Literotica
is one of the oldest web sites devoted to
erotic literature, both
with plot and
without. Started in 1998, it is now home to close to a quarter of a million individual pieces of written fiction
* counting poems and the chapters of multi-part stories as individual pieces
and has an Alexa rating of
1,170
. It's the "America Online" of porn stories in that most people start there, some never leave, and
lots of them are idiots.
Content is user-submitted and screened by the site's hard-working administrators, Laurel & Manu; only three things are hard rejects:
underage participants,
bestiality, and
excessive gruesomeness. This has more to do with liability than censorship; as the largest and most visible erotic-literature website on the Internet, Literotica will be the first target on the list the next time a Jack Thompson starts an anti-smut crusade. So they'd rather be safe rather than sorry. (There
are other websites out there if you want to read—or publish!—things Literotica won't touch, but some people have gone for years without figuring that out.)