My Dad, the Pornographer

February 6, 2015 12:37 AM

In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a book across the room and told her he could do better. Mom suggested he do so. According to her, the tipping point for Dad’s full commitment to porn, five years later, was my orthodontic needs.

If people know of Andrew J. Offutt, it's as a science fiction and fantasy writer. However, it turns out he was much more successfull as a porn writer back in the days you could still make a good living writing softcore porn novels. For the New York Times, his son Chris Offutt, goes through his legacy and finds some real surprises.
posted by MartinWisse (36 comments total)

The maps shown in the article are somewhat modified version's of Robert E Howard's Hyborea, where Conan did all his adventuring.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 12:50 AM on February 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

Jesus H., that got dark.
posted by brennen at 12:56 AM on February 6, 2015 [7 favorites]

Yeah, I was reading this on the train this morning and almost missed my stop.
posted by nevercalm at 1:03 AM on February 6, 2015

After five decades, he died in harness.

Considering he authored a lot of BDSM stuff, for a second I thought this sentence was literal.
posted by GrumpyDan at 1:55 AM on February 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Very fascinating, thanks for sharing.
posted by reedcourtneyj at 2:37 AM on February 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

This would explain why the Shadowspawn stories in the Thieve's World anthologies got more and more Freaky-Deek as the series went on. I kind of want to read those Spaceways books now.
posted by KingEdRa at 3:38 AM on February 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Wow, I could smell the dust and dank in that office.

Also,

With the proceeds from porn, she’d gone to college for a philosophy degree and a master’s in English.

Given her support of the venture, and her own professional life, it seems to me his mother is probably another fascinating story.
posted by allthinky at 4:37 AM on February 6, 2015 [7 favorites]

Chris Offutt is a damn good author in his own right.
posted by jonmc at 5:19 AM on February 6, 2015

I have read accounts by practitioners of the modern equivalent -- self-publishing erotica on Amazon. Every possible kink gets explored, with the trend du jour seeming to be interspecies books, whether it be centaurs, werecows, hermaphrodite mummies or Gronkowskis.

I have been tempted to try to make some pocket money that way; I am a writer by trade, I have placed in Bulwer-Lytton (only a Dishonorable Mention, but I hope to climb that ladder to the top some day), and I have the right sense of humor for such an endeavor.

The usual things have gotten in my way: the amount of work and time involved, as this article demonstrates nicely, plus the look on my wife's face when she explains to her parents that "my hubby's an author now!" and then gets asked what I've written. There is also the fear that, as with being a drug user, Tea Party rally attendee or Cubs fan, that dabbling is very difficult -- once your toe is dipped in such a pool, you either dive in headlong or run away screaming.
posted by delfin at 5:34 AM on February 6, 2015 [6 favorites]

I read the article yesterday and found it unexpectedly captivating. I realized partway through that I have actually read a couple of his father's smut books almost three decades ago, the science fiction series with the inter species sex. I don't recall them as incredibly erotic, but they were definitely quite forthright in their exploration of quite kinky themes. Reading about his systems for being able to write the books so quickly and efficiently was interesting. He was a good enough writer that I wonder what he might have written with more time and a less production-oriented approach.

It was sad how guilty he felt over the comics he was compelled to draw, though. Clearly he was a troubled person with a lot of issues, and this article felt like it scratched just the surface of that. And I agree with the comment above that the mother sounds at least as interesting a character -- I assume that this article will appear later in book form, and hopefully she gets more space in that longer version.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:07 AM on February 6, 2015

I read this the other day. It really ate into my productivity at work.
posted by dortmunder at 6:09 AM on February 6, 2015

Interesting and powerful, thanks for posting this, MartinWisse.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:30 AM on February 6, 2015

Yeah, this is a really great article.

Dad missed his attentive audience, but the old ways no longer worked. One by one we did the worst thing possible: We ignored him. I believe this hurt him deeply, in a way he didn’t fully comprehend and we certainly could not fathom. In turn, he ignored us.

