Writing porn is hard (photos)

There’s also the issue of opportunity. Men may still , but on the Internet, sex writing is a female pursuit. That’s partly because when women write about sex, the authors themselves are sexualized—as in all corners of marketing, their “sex sells” more than a man’s does. Think pieces and reported essays about what women ought to be doing with their bodies also sell well—the same social pressures that Dederer says make sex writing so difficult for women are also hot-button issues in politics, and therefore journalism. And because the realm of relationships has traditionally been framed as a female concern, women perceive (or have) more opportunities to pursue personal essay writing and sex-themed reporting. If you’re a woman who wants to write about your or , you have a platform; if you want to investigate the hookup culture at an Ivy League school, you don’t have to interview a ; and if you want to write about how hard it is for women to write about sex, you can do that, too.

My worst hack job of all time was writing three erotic romances—to give them their polite name, though the ones I wrote were really just porn for women. It was the worst job both because the stuff I wrote was unforgivably bad, and because it was the hardest. Each novel had to be 100,000 words, and I got $5,000 each. My idea was that writing these would buy me time to write my “real” novel, so I gave myself a month for each one, and stuck to that deadline like a person defusing a bomb with a digital clock ticking down beside them. From the moment a porn month began, I porned every hour I was awake.

But I also have deep respect for writers of erotic fiction because I learned how hard it is. The first sex scene was no problem, but then there was another. And another. Each one had to feel different—but, as the editor had warned, it couldn’t get too edgy. It didn’t have to be all vanilla, there could be chocolate—but not too much chocolate. I soon realized this meant writing the same scene over and over, and trying desperately to make the 17th bowl of vanilla-with-chocolate-sprinkles seem different from the first 16.

Looking back further, it’s hard to beat the shamelessness of the 16th-century author who wrote a fake deathbed confession for the writer Robert Greene and hawked it as a pamphlet. I personally feel a kinship to the writer Thomas Nashe, now best remembered as a collaborator of Shakespeare, because although Nashe was fiercely snobbish and loved to sneer at the mercenary behavior of others, he also wrote porn for cash. His poem, “The Choice of Valentines, or The Merry Ballad of Nashe His Dildo,” explicitly describes the narrator’s sexual misadventures with a woman who, left frustrated by his premature ejaculation, finishes herself off with the eponymous dildo. When upbraided for the filthiness of such works, Nashe excused himself by saying poverty forced him “to pen unedifying toys for gentlemen.”

The moral of this story is that hack writing isn’t even that well paid. Grub Street wasn’t just known for its shoddy publications, but for its poverty. Today’s hacks could often walk down the street, fill out an application at Duane Reade and make the same money for fewer hours. Yet it’s surprisingly hard to give up. Even when you’re not perpetrating a hoax, it has a sleazy glamour to it. You’re a rogue, a Humphrey Bogart character, a scrappy low-life living by your wits. And finally, it’s still writing. When people ask what you’ve been doing, it still feels good to say, “I’m writing …” even if the end of the sentence makes you blush.