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Remittance Girl

Expulsion: Love, Men and Female Objects of Desire

by | August 13, 2014 | | 5 Comments

Historically, erotic art (visual and textual) was produced primarily for men, by men.  Yes, there have been exceptions, but the ones that survive are rare. It was only in the 20th century, and mostly in the latter part, that women began to produce erotic fiction aimed at women. This has been portrayed as emancipatory and, unarguably, it is. It filled a vast and silent gulf. For millennia we have known what men wanted, what they fantasize about, what arouses them.  In a recent conversation on Facebook about Fifty Shades of Grey, Kristina Lloyd commented:

I think the reason the book spoke to so many women is because precious little else in our culture does when we’re talking het female desire. Give a bone(r) to someone starving, and they’ll pounce on it. The success of the book is about the failures in our culture. I wish we could chart a similar moment when it was suddenly acceptable for men to access and enjoy adult material without recrimination. 1970s? 18thC? Forever? 1

Once a book has sold 100 million copies, this is a pretty definitive sign that it has become acceptable, in the mainstream, for women to access material that arouses them. 2

It isn’t accidental that, since the 1960s, as the production and consumption of erotic material aimed at women gained momentum, so has the criticism of how women are presented in male-centered erotic material. It is only when both flavours are readily available that one can see the differences between them.  In the past 50 years, feminists have raged against the objectification of women as objects of desire.  We are more than the statues, the Madonnas, the Whores, the bountiful breasts and the warm wet holes you make of us.  We’re not just breeding stock, or somewhere to put your cock. We are not that simple.  See us – desire us – for what we truly are, instead of the facile, two-dimensional caricatures you’ve made of us! It was a legitimate demand.

Who would have thought that, suffering as we have from this diminishment, we would in turn come to produce material that commits the same sin? Yet, from the heady days of the explicit bodice busters until now, we have, with some laudable exceptions, fallen into the same trap. The spectre of the inscrutable Alpha male, with his money and his power, and his somewhat-but-not-impossibly-large-cock, his insatiable sexual appetite, his obsessive desire to please only the heroine and – by extension – us, has dominated the world of female-centred heterosexual erotic content. Christian Grey is its poster-boy, but his clones are everywhere. And, quietly, they always were. Consider Mister Darcy.

And there is little sympathy for the few male voices that speak up to complain about it. Partially for the same reason that very few women in earlier eras spoke up against female objectification; we are torn between our need to be known for who we are and our desire to be desired, even if imperfectly.  Moreover, and like many women through the ages, men have participated greatly in their own objectification. It does seem a little whiny, after two thousand years of Venus De Milo, to complain that being simplified as a brainless, lust driven cock with a wallet is unfair.

But a few men have spoken up. Like their counterparts, they speak in the language of their own desire. Don’t we all? Nonetheless, the subtext is clear: please don’t make me a caricature. After trying his damnedest to get through volume one of Fifty Shades of Grey, my friend and sometimes co-writer, Alex Sharp, has recently written a piece I think every female erotic writer who sets out to craft male characters – especially the non-vanilla variety – should read: “I am he, and he is me.”

Good fiction writing embraces realism, even in its most dramatic flights of fancy. And, in my opinion, well-written erotica should attempt to embrace the eroticism in the entirety of the character or, at least, attempt an honest fictionalization of the problems of desire and objectification. I think that is the challenge that separates erotic fiction from pornography.

Admittedly, I’m torn. Desiring someone in all their complexity is a laudable aspiration, but I have several well-supported doubts as to whether, in the moment that lust takes us, this is even possible.  Perhaps it is only now, with all our objects of desire so flagrantly on display, that we can begin to come to terms with the dilemma that so haunted Kant, the schism between desire and full knowledge of another. Jacques Lacan said that there is no ‘sexual relationship’; our projected desires are the product of the symbolic, muted world of controlled meaning that bears little relation to the real humans upon whom we heap our fantasies. Being a romantic, despite himself, he felt that only in love, in the terrifying Real of love, could we hope to overcome the watery barrier of symbolism and step out of Plato’s cave and into the blinding light of day. 3

So love in erotic writing should be the answer, right? Lord knows, the genre of erotic romance has well and truly eclipsed the erotica genre. It has all but swallowed it up, in no small part because Fifty Shades of Grey was marketed as erotica rather than romance.  A large proportion of those 100 million sales have been to women who’d never read ‘erotica’ before. Now each time they pick up an erotica novel, they’re expecting romance.

The quandary, as I see it, is that love itself has been objectified.  The very presence of the inevitable happy ending diminishes and even denies the terrifying truth of love: that it is seldom forever, that – like everything else – it changes, that its very volatility and instability is what makes it a dangerous place but also one of greater knowledge.

I’ve often contemplated the Judeo-Christian myth of the Garden of Eden, so often used as a metaphor for a state of perfect love. Its portrayal of humanity in a state of innocence, nakedness, and openness, before we ate from the tree of bitter knowledge, offers us an aspirational but ultimately impossible and fantasmatic vision of love. And I’d argue that most fictional romance presents this state as the final one; the scene fades on Adam and Eve, in all their natural glory, hand in hand in the garden of delight.

But isn’t love is more fittingly portrayed as the Expulsion from the Garden? That fruit we tasted was not only the knowledge of good and evil; it was the knowledge of ourselves and of each other. Love is the struggle to keep holding hands while carrying the burden of that knowledge on our backs. Assuredly, it has its idyllic aspects, but it also takes us through the rocky desolation of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland.  If we are to truly know each other, we must work to find erotic love in that dark and sometimes barren place as well.

So, I want to challenge you, as fellow writers of erotica, to try to forge the erotic there in that far more realistic landscape. We’ve spent too long in the garden; time to get out into the real world.

1 Lloyd, K. (2014) Comment in response to ‘I’ve Just Watched The FSOG Trailer’ Facebook post. Accessed 3 August, 2014 https://www.facebook.com/Remittancegirl/posts/10203583569204376?comment_id=10203584398105098&offset=0&total_comments=57↩
2 Flood, A. (2014) Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy Has Sold 100m worldwide, The Guardian Online. Accessed 3 August, 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/27/fifty-shades-of-grey-book-100m-sales↩
3 Lacan, J. (1988). On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Book XX, Encore 1972-1973. (B. Fink, Trans., J. Miller, Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.↩

Abberant Romances and the Rise of Erotic Fiction as a Self-Help Guide

by | July 13, 2014 | | 9 Comments

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m addicted to House of Cards.  I remember being equally addicted to the original 1990’s UK series, but the US Netflix adaptation is, surprisingly, even better than the British original.

Yes, the writing is excellent and the characterizations are superb, but what I most like about House of Cards is that it represents a very realistic but seldom written-about form of relationship.

The relationship between Frank Underwood and his wife, Claire, is a strange one.  On the surface it appears to be a marriage of convenience – neither is sexually faithful and there appears to be nothing but a cool sort of companionship of purpose between them – but as the series goes on, we get glimpses into something more complex.

This is a portrait of two people who feed each other’s jouissance. Leaving the moral aspects of their individual actions and aspirations aside, this is love at its most powerful and revolutionary. 

In her amazing TED Talk on the secret to desire in long-term relationships, Esther Perel points out that distance is essential to desire. Being able to see your partner from a distance, doing what drives and impassions them, allows you to maintain the stance of an admirer. It allows for the preservation of a certain level of mystery and of uncertainty, which keeps the embers of desire burning hot. 

As married characters, Frank and Claire Underwood watch each other pursue their ambitions, execute their nefarious plans, as if they were each secret admirers of the other, aroused by their individual acts of ruthlessness.

