What duty of care do erotica writers have when it comes to being teachers as well as entertainers? This is a question I and my fellow writers have debated at Frolicon several times over the years on various panels, and I don’t think there is a right answer. On the one hand, we are entertainers; it’s our job to create a world where the reader can get lost, can fantasize, can let go of reality for a while. On the other hand, though, a lot of our readers are going to want to do the things our characters do, and if our readers aren’t doing their own research — if they’re just playing based on what we write — they could seriously hurt someone (or themselves).

I’m still thinking about the “right guy” from the BDSM romance I’m editing. He is basically a case study in what a top should do when getting together with a new-to-the-scene bottom. He’s careful, consent-focused, gentle when he needs to be, conscientious, kind, and understanding. When he gets down to business, he takes Lauri (the MC) on a journey that leaves her in subspace, and he takes care of her afterward. Because it’s a romance novel it’s not exactly a spoiler to say that they end up in a relationship, and he even does that perfectly. 

Now the question is: did I write him that way because I wanted to, or because I wanted to give readers a good example of what a BDSM relationship can be like so they’d know what to look for? I don’t have the answer to that. 

I think that, in the grand scheme of things, I come down on the “we have a duty of care” side. This is mostly because I was on Tumblr from the late 2000s until the end of the adult era, and I saw how “tumblrdoms” — “doms” who learned how to be dominant from looking at pictures and watching videos on Tumblr — were harming people. Even I probably influenced some of them with some of the things I posted or said, although as time went on I tried to be a better citizen of the kinky internet. People are going to learn from the internet, and people are going to learn from erotica. It’s up to us as writers to point out the good, the bad, and the ugly, so that when our readers do engage in these activities, they make healthy choices.