This is like a whole Franzen novel in four sentences.
posted by No-sword at 7:09 AM on February 6, 2015 [24 favorites]

Metafilter: As with being a drug user, Tea Party rally attendee or Cubs fan, dabbling is very difficult -- once your toe is dipped in such a pool, you either dive in headlong or run away screaming.
posted by 445supermag at 7:38 AM on February 6, 2015 [9 favorites]

I have placed in Bulwer-Lytton (only a Dishonorable Mention, but I hope to climb that ladder to the top some day)

Shouldn't that be the bottom?
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:27 AM on February 6, 2015

"The era of written pornography was over," writes the guy who apparently hasn't heard about this whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing.
posted by Doktor Zed at 8:52 AM on February 6, 2015

"The era of written pornography was over," writes the guy who apparently hasn't heard about this whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing.

That's kind of the amazing thing about this. His dad had the sensibility and basic writing ability to have been James Patterson or Michael Crighton, and the discipline to figure out a system for producing acres of text... but was kind of hamstrung by his own fetish. He wanted to make something that felt shameful and degrading to him, rather than something which would have made him rich.
posted by ennui.bz at 8:57 AM on February 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

Fifty Shades doesn't bill itself as pornography, which is good, because it isn't pornography. I doubt it even counts as "erotica." It shouldn't even count as "women's a-little-bit-sexy romance" because there was way, way better stuff in my dormroommate's vast collection of women's lightly eroticized romance pulp in the mid-eighties. Rosamind or Rosalynd somebody had some fun ideas.

The dude did get rich, writing what he wanted to write. Who wants more James Patterson or Michael godhelpus Crighton? He put his wife through graduate school, and produced and nurtured Chris Offutt. Hello? Chris Offutt!
posted by Don Pepino at 9:03 AM on February 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Huh, I encountered the Spaceways books in a used book store back when I was 13 or 14. I don't think the old woman who owned the store realized they were porn in the disguise of SF, she didn't even blink when a 13 year old boy spent all his cash on the stack of them.

I'd forgotten about them until I read this article.
posted by sotonohito at 9:05 AM on February 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

See? SEE? He helped out 13-yr-olds in need. Can Michael Crighton say he did any good for anybody ever, no.
posted by Don Pepino at 9:09 AM on February 6, 2015 [5 favorites]

Although the part where he tricks the publisher into buying his manuscripts by changing pseudonyms and other artful dodges is pure gold:
To get a different font, he bought a new ball for his Selectric typewriter. He changed his usual margins, used cheaper paper and churned out two books.

His dad sounds like a character in a Tom Robbins novel (albeit one that ends in a Not-At-All-Tom-Robbins fashion).
posted by eclectist at 9:23 AM on February 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

1. I met Andy Offutt a few times in the 1970s. He was omnipresent at the cons in those days. He seemed like an OK guy, but then I didn't have to live with him.

2. I fondly remember Offutt's story "For Value Received" in the second Dangerous Visions collection. It has perhaps not aged well.

3. I haven't seen an actual "porn novel" since the 1970s either. When I worked in hotels, we used to find them left behind in rooms. I guess it's the kind of thing you buy when traveling, but don't bring home. Young people reading Kurt Vonnegut describe the career of Kilgore Trout must wonder what he's talking about.

The maps shown in the article are somewhat modified version's of Robert E Howard's Hyborea, where Conan did all his adventuring.

Offutt wrote a number of legit Conan and Cormac novels, which of course all take place in Hyborean Age.
 
posted by Herodios at 9:32 AM on February 6, 2015

See? SEE? He helped out 13-yr-olds in need.

Personally, I bought the Robert Shea/Robert Anton Wilson illuminantus! trilogy, which was nicely filthy for a growing boy.

Apple polishing has never meant quite the same thing to me after reading that.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:37 AM on February 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Fifty Shades doesn't bill itself as pornography, which is good, because it isn't pornography. I doubt it even counts as "erotica."

Fifty Shades, however little sex or BDSM it actually depicts, is merely the mainstream tip of a contemporary iceberg that Ouffat fils is underestimating. Whether it's called "smut", "mommy porn", "slash fic", "erotica", "romance", or however one classifies the likes of "Moan for Bigfoot" and its cottage industry on Kindle Direct Publishing, there's no end in sight for written pornography.
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:45 AM on February 6, 2015 [4 favorites]

After five decades, he died in harness.