When they finally come together, there’s an amazing erotic tension between them. It is never a ‘dutiful’ performance of marital obligation. They come together to give each other a sort of carte blanche absolution for being the reprehensible creatures they are.  It’s a bit like watching scorpions mate.

After the never-ending parade of superficially written, poorly characterized and formulaic love-bonds that seem to be the norm in almost all narratives these days, it is refreshing and exciting to see a well-wrought portrait of something that isn’t pabulum.

Another interesting and complex relationship I have stumbled across recently is the novelized version of Macbeth by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson. They’ve done a magnificent job of digging into and expositing the compelling power dynamics between Lord and Lady Macbeth. Again, ambition definitely comes into it, but so does desperation, mania and regret. In this case, although Lady Macbeth is the instigator who gets the transgression ball rolling, there is a clever portrayal of how one hideous act leads inevitably to another, and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

So many modern fictional romantic narratives are offered and consumed as models to aspire to, especially in erotic fiction.  In this I see a tragic loss of  the potential of fiction to examine the places we should never go in real life. This current need to make all kinky scenes safe, sane and consensual; this obligation to never represent negative, abusive relationships without clearly condemning them within the fiction, places all our fictions within the genre of YA or as thinly disguised self-help paperbacks.

It is as if we have decided that adults have no capacity to distinguish between fiction and reality and must be guided in their fictional adventures by an overbearing, authoritarian hand whose job it is to constantly nudge the reader towards a post-modern sort of ‘right thinking’.

This might be tolerable if most contemporary fictional love relationships were represented with any realism and complexity, but they’re not.  Consequently, we are encouraged to judge our own relationships in the light of those that are not only fictional, but ones that aren’t realistic and revel in their own formulaic qualities. 

In her book, Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best-Sellers and Society, Eva Illouz breaks down the phenomena of the erotic novel as self-help guide:

“some narratives are not only symbolic rehearsals of social dilemmas and of the solution to these dilemmas: they are also performative structures offering ways of acting and doing.”

To me, this is the anathema of contemporary erotic fiction. It is a closing off of the possibilities of using fiction as a refuge from the rules of social reality. Instead, it has become a place where we are schooled, counseled and given exemplars of how to ‘do it right.’

Penetration: The Eroticism of Sacrifice and Feminine Jouissance

by | May 13, 2014 | | 10 Comments

Bernini’s Saint Teresa of Avila

Anyone who has been dropping in to my fiction blog for the past six months has probably had a rough time of it.  I’m not apologetic; my blog was always meant to be a place of experimentation and that has only intensified since I began my doctoral studies.

What has been intriguing me, maddeningly, in the last little while is the subject of ‘Feminine Jouissance’ and how to represent it in contemporary erotic fiction.  The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, identified three types of what he called jouissance. Originating from the French verb ‘jouir’ (to enjoy) but also translated as the slang for having an orgasm, Lacan began by interpreting the word in the vernacular sense: sexual enjoyment. His definition evolved over time, becoming more complex and nuanced until it came to mean a type pleasure that causes pain.  One of the best, easiest ways to get one’s head around this is to think of what you feel like, both in body and in mind, about 10 seconds before you reach orgasm.  At that point it is not an entirely pleasurable feeling.  Inherent in it is both the anticipation of great pleasure, the frustration, discomfort, and sometimes even the agony of not having quite reached it yet and, finally, the sometimes wistful sadness of the knowledge that it is over so fleetingly even before it has arrived.

Lacan identified three types of jouissance: phallic jouissance, the only kind experienced by most men (the state of pursuing a desire which, once arrived at is never quite the absolute bliss one dreamed it would be, which can also be experienced by women); the jouissance of the other (a form of yearning, exiting, and bitter envy in which one believes that the other person’s pleasure is somehow more perfect than one’s own) and feminine jouissance (which Lacan said could only be experienced by females and mystical men).  Interestingly enough, both Bataille and Lacan chose the image of Bernini’s Saint Teresa, being pierced through the heart by an angel, to illustrate what they conceived of as a type of bliss most often described as ecstatic experience.  I’m simplifying the explanation of these types of jouissance and especially how they pertain to gender because when Lacan spoke of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ he is not referring to biological gender identifiers and, in my opinion, never did a very good job of explaining exactly what he meant. This is exacerbated by the fact that he kept insisting that it couldn’t be described in language.  Perhaps because he himself was very much an unmystical man? Admittedly, as you read on, you’re going to notice that this IS very difficult to write about, but I think it can be written around. I think it is possible to call the inner knowledge of most readers into the service of a mutual understanding of what we are talking about.

This idea of feminine jouissance intrigues me greatly because I think it drives the deepest erotic desires of many more people than we think.  And , again, I want to underscore that although ‘jouissance’ always contains an aspect of pain, I’m not not referring to traditional definitions of masochism (where the masochist enjoys the sensation of physical pain).  My gut says that this jouissance is present in some erotic romance writing and a lot of D/s erotica – if there is any internalized thought or dialogue present in the text – and refers to what is often described in purple prose as a ‘sweet pain’ or ‘delicious agony’ or ‘surrender.’

Not always overtly sexual, it is always erotic. The stimulus might originate in the brain, but it has physical reverberations. The pain/pleasure involved cannot be situated only in the body or only in the mind; it must take place in both. One of the reasons why I think the statue of Saint Teresa was used as an illustration of female jouissance is because it so literally and radically exemplifies the ‘sacrifice’ of penetration.

At this point I don’t want to even contemplate how much politically correct shit I’m pulling down on my head, but before you start to throw bricks at me, let me explain.

In the first place, sacrifice, as it pertains to women, always does come with a lot of sexist historical baggage.  However, the baseline concept of sacrifice has to do with relinquishing something (a fatted calf, the village virgin, Christ, one’s bodily integrity, one’s individuation) for a specific purpose. You’re giving something in anticipation of getting something more important back. So what I mean by the ‘sacrifice of penetration’ is not that something is given up altruistically, but that it is a sort of metaphysical trade.

Secondly, I am speaking about penetration in either the physical or metaphorical sense. To be penetrated physically is a breach of the boundaries of the body.  But I want to underscore that metaphorical penetration is just as radical an infringement of the integrity of the self.  I disagree with Lacan that only ‘mystical’ men experience feminine jouissance and I’m not implying that he was leaving out gay or bi or trans men who enjoy being penetrated or submissively kinky men who like it also, because he didn’t. But I have witnessed both dominant and sadist males experience ‘feminine jouissance.’ It occurs when they allow the erotic entanglement to transgress their own boundaries – whether physical or ethical or emotional. The ways in which we are penetrated metaphorically in the midst of eroticism are many but I think, it always entails the pain, the pleasure and the exhilaration of a radical change of state, an undoing of the zipper of the hermetically sealed self. To find yourself in a state of genuine instability is to find yourself penetrated, and in the clutches of feminine jouissance.

What makes writing about this type of jouissance in a contemporary setting so difficult is that it flies in the face of a lot of our post-modern understandings of what it means to be an erotic person.  We exist in a culture that celebrates the auto-creation and social inviolability of personhood. The modern sexual woman, we are told, makes no sacrifice. She comes to the erotic moment fully individuated, knowing all her needs and ready to ensure they are met. So, although she is gets fucked in any number of orifices, she cannot be ‘penetrated.’ This phallic jouissance; she may experience disappointment, but never the destabilization or breach of her identity.  So it is easier to set narratives that involve feminine jouissance in the past. Apparently we can female sacrifice if it’s set in earlier times. Those poor women, they didn’t know better. And, as readers, we can enjoy the nostalgia of their jouissance, their sacrifice, vicariously.

