Lush Stories

Lush Stories

It is impossible to write about any large erotic story site (as I’ve done twice before here at Noveltrove) without immediately confronting the question “Just how big is it?” Writers are trained to ask the “who, what, when, where, and why?” questions, and readers are trained to expect answers. So, when the first answer to “what?” is “a great big treasure-hoard of sex stories”, it’s natural enough that we would want firm numbers on the size of that hoard. Lush Stories acknowledges this need by putting its detailed up-to-the-minute stats right in the header:

Lush Stories Header

Upon first seeing these statistics, the most obviously important number is the total number of stories: well over forty-two thousand! But before we get into the details of that enormous collection of delicious smut, let’s consider the other statistics: they tell us that Lush Stories is a community as well as a story site, with active chat rooms, user blogs, a large and active forum, and user-uploaded albums for image sharing. Users can have profiles in which to share information about themselves, and there’s every sign that users follow each other on the site, leave comments, share favorite images in albums and comments, and generally hang out together on the site even when they aren’t writing or reading erotic stories. In other words, it’s an adult social network at least as much as it is an erotic story collection.

The stories themselves are divided into 39 categories (everything from “Anal” to “Wife Lovers”) that are individually searchable using the Lush Stories advanced search function:

The advanced search does, regrettably, have some sharp limitations; it seems to treat multiple keywords as an “OR” search, which means that if you type two keywords into the search box, it will return all of the stories that contain either keyword, which is much less useful than it might be. But, with fine-grained checkbox control over which categories to search, a single keyword is usually going to be enough. Even searching for relatively rare fetishes like figging delivers a good selection of results, like this erotic re-imagining of Beauty and The Beast:

He finished paring the ginger and held it up for her to see. The tip was rounded off at the top. The middle portion bulged out to about the width of a fat carrot before tapering down to a narrow neck. A flared base finished the shape.

Beast leaned close to her ear, and said, “My dear Beauty, I’m going to slide this here root deep into your ass. Do NOT push it out! Then, I plan on spanking those white ass cheeks until they are glowing red. The more you dance around and the tighter you clench your ass, you will be squeezing more and more juice from the ginger root. You know what it did to your lips; just think about what it’s going to do to your ass.”

No site is perfect, and I encountered several oddities and imperfections at Lush Stories that have tempted me into criticism. For one thing, as a membership-based community there are features that are only available to logged-in members. That’s obviously needed, if only to prevent spam and abuse from internet randos. Signup is, in any case, free, but it’s unclear at the time of setting up your free account what privileges the basic free membership confers. There are indications that bronze, silver, and gold membership levels exist beyond the basic free membership, but there’s no clear schedule available showing what membership levels are needed for which site privileges. If you’re an old internet cynic like myself, this uncertain state of affairs feels like a red flag for the sort of bait-and-switch marketing that gets you invested in the effort of going through the signup process before you discover what it’s going to cost to get the access you actually want.

On the other hand, there are (we are told) a third of a million members. Presumably that includes every inactive member who ever created a login, but even so, such a huge number invokes the wisdom of crowds, and strongly suggests that creating a free membership isn’t entirely a waste of time. That neatly illustrates the downside of being an aging web cynic like me; we sometimes discount excellent sites because of the less-than-excellent marketing choices they make, and in this case, I fear that my dubious instinct may have prompted a rather-too-negative initial impression.

More inexplicable and much less forgivable is my discovery that Lush Stories uses Javascript tricks to disable clicking on, selecting, or copying the text of the stories displayed on the site. In 2017 these sorts of pointless copy-protection shenanigans are just complicated ways for the site owners to signal contempt for visitors and readers. There’s no actual benefit because there’s no actual protection, given how easy it is to access the text by viewing the HTML source for any page. All that the obfuscating Javascript accomplishes is to proclaim by its existence that the site owners are either clueless enough to imagine they have “protected” their stories, or else (more likely) they think their visitors are too clueless to refer to the HTML source when a block of text is needed for some legitimate purpose, like the quotes in this story. Back in the late 1990s when Javascript was new and arcane, misusing it so sorely was perhaps an understandable mistake. Twenty years later, it’s just condescendingly rude to readers and reviewers.

But these are niggling objections! A well-populated adult online community with a lot of social-media features is, after all, worth paying something for, and there can be no dispute that a curated collection of more than 42,000 free sex stories is an internet treasure that utterly transcends any modest niggles I might have about about the design and marketing of the site.

By now you know my method for testing and measuring the depth of a story collection. I like to give the search functions a workout, by plugging in unlikely keywords to find stories that feature relatively-rare fetishes and minority sexual interests. The “figging” keyword in my example above turned up 10 results, which is pretty respectable for stories about putting fresh ginger in butts. I got zero results for “mouthsoaping” (the “washing mouths out with soap” fetish often associated with spanking and domestic discipline scenarios) but that may reveal a defect in the search engine rather than a paucity of mouthsoaping stories; some people spell this fetish activity “mouth soaping” or “mouth-soaping” which the Lush Stories search engine parses as a search for stories containing either “mouth” or “soaping”, rather than both at once.

Fortunately I had better results when searching for a more contemporary keyword. I got 85 results for “tribbing” which is pretty respectable, considering “tribbing” is a keyword I only encountered for the first time about a week ago. Apparently it’s derived from the word “tribadism” and is being used these days by the youthful Tumblr crowd to refer to what some people called “scissoring” back in the day. The best tribbing story I found was called Help Me, Please? by xGinger:

She pushed me off of her, only to climb on me herself. She spread my legs, putting one of them over her own leg and one of her legs over mine, our pussies almost touching.

Looking at me with a grin on her face, she looked at the laptop screen, which still featured two woman tribbing. “Let’s re-enact that, now shall we?”

With that she pushed her pussy against mine, our juices mingling and our clits touching. An electric pulse went through my body as I moaned, my arms soon wrapping around her as we kept humping against each other, as we kept searching for more pressure and more friction on our clitorises…

I had good luck as I continued to plug in my small-batch artisanal sex and fetish keywords. On my next three attempts at plumbing the depths of this story collection, I got 13 results for “felching”, 15 results for “pillory”, and 276 results for “hypnotized”. Whatever you are looking for, there’s a good chance you’ll find at least a few stories about it at Lush Stories.

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Bacchus is the author and proprietor of ErosBlog.com, writing since 2002 about sex, porn, and the adult internet. In recent years he's become passionate about curating digital porn and about the challenges of stabilizing it in well-sourced collections.