J.B. Rogers

Surprise, surprise - I’m posting something that isn’t smut! I guess you could say it’s meta-smut, though; today’s short rant is about the “billionaire” genre of erotic fiction. Sometimes, it seems like that’s all that’s out there - sexy young people with billion-dollar bank accounts and kinky desires, moping and alone until Our Hero(ine) comes along and all the magic happens.

Let me throw a couple of numbers at you. According to Forbes, there are less than 2,000 billionaires in the world. Of those, less than 50 are in their sexual prime (40 years old or younger). These are public figures; they don’t have the luxury of anonymity. You’re not going to run into them at the local hardware store.

It’s very tempting to use wealth as a way to get around real-world constraints when writing smut. You don’t have to worry about little things like going to sleep so you can get to work in the morning. You can conjure up a palatial estate, extensive wardrobes filled with expensive clothes, dungeons filled with whatever kinky pleasures your heart (or any other part of your body) desires, and you don’t have to explain where it comes from or who takes care of it. You can put your heroine in a dress worth thousands of dollars and have the rugged hero rip it off of her, and nobody cares about the expense.

It’s too easy.

If you can throw money at any obstacle and make it go away, where’s the conflict? All that’s left is the “I can’t buy love” story, and that gets old in a hurry. Further, a lot of really rich people don’t want love, not in the Pretty Woman “I just met you and I can’t live without you” sense. The truly rich always have to consider what could happen if things go sour. Yes, this woman may intoxicate you, but how bad is the hangover when she walks out - and how much of your estate will she take with her? Then there’s the small army of servants and bodyguards and lawyers and accountants… forget about privacy, and those are just the people you pay to know what you’re up to. Add TMZ and random stalkers and “old friends” you went to school with, and the idea of having a hidden personal life goes up in smoke.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some good stories to tell about the problems of finding a soulmate while having fame or an embarrassingly large fortune - but how often do you see the downsides of wealth show up in a story in any meaningful way? Too often, it feels tacked on, and that’s just sloppy.

I’m not above using characters who have some money in the bank, but I draw the line at billionaires. Everything I want to explore on the subject of wealth and love and sex can be done with someone who “only” has a few million dollars in the bank. When you go too far above that, you lose that anonymity that I feel lies at the heart of good smut - the idea that this could really happen to someone. The fantasy that if you’re in the right place at the right time, maybe the right person will want to sweep you off your feet and take you away from your ordinary life.

Billionaires just aren’t credible for that. There aren’t enough of them. Give me someone with a well-paying job or a low-end millionaire instead. A small-business owner, for instance - maybe a person who makes good money giving solid financial advice. There’s a character who can have flexible hours; they’re on call, and they can probably work from anywhere. Perhaps one of his clients is grateful enough for a well-placed tip to let him borrow a spare mansion for the weekend…

All I’m saying is, let’s get inventive. Don’t use “billionaire” as if it only means “rich,” and don’t solve all your characters’ problems by throwing money at them. Give them more of a challenge, and your readers will get a better story.