Amazon's Erotica Section Is The Dollar Store For Horniness
Porn is a spectrum, from the lowest-budget homemade iPhone video to the most flowery screeds that could be serious literature were it not for the graphic pounding. Somewhere in between is the Kindle short story industry, where hordes of writers hastily produce a few thousand erotic words that ... someone then buys for .99 cents. It's the Dollar Store for horniness.
And sure enough, mere weeks after PornHub provided us with the GoPro variety of coronavirus porn, Amazon's erotica section has delivered theirs. Some are clearly jokes, like Chuck Tingle of "pounded in the butt by various billionaire mythological creatures and/or abstract concepts" fame writing a whole pandemic-based trilogy with Bisexual Vampire Unicorns Teach Me The Importance Of The Vampire Cough, The Physical Manifestation Of Washing My Hands Gets Me Off, and Not Pounded By Anything While I Practice Responsible Social Distancing.
Some were obviously unrelated stories the writers just had lying around that they slapped the word "coronavirus" on, like Love in the Time of Coronavirus: 20-Book Gender Swap Bundle or Quaranteen: Step-Sibling Love In The Time Of The Coronavirus: A Story Of Taboo Romance. (As with the plots of most of these stories, that title notably features two colons.)
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Others, however, are impressively specific. There's no way anyone could have predicted the market for COVID-69 or Quarantined With My Hot Roommates a month ago, which raises the question: Why is there a market for these things? Some have tried to explain it as the typical erotic story, full of "chance encounters," no longer "ringing true," but authenticity has never really been an issue for people writing and reading about 17th-century pirates who know about the G-spot.
It seems more likely that what's going on here is the same thing as fantasizing about nonconsensual situations or other types of victimization (which, yes, is extremely common): By eroticizing a fear, it becomes less scary. Imagining that you could be unwittingly locked up with a one-night stand with nothing to do but test each other's sexual limits is a lot more appealing than the boring and terrifying reality of choosing between groceries and maybe death.
Or they're all jokes. No one is writing Bored and Fertile (Coronavirus Quarantine Erotica Book 2) without their tongue firmly in cheek when it's not otherwise occupied, but jokes are just another method of dealing with fear. Whatever the case, as terrible as everything is right now, at least it's given us a lot of time to think about the psychological power of the human boner.
You can follow Manna on Twitter, but she doesn't usually talk about dicks this much.
Top image: Unsplash/Bence Boros
