Teens craft sexy stories online
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SINGAPORE – Since the age of 15, Jane (not her real name) has been writing erotic fiction and posting it online.
She is 19 now and has just graduated from a junior college in Singapore. Her characters, mainly male K-Pop stars she idolises, have sexual relations with each other under a fan-fiction category known as slash, in which two male characters engage in sexual relationships.
In one of her 10 stories, Jane describes popular K-Pop star Eunhyuk as “licking the shell of his lover’s ear sensually” and whispering: “So are you ready for the experience of a lifetime?”
In another, she paints a scene where K-Pop star Donghae “trails his fingers up the line of his lover’s spine”. The lover, “tired of being teased, grabbed his tousled hair and proceeded to attach his mouth to his”.
Singaporeans as young as Jane are not only uploading their stories on websites that host fan fiction, like Asianfanfics and Archive of Our Own, but also reading them avidly. Each of Jane’s stories have been read at least 2,000 times by people around the globe.
At United States-based website Archive of Our Own, an average of 121 Singaporeans visited at any one time in the past year, up from 89 in 2012.
The number of visits from Singapore to Asianfanfics, another US-based website, has more than tripled in the past three years, from 3.7 million to 12 million visits annually.
Fan fiction was thrust into the public spotlight by best-selling book Fifty Shades Of Grey, which started off as a fan-fiction piece based on Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, the main characters in the movie Twilight. The author, E. L. James, later re-named the characters and extended the story.
Writers say that sex scenes are an avenue for “sexual exploration”.
“It’s a way for me to express my attraction towards my idols,” Jane said. “The idea of them being together in a sexual way thrills me. So I write it out and it’s a way to realise my fantasies.”
This was even as she was “disgusted” and “shocked” when she first read sexually explicit fan fiction, known as smut, after a friend introduced it to her.
However, another fan-fiction writer, who wants to be known only as Rose, 18, said: “Fan fiction provides better sex education than all the school courses put together.” The junior-college student wrote her first fan fiction based on the movie Harry Potter when she was 12 years old.
Dr Carol Balhetchet, director of youth services at Singapore Children’s Society, said: “Youth who write smut may feel gratified to have come up with something that challenges the boundaries of social acceptance. By writing such material, they take risks and hence get a thrill out of it.”
But Madam Chan Wai Ning, 49, housewife and mother of one, opposes the reading or writing of smut by youth.
“I don’t think that youth are mentally or emotionally mature enough to handle such sexually explicit material,” she said.