Interview: KinkVision Podcast "Hotter than Fiction."
- Southern Suitor
- 11 hours ago
- 10 min read
These are the notes I prepared for my recent interview with the KinkVision podcast with Kevin and Nat, both fellow kinksters and writers. We spent some time unpacking the trope of the werewolf (as a reluctant monster, an expression of humiliation and loss of control), as well as the pros and cons of fiction writing (being able to realize erotic fantasies that are not possible in ordinary life), screencap culture from the Tumblr days as a form of flash fiction, and the evolution of content warnings. Enjoy.
Notes on Erotic Fiction
Background: where I started.
I recall my earliest erotic fantasy from the age of six. I began having this recurring fantasy of a handsome executive in a fine suit and tie either stranded on a desert island, or trapped in a desert, forced to wear his suit and tie without any other clothing. Over the course of his ordeal, his suit would fray, ripping apart as his musculature grew. In my 20s, this fantasy would give rise to my "Walk in the Park" series, which is a set of musclegrowth wet-and-messy suit and tie stories that I have written and rewritten several times.
But, from the ages of 6 to 17, many of my erotic fantasies remained in my head. I was too afraid to write or draw them out. I would try on my father's suits and ties and his military dress uniforms, and even got caught once taking one of his dress uniforms into the shower. I was so terrified that I never tried it again--at least, not with his clothes. But, later on, I tried it with mine.
My first piece of erotica began when I was 17. It was a fantasy novel written from the point of view of a ranger/barbarian. I had been reading a lot of Jack London and Lord Byron at the time, so this character was very much a brooding, solitary, musclebound hero who grunted in monosyllables and showed a curious lack of interest in any kind of romantic connection. I drew pictures of him too, studying his anatomy meticulously, thinking about all of the handsome musclejocks who bullied me, how envious I was of their body hair and beards (which I still have never been able to grow). I completed two drafts of the novel, and it came out to about 250 pages. I didn't finish it until I was 27. But the further I wrote the character, the more aroused I felt by him. I wanted to be this character, and I refused to give myself permission to acknowledge that I was writing erotic fiction about an imaginary character, erotic fiction about a body type I knew I would never embody.
I considered that barbarian novel a "serious" piece of literature, but the more I tried to rescue it from my erotic impulses, the further it slipped. Fantasy musclebear fiction. That was how it started.
In 2004, when I was 21, I discovered online suit fetish porn. By that point, I had figured out that suits and ties aroused me like nothing else. MenAtPlay began as a forum for wet-and-messy suit and tie fetishists, and a portion of the forum allowed people to post erotic stories of their own. And so I began writing out a blue collar/white collar romance called "The Dandy and the Cub." It's a tale of a hunky musclecub construction worker who falls in love with a silver daddy bear of an architect (the "Dandy") who slowly takes him in, gets him to try on his first suit and tie, and it all gets rather steamy from there. The MenAtPlay guys (quite a few of whom I've become friends with over the years) ate it up. And so I tried something more bizarre and adventurous: a supernatural story in which a handsome asshole of a CEO walks through a city park one night and ends up getting teleported into a jungle populated by muscular brutes who shamble about in the remnants of their suits and ties, all in service of a powerful chieftain who lords it over them all. A riches-to-rags story with lots of mud and gunge, musclegrowth and clothing destruction. One of the MenAtPlay guys once described it as a "fucked up Narnia," which I took to be a high complement.
During my MenAtPlay time, I took inspiration from the illustrations of Etienne (who always has a thing for sheer socks and garters), as well as private conversations with followers. There was one MenAtPlay user who gave me the idea of doing a suited werewolf story, which later became "Good Ol' Beasts."
MenAtPlay, unfortunately, changed hands in my mid 20s. It was bought out by a mainstream porn studio, so the forums were wiped out to make room for--well--the more standard content that MenAtPlay produces today. So, around 28 or 29, I began migrating my fiction elsewhere. By that point, I discovered MuscleGrowth.org, and I decided to start revising my old suit fetish stories and add more musclegrowth elements. So that was when I took the MenAtPlay werewolf story and expanded it into my "Good Ol' Beasts" series. I also did a suit and tie musclegrowth series called "Power Tie," in which a news executive puts on a cursed tie that turns him into a hairy Nordic barbarian, complete with an extended hulkout sequence that I managed to draw out for nearly 10 pages.
My MenAtPlay and MuscleGrowth forum fictions were experimental and playful, and I remembered feeling validated as I explored these fantasies in writing. I didn't understand proper BDSM dynamics, though, so I ended up running into some problematic portrayals of dubious consent, slavery, and rape. In my late 20s, I began to realize that there were some serious problems in "A Walk in the Park" in particular, so I began taking down my pieces of fiction, scared that someone might find them and think that I was endorsing those violent behaviors. In my need to apologize for my glorification of toxic masculinity, I self-censored. So, around 2012, I took down my stories from MuscleGrowth.org and disappeared.
Yet the old desires persisted. I still fantasized about those stories. I still wanted to finish them. During my Tumblr days, I began writing small vignettes of flash fiction inspired by suit fetish pictures, and those spun out the stories further. Around 2015, I started an alternate Instagram just for suit fetish content, and my private conversations with suit fetishists continued to feed these fantasies. I exchanged drafts of my old stories privately with other guys, and even collaborated on some pieces with them, such as the "Workboots to Opera Pumps" (both here and here) series that I co-wrote with a sock fetish guy. Sometime during this Instagram phase, I met Nat, since his bondage fiction very much meets my dress code.
