Last week, a user in Erozetta's Erotically Inclined Discord server crashed out over "political bullshit."
A couple other users were celebrating the launching of dildos at ICE vehicles in Minneapolis. For the angered user, "people spouting political bullshit are ruining the experience"—he ended his rant with "just shut the fuck up" and proceeded to excuse himself from the server.
I've encountered chilling effects around "political discourse" plenty of times in my life. Lots of people want to enjoy social spaces without confronting the ugly reality of polarized political opinion, without navigating conflicts around beliefs and values. There are contexts in which it makes sense to me, but smut is not one of them.
Smut itself is highly politicized. What is or is not obscene, what is or is not censored, which 18+ creators are or are not debanked. I think simply choosing to engage in the production of adult content in 2026 is a political question—but many people elide this question, or pretend they do, by making smut they hope will be palatable to some imagined broad political spectrum of readers. If you're just putting textual penises inside textual vaginas and everyone's having a good time, maybe you can avert your eyes from politics for a few minutes.
That is, as many of you know, not what I choose to do.
I write explicitly political smut.
It's not always suffocatingly preachy, but even my most recent submission, "Fellas, is it gay...?", despite being a zany and wholesome romp based on a joke, makes passing acknowledgment of climate change and the rise of naziism in Stewardland.
Why? Couldn't I have written about a Red Lobster server taking a couple friends home for sexy funtimes without mentioning climate change or nazis? Sure. But it would still have been political, because the characters are queer.
This is my experience, my lived experience. As a trans person, my body is politicized. As a disabled person, my mind is politicized. As a bisexual, aroace person, my feelings are politicized—and that means my soul is politicized.
Five years ago I left a job in the video game industry. It was an incredibly good job: I was the lead designer on a game I absolutely adored, I had good relations with the playerbase, I was having fun and riding high. But when I dared to make a couple minor characters gay, my bosses told me that they weren't comfortable putting "political content" in the game. The game had straight romance. The game had murder, war, and that special, fun brand of genocide where it's okay because the people you're wiping off the map are a fantasy species. But a passing mention of the relationship between two male ogres—that was "political."
The fact is that the only things that aren't deemed "political" are the assumed defaults. The values of the ruling class, and the culture that the ruling class creates. Straight romance wasn't considered political by my bosses.
These apolitical memes are unassailable. They're not up for debate. No one is trying to destroy straight romance.
Conversely, when you call something political, you dub it debatable. You dub it destructible.
Most of my social profiles have a note along the lines of:
My stories are written on stolen Ohlone land. Fuck genocide, fascists, and borders.
Is that political to you?
Is it political to say genocide is bad?
If your answer is yes, that means you want to allow for people who feel otherwise. You want to allow for people who think genocide is cool. You want to allow for people to say "yeah, slaughtering people and stealing their land is good, actually."
Some political positions should not be tolerated.
When I say that, I lose some of you. So much for the tolerant left! But the flip side, the null hypothesis, is that the political is taboo. That the political itself should not be tolerated. That my body, mind, and soul should not be tolerated.
My art is authentic, sometimes to the detriment of its accessibility. There is no way to disentangle my smut from my life, my life from my identity, my identity from a political zeitgeist that seeks to destroy me.
When you say "shut the fuck up with your political bullshit," you're telling me to roll over and die.
Needless to say, I won't be doing that.
The good news is that art can be overtly political and still fuck.
I'll always remember being a small child, listening to Rattle and Hum with my family. In "Silver and Gold," Bono stops singing and goes on a rant:
This song was written in a hotel room in New York City
Right about the time a friend of ours, Little Steven
Was putting together a record of Artists Against Apartheid.
It's a song written about a man in a shanty town outside of Johannesburg.
A man who's sick of looking down the barrel of white South Africa.
A man who is at the point where he is ready to take up arms against his oppressor.
A man who has lost faith in the peace makers of the West,
While they argue and while they fail to support a man like Bishop Tutu
And his request for economic sanctions against South Africa
Am I bugging you?
It's an interruption. It raises questions. I was five or six years old, asking my parents what "apartheid" was, what "sanctions" mean. Even today, with that rant so etched into my brain that I could recite it, I pay attention to it when the song comes on. I think about Bono, about U2, about political art, about hypocrisy, about digital rights management and the cruelties of the music industry and the tragedy of celebrities abandoning popular cause.
None of this detracts from "Silver and Gold."
It's still a banger.
Edited to add: this essay was rejected by Literotica's moderators.
In response to overwhelming feedback from readers, we have decided at this time not to publish works that promote or focus heavily on politics or religion, or political or religious figures or scriptures. Lit readers are bombarded with political disputes on other platforms and they prefer to avoid these types of divisive issues in their erotica.
Yeah, yeah. Fuck you.
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My book about finding meaning and queer love in dark times is available now!