Well on our way into the 21st century, it is hard to imagine a world in which we don’t have millions of porn videos at our fingertips any time of the day or night. We were fortunate enough to be born at a time where, with nothing more than the click of a button, we are able to access a near-infinite number of sexy sluts ready to please. We can even throw on a pair of virtual reality goggles and watch as our living rooms instantly turn into porn sets and supermodels appear before us, ready to suck our dicks for free. Ah, we are too fucking lucky.

This, of course, was not always the case. Have you ever wondered how lonely fappers such as yourselves got off before the advent of video cameras? How about before the film? It’s not like people just didn’t please themselves way back then to things other than their own memories and imaginations. Oh, they most certainly did. The only difference being that, instead of busting nuts to photos and videos of naked girls, they busted nuts to books.

The tradition of erotic literature goes all the way back to the days of ancient Sumer. One of the first known iterations of literary smut came in the form of a cycle of poems that revolved around the goddess Inanna getting fucked silly by her consort, Demuzid the Sheppard. I bet that shit blew the minds of ancient Sumerian men of the time. Fucking an actual goddess? Now that’s the dream.

Many examples of erotic poetry also survived Ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek poets Straton of Sardis and Sappho of Lesbos (lol) were world-renowned for their groundbreaking erotic verse, and the tradition of erotic prose found its origins in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, of course, erotic fiction is a giant in the world of publishing, and the genre enjoys an avid and active base of underground amateur authors and readers as well.

In other words, the ancient tradition of erotic lit is alive and well in 2018, even though there are millions of websites dedicated to hardcore porn. Some people just prefer to read their porn, as opposed to watching it. I wonder if many erotic lit fans are those people you hear about who identify as sapiosexual (they find the intellect hotter than the physical appearance). At any rate, there are plenty of sites to check out if you get off primarily on the story.

Storiesonline.net has a somewhat deceitfully innocent-sounding name. I could see a lot of people visiting this site, expecting to find some Hemingway shorts, The Tempest, or maybe some Dickens to enjoy. Instead, though, what they will find are plenty of dicks enjoying short skirts and temptation. Stories Online is a huge database of erotic literature—full books, short stories, and nonfiction all revolving around the oldest of human pursuits: sex.