michael-dean-k/

Just came across a smutstack in my feed, an excerpt by someone liked by someone I follow. It led me to find a logloglog style page with date-stamped entries; at first I was compelled by the formatting—timestamp, return, paragraph, return, timestamp, no lines and single paragraphs only … innocent stuff—but then I read the writing itself, about a girl with an evil boyfriend. Then I clicked into one more post (one of the not paid ones) and it was an essay about her inner monologue while giving a blowjob at a club, written with specificity and elegance, on how she can’t help but think about dramatic ways to kill herself in the act if it goes longer than 5 minutes. My first thought is that this is like Worst Boyfriend Ever, except from a woman who writes a lot better. Is it great? Possibly, I’d have to read more. The problem is, I don’t want to, and basically can’t read more. Almost everything is paywalled and I can’t help but feel conflicted in paying for good writing when it can easily be interpreted as paying for written porn (especially now that Substack badgifies this!). It is called “Girl Insides” and that suddenly makes sense. I have not thought hard enough about the complexities behind sex writing (writing it, reading it, anthologizing it) and how that interacts with the essay. As do most people, I naturally keep writing and sex in different silos, but if sex is one of the most fundamental parts of the human experience (given that, you know, that's where kids come from), it feels odd and puritanical to exclude it.