut, and they might well be right.  A grown-up, they would say, has integrated a healthy sex life into the rest of his or her activities.  It’s only our culture’s censorious approach to sex that makes us react to it so strongly that everything else pales into insignificance once our propensities are inflamed.

To which I would say, so what?  Today’s readers are today’s readers, for good or ill.  There may be a utopia out there in which sex is just one more healthy avenue of human interrelationship, but it’s in the future.  The most ultraliberal of us still react pretty strongly to any attempt to integrate sexual attraction into our workplaces or hobbies.  We assume that inflaming the propensities is a game-changer.  So why pretend it isn’t, when we pick up a novel?

I’ll stretch my metaphor out further, though, and suggest what might make good smut.  Not a regular sugar cookie of a novel studded with sex scenes; no, a real prime chocolate-chip cookie not only has big juicy chips in abundance, but they’ve melted out into the cookie dough between them.  The entire cookie is permeated with their salacious decadence. They echo in every mouthful, and you never for one bite forget what you’re eating.  So for those of us who aspire to write good smut, shouldn’t the plot, descriptions and characterization be almost as sexy as the sex scenes?

For myself, I’ll stick to the smut-eating asterisks.  Because I know my limits, and the last thing I want to create is a two-chip cookie.

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