Fast forward to 2021. During the pandemic, my involvement with the Instagram suit fetishists really took off. I was juggling dozens of conversations a day, sharing my fiction privately with guys I met there, until one day I tried logging in, only to find that my alternate Instagram had been reported and banned. So I started up another account, but this time I took a page from Nat's playbook and started a separate blog of my own, one that would not need to depend on the whims of Tumblr or Instagram or other social media platforms' "community guidelines." My blog became a place for me to collect and archive the "origin stories" of other suit fetishists, as well as a place for me to begin revising and reposting my old fiction.
My work responsibilities have really ramped up these past few years, and my involvement with the leather scene has prompted me to devote my energy more to in-person connections than to social media these days. I still try to write when I can. Many of my story drafts start off as horny conversations I have with followers: with their consent, I privately save our conversations and begin spinning out the scenario from choice lines that I wrote, or that they wrote. I like using those social interactions as inspiration.
The nature of my work is very seasonal, so there are entire six- to eight-month stretches when I can't really devote my energy to writing. During the summer, though, I get to refocus. My fiction is always very long-form, often involving heavy amounts of revision and editing as I study my own descriptions and dialogue, trying to find ways to express the same images without using repetitive language. For a while, I wanted my fiction to try to model the kinds of consent and mutually safe power dynamics that I wished I had known about in my 20s. However, these last few years, I've grown fond of just letting the dirty sleaze of it all come through. Content warnings have helped me establish the line between representation and endorsement. And, as my own exploration of the leather community grows, I find that I have a better sense of how other erotic writers have handled problematic content.
The taboo is what fascinates us. Yes, we should model safety and consent in real life. But sometimes we need an outlet for pure, filthy fantasy. So I'm still using my fiction to explore and push those boundaries.
What makes decent erotica is fundamentally the same as what makes decent fiction: 1.) dialogue, 2.) character development, and 3.) a slice of life.
Dialogue.
Most guys who send me pieces of their erotica don't seem to understand how human beings communicate. I've seen way too many stories in which characters don't actually say anything, and the writer just gets carried away in describing what he (always he in this case) thinks of as "hot." Descriptions are not a replacement for plot. My early fiction from my musclegrowth days certainly got carried away with excessive description, so I had to do a lot of work to figure out how to make dialogue convincing and realistic. For me, descriptions are easy: I can pound out a 250-word description of a suit and hover over every last lavish detail of the guy's outfit. But dialogue for me feels like chess. I really have to struggle and labor over it to make it sound real. And I admire it when writers can do dialogue well.
Character development.
Most guys who send me pieces of their erotica also don't fundamentally think of their characters as human beings. They're sex toys, stand-ins for whatever desires they wish to project onto them. And it shows. I find myself more drawn to the interior states of my characters. What are they feeling? What drew them to this dirty thing to begin with? How do they discover their kinks? Since I myself am still very much growing and discovering my own, I like to replicate that "Holy shit this is hot!" state of mind as much as I can.
Slice of life.
Most guys who send me pieces of erotica do very little to provide a sense of place or time. The characters just dick around and eventually fuck and that's that. There's no sense of where these characters have been, or where they're going. There's no sense of who they are, or the world they inhabit. There's no sense that sex has any meaning outside of pleasure. There's no sense that sex means intimacy, and that such moments of intimacy are rare and precious in an increasingly hostile world.
Even if erotic stories verge into fantasy--which is not a problem by itself--there needs to be a sense that the fantasy is anchored to some kind of external reality. Fantasy has to exist in relationship to reality. I need there to be a sense of what need or desire this fantasy fulfills, why its writer or its characters need this fantasy to exist.
One of my favorite things, though, is when there's an "afterglow" scene. I don't like it when the cumshot is the last frame, so to speak. I want there to be some sense that these characters will see each other again, or some sense that they'll remember the encounter. That, to me, is an often-missed moment of intimacy. I also really enjoy it when the characters have to put together the remnants of their suits and ties to face the vanilla world again. I find something really hot about the walk of shame, especially when it becomes a walk of pride.
Content warnings.
I spent a great deal of time back in 2023 and 2024 going through my old blog posts and stories and adding content warnings to each one. As I wrote one content warning after another, I began to notice a shift in my language: my first few content warnings came across as defensive, apologetic. Yet, as I grew into the practice of writing them time and again—as I grew into the practice of reading content that features content warnings—I started to notice that the defensive, apologetic tone came across as contemptuous. It was as though I was kink-shaming myself. As kinksters, many of us are aware of the mantra of safe, sane, and consensual. There is also the related mantra of risk-aware consensual kink: if you sign up to go on the scary ride, you consent to be scared.
I began to realize that writing these content warnings had less to do with apologizing for my kinks, and more to do with establishing consent with the reader. “This is what you’re signing up for. This is what you’re about to read. Proceed at your own risk. And have fun.” This is a fine shade of nuance, to be sure. But it’s a necessary one. And it’s a crucial one.
The trigger warning that defends or apologizes is one that begs, one that reeks of desperation. And desperation is not a great way to attract a person’s attention. Most often we associate masculinity with confidence and security. A person who is self-assured needs not beg, or defend, or apologize. A person who is self-assured needs not resort to desperation. Rather, a person who is self-assured simply tells it like it is. “This is kinky in the following ways. If you like that, keep reading.” It’s less of an apology or defense, and more of an offer. “Here’s what’s on the table. Here’s what I’ve got for you. You can take it or leave it. Up to you.” And so a content warning is analogous to what it must be like to pass the “fuck it” point: there’s an analogy between a content warning and how to live without apology. “This is who I am. I’m kinky. I’m queer. You can deal with it or leave me alone.”
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