I hesitate to bring this up at all, but one of the reasons I think Fifty Shades of Grey was so popular was because, sexually at least, Anastasia Steel is almost the model of a Regency Romance virgin. And, as badly written and politically incorrect as it is, a lot of readers enjoyed the vicarious spectacle of her ‘penetration’ and her ‘sacrifice.’ For me, the problem with it is that was just such a cliched, hamfisted example of it.

Similarly, the idea of the ‘penetrated male’ as some lesser form of the gender has been around for thousands of years and, in the mainstream, continues to this day. It’s probably why so many male protagonists in both male and female-penned erotic fiction seem so rigid and cardboardish and – haha – impenetrable.

I’d like to make a plea for a reinstatement of feminine jouissance, of sacrifice, of metaphysical penetration in contemporary erotic writing.  But please, let us not resort to the same old spectacles of sacrifice. Let us consider that this giving over, this destabilization, this surrender is not gendered. It is deeply human. It defies the material transaction and celebrates the metaphysical one. I believe there are new ones for us to explore.

The Gaze, Erotica and the Aesthetics of a Hog-tie

by | April 13, 2014 | | 11 Comments

“Don’t you appreciate the visual aesthetics of a good hog-tie?” he asked.

I thought about it a long time.  I’ve never hogtied anyone. I’ve never had the desire to hogtie anyone. I’ve been hogtied myself, but one can’t appreciate the visual aesthetics in that position.  Of course, I have seen other people hogtied, both in the flesh and remediated in porn, but I have come to realize I lack the mental faculties needed to project myself into the visual image of the hogtied individual.

You can imagine, this makes porn a disappointment for me, because so little of it is actually made for the female gaze.

Why can’t I have a photograph of a middle-aged man in a conservative suit with his fly down and his cock in his hand?

I’ve complained about this and been pointed to gay porn. For some women, gay porn works. It doesn’t work at all for me. I find it viscerally disorienting because I perceive that this erotic gesture is not being aimed at me. I’m back being a voyeur again.

And it occurs to me that, in order for women to enjoy porn, they either have to be toppish and at least bisexual. Or they have to do something rather intricate: they need split themselves into two.

One part projects themselves into the body of the object of desire and the other does a sort of interesting recursive thing: occupying the place of the viewer, with a male gaze, and imagining themselves being the object of desire that the viewer wants to see.

We do a similar thing when we read. We split ourselves. One part acknowledges that this is a fictional textual remediation of something erotic. The other part projects itself into the text and, immersed there, vicariously experiences the happenings in the story. I have no problem doing that. In fact, I’m an expert at it.

But when it comes to visual stuff, it just doesn’t work for me. The woman in the picture doesn’t look like me, and, if it’s a video, she doesn’t sound like me or act like I’d act. She doesn’t wriggle like I wriggle. She doesn’t mew like I mew. Her breasts are not my breasts; her hips are not mine either.  And, more importantly, I know it’s staged so I don’t trust anything she is doing to be a true indication of what she’s feeling inside. So, weirdly, I am totally devoid of any empathetic feeling at all. Certainly not any erotic empathy. Wondering how long it might have taken to shoot this scene and who was fluffing the male actor distracts me.

And, although I am sometimes very attracted to certain women, I can’t honestly say I’m bi. But then I can’t really say I’m straight either. There are people, regardless of their gender, to whom I’m attracted. However, I don’t have dominant tendencies. So I can’t enjoy the view from the top in and of itself.

Strangely enough, this is not true when it comes to text. I can easily mediate and translate the view from the top in writing.  Reading a story written from either the view of the dominant or the submissive, I have no problem, if the writing is halfway decent, finding my way to the sweet spot of the reading experience. It doesn’t even have to be a kink I like. As long as I am offered some insight into how either of the parties feel, I can get in.

Before you go accusing me of going on an anti-porn feminist diatribe, let me try and explain why I think text is different to images. And why I think erotic writing is different to porn writing. Or at least what I have come to believe is one of the differences.

Beyond the whole ‘porn doesn’t contain conflict’ thing, which is also true, it makes a lot of automatic assumptions about the viewer (or the reader). It takes many things as a given. Orientation, gender-role, how the viewer consumes experience, how he or she translates it internally.

I have come to believe that really good erotica doesn’t make those assumptions. Like good writing in general, it doesn’t assume an automatic alignment of desire between the reader and the narrator. The text slowly, and at its best, unobtrusively offers you reasons to find commonality. Information about who the narrator is and why they are turned on by this helps, but it is also the silences, the gaps, the things the reader is not told, that allow them to find alignments where none are even offered.

To some extent, reading is narcissistic. It is about seeing where you can fit yourself in to the world of the story. Even as you acknowledge that it is a fiction and it is about characters who aren’t you. Nonetheless, it is both the details and the gaps that ease the reader into internalizing and personalizing the story.

And unless someone has specified looks, and race and social status down to a boring level, I seem to have no problem looking past my difference to the character and immersing. Most notably because physical attributes aside, feelings are much more universal. As long as I get a sense of what the characters are feeling, and I can relate to it, I’m in like a dirty shirt.

This last thing is probably why visual and textual porn doesn’t work for me. The assumptions made in the positioning of the consumer, viewer, reader confront me with my difference.  And with no communication of what is going on from an interior perspective, I have no way in.

“I just can’t believe you can’t see how fucking
beautiful this is,” he says, showing me a picture of a woman hogtied,
artfully positioned on a red velvet settee. She is white, with dark hair,
wearing a leather corset, stockings, fuck me pumps and a lot of white rope.

“I just don’t find her attractive. It doesn’t make me
want to fuck her.”

“You’re not supposed to want to fuck her. You’re
supposed to want to be her.”

“She doesn’t look anything like me.”

“Can’t you picture you instead of her there, on the
couch?”

“No. This is not a picture of me hogtied on a couch.
It’s a picture of someone else hogtied on a couch.”

“But look at those knots. Aren’t they lovely?”

“If I’m supposed to want to be her, how would I see the
knots?”

“You wouldn’t. But you can appreciate them, can’t
you?”

“Not really.”

He’s getting frustrated. I can tell. “Jesus, you’re
supposed to look at this and want to be in her position. You’re supposed to
want me to want you like that.”

“Who says?”

“What?”

“You said ‘You’re supposed to’. Who says I’m supposed
to?”

“Jeeze. For fuck sakes. I don’t know. People who like
kink.”

“The kinky powers that be?”

“Yeah.”

“That explains everything.”

“What.”

“I have a bad reaction to authority.”

“You’re not a real submissive, are you?”

“Probably not.”

Lacan famously said: “There is no sexual relationship.”

I think this was what he was getting at. It would have been easier to say, ‘Wow, that’s hot.’ Then I probably would have gotten laid.  But I would have been lying. I can think it’s hot that he thinks it’s hot, but that’s not what he wants. He wants me to put myself in his shoes. He wants me to desire what he desires. If I could do that, we’d be twins. And I would want to hogtie him. I’m pretty certain he doesn’t want that.

I disagree with Lacan. There is such a thing as a sexual relationship, but it relies on our ability to accept the other’s object of desire without having to desire it ourselves. A kind of laissez-faire that only happens when you really know someone.

Our society stresses the positive nature of accord. It has a model of lovers in which they want exactly the same thing. But I suspect that, a lot of the time, one of them might just be pretending.

Or, better still, enjoying the fact that the other wants whatever it is. It is possible to enjoy someone’s desire without needing to share it. This is where I think he’s wrong. That admiration, that gratification that one gets from witnessing someone else’s desire… that is a sexual relationship. But they are rarer than we care to admit.

