Remittance Girl - Erotica Readers & Writers Association

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Remittance Girl

I Often Write About Love. You Just Don’t Recognize It.

by Remittance Girl | August 12, 2013 | General | 13 Comments

I was really stuck for a topic this month. I tweeted the question ‘what is hard about writing’ and got back an overwhelming number of really good answers and many of them were familiar: finding time, finding inspiration, the grind of editing, having a story stall out on you, uncooperative characters, not believing in yourself as a writer or trusting your voice … you know them all. I could and probably should have written on one of those, but instead, I thought I’d write about the one thing no one expects me to write about.

Love.

People don’t think I write about love. They think I write about sex. I write erotic fiction, not erotic romance, so people assume I don’t think love is important or worth writing about. They often assume I’m a cynic about it. But the truth is, there’s love in almost all my stories. It’s not explicit, and it’s not always sane, or permanent, or perhaps it’s not a kind of love you recognize, but I believe it’s love all the same.

The media has perpetuated a very idealised, standardised model of love. The lovers look into each other’s eyes and they know – they KNOW – this is love, this is real, this is forever. Cue the violins. And post-modernity hasn’t done a fucking thing to advance it. It’s just commoditized it. We may be all for same-sex marriage now, but we want their love to look just like that love too. Eternal, monogamous, spiritual, the foundation of a family unit. Heck, even Sookie Stackhouse can’t fall in love with the next vamp until she’s fallen out of love with the last one. And the most meaningful, best sex is the sex you have with the person you love.

We want to believe that love is universal, but I’m here to challenge you on that. I think the thing we call love is a cultural construction. I’m not going to go all biological on your ass and talk about love as an evolutionary strategy. Mostly because the jury is a long way out on that one. Nor am I going to say that we are imagining the feeling we identify as love, although I don’t think it matters whether we are imagining it or not. It has massive real-world consequences all the same.

I’m saying that there is most certainly a phenomenon that humans experience that destabilizes us as hermetically sealed individuals. We allow another in so deep that it breaks the seal on our individuality. They bleed into us, and if it’s reciprocated, we bleed into them. We stop being ‘alone’ in the the big sense of the world.

It is the culture we are born into that uses models and language to help us order that experience in our brains. Although love occurs in all cultures, how we identify it – the rules we expect it to obey – bear the marks of how our societies seek to order themselves.

Let me give you an example. I know this 24-year-old Vietnamese woman named Tuyet. She was born down in the Mekong Delta in a tiny little village. Grew up dirt poor. Her mother died of cervical cancer because the family had no money to treat it. She came to the city bone thin – not starving, because no one starves here, but rake thin from a poor diet – looking for a job to support herself and send money home to her family.

It’s a very common story in developing countries. She found a day job, but she became a part-time sex worker because the money was much better than anything she could earn with her lack of education or qualifications. In the course of her work, she met a 68-year-old American named Burt. Divorced, overweight, balding, bit of an alcoholic, not a prince by any means. And they marry. He gets all the sex he’s ever dreamed of and she gets the kind of financial security she’s never even dreamed of. She says she loves him. He says he loves her.

To Western eyes, there are nasty words for this sort of a relationship. In the West, loving someone for giving you sex is not love. In the West, loving someone for giving you economic security isn’t love. But to people in developing countries, you DO love someone who is willing to take care of you, and keep you safe, and pay your medical bills, and has the wherewithal to feed your family.

I’ve lived in foreign cultures long enough not to judge. They are giving each other what they need. They have allowed themselves to be vulnerable and dependent on each other for things that each of them find very important. If they call it love, then… it’s love.

One of my co-workers is Indian. He’s from New Delhi. His marriage was arranged. He met his wife once before they got married. Both their families each believed that they were two kind, decent people and they would make a good match. Both he and his wife believed that their families had their best interests at heart. They’ve been married seven years now, and have a little boy. The wife, Medha told me that she fell in love with him about 6 months into the marriage, after she was already pregnant with their child.

These are models of love we don’t understand because our understanding of love is culturally proscribed.

