Welcome to Porn Week,melissa gilbert sex videos Mashable's annual close up on the business and pleasure of porn.

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If watching porn isn't for you, consider reading some smutty fanfiction.

Isa, a fanfiction writer who preferred not to share their last name, began writing smut last fall "partly as a sort of rebellious thing against the whole conservative Midwest upbringing."

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"Which is a bit silly since I'm queer and pretty actively beyond that now," Isa said in a Twitter DM. "Honestly, I was better at it than I thought I would be."

Their first fic was a oneshot, or a standalone story. Because it ended up "getting some attention" on Archive of Our Own, an online archive for sharing fan art and fanfiction, Isa expanded it into a "really ridiculous longfic that tried to balance a lot of serious plot and emotions with porn."

The result: A multi-chapter, three-part epic exploring the relationship between Felix Hugo Fraldarius and Sylvain Jose Gautier, two characters in Nintendo's fantasy game franchise Fire Emblem. It clocks in at 97,259 words — roughly a novel.

"And then I kind of fell into smut fandom a lot more actively than I meant to," Isa said.

"You pick a couple characters, figure out one or two intense emotions they need to be feeling for the scene to really work, and mix-and-match some sex to complement that."

They added that although most fiction writing can be formulaic, smut writing is "formulaic in a weirdly refreshing way" because of the nature of its content.

"You pick a couple characters, figure out one or two intense emotions they need to be feeling for the scene to really work, and mix-and-match some sex to complement that," they said.

Fanfiction as we know it has been around for more than half a century. In the 1960s, Star Trekfans wrote short storiesabout their favorite characters in zines that were printed and distributed at science fiction conventions. In the early daysof the internet, writers posted their work to sites specifically designated for certain fandoms.

Fanfiction.net was founded in 1998, establishing a catch-all platform for any and all fandoms to post and read fics. In the last two decades, fanfiction has flourished on sites like Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. While fanfiction remained relatively niche through the aughts finding a home on sites like LiveJournal, Tumblr's popularity in the early 2010s normalized much of fanfiction in larger internet culture. Phrases like "AU" (alternate universe) and "shipping" (pairing two characters together whose relationship isn't canon) became widely known terms on Tumblr.

SEE ALSO: How erotic fanfiction lets women explore their sexuality without shame

The culture around fanfictions is so popular, adaptations of popular fics have been published as novels or movies. The release of Fifty Shades Freed, the third installment in E.L. Jame's thinly veiled Twilightreimagining, pushed the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise to more than $1 billion in box office profits. After, a novel turned 2019 movie based on Harry Styles, drew criticismfrom fans for infringing on the star's privacy and personhood. Regardless, it still made more than $69 million in box office sales.

It's natural that the most commercially successful fanfictions are based not just on romance, but sex. And while Tumblr's usership took a nosedive after the platform banned pornography, erotic fanfiction still thrives online — especially in the LGBTQ community.

Aside from often featuring same-sex pairings, reading and writing fanfiction accommodates for a deeper understanding of the relationship between characters.

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"The ability to lose yourself in the context of a sexual situation is what creates the best sexual experiences."

Dr. Helen Wyatt, a sex therapist (and fanfiction reader herself) at the Center for Mindful Living in Chicago, Illinois, noted that most porn lacks context necessary for arousal. There are some exceptions, but pornography rarely fleshes out storylines, character arcs, and lust.

"The main outcome is the orgasm," Wyatt said in a phone call with Mashable. "And erotic fanfiction is more about the journey. It's about context. Often, the ability to lose yourself in the context of a sexual situation is what creates the best sexual experiences and the most fulfilling rise to climax, which is hard to find in pornography."

Wyatt said most people, especially those who aren't cis men, need more than just visual stimuli to orgasm. She describes arousal as a biological mechanism similar to eating or breathing that's controlled by a "reptilian old part of our brain." For a lot of people, getting into a state of arousal means first feeling safe. The lead-up in to sex scenes in most erotic fiction tends to be more gradual than in pornography, and the personal investment readers have in characters can help them get into the mindset necessary for arousal.

"For you to become aroused, it goes back to primal instincts. Are you safe? Do you go into fight, flight, or freeze mode?" Wyatt said, adding that the readers' empathy for characters makes arousal more comfortable. "When the context is telling you that you're in a safe place, and you're even in a sexy place, you're more likely to become aroused than if you were just watching a porn where there's no context."

