Writing Hygiene

Lightly edited from the video above. The video is the definitive version. This page exists for readers, searchers, and citers.

Hi, my name's Carter and I talk about butt stuff in books. What can I say? It's a great hobby.

In the first video in this series, I talked about the many ways that people who are engaging in butt stuff might get prepared for it. That includes diet, hygiene, protection, and foreplay. Today I want to talk about hygiene specifically, and the many ways that authors could approach describing that in their books. In the previous video in this series, which is in a playlist that you can hit at the bottom of this video, I talk about the internal and external ways that you might want to clean the area before use. Today I'm not going to get into those specific details. Instead I'm going to talk about how you might go about describing that.

And before I do that, I want to address a concern that I've seen raised numerous times when I've talked about butt stuff in books. And that is that preparation isn't sexy. In a romance, people want to get swept away and have a romantic butt stuff fantasy. And preparation would get in the way of that. I strongly disagree with that perspective. Claiming that preparation for butt stuff is inherently unsexy to me is a failure of imagination. It fails to account for the excitement that the person who is getting prepared might be having. Why are they getting prepared in the first place if they are not excited for the encounter to come? And a partner who is waiting for someone else to get prepared could be experiencing heightened sexual tension waiting for that moment to begin.

Nevertheless, authors might not want to get into all the details and mechanics of that preparation. So here are a number of ways that I think authors could approach that in their books.

First, just do it – and you can dial up or down how much description you want to have. One line from the person who is about to receive the butt stuff could suffice, and that would be, "I'm ready." To a butt stuff novice, or someone who may not be aware of the preparation that might be involved in that, they might just interpret that as saying, "I'm ready for this encounter." For those of us who have more experience with butt stuff, we can interpret that as saying, "I have made myself ready for this encounter." The line could also come from the person who is about to deliver the butt stuff pleasure. They could say, "Are you ready?" You can wrap that idea within a consent conversation, which I think is always great to have in these types of books, and that kind of thing can be pretty sexy. Like, "Are you ready for this?" "I'm ready."

Another way that you could handle butt stuff preparation is through what I'll call ellipsis. A character can go off screen and come back, and you don't have to say what it is that they did. M.A. Wardell's Teacher of the Year is a great example of this. In a butt stuff scene where Marvin is on the receiving end, he goes to the bathroom and we don't really follow his POV into it, and then he comes back. We don't know what he did in there. Maybe he just washed his hands, or maybe he spent a little bit of time in there and got ready. In a subsequent encounter where Olan is on the receiving end of the butt stuff pleasure, he merely says, "I've been practicing for this," and the scene starts later in the day. So we can assume that if he's practiced this and he has been doing his research on this, he probably got ready for this encounter at some point.

And that gets to a third way that you can handle this, which is the scene could just come up at the beginning of the encounter, or just before the encounter, and we have no idea what happened beforehand. Maybe we would call this fading up on the butt stuff.

In both ellipsis and fading up, we are essentially implicitly acknowledging that preparation happened, or at least giving plausible deniability that it could have happened. That way readers who might be offended by that for some reason, or turned off by it, don't have to deal with it, and readers who appreciate that could imagine that it did happen.

What I would not recommend doing is having no explicit acknowledgement of preparation and no plausible deniability. And that's what happens in a book like Him, where one of the characters' first time bottoming experiences happens after we follow them through a whole day. The scenes never fade up or down, the characters are never going on and off screen for us to imagine that they got ready. And this gets into a point that I made in my first video, and I probably will make in every one of these videos, which is what preparation happens needs to be driven by your characters. In Him, you have an out gay man and a bi man who is having his first time. You would imagine that the out gay man who has experience with butt stuff might be helping out the man who is having his very first time, and that doesn't really happen. That to me is a failure to fully imagine what these characters' lives would be like. Or that it's an unintentional choice, which is to say it imbues one of the characters with qualities that I don't think the authors intended. In this case, that might be a lack of caring and gentleness on the part of the more experienced partner.

Let's wrap this up with more talk about intentionality.

And that leads to the final way you could describe prep, which is you don't. That could be because it's two people having their first time and they don't know what they're doing. Or it could be because you have an "I know my own body" bottom. Perhaps the person who is going to be on the receiving end of the butt stuff already took care of business earlier in the day; they know they're clean down there, they know their body, they have the right diet, they have the right practices, they know they're good to go. That's very different from just skipping the prep. And it also requires a certain kind of character. You need a character who is very experienced with butt stuff and knows their own body. And that is certainly not what's happening in a book like Him, or many other M/M romances that totally skip prep.

I'm sure there's plenty of other ways that you could describe or not describe prep for butt stuff. These four methods – direct acknowledgement, ellipses, fading up, and intentional skipping – are just what I came up with. If you have examples of either these methods or other ways that you've seen prep for butt stuff happen in books, I would love to see that in the comments.

And my final piece of advice, which is kind of the same thing I've been saying this whole time, is just be intentional about it. Think about their characters, their experiences, who they are. Do the research on this if you don't have direct experience with butt stuff, and then make a choice. Don't have a choice made for you and your characters. Don't just let those things slip in the back door.