Writing in the Red-Light District

by | March 12, 2014 | | 3 Comments

I’ve been considering the genre of erotica in historical context as a way to understand where it came from and what it has become. From a European perspective, it seems fair to begin with the Greco-Roman poetry of Sappho, Ovid, Juvenal and the Dionysian spectacle of the Satyr Plays (of which we no longer have any clear records). But we have a problem: it is almost impossible for us today to truly grasp what kind of a relationship the ancient Greeks and Romans had with sex. Judeo-Christianity and, later, the Enlightenment and rise of rationalism have had profound effects on the way we contextualize desire and sex both in relation to ourselves and to our society. We often represent the Greeks and the Romans as being a lawless bunch of reprobates, but this isn’t true. There were very strong prohibitions and social rules about how one conducted oneself as a sexual being and how that reflected on the overall character of a person. They were just very different from ours.

Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in the 12th Century –  a collection of tales which borrowed mostly from earlier erotic folk stories as well as westernized oriental narratives. The Tale of Two Lovers, an epistolary novel of the 15th Century, was penned by a man who later became a pope. The Heptameron was written by Marguerite de Navarre in the 16th Century. All these writings are bawdy and explicit in their exploration of human sexual adventure. But it is also fair to say that they are not simply detailed descriptions of sex. To one extent or another, they all contain a good deal of humour and there is a considerable focus on the licentious behaviour of characters whose social status demanded they be modest. They were often about the secret sex lives of the rich and celibate. Eroticism, politics, and social satire it seems, went hand in hand.

The libertine movement of the 15th and 16th centuries was an interesting evolution. Written by aristocrats for aristocrats, it represented the pursuit of pleasure as a radical philosophy in itself. Its comparison with earlier writings is interesting. For all its sexual excess, its humour is more curdled and jaded and, for all its explicitness, seems more aimed at offending sensibilities than representing the pleasures of the flesh. (It always reminds me of people desperately trying to fuck on way too much cocaine at four in the morning. Take my word for it, it’s not all that much fun.)  Then we get to Sade,with his lists of debaucheries and his blatant attack on Catholic mores. These books are pornographic in the sense that they are explicit, but as Angela Carter pointed out, they are also aimed at honestly representing the almost unlimited power of the wealthy and the violent and dehumanizing use of the poor. Sadean writing may be erotica, but it is also heavy handed social critique.

The Victorian era saw a new age of confessional erotic writing. For the most part, there isn’t much obvious attempt at social commentary, other than the adolescent glee of writing explicitly about sex acts in a society that had developed an almost psychotic fear of discussing it in public. Certainly there was pleasure taken in writing and reading about what was socially forbidden. But it lacks the confrontational nature of earlier erotic writing.

Although I would include Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs,  it was not really until the 20th century that we see the use of erotic writing as a tool for exploring or defining the self in relation to society.  In the works of Miller, Nin, Nabokov, and Duras, you begin to see erotic stories that have deeply psychoanalytical dimensions. They all, to some extent or another, pit the individual’s pursuit of erotic desire against the prevailing environment. As conscious, revolutionary acts of disobedience in pleasure. And yes, the sex matters and the sex is erotic, but it is also a private struggle for inner structure in the face of a confusing world.

I’d like to stop here and say that there has always been pornography, both visual and written, whose sole purpose was as an aide to sexual arousal. Certainly most of the Victorian works could not really be viewed as having other uses. And the sexually explicit pulp erotica of the 50s and 60s served the same purpose. But the literary and financial success of novels like Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, and Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor put pressure on writers in the 70s to add more explicit sex to their work in order to sell more books. It was no longer a revolutionary act to describe a sex scene in detail, it made monetary sense. 

It is ironic that the genre we now call erotica hasn’t really been around that long. Until the early 70s, writers either considered they were writing pornography as a sex aid (and usually for the money) or they felt they were writing literature which, as a function of exploring the human condition, explored the characters erotic lives as well. 

The post-modern literary world has, with the exception of some outstanding Queer writers, mostly portrayed graphic sex in their writing as a site of alienation. From Michel Houllebecq to Ian McEwan, it seems that authentic characters shouldn’t ever have good sex, or sex that informs them of anything other than the emptiness of the act. Intelligent people, it seems, have uniformly awful sex, according to the literary world.

So erotica, as we know it, is a genre that has tried to serve many interests. There are still writers and readers who see the job of erotica to simply provide stimulating imagery for masturbation or spicing up a couple’s sex life, but are uncomfortable with consuming what is clearly labeled pornography.  There are also writers and readers who see erotica – particularly erotic romance – as a way of narrating romantic stories more realistically, including the sexual aspect of the evolving romantic relationship. And then there are those of us who feel that exploring the complex erotic desires and actions of characters continues to offer a landscape in which to reflect on the human condition as a whole.

It’s hardly a wonder that readers get disappointed when they pick up an erotica book and falls short of their expectations. As a society, we still feel the need to shove our written explorations of eroticism into a single, literary red-light district. It is a crowded little enclave, with many agendas.

Overwriting

by | January 13, 2014 | | 2 Comments

I have a confession to make: I’m a chronic over-writer. In fact, unless you are one of those very few people who do almost all your editing while you are writing the first draft, you do too. There isn’t anything wrong with over-writing. It’s a mistake to think that you can leave it as is. And this is a sin I do find a lot of new writers (and many old ones, too) commit.

To put it simply, over-writing is using too many words, and not the right ones. Or it is mistrusting language not to do its job or mistrusting your own use of words. Sometimes you’re too damn anxious to get your point across. Sometimes over-writing happens because you’re attempting to describe something complex and nuanced and you take a number of runs at it. So over-writing is very much part of the process of writing: it’s fertile, it allows you to play with the way you get things across, but it’s not okay to dump that onto a reader. This is where thinking poetically is very helpful. Poets often aren’t good at constructing a plot, or characters, but they are excellent at using language carefully and strategically, and we can learn a lot from them. I will get to an example of this in a minute, but first I want identify some of the common places where overwriting happens. I want to make it clear that this isn’t something you should ever be thinking about in your first draft. This is the test to which you should put a piece of writing once the first draft is written.

Adjectives:
To be pedantic, let’s define what they are. Adjectives are words used to modify nouns. I’m not saying they’re bad. We need them often, to be precise about what qualities the noun has. ‘A soft bed’ informs the reader that the bed has the quality of being soft, not hard. But before you settle on the phrase, consider if there is a noun that will allow you to dispense with the adjective. Could you use nest, or cocoon? Could you use a noun that implies both bed and soft? Or could you use an adjective that did more work for you? Something that added more meaning to the phrase? A cosy bed? Cosy is an adjective that is going to imply soft, if we’re talking about beds, because hard ones aren’t cosy at all but, more than that, it’s also going to add a sense of rightness and belongingness to the phrase. Or what about ‘hard edge of the table’? Have you ever met a soft one? The hard here is simply not needed. Same with ‘a big gulp of coffee’ or ‘a big gulp of air’? A gulp IS a large amount of liquid or air taken down at once. You don’t need the ‘big’.

Adverbs:
I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged on this one before, but I’m going to do it again because I read far, far too many erotic stories where someone ‘lightly brushes his fingers over her skin’. For some reason, I really overreact when I hit phrases like this. ‘Brushes’ implies light, soft strokes. You don’t need the lightly. Same with ‘whispered softly.’ A whisper is soft. You only need to use an adverb when you want to use the verb in an unexpected way, i.e. ‘he whispered viciously (hoarsely, harshly, gratingly).

Redundancies:
The room was empty. There was no one there.
Yeah, don’t laugh. I’ve read this. And we all do this sort of thing while we’re writing a first draft. It’s the ‘circling around’ I spoke of earlier.