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Isa added that a sex scene that shapes a narrative storyline is often more arousing than a contextless video of two porn stars having sex. The two (or more) figures involved in a smut fic are imbued with feelings and personal goals. While porn may be visually stimulating, most people need more than just seeing naked bodies to be comfortable enough for arousal.

"Honestly, live action porn doesn't really appeal to me. Part of the attraction of smut specifically is the sense that there's a whole narrative behind the smut," Isa added. "Even the flattest, most plotless smut fic is building on characters that already have story and history."

Smut fics are also largely imaginative. Isa, who describes their gender as "some flavor of trans," added that seeing "real genitals" in live action porn brings on a wave of dysphoria they'd rather not consider while trying to get off. A steamy scene between their favorite ship involves far less "thinking about gender and shit." Writing fanfiction allowed them to explore much of their own complicated feelings about gender and queerness, with some degree of separation because they weren't writing their "own" characters.

"It's a really low-pressure environment to project one or two thorny feelings onto a favorite character and run with it."

"Discourse aside, it's a really low-pressure environment to project one or two thorny feelings onto a favorite character and run with it," Isa continued. They didn't have to worry about writing fics to be marketable to literary agents like with an original novel. "But the stakes here are really low. Pretty recently I wrote a smut fic where one of the characters was trans, which is something I was really overthinking for a long time, but it ended up being just as simple and easy as my other fics. There's sort of this sense of relief that I can just write little 3,000-word explorations of whatever I want, and a few people will read it and write a few encouraging comments, but it's never going to be marketed to an enormous audience."

SEE ALSO: A beginner's guide to the best porn games: What to play and what you should know

Within the fanfiction community, though, some believe that smut fics about real people violate privacy by putting celebrities in sexual scenarios without their consent. Archive of Our Own is overflowing with smut fics about various politicians. At the height of the Democratic primary debates, writers delighted in pairing rivaling candidates. The wildly popular K-pop group BTS inspired a fresh wave of ships between band members. When an anonymous protestor went viralfor showing up to a Black Lives Matter rally dressed in full riot gear, fans fawned over his ability to intimidate police officers with his sheer height. He became known as “Tank” or “Spec Ops Guy.” There are 1,500 stories written about him on Wattpadalone.

"Larry Stylinson," a portmanteau ship name for boy band heartthrobs Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, incited discussionwithin the One Direction fandom over whether the fandom had gone too far. Fans' insistence that the two were secretly in a relationship was so relentless, it caused tension between Styles and Tomlinson. In 2012, Tomlinson toldTumblr's now-discontinued Storyboardthat Larry "was funny at first but is actually hard to deal with, as I am in a relationship. Me and Harry are best friends. People look into our every move — it is actually affecting the way me and Harry are in public."

Fans who do engage in smut fics about real-life idols take some precautions to ensure the subject of their writing doesn't see their work, like avoiding tagging celebrities in posts promoting the fics. There's also an understanding that characters are "fully divorced from the individuals they're based on," Palmer Haasch wrote in a breakdown about fanfiction for Polygon.

"Maintaining this understand and keeping [real person fanfiction] as far away from the artist as possible are two major rules in fandom centered around real people," Haasch continued.

Wyatt, the sex therapist, acknowledged the uncomfortable nature of smut fics, but noted that they provide a safer platform for someone to explore potentially harmful kinks and desires. She said it boils down to a deeper ethical question about sexuality.

"I work with this with my clients — when we're fantasizing about someone, is that consensual for them if they found out?" Wyatt said. "I don't know that there is a definite line of consent from people that these fanfictions will be written about."

"Smut fics are as much an outlet for artistic expression as they are a platform to explore sexuality."

Which is why taking precautions like never tagging celebrities in social media about smut fics is perhaps the safest way to go. Fans would be hard pressed to stop fantasizing about their idols, but can at least shield them from the dirtiest aspects of their admiration.

Smut fics are as much an outlet for artistic expression as they are a platform to explore sexuality. Isa, the fic author, has found solace in writing smut as the pandemic stretches on.

"This might sound shallow, but people read smut and it's nice to write things that people read," Isa said. They also write "plotty gen fics," lengthy pieces that focus on plot over coupling, but gen ficsare much less popular and have a smaller audience than smut.

"A lot of people seem to struggle with smut, but I feel like it's reallysatisfying and flows really easily once you find a good balance of description, dialogue, [and] emotion," Isa said. "Especially these last few months, it's been really helpful to have something that I'm good at and know people enjoy when I'm feeling particularly shitty about, you know, the state of the world."

Like any alternative to porn, smut fics don’t have to be that deep. Sometimes you just want to read about Draco getting magically pegged by Hermione.