“If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works, you’re a hack.”
-Kelly Sue DeConnick
Definition
Narratophilia is a fetish where someone finds words and stories to be sexually arousing. Often it is actuated by a partner telling dirty or obscene stories or using dirty words. For some narratophiliacs even writing dirty words can be arousing.
Erotic History
Though narratophilia is more than just erotic stories, it typically concerns dirty stories. A lot of dirty stories have their history in erotica. Something that was written hundreds of years ago may sound like tame erotica or barely arousing now, but at the time could have been very taboo. The history of erotica shows us that people have been enjoying, to various degrees, sexual and dirty stories since storytelling first began.
In the 17th and 18th centuries there were a number of poets who became quite famous for their dirty verses. In the 1600s John Wilmon, Earl of Rochester, was infamous for his obscene verses. Some of his poems were so obscene that they continued to be censored until 1953. He is so infamous that a movie called the Libertine, starring Johnny Depp, was made about his life. So popular was dirty writing that an underground magazine circulated in the mid-late 1800s called The Pearl. The Pearl was a dirty magazine that featured stories and images that ranged from erotic to obscene.
A Movie in the Mind
Obscene sexual storytelling is akin to watching a pornographic movie for a narratophiliac. The stories can be told in person, over the phone, or even on a recording. But the most affecting is by a live person on the phone or in person.