She screamed and screamed until her throat was raw.
I think I may have actually written this one. What’s with the ‘and screamed‘? I guess I wanted you to know she really did do a lot of screaming, but the modifying phrase ‘until her throat was raw‘ does the job.

He wept. The tears rolled down his cheeks.
I’m absolutely certain I’ve written this. It’s stupid. And either sentence is so much more powerful on its own than the two combined. More isn’t better. More gums up the writing for the reader.

Erotic description:
One of the acknowledged problems for anyone writing erotica is that, although English offers us a wealth of options when it comes to many nouns and verbs, it isn’t particularly generous when it comes to sexual vocabulary. There is no other word for a kiss. Consequently, we do need adjectives and adverbs to fine tune the meaning. What kind of a kiss was it? Languid, intense, rough, studied, thoughtless, hungry? Sometimes, I try to do without it. She pressed her closed lips to his navel, his hip, his thigh. All the while watching his cock creep to life.

Repetition:
As much as the ‘again and again’ problem is giggle-worthy, it’s also important to recognize that repetition is a powerful form of rhetoric. Where would Churchill or Martin Luther King Jr. have been without it? We’re back at poetics: not what the words mean, but what impact may be had from they way they are used. Repetition can reveal character, it can deepen the immersive experience of a written description. And, as speakers, we repeat ourselves when we talk. It can signal indecision, insecurity, anxiety, desperation. It can alert us to a character at the edge of language, where it fails to be enough. Here repetition informs us, not of the meaning in the words, but of their inadequacy. This becomes an issue of a writer’s honour. Are you being lazy or are you making a conscious choice?

Evil words:
I call them evil, because they sneak into my writing all the time and I don’t notice I’m doing it. Some are common to many writers and some are highly individual. My evil words are just, really and even: I’ve (just) right this minute done a word search through this post and found five instances of ‘just’ that didn’t need to be there at all. WriteDivas has a lovely list of over-used and unnecessary words, as well as some examples of cliches and pat phrases. A good way to brutally edit your work is to take each of those words and phrases, and do a search for them in your document. You’re not going to want to delete every instance of the word ‘really,’ but at least 80% of them go. The 20% that you make a conscious choice to keep is the birth of your style as a writer.

Style:
Style is really one of the hardest things to define in writing. It is a combination of so many aspects of writing that, like porn, it comes under the ‘I know it when I see it’ headings. But what it isn’t is accidental. It might start off as accident, but by the time you get to call it style, you’ve recognized what you’re doing and made a conscious decision to keep on doing it. This is why it usually takes writers many years and a good deal of experimentation to acquire a ‘style’ of their own.

I bring this up because there are excellent reasons to completely disregard everything I’ve said above, in the right circumstances. When you, as a writer, judge the circumstance to be right to consciously over-write, then you are making a stylistic decision. That’s fine. Just don’t over-write because you were too lazy to edit.

Poetry as an aspirational exemplar for prose writers:
I’m going to offer you the second stanza of the poem “Men” by Maya Angelou. Her language is gorgeous and fierce. There is repetition, there are adjectives and adverbs, but they are all used consciously, to produce a powerful effect.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world. Then
They tighten up. Just a little. The
First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.
Soft into your defenselessness. A little
More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a
Smile that slides around the fear. When the
Air disappears,
Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.
It is your juice
That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.
When the earth rights itself again,
And taste tries to return to the tongue,
Your body has slammed shut. Forever.
No keys exist.

Metaphor and simile:
The last thing I’d like to point out is that sometimes correcting your over-writing means writing more, not less. Notice in the stanza of the poem above, Angelou is opting to use similes and metaphors instead of resorting to adjectives or adverbs to deepen meaning. And it is so much more vivid.

One day they hold you in the
Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you
Were the last raw egg in the world.

The simile of the ‘last raw egg in the world’ is just so much more powerful than writing ‘he held me gently.’ True, she’s using more words, but she forces you to imagine exactly how precious, how breakable the last raw egg in the world might be.

Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,
Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.

Here we have adverbs galore, but it resolves into the simile of ‘the head of a kitchen match’ bursting into flame. It is a brilliant and terrible piece of imagery. Erotic, incandescent and also destructive.

It is your juice
That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.

And here is the metaphor to end all metaphors. It’s just so fucking clever and so fertile. You probably recognize the allusion to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Lemon Song’ but they stole it from Robert Johnson and Arthur McKay. She’s appropriating the phallocentric metaphor of ‘squeezing lemons’ and juxtaposing it. Your juice, in this poem, is more than sexual body fluid: it is hurt and pride and hope and wasted love. And those stained shoes, in the next stanza, just keep on walking by.

My point in deconstructing that last piece of poetry is to remind you that even in prose, if getting rid of your adjectives and adverbs and redundant words is frustrating you, try building a metaphor or simile to get the meaning across instead. It’s almost always stronger writing.

Process:
Over-writing is only a problem when you don’t recognize it as an early stage of the writing process. Think of writing as trowing pottery on a wheel or sculpting. The first task is to shape it roughly and explore the possibilities that material has to offer. At this point, it’s important to have too much of whatever it is. You want enough to be able to go to the next stage, which is to judiciously refine it into a final version.

I meet so many first time writers that believe they can sit down and write something brilliant in a single sitting. It’s certainly possible to do it, but very unlikely. Be prepared to approach your work in three stages. Write it out in as full a way as you can and let it sit for a while. Go back with an eye to purging it of over-writing – get rid of all the repetitions, redundancies, cliches, memes, etc. Then let it sit a while longer. Finally, revisit it for a final proof reading and an eye to adding back the things that will make up your unique style.

Question from one of my students: “Isn’t there a quicker way to do this?”

My answer: “No.”

The Paradox of 'Normalization'

by | December 12, 2013 | | 5 Comments

If we wore these everyday, no one would think they were sexy.

The term ‘normalization’ (and the verb ‘to normalize) has become very popular of late.  It has a number of meanings, but its most current use in the media refers to a process by which exposure to something renders it ‘normal’ in the minds of those who are exposed.  For instance, it has been proposed that the preponderance of photos of women’s legs, showing them with a gap between their thighs has ‘normalized’ a body type that is not normal (Jones, 2013), and video games ‘normalize’ violence against animals (Hochschartner, 2013).

Of course, we’ve spent years hearing about the way pornography – any kind of pornography – normalizes the view of women as sexual objects and encourages violence against them (Horeck, Days, & Don, 2013).  Attempts to verify this through research have resulted either in highly ambiguous results, or actually contradicted these claims.  A literature review of a large number of studies has concluded that porn is not even a co-relational factor in violence against women (Ferguson, 2013). In fact, there is good data to suggest the opposite; that the more widespread the access to pornography, the lower the violence to women (Amato & Law, n.d.).

As of January, 2014, it will be illegal in the UK to possess material that contains eroticized depictions of rape. Not possession of photographs or videos of actual rape – that was always illegal, but material containing fictional depictions of rape (Zara, 2013).  According to many sources, including the Prime Minister, David Cameron, exposure to this kind of pornography ‘normalizes’ sexual violence against women (Morris, 2103).

My problem with the word ‘normalize’ is that it has been widely interpreted to mean that exposure to whatever it is that is currently offensive to us will cause us to think that it’s okay.  They’ll stop having negative feelings about it, and embrace it as part of their everyday lives. I’m not disputing that constant exposure to something will change the way we think about it – that would be cognitively impossible for that not to occur.  What I’m disputing is our assumptions about two things.