Considering he authored a lot of BDSM stuff, for a second I thought this sentence was literal.

I think the ambiguity of the image was intentional.
posted by Flashman at 9:58 AM on February 6, 2015

I think the ambiguity of the image was intentional.

Oh yeah, for sure. Just not literal.
posted by GrumpyDan at 12:55 PM on February 6, 2015

Oh wow, y'all thinking I Fucked Bigfoot is modern erotica publishing are...misinformed. It's certainly lucrative and everpresent in the niche kink stuff, but there are actual porn novels published, in a variety of genres, and it's mostly women. Women writers, publishers and so on. Black Lace in the 90s, Cleis Press now, there are absolutely explicit erotic novels being published on paper for purchase.

Go into a major bookstore, you see Sylvia Day? That's erotica. It doesn't have tits on the cover (probably a feather, or a hand, or a chess piece) so it's not as obvious but really - you not seeing it doesn't mean it is invisible. Women have been reading, writing, publishing and buying sexually explicit material for decades, y'all are focusing on a really dudely vision of sex texts.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:02 PM on February 6, 2015 [2 favorites]

Women have been reading, writing, publishing and buying sexually explicit material for decades, y'all are focusing on a really dudely vision of sex texts.

My impression is that ebooks and audiobooks have been an incredible business pathway for smut, because people can consume them on their commutes without any external evidence that they are enjoying porn.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:52 PM on February 6, 2015

Women have been reading, writing, publishing and buying sexually explicit material for decades, y'all are focusing on a really dudely vision of sex texts.

I was also disappointed that the author completely overlooked this fact, in his memoir of his father's writing career.
posted by Flashman at 4:11 PM on February 6, 2015

I think ebooks have changed some of the lifecycle but there's a bunch in print. And I was mostly responding to the discussion here, as jarring as I found the 'no text porn after the 70s because VCR' bit - parts of the industry may have felt that as a blow but not all of it.
posted by geek anachronism at 4:23 PM on February 6, 2015

Hopefully in the book version the author spells it out more clearly, but I agree that the difference is in the market for written porn for men, which seems to largely not exist now compared to what was spent a few decades ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the total smut market was larger, but that's because of so much reading, writing, and buying by women.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:33 PM on February 6, 2015

My impression is that ebooks and audiobooks have been an incredible business pathway for smut, because people can consume them on their commutes without any external evidence that they are enjoying porn.

At the very least it really helps explain Abraham Lincoln, Fuck Lord of the Moon.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:44 PM on February 6, 2015

Dad believed he’d influenced the industry to the point where his style was consistently copied, the proof being that other authors had begun writing knowledgeably of the clitoris, which he believed he pioneered.

This is the best sentence that has ever appeared in the NYT.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:11 PM on February 6, 2015 [6 favorites]

Things are never simple when another person is involved, especially those you have know from the very beginning. I am very curious about his father's admission to darker thoughts and basically changing his mind as to how he was going to go about expressing them. I am glad he chose to write about it instead living out that one time. America is interesting in how it's chosen to manifest itself via popular, all be it underground, literature, it managed to make itself known though the mediums that, for lack of a better term, nurtured it for profit. I think this country willfully tries to forget how really weird it's always been. There is no shame in the weird game.

Also, this family reads like a domestic Philip K Dick novel, which I heartily approve. Come to think of it, Philip K Dick lived a similar situation as far as sci-fi writer dad with crazy shit going on at the same time you have to grow up deal.

I'm looking forward to the book involved in his endeavor.
posted by reedcourtneyj at 5:34 PM on February 6, 2015

Florence King wrote pornography when she needed some bucks. Her recollections figure in some of her fiction.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:58 PM on February 7, 2015

Herodios: "I fondly remember Offutt's story "For Value Received" in the second Dangerous Visions collection. It has perhaps not aged well."

"Dangerous Visions" and "hasn't aged well" are basically synonymous.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:30 PM on February 9, 2015 [1 favorite]