He bites his lip and his eyes darken…
‘Y/N, don’t look at me with those eyes.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
He stalks towards me and places his hand on my cheek. His digits run across my face and then he-
“DINNER TIME!”
Dirty stories found on AO3, Wattpad, Tumblr (the holy trinity) featuring favoured fictional hunks have become a significant part of the hormonal sexual awakening. Wattpad has around 90 million monthly users and over 665 million stories. “Revolutionary” works by ‘great novelists’, i.e. old white men, pale in comparison to the pen[wo]manship of middle school girls. Her dog is ill, she’s moving house, and her parents are divorcing during exam season and yet, she’s created a masterpiece.
Can Shakespeare say the same?
Often following trends, such as the ever-evolving “White boy of the Month'' on TikTok, or catalysed by new films or series, recently it’s The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes or House of the Dragon, these stories elicit millions of readers. Most are completely unhinged sexy romps, à la ‘After’, that go on to be made into equally cringey movie adaptations. These variations on traditionally formatted video porn are at times comically cringey, hot asf, or genuinely concerning, as real world people are often slowly roped into the narrative. The result? Most teenage girls not blinking an eye to the ‘scandalous’ Saltburn, having read much worse. Regardless, smut of all forms can be an entirely valid avenue to climax.
Fanfics and smut are mostly written and consumed by young women. A common joke online is that smut readers need to assign a designated individual to delete their reading history upon their death, taking their scandalous smutty vices to the grave. Smut is so popular due to the taboo of female sexuality. At school I remember boys openly talking about their favourite porno (a troubling thought then and now, ugh!). It was an unspoken truth that if their female peers mentioned anything of this ilk, public ridicule would have ensued.
The increasing objectification of the women in porn is off-putting. How does one find pleasure in something that fails to keep your perspective in mind? Fanfiction does just this: it reallocates humanity and identity in sexuality. There’s no worry of hackers or viruses, and it is completely free. Only an ad for ‘Mistplay’ between chapters on Wattpad. It is customisable through tags and the genius design of AO3. Choose your man, trope, length, and rating.
It gives us a vivid space for escapism. In an age where misogyny is on the rise due to the cretins of the internet like Andrew Tate, teenage boys can be repulsive. So log on to Wattpad and be with a respectful beefy superhero who is in love with you. Watch edits of your man and evade being tied down; on the internet you can have multiple boyfriends. It’s a community space happily centred around celeb obsession and disrupting the taboos of female sexuality. While female interests are ridiculed by men on podcasts, these spaces become safe havens. The comment section on Wattpad will forever be the funniest place on the internet.
Still, fanfics remain the bastard of the literary family. They dominate the debate of High Art and true literature; the erotica of Nabokov is allowed but not mine, why? ‘Respectable’ modern-day literature has no shortage of derivative works: Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius are Hamlet fanfics. Pamela Morgen’s series based on Pride and Prejudice was acquired by Simon & Schuster and is widely cited as a fanfic author crossing over into “real” publishing. Yet no one slapped the fanfic label on Sally Beauman's Rebecca's Tale, a retelling of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, when it was released by a major publisher in 2001.
In 2020 a tumblr post went viral. It described the link between - wait for it - 9/11 and Fifty Shades of Grey, illustrating the significance of fanfiction in mainstream media. Catalysed by Gerard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance who formed the band post witnessing 9/11. MCR’s music inspired Stephanie Meyers to write the Twilight saga, a self-insert vampire angst filled slow burn romance. The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction series originally titled Master of the Universe and published on fanfiction websites by ‘Snowqueen Icedragon’. Full of BDSM, slowburn angsty smut, it leaked into Hollywood and the homes of millions around the world in a “respectable” fashion.
Fanfiction is a symbol of teenage female sexuality that, after being shamed by society for decades, has now found sanctity on the internet. Fanfiction is all around us whether you like it or not.
But I do and so do millions around the world.