The first is a widespread assumption that fictionalized versions of horrific realities are interpreted by the brain in the same way as witnessing or experiencing those realities.  I can accept, for instance, that small children might have difficulties telling the difference between a fictionalized, mediated version of war and war itself.  But adults reading “War and Peace” or watching “Saving Private Ryan” don’t believe they are actually experiencing war.  Admittedly, we do suspend disbelief when we read or view fiction, but we don’t mistake it for reality.

The second assumption is that repeated exposure to mediated forms of real horrors will cause us to feel neutral or even positively about them.  This has no basis in fact either. Indeed, in the last century, we have been exposed to more mediated versions of reality than in the whole of human history. More war, more death, more rape, more everything.  And as much as the media would like you to believe you live in a terribly dangerous time, the truth is that we are safer, healthier and longer-lived than we have ever been.

As a woman, a writer of erotic fiction and a questioner of received wisdom, I do believe that the widespread availability of explicit sexual imagery must, indeed, be having some effect on us. I just don’t accept that it is either wholly positive or wholly negative. For instance, I’m pretty sure that far fewer people today feel that there is anything fundamentally evil about sex; I think porn has played a part in this.  I think the quantity of mediated sex out there has allowed many more people to admit to watching and enjoying it. 

I also believe – although I have no hard evidence of this – porn has served to ‘model’ what sex should look like.  After all, for many people, it’s the only sex they see (other than their own).  And porn sex is, by its nature, exaggerated and dramatized. I think there are people who may (because they aren’t having the sort of sex that looks like the sex in porn) feel a greater sense of dissatisfaction with the sex they do have.

In the Middle Ages, children learned what normal sex looked like by witnessing it – either seeing it, or hearing it in a darkened room because private space was at a premium. Today we’d call that child abuse.  These days, other than porn, the only way to see real sex between real people is by being a voyeur, which is loaded with its own taboos.  It’s hardly a wonder that amateur porn became so popular. There is some sense that this is real sex. Sadly, because of the fact that it needs to stand up against produced porn, more and more commercial porn memes creep into amateur porn. Conversely, commercial porn producers have sought to make their product look more ‘amateur’ in order to appeal to amateur porn viewers. They tend to fail miserably.

What I’d really like to dig my inquisitional fingers into is the idea of ‘normalization’ as it applies to the erotic. I want to make a distinction between the sexual and the erotic, because I am increasingly coming to believe that there is the biological urge to scratch the itch, which requires nothing other than a relatively functional body and no imagery or semiotics at all, and something else.  This something else is the intersection between that biological imperative and language. Not language in the sense of words, but language in the sense that, as our brains mature, we process reality through the veil of language.  There is nothing fundamentally sexy about a black, patent leather, high-heeled shoe.  It is language in the larger sense, in the way we make relational linkages and chunk feeling and meaning together, that has made the ‘fuck-me-pump’ the iconically sexy item it has become.

I’m going to call this ‘the erotic’ as distinct from ‘the sexual.’ The erotic is heavily dependent on limits: on what is allowed and what is forbidden (Bataille, 1962; Foucault, 1980; Paz, 1995).  There is a reason for why the adjectives we use about the erotic ideas that turn us on are negative: naughty, filthy, dirty, forbidden, nasty, sinful, obscene, perverse, wanton, illicit, etc.  We want, most passionately, the things we shouldn’t want.  It doesn’t mean that we act to get them, or need to transgress socially accepted behaviour in order to be sexually satisfied, but our mind goes there.  Of course, positive things can also be erotic: beauty, love, devotion, affection, perfection, purity, faith, truth… but even as I type these words, and even as you read them, it starts to become obvious that erotic desire feeds more voraciously off the forbidden than the allowed. 

Here’s the paradox:  things that become ‘normalized’ can no longer be the stuff of erotic fantasy.  So, I’m not arguing that normalization doesn’t occur. I’m suggesting that it is a self-limiting phenomenon.  I’m suggesting that we are twisted little creatures who don’t get off on the ‘normalized’.  And so our fears as to its consequences may be somewhat hyperbolic.

My greatest antipathy towards the ‘normalization’ of the erotically forbidden is that it will lose its power to be erotic.  I believe that our inner, transgressive, politically incorrect and ugly erotic desires are part of who we are as human beings.  Our ability to understand that these things we want,  things that when acted out in the real world would be atrocities, are part of the mechanism that preserves our inner and outer worlds as separate.  Like fantasy, fictionality affords us a playground for our deeply unsocial selves.  It doesn’t school us in what is acceptable in the real world. It underscores and helps to contrast between the two. 

References

Theme: The Good, The Bad and The Preachy

by | November 14, 2013 | | 9 Comments

I seldom walk out of movies. When I find myself in a movie that doesn’t particularly draw me in, I tend resort to viewing it critically: identifying the story arc, the character arcs, the nuts and bolts of the construction of the story. 

Two nights ago, I walked out of Ender’s Game.  I’ve never read the book. Although I am a massive sci-fi fan, there are certain areas of the genre that don’t turn my crank.  Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card just never did anything for me.  Nonetheless, big budget, hyped marketing campaign… I bought my ticket, sat in my seat, and stuffed my face with popcorn.

At some point – about an hour into the film – I caved to the overwhelming urge to be out of the cinema. Later, when I tried to analyze why I couldn’t bring myself to sit through it, I realized that it was the way the theme of the story was being presented that I found almost suffocating.

Without a strong theme, stories are soulless. They feel fluttery, airy and insignificant.  But when the theme of a story is so obvious and so constant that it eclipses the story, the characters and the plot, it becomes like treacle. It gums up everything.  Theme can, if you let it, suffocate every other aspect of your story.

Recent cultural and literary theorists have had a very low opinion of theme.  Post-modernism rejected the idea that stories have any responsibility at all, to anyone. Being a staunch modernist myself, I’m rather glad to see this era of the glorification of the totally meaningless pass.  But when I sat in that theatre and choked hard on the dominant theme in Ender’s Game, I could see why they wanted to kill the beast dead.

I teach writing at college level, and theme is one of the hardest things to teach.  It is easier to say what theme isn’t than to say what it is. And, of course, there are stories with more than one theme.  Time and culture can deeply influence the themes that come to the fore of a story and how they are perceived.

No matter what the story structure, the theme should be what the reader takes from the story as its overall message. In archaic structures, such as fables, the theme is the moral of the story. In parables, the theme is the ‘wisdom’ it imparts at the end.  Old story structures demanded that the theme was an answer to a universal question.  In more modern, adult story forms, the theme shouldn’t offer answers, but encourage the reader to a deeper consideration of some serious and universal question.

Because of its broadness of scope, erotic fiction has the capacity to offer a valuable exploration of many aspects of the human condition in depth and at a very personal, concrete level.  So often, themes in erotic fiction deal with issues of ethics and morality, of embodiment, of identity, of loneliness, of abjection, of mutuality. Deep, deep stuff.

Erotic writing represents an entirely culturally constructed part of humanity (our sex drive is animal and focused on reproduction but, as cultures we have abstracted and reinterpreted that drive to the point where the things that trigger our arousal are entirely constructed.  Horniness may be biological, but eroticism is the meaning we’ve layered on top of that biological imperative).  So it would seem that erotic fiction is a great place to explore theme. We bind our sense of the erotic to so many elements that don’t have a biological foundation.  Here, in the rarified air of lateral and obtuse relations between intellect, the emotions and groin, theme can run riot. That’s a wonderful garden to explore.

Choosing a theme can help you make decisions as to how to carve a peace between your characters and your plot.  It can guide you to where a story needs to go. And yet, if you let your theme dominate your story, it will leach all the colour, all the texture, all immersive ‘hereness’ from your story. Themes are abstractions. They should sit at the foundation of the story, but never on the surface.

