In recent days I've seen an article about how the California wine industry is coming apart because the young adults don't drink wine now ... and at the same time, many new indicators of a trend I've been noticing on the steady rise for a couple of years: the young adults are fucking prudes and they are uncomfortable with all adult content.

The first of those two things is kind of a lie, or at the very least an oversimplification. The second one is a real problem that also happens to affect me personally.

The thing about wine is, yeah, some of it is they've decided drinking is bad, and some of it is that they're stoners, not drinkers -- the gradual legalization of cannabis has eaten into the alcohol market. I personally am never going to be a pot person. First, I don't smoke anything (I have absolutely zero history of it; I've never so much as smoked a single cigarette), and second, whatever the THC ooze is that they extract to put in candies or baked goods, I can smell it and I bet I could taste it too. And if it tastes like pot smells, then that's a deal-breaker for me. Gross shit. I want to actually enjoy my recreational chemicals.

But the wine makers have also made some bad choices -- chasing the market in ways they probably shouldn't have -- and, also, let's face it: A whole bunch of people who are in their househunting years just can't fucking afford to drink Big Wine. Hell, I can't afford to drink Big Wine very often. In our house, cocktails are to unwind before dinner and wine is to go with food -- I can't tell you when I last drank a glass of wine as its own thing -- and we probably couldn't afford to have wine with every dinner even if we wanted to. As it stands, we are incredibly fortunate that we have a liquor store down the street with an apparently genius wine buyer who finds an endless selection of $12-18 dollar bottles that are of good to excellent quality.

In other words, I think the kids might learn to appreciate wine if there were more drinkable cheap wines to have with dinner available to them, just as they might learn to appreciate an occasional cocktail if they could get decent booze at affordable prices. They might even learn how to drink something that isn't Cheesecake Factory-sweet.

But that's all amusing grousing and idle woolgathering. The smut problem is much more serious. One reason it's serious is that we on one side of it -- the correct side of it -- have so few allies. The Youths who are scared shitless of adult content for some inexplicable reason don't just have to go to the bluenoses and zealots for support anymore. They can go to the Republicans, who collectively cannot get off unless it's accompanied by a large dose of shame, and thus chase their porn in private and deny it while publicly trying to destroy it for everyone. They can go to the soccer moms, whose view of sex tends to be fairly dismal anyway for a number of complex and flawed societal reasons which are out of scope of this rant, and who are happy to fall for "think of the children" because they, like most misguided parents (which is to say, nine-tenths of the parents in the English-speaking world), want to shield their children from any sexuality until they reach their majority ... at which point they are thrown out into the world with no preparation in this area whatsoever, and immediately fuck up their relationships, their sex lives, their marriages, etc. It's the American way, apparently.

Yeah, that paragraph was a lot. I'm leaving it as is because it shows you just how very angry I get every time this topic comes around. Imagine if you had no allies. Imagine if this was a shadow hovering over your friendships because some people you could otherwise trust with your life go inexplicably weird and sour on this point. Imagine if you heard an endless chorus of "Oh, my teenager would probably love that story but I won't show it to them because it's got a sex scene," from people you would otherwise have thought were sane. All the fucking time.

I can't tell you how tired I get of parents who don't want their children seeing any sex simply because they don't want to have to explain it to their kids. They don't want to explain it to their kids because they aren't comfortable with that. They aren't comfortable with that because they don't know how. They don't know how because they weren't taught how -- not by their parents, who were exactly the same, not by any part of the educational system, etc.

I know, I know, in the grand scheme of things, with literally everything else around us being destroyed faster than we can react to it, this may seem unimportant. But, y'know, that's what you think only because you don't write stories with sex in them.

You don't realize there is a war on. You know about the other wars our Asshole Element are fighting, but you don't know about this one, because it's in an arena you try to think about even less than you try to think about trans folk ... which is saying a lot, because my cis friends are all* collectively putting their fingers in their ears and going neener neener can't hear you about what's happening to trans folk right now.

Anyway, so, what you don't know is that in addition to all the "eww, ick, sex" you get, both from the people who don't know any better and from the people who do know better but find it politically useful to bluenose it up, the war is also going on at the commercial level.

One day I'll retell the story of Hotel Eleusis and how you can't reputably sell a game or a story if it has any explicit content in it. The situation has gotten worse since then.

The fulfillment people -- the companies that actually process your transaction when you buy something online -- were always jumpy about porn sites (their rationale was that many of them were so fly-by-night that they were a bad financial risk, which dodges the basic question of why the porn sites were forced to be so fly-by-night in the first place). But when Apple went on an actual purge of adult content from their app store, that really started an avalanche. Now the fulfillment companies had an even better excuse not to touch adult content.

I buy adult resources for my renders. I put kinky scenes in my stories and these are depicted visually. I actually have a story need from time to times for, say, a humanoid character with a realistic canine penis.

If you ran away from that sentence, how about you grow the fuck up?

There have always been only a couple of places to get something like that, and they are all having trouble right now, because they can't get fulfillment. They are having trouble selling these resources because they have no one who is willing to take the money. It's seriously bad, folks. It's bad enough that a couple of weeks ago I was "I'd better buy these things now because I'm not sure how long this site will be able to stay in business."

And if your reaction is, "Well, I think the world would be a better place for not having any sites where artists can buy dog penises," 1) you, sir or madam, are officially Part of the Problem, and 2) how about you grow the fuck up?

My smut does not hurt you. It does not affect your life in any way. I don't piss in your soup, but you love to piss in mine -- or at least are willing to look the other way and countenance it when other people do the pissing.

I'll tell you another one: Your kids know about sex already. But if you didn't guide them, they got a kind of warped version. (Maybe even if you did guide them, because unfortunately, the odds are you got a kind of warped version yourself. Sorry. It's probably too late for you. Might not be too late for your kids.)

And if your kids became adults with weird and counterproductive ideas about sex, it's largely because you didn't teach them better when they were teenagers. An ounce of "Yeah, that's fun to look at but it's not what actual sex is like, or should be like," or "That's fine, but it's something many people would find very strange, so be careful about it," or "That's OK in a fantasy but it is something that should never happen in the real world," or "You can always say 'that's not for me' and walk away, but you shouldn't try to piss in someone else's soup" would be worth a pound of cure.

But I suppose I can't blame you for being unable to pass on lessons you didn't learn yourself.

This whole thing pisses me off well beyond coherence. I literally go into a steaming rage.

Anyway, you can add that to the growing list of reasons I suspect I won't be able to do the comic-style stories for all that much longer, at which point I'll probably just stop showing stories to anyone because there's very little point in doing that with prose, and anyway we're getting so prose with kink or sex has only AO3 as a refuge.

If your attitude is "good riddance, no great loss," you can fuck all the way off into the sun.