Erotica & the Positive Review Problem

This is almost certainly going to fall into the category of blog posts that lose me followers/friends. It’s also one that for weeks I told myself I wouldn’t write: not because it constitutes professional suicide (for one thing, I’m not a professional writer), but because while I think it needs to be written by someone, it would probably have more impact if that person was female. As a man, I’m well aware that this risks coming across as privileged, patronising, pompous, or some combination of the three.

I’ll take that risk.

Erotica has always been the Jon Snow of the literary world. A stunningly attractive bastard of a genre, it is forced to live with the knowledge that nothing it does will ever make it respectable or credible to popular opinion, nor to the establishment it longs to join. Instead, it ploughs its own furrow, with determination, imagination, and a stubborn refusal to be beaten down by those who would mock or suppress it.

Like any decent countercultural movement, it succeeds and survives in large part by fostering a friendly, supportive environment within which its artists can work. I’ve lost count of the people who have said to me – half in admiration, half in wonder – “I can’t believe erotica writers are so nice.” Nor does it surprise me: I’ve been both stunned by and incredibly grateful for the access that authors like Kristina Lloyd, Lexie Bay, Oleander Plume and others have given me since I first expressed an interest in writing smut. Events like Eroticon just hammered home the extent to which people who write about sex are willing to give their love, time, support, and kindness to anyone who engages them, whether as peer, disciple or enthusiastic reader. There’s a solidarity that perhaps doesn’t exist in other genres; people aren’t just aware that a rising tide will lift all, they’re willing to roll up their sleeves, grab a bucket, and help push the water up the beach.

In a world where few mainstream publishers are willing to take a chance on erotica, personal interactions are extremely important, as are the social media networks that enable them. The more Twitter followers you accumulate, the more blog hits you get; the more blog hits you get, the more readers you’re able to reach with your published work; the more Amazon reviews those readers write, the more books you sell overall. In erotica, more than just about any other genre, relationships matter. It really is about who you know, as much as it is about how good you are…

…and that’s great…that’s gr…wait a minute: that’s REALLY NOT great.

Look, not every artist is a nice person. Not every artist will share his or her toys, and not every artist will play nicely with the other children. Some artists are – for want of a better word – arseholes…and that’s fine. More to the point, some of us (nice or otherwise) would rather live and die by the value of the content we create, rather than by the butt we’re willing to kiss in order to promote it. We don’t want to scratch your back, just so you’ll scratch ours at a later date; because every time we settle for that, we’re tipping over the credibility line: we’re passing from supportive and encouraging into sycophantic and false, and that’s where the danger lies.

What I’m trying to say is this. Erotica has a positive review problem. We exist in such a wonderfully supportive, mutually encouraging environment that we’ve apparently forgotten how to impart, digest, and discuss negative feedback in a sensible fashion. We review each other’s work with agonised, tortuous care; desperate to avoid causing offence, but hating ourselves for pulling punches and leaving the things we want to say unsaid. We’re not just glass-half-full about the novels and anthologies we’re given to read: we chuck out the water and fill it to the brim with vintage champagne, because that’s the easiest substitute for honest, nuanced commentary on the writing of our friends and (in some cases) professional colleagues. We’re not critics: we’re cheerleaders.

Here’s the thing though. After a while, all we’ll succeed in achieving is the destruction of erotica’s ability to punch above its weight, both creatively and commercially. If every review offers up five gold stars, and every tweet or blog-post showers fulsome praise on the slightest or most banal piece of writing, then all of that support – all of that love – will cease to have an impact. We’ll eventually turn the whole thing into one great big circle-jerk…which might make a small number of people feel a little better about themselves, but will stop them hearing the honest feedback they need on their work, and will also further alienate erotica from the sorts of people who might otherwise be open to buying into it.

The other depressing consequence of the positive review culture is how readily –and viciously – people are ostracised for failing to toe the line. I’ve watched with dismay over the last few weeks as an erotica author and editor for whom I otherwise have a huge amount of respect – Alison Tyler – has used her blog and Twitter feed to lay into those who have the temerity to criticise either her work or the people and publications she chooses to work with. Her line of attack is not just immature and cowardly in its preference for snide innuendo and vague allusion over actually addressing these ‘douchebags’ by name, it lacks any sense of perspective about what it is to be a professional writer.

Look, I take absolutely no pleasure in writing any of this. Alison Tyler is someone who donated prizes to a contest I ran last year; she’s someone who was kind enough to give me feedback on a story I submitted for one of her anthologies; and she’s someone who, from what I’ve seen and heard, is typically generous with both her time and expertise to many people throughout the erotica industry. She’s forgotten more about writing smut than I will ever know, and has more talent in her little finger than I do in my entire body…and yet, on this particular issue, she could not be more spectacularly, damagingly, and insultingly wrong.

Cutting people out of your (professional or personal) life and passively-aggressively smearing them online when they express ‘strong negative feelings’ toward the magazine you work for isn’t principled and doesn’t give you access to the moral high ground. Furthermore, writing a review that’s critical of something you’ve written is not the same as attacking you personally – it’s not even equivalent to saying that all of your work is mediocre/bad/etc.

A well-written, well-argued negative review is its own thing, and deserves to be treated as a valid response to the art that we put out there, whether we agree with what it says or not; by questioning the motives of the person who writes it, and by dismissing their entire point-of-view simply because we don’t like what they have to say about us, we don’t demean them – we demean ourselves. We’re essentially claiming that the critic’s perspective on our work is invalid, for no other reason than the fact that they don’t see it in the same way as we do, and that they therefore haven’t appreciated or understood what we were trying to do or say with it. And that’s bullshit.

Reviews (and reviewers) don’t qualify as malicious or unfair simply because they’re negative or ambivalent. If Alison Tyler has a problem with people who’ve reviewed her work, she should take that up with them directly and in private, rather than using her position of influence within the industry to try and scare or bully other people away from writing critical reviews in the future. By telling the world that she’s willing to blackball anyone whose opinion she doesn’t like, she’s sending an incredibly damaging message, whether she means to or not: namely ‘if you’re asked to write a review of my work, and if you want to continue associating with me on a professional level afterwards, say something nice, or don’t bother saying anything at all.’

And I’m not ok with that. I’m not ok with it when it comes from an individual author, and I’m certainly not ok with it becoming the prevailing attitude within the wider erotica culture.