Let me give you a very simple, obvious example: I want to write a story with trust as a dominant theme.  BDSM seems like a perfect fit. My characters are going to learn that the only way they can explore the outer reaches of their erotic imaginations is to trust each other.

However, if I keep bringing up ‘trust’ in the story. If I keep placing the words into the mouths of my characters, into their brains, if I keep bringing something as abstract as ‘trust’ to the fore of the story, it will lose every ounce of heat it might have had. You may end up with readers nodding their heads in agreement, but you’re preaching to the choir. You’ve just produced a piece of rhetorical propaganda, not a story. 

Of course, the issue of trust needs to be there. But it needs to operate below the surface, like a current in the river, driving the story along invisibly.  You can show your reader the ultimate results of a lack of trust. You can show your reader what its presence can enable. But if you bring it directly into the text of the story, you treat your reader like a child. You don’t allow them to discover the theme and its implications on their own. You need to let your theme inform your story, but not dominate it.

If you do, your reader will come away from your story not only having had a good, immersive erotic experience, but also with a head full of ideas and questions.  For me, this is the ultimate goal of writing anything.

When you start thinking about a new story, do you consider its theme? How do you weave it in?

Immersive Proximity and the Luxury of Space: POVs in Erotic Fiction

by | October 13, 2013 | | 14 Comments

Justine by de Sade, the first two editions were in 1st person,
the final version in 3rd.

I took a quick poll last night on my twitter stream to find out which point of view was the preferred one for both readers and writers of erotica.  As you might imagine, no one behaved themselves and I didn’t get a definitive answer. 

Now, you’re asking yourself why this question might not pertain to other genres equally. Of course, POV is always significant to the reader’s experience of the narrative.  But there are both historical and cognitive reasons why it is of greater interest to erotica writers than it would be, say, to murder mystery writers. 

Before the 20th Century, much erotic writing was written in first person and often presented to the reader as a candid confessional.  The choice of this voice is significant because it was, in literary terms, the equivalent of the money shot. First person was felt to convey veracity and solicit reader empathy.

Narrative theorists, novel critics, and reading specialists have already singled out a small set of narrative techniques–such as the use of first person narration and the interior representation of characters’ consciousness and emotional states–as devices supporting character identification, contributing to empathetic experiences, opening readers’ minds to others, changing attitudes, and even predisposing readers to altruism” Suzanne Keen writes, leading to narrative empathy. (1)

Certainly confessional memoires like ‘My Secret Life,” by Walter, strove to create the effect of a confidence being shared between ‘men of the world’ about the forbidden landscape of sexual experience.

The firmness of her flesh impressed me, whether I put my finger between the cheeks of her arse or between her thighs I could with difficulty get it away; she could have cracked a nut between either.  (2)

This approach survives to this day, with the same strategy to convey genuineness and confidentiality to the reader in letters to the Penthouse Forum.

She started out by telling me that she loved me, then asked, “Honey, what would you say if I told you that I wanted to have sex with some other guy?”

I was thrilled with the thought, but needing to act like I was maybe too macho for that, I asked, ‘Where did you ever get an idea like that?'”  (3)

But before you start to think that first person erotica just results in downmarket pseudo porn, it’s worth remembering that Henry Miller wrote “The Tropic of Cancer” in first person:

At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. … I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love.  (4)

Interestingly, de Sade’s two first versions of Justine were written in first person, but for the final publication, La Nouvelle Justine, he changed it all into third person.  (5)  Considering how long it is, this must have been quite task. It should tell you something about how important he felt the POV was to the way he wanted the story read.

In an interesting meta-strategy, although the stories in Anais Nin’s “Delta of Venus” are in third person, the collection starts off with an intensely first person narrative prologue in which she talks of how the stories came about and how she wrote them, which cleverly assures the reader of the author’s personal erotic investment in the work, while presenting the stories as her own intensely narrative sexual fantasies set at a distance to allow the reader into her lascivious world.

She was a very, very clever writer. She gains the confidence of the reader in the same way that first person narratives do, but her use of the third person POV in the actual stories works an interesting magic. First person erotic narratives work very well when the reader finds it easy to empathize with the narrator.  Walter, de Sade and, I would hazard a guess, Miller, all assumed their readers would be men. Men like them. 

Nin not only set out to write beyond her lived and (perhaps) autobiographical experience, but take the reader into erotic fantasy and position both she  – the writer – and you – the reader – as voyeur. Third person narratives allow the reader enough distance so as not to be put off by the gap between fiction, the fictional characters, the erotic fantasy and the reader’s sense of self.  Moreover, the third person narration makes it possible to present male protagonists without jarring the reader with the reality that the writer is female.

“Now the Baron, like many men, always awakened with a peculiarly sensitive condition of the penis. In fact, he was in a most vulnerable state.”  (6)

Some erotic writers find themselves compelled to tell a story and it presents itself with a voice in which to be told and they remain faithful always to allow the story, in essence, to ‘tell itself.’

However, after I’d been writing a while and I began to get stalled on stories that didn’t seem to slither off my fingertips with the fluidity I had hoped for, I began to take more notice of POV. I realized that sometimes a story wasn’t working because it wasn’t being told by the right character. This is what really prompted me to think deeply about POV.

I realized that sometimes my stories didn’t have the level of conflict I wanted because I had started out writing the story in the POV of the character who was least conflicted. This gave me a more reliable narrator, but a less exciting story.

When I began to venture into writing male protagonists, I stuck to third person for the same reason Nin did. I wanted to acknowledge my unmaleness as a writer, and underscore the fictionality of the story.  But more recently, in stories where I felt I really could truly empathize at a deep level with the male protagonist, I have attempted first person.

It is often said that ‘literary’ works are usually written in third person and, if you take a look at the literary canon, a large portion of them are, but by no means all of them.

I think one of the reasons for the perpetuation of this myth is a legitimate one. Literary fiction attempts to ask the reader to, in a way, be conscious of the writing while reading. It asks the reader to split themselves in two – immersing in the narrative but also always remaining a little distant in order to afford the reader the opportunity to read critically at the same time.

You might think this has no relevance in erotic fiction, but I would argue that there are times when it can be very effective.  Say, for instance, you are writing a story involving a paraphilia or fetish that the vast majority of your prospective readers might not share. You want to tempt them to glimpse in at the eroticism of it, but you don’t want to assume their compliance, from a literary perspective. Third person affords readers the space and distance to intellectually acknowledge the eroticism of something they might not want to do in real life but might be aroused by in fiction. So, if you want to write a watersports story that is not aimed at readers who you know will get off on it instantly, third person is a great way to afford them wiggle room and allow them to indulge in the erotic descriptions of it without feeling like they’re living it personally.

On the other hand, I have at times wanted to intentionally disorient the reader, to prompt that fine line between disgust and lust, and a first person narrative can be much more immediate and immersive for this, forcing them into the world and the scene for narrative effect. In a way, intentionally violating their comfort zone.

Most people who have been writing a long time make POV decisions very consciously. They’re well aware of the pros and cons of each voice.  If you haven’t tried to go against the grain of your instincts yet, give it a try.  Even if, after a few attempts, you decide to return to your favourite POV, at least you will have had the experience of wielding the power that the decision of POV can offer you.

____________________

 1. Keen, Suzanne. “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative. 14.3 (2006): 207-236. Web. 13 Oct. 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/narrative/v014/14.3keen.html>.

 2. Walter. My Secret Life. 1. Amsterdam: Privately Published, 1888. Web. <http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1880s/1888_my_secret_life/vol_01/index.htm>.

