by Jean Roberta

On the last day of EROTICON: Sunday, March 18, the weather was still grey and sleety, but there was plenty to do indoors.

At 10:15, Mirtha and I passed up Natalia Grubizna on “Designing your sexy-sexy product,” more Kinklab demonstrations, and Cressida Dowling on “Is there a book in your blog?” to hear a Nigerian-British female blogger, Oloni, discuss polyamory.  The audience contributed comments, but we would have liked to hear more discussion of the history of long-term relationships involving multiple lovers, the challenges of maintaining these relationships, and ways to make them work.

At 11:05, we went to hear Jamie Lawson give a personal talk on “Becoming a queer anthropologist.” This speaker explained his early belief (common to many LGBT professionals) that he could keep his professional status completely separate from his general world-view, his sexuality, and his social status as a closeted gay man. His talk on the breakdown of this belief was poignant.

At the same time, someone from the site Fetish.com gave a talk on “Getting it up! How to raise your writing visibility on Google.”

The lunch buffet was as delicious as the one on Saturday. On Sunday, it was scheduled earlier to allow for the five-minute readings from 12:30 to shortly after 1:00 p.m.

At 1:15, we reluctantly passed up Nina Saini’s talk on “The adult industry in the 21^st century,” to hear Kendra Holliday on “Shocking the System: When Your True Life Tales Cross the Line.”

Kendra Holliday from St Louis, Missouri, a sex-worker and the divorced mother of a daughter, told her cautionary tale of being publicly persecuted (and this word doesn’t seem too extreme) after blogging in social media about her actual sex life, including her experiences with other people. She talked about being slut-shamed on a blog, “The Dirty,” being threatened with the loss of child custody by her ex-husband, and being fired from her job with a non-profit organization. This speaker seemed surprisingly cheerful, possibly because at its lowest point, her life had nowhere to go but up.  Like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (novel about the public shaming of an “adulteress” in Massachusetts colony in 1640), this woman has survived.

At 2:00 p.m., we heard Lori Smith (a lingerie collector) on “The surprising history of the bra.” As an amateur seamstress, I was fascinated by her illustrated lecture. I had already known that in 1914, an American socialite named Mary Phelps Jacob had applied for a patent for the bra (or brassiere), even though she didn’t invent it. I hadn’t fully realized that the changing shape of women’s breasts under all clothing styles since then (and before then) were largely created by undergarments, or that the invention of rayon from wood pulp (called “artificial silk” or “art-silk”), latex, and lycra were crucial in the development of the bra.

Lori Smith debunked the myth that feminists in the 1960s were “bra-burners.” She explained that due to fire regulations, a symbolic trash-can filled with the trappings of femininity by protesters at the Miss America pageant of 1968 was not even burned.

The talks we missed were by Dr. Meg-John Barker and Justin Hancock on “How to give responsible sex advice,” and Michael Knight on “Tech for Blog Success.”

At 3:00 pm, we had to choose amongst three workshops: “Photographing Eroticon” by Molly Moore, “Financial Wizardry for Sex Bloggers” by two Sarahs (Sarah Bryn Holliday and Sarah Jane), and Remittance Girl on longer (self-contained, novel-length) erotic fiction.

We went to hear Remittance Girl, who discussed the challenges of writing erotic fiction which can’t easily be read in one (one-handed) sitting. As she explained, the nature of erotic feelings is that they are short-lived (there is a cycle of arousal and release), and can’t easily be sustained over the course of a novel without boring the reader.

And there have always been cultural and legal prohibitions on publishing sexually-explicit work. RG pointed out that the big publishing platform, Amazon.com, has inconsistently slammed down on erotic publications which are not bestsellers.

She summarized the history of erotic publications, many of which predated the invention of the novel by centuries. She explained that the classics (the poetry of Sappho, the “satyr” plays of ancient Greece, largely destroyed, the first-century Satyricon, The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade) are generally episodic, containing a series of sex scenes. She went on to discuss twentieth-and-twenty-first century works of erotica: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, Crash, Fifty Shades of Grey, all of which are about something besides sex.

RG discussed the “snowflake method” of writing a novel: to build a relatively simple central premise into a novel-length plot by adding complexity to the events, the characterization, the background and setting.

She explained the archetypal “Hero’s Journey,” as defined by Joseph Campbell, in which a central character becomes a hero by being tested: hostile circumstances give rise to cycles of despair, hope, resourcefulness, and psychological growth. She pointed out that many films from the Walt Disney studio follow this pattern.

RG circulated a chart detailing “The Pervert’s Journey,” an erotic version of the hero’s journey. This version of a traditional plot was both hilarious and recognizable. It showed brilliantly how suspense can be maintained throughout an erotic novel through the introduction of elements which on the surface seem to be anti-erotic, including the hostility of other characters, society at large and the “pervert’s” own fears as obstacles to the “pervert’s” self-actualizing search for sexual fulfillment.

At 3:40, we all gathered together into one room for prizes! Molly Moore explained that all the attendees were entered into a draw to win sex products which had been available for sale at the merch tables throughout the weekend. To our surprise, Mirtha and I both won items. Mine, a large clear diamond-shaped vibrator from a company named “Bijoux Indiscrets,” could possibly be passed off as a coffee-table ornament.

After hugs and photographs, we were off to our hotel room to have a quiet supper in the restaurant and pack for our trip home to Saskatchewan on Monday morning.

We wished we could have stayed longer, but work was waiting for us. Our four-day visit to the UK was an unforgettable break from the routine of our lives. 

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