On another forum, we were discussing an essential social role for erotica writers, if we choose to accept it.
Sex education programs are being cut across the US (and perhaps elsewhere). Planned Parenthood has been demonized. Religion-based belief systems are coming down like a soggy blanket over all human interactions except killing.
How are today's youngsters going to learn about sex? From Redtube or Xhamster? Graffiti? HBO? Not likely from parents, who are notoriously bad at it.
While I was growing up, sex education was something that happened on the streetcorner or at the drive-in. My father was not very clever about hiding his porn collection, so much of what I learned about sex, as an adolescent, came from cheap novels. I can't tell you how many twisted and plain wrong ideas came from porn writers who likely knew less about sex than I did.
I'm talking about the serious side of sex: simple anatomy, birth control, disease protection, the importance of female gratification, and other stuff that wasn't available at all until the 1970s. Disease control doesn't have to be a scary and dry subject, for example, it can be incorporated as a natural part of sex scenes, or even as plot seeds in their own right.
As fellow smut writers, do you feel a responsibility to educate as well as entertain?
