Literotica is a website for
literary erotica. Well, in reality it's for
stories about
sex. Only the best stories are literary, and only the best of the sex is truly
erotic. Inevitably, most of it is boring and repetitive and just filthy, but there are some very good writers out there.
www.literotica.com
The main thing is it really is just stories. It's not one of these pay-for-porn sites with pop-ups and big-haired whores sucking dicks. Yes, there are several of them on small advertisements on some pages, but basically it's just a place for reading and writing stories.
There are no hassles. You can read all the stories without signing up. When you sign up as a member you don't get spam or any other annoyances. The people who run it, Laurel and Manu are honest, decent people who just want to get sex stories to a wide audience. It costs nothing and they're not out for anything.
From the main page, the two main links are to "Stories & Pics" and to "Bulletin Board". All the rest - the webcams and dirty pictures and audios - are not the main thing, and not very exciting, unless you're really really desperate.
The Stories area is divided into all sorts of genres you might be interested in: Erotic Couplings is the basic "Boy and girl have sex", with by far the most stories. After those come Incest; then Loving Wives, BDSM, Group Sex, Exhibitionist & Voyeur, NonConsent, Lesbian, and Romance get a lot of entries, as you might expect; then Fetish, Celebrities, Interracial Love, and Gay Male; and there are numerous others, including toys, horror, anal, cross-dressing, and humour.
The search facilities are not very good. It's a bit complicated to navigate around. But the thing is, it's just stories. No-one's out to get you. No pop-ups and spam. And you can sign up and submit your own. As long as it's not underage or bestiality or rape, or completely illiterate, your story will be approved after about three days (or longer if it's busy).
The other area I recommend is the Bulletin Board. Here you can post discussions of writing, ideas for stories, or bond with other Gay/Lesbian or BDSM folk, and so on. There are various thread groups. Some of them are genuinely helpful for budding authors who just happen to like writing erotic stories.
While pictorial porn is almost entirely aimed at men, stories are different. It's hard to say exactly, but round about half of the contributors and half of the readers are female, going by both names and cues. A few are obviously people trying to disguise their sex, but a lot more women do appreciate written descriptions and get turned on more than by the usual Internet porn pictures.
Voting. At the end of a story you get five radio buttons, 1 (worst) to 5 (best). This is the only public rating system on the site: out of thousands of views, a story might get tens of votes. You can also send personal feedback to an author, either anonymous or with your own e-mail address. Taking the trouble to send a personal message via feedback is highly approved of, and not much done: a bit like E2.
A year or two ago they made a printed collection Literotica of some of what they considered the better stories. This is available in bookshops. So that's another incentive to budding authors, though it only had eleven stories out of many thousands on the site.
And no, I'm not telling you my identity there; but if you want to have yours made public, let me know and I'll add it here:
- etoile uses the same name on both, and is a moderator on their 'GLBT Chatter' forum.
- [name deleted] used the same name on both here and there, but now (2005) has removed their stories because of all the junk there. This is worth noting.