 3.  T.P. “A Fucking Good Time.” Penthouse Forum Online. GMCI Internet Operations Inc., 28 Apr 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013. <http://penthouseforum.com/2013/04/a-fuckin-good-time/>.

 4. Miller, Henry. The Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Print.

 5. “Justine (Sade).” Wikipedia. N.p., 18 Jul 2013. Web. 13 Oct 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justine_(Sade)>.

6. Nin, Anais. Delta of Venus. OCR. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Web. <http://optimisinglife.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/nin-anais-delta-of-venus.pdf>

In Defense of Long Sentences

by | September 13, 2013 | | 18 Comments

Composition classes have been lauding the short sentence for
about 80 years. I’m not going to tell you the short, sweet and tight is bad; it
isn’t. I love it, often employing a consciously clipped style myself. It’s
effective for the gritty, brutal narrative and it affords a great deal of space
for the reader to root around it.

It’s been Hemingway vs Faulkner in the world series of
wordsmithery forever  but, if you do
a little investigation, you’ll find that Hemingway wrote some very long
sentences and Faulkner wrote some very pithy short ones. That’s probably why, even
after all this time, they’re still considered paragons of literary style.
Because, although they are each known for their radically different sentence
constructions, they both knew when to switch gears and break out of their own
stylistic niche to good effect.

Just the facts, ma’am and no purple prose. The popularity of
the short, sweet sentence arose with the emergence of the journalistic style,
evolving the way it did, partly due to technological limitations and partly for
clarity. When news stories were first transmitted by telegraph, there was a lot
of drop-out on the lines. The shorter the sentence, the less likely it would be
cut off. Hence the inverted pyramid format. And, hard as it is to believe now,
literacy was still relatively low at the dawn of the 20th Century. The press
was part of a democratization of information – particularly in the US – and
that effort included writing in plain, simple language.

Now it’s simply a matter of acclimatization to style. In
genres that place an emphasis on hard and gritty, you see the preference for
short sentences and unadorned language. Thrillers, horror, hard crime fiction
and any other genre that relies heavily on action tend to preference the short
and sweet. Unless the writer is very skilled, too many sub-clauses can gum up
the tension and slow down the pace. But allow me offer you an alternative.
Here, from the master of the short sentence, is a long one, pure action, with
all the tension and fluidity you could ever hope for:

George was coming down in the telemark position, kneeling,
one leg forward and bent, the other trailing, his sticks hanging like some
insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow, and finally the whole kneeling,
trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs
shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks
accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.

Yup, that was Hemingway with a 75 word sentence.  Did the sub-clauses slow it down?

There is a place for short, staccato sentences in erotic
fiction, but when I encounter erotic writing devoid of any long sentences, I
find it effective but not affective. My intellect engages, but my emotions and
my senses don’t. Lots of erotica leaves me not very high and literally bone
dry. Writing style is often the prime culprit.

Long sentences with a kernel or root clause and subsequent
sub-clauses that elaborate on the main one are a way to pull the reader into
the moment affectively. They offer substance, direction, rhythm and texture,
engaging the emotions, the senses and the reader’s ear. It complicates ‘the
facts’ with the meat of human experience; it offers shades of meaning to what
is happening in the story.

For those of you went to school after they stopped teaching
grammar, the kernel or root clause is the main subject, very and object of the
sentence.

Tracy adores cunnilingus.

 Now we’ll add on a sub-clause:

Tracy adores cunnilingus, since it’s the only way she can
orgasm.

Now a one more:

Tracy adores cunnilingus, since it’s the only way she can
orgasm, regardless of her lover’s technique in other areas.

We’ve put significantly more substance in the sentence, and
you’ll notice, there’s also a direction. 
We start out with the root clause ‘Tracy adores cunnilingus’ and then we
are elaborating by adding modifiers after that statement. But we could easily, perhaps
more elegantly, shift things around and add a little more:

Regardless of her lover’s technique in other areas, Tracy
adores cunnilingus, whining for it like a persistent cat in heat, tugging on his hair to drag his face down to her cunt, since it’s the only way she can orgasm.

The problem with long sentences is that there are a lot of
words in them to misuse. Run-on sentences are often painful because they’re
poorly constructed. The reader loses her grasp on the kernel clause, even on
the subject itself, and can’t remember what all this modification was actually
modifying. But, as you can see above, we haven’t lost the plot. This is still about Tracy’s love of a good licking.

Well written long sentences should enhance the reader’s
depth of understanding of the subject, not lose it. The addition of sub-clauses, either
free modifiers or bound ones, should deepen the in-the-moment ‘thereness’ of
the reader instead of jerking him out of the narrative in a tizzy of
‘lost-the-plotness.’

No matter what composition teachers tell you, language is
not like mathematics. In mathematics, elegance is based on simplicity and
compactness, but language is an additive beast. The more details you get, the
more you know.  I’m not saying that
the mot juste is not important. But
when language gets too clean, too pithy, too simple, it can lose its humanity.
It can also lose its rhythm.

This is particularly true when it comes to writing sex
scenes with a view to arousing the reader. Literary fiction writers will often
stick to a description of the mechanics in a sex scene. It’s about as sexy as
jumping jacks or watching dogs fuck. The whole thing is rendered like a series of
short, sharp stabs. All showing and no telling. If they’re scared of being
accused of purple prose at any time, they’re terrified of being accused of it
during a sex scene.

But erotica writers know better. When you write a good sex
scene, you fuck the reader. And good erotic fiction writers are, at least
mentally, accomplished lovers. They vary the pace by varying the length of
their sentences. They vary the sensory experience by glancing the subject in
some sentences and going in for the hard and deep plunder in others. They’re
not under the illusion that a ripped body and a 8″ cock used artlessly is going
to ever compete with the delicious rollercoaster ride of a well-executed
mindfuck. A hot quickie is pleasant, but a good erotic literary mindfuck is a
memorable thing. It requires that you make ingress into the reader’s affective
mind, not just their imagination of the narrative physical event.

The chief problem with long sentences is that people feel
they need to use prepositions and pronouns. If they don’t bind all those
sub-clauses together, it won’t be logical.  So, you get this:

 He
pressed his open mouth over her left breast, then stroked the tip of his
searing tongue around her nipple in a circular fashion before sucking the
entire area into his mouth, afterwards leaving the indentation of his teeth
behind on her skin.

Admit it, you felt the need to take a deep breath,
right?  It’s cludgy. When possible it’s better to set your modifiers free (bound modifiers attach to the sentence using joining words or prepositions, free modifiers don’t use them).

You need to trust that your reader is smart and with you.
They understand that the progression of words is the progression of events, and
they know enough about anatomy and how tit sucking works not to need half that
crap. You’ve already established who is doing what to whom, so you can be a little less concerned with locating everything in time and space.

 Pressing an open mouth to her breast, he circled her nipple with a
searing tongue and, sucking hard, marked her skin with his teeth.

You can’t get rid of every pronoun or every preposition, but
you really don’t need most of them. 
Although a good deal shorter, it’s still 25 words long . Not exactly short. I admit to having written much longer
sentences and I could easily slow down the pace and be languid in my
description of this, using more adjectives, an adverb or two if needed. It
depends on how I want the reader to experience this particular piece of intimacy.

Sentence length should be about depth of knowledge, direction, pace and rhythm.
Just as there is a place for the short, hot, meaningless fuck, there’s a place
for the long, slow, pulsating, eviscerating annihilation of the flesh and mind. And your ability to execute either of these
depends on your ability to be flexible in the way you construct your sentences.

If you’re up for it, there is rather deeper examination of the topic of sentences and especially of modifying sub-clauses written by Frances Christensen. “A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence” linked here. It’s a pdf file.

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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