I have fallen in love a number of times, and out of love fewer. There are people I loved who I continue to love, even though I’m not with them anymore. Even though I was only with them a short time. And I have never ever loved two people in the same way. There isn’t one kind of love. There is a love for every love you fall into. There are people I fell in love with fast, and out of it fast. But in the moment, it was love. Our belief that only long-lived emotion is love is also culturally proscribed.

It’s incredibly ironic that we all agree that love hurts, but we taught to yearn for a love that doesn’t hurt. In Western concepts of romantic love, it only hurts in the short term, but in the long term, it turns into a kind of endless warm jello bath.

Another interesting Western belief is that love needs to be reciprocated. If it isn’t, it’s not love. It’s pathological obsession. It’s sick and unhealthy. We also believe that love needs to be physically consummated. If it isn’t, at some point, then it’s tragic and pathetic. But that’s only because it falls outside our cultural construction of how we’ve defined romantic love.

I’m not saying that because you adhere to your cultural understanding of love you’re wrong. I just want you to consider that it is a construction. It’s not the TRUTH, it’s a truth. It’s the truth of love in your culture. You can chose to insist upon it, but you can also reject it, and decide on another definition. A personal one.

I guess that’s the point of my post. I want to encourage you to consider that the definition of what love is isn’t static or etched in stone. And perhaps write about alternate versions of it.

Positioning the Reader: Who Do Erotic Writers Address?

by Remittance Girl | July 13, 2013 | General | 7 Comments

photo by sp333d1

You will often hear writers say that they write for themselves, and surely this is true for most writers. We are our first readers and often our harshest critics. Nonetheless, I think there is a definite progression to the development of ‘a model reader’ amongst writers in general and quite a specific progression among writers of erotica.

This post is by necessity going to be personal and anecdotal. A model reader is the person you imagine reading the work while you’re conceiving of the story, writing it, polishing it or getting it out there. Getting a firm sense of who that is will give you a better, more realistic sense of how many readers you can attract and some guidance as to how to classify yourself within a genre.

However, there is one very interesting difference between other genres and erotica. A great many erotica writers write their first stories, not as forays into the art/skill of writing, but as masturbatory entertainment. They write something that they cannot find written elsewhere (in the tone or to the standard they require for their arousal) that turns them on. Many others write their first stories as a tool of seduction – to arouse a specific lover – an intimate, handcrafted, experientially endowed gift. I am sure there are probably writers in other genres who make forays into erotica just to test their skill at writing explicit sex, but I’d guess this is probably not where the majority of erotica writers start.

My first piece of erotica (a happily doomed novel) embodied some of my most deeply held erotic fantasies. It wasn’t very well written, and the plot was a complete mess, but if I have to be entirely honest, I was writing for my own arousal. I had no reader in mind. I wasn’t seeking an erotic conversation with anyone.

As I developed as a writer, and especially after I joined ERWA’s ‘storytime’ list, the understanding that this act of writing was a form of communication – an attempt to transfer information from me to a reader through the text – became more apparent. There is nothing like having a story critiqued to give you a solid understanding that your writing is ‘received’ and, sometimes, not in the way you intended.

But the experience also taught me that, on a list as diverse as ERWA’s, there are times when it is not a case of having written a bad story, but that it has ended up in the wrong person’s lap. I am speaking here of stories that contain good grammar, fleshed out characters and a reasonably adequate narrative structure. One of these areas of disjunction was immediately apparent even at an organizational level. Non-consent lies at the heart of some of the most erotic themes for me as a writer. ERWA forbids the posting of non-consensual material. [“Storytime Guidelines” Erotica Readers & Writers Association Website. (Accessed June 21, 2013) ] So, at a most simple level, there were lots of stories I simply couldn’t post. But, at a broader level, when I posted stories on my blog, there were readers who for reasons of ethics or life-experience found my work did not speak to them at all.

Eroticism is one of those areas where lust and disgust nestle in very close proximity. [Stoller, Robert J. Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975] For some readers, the mention of a golden shower will ruin their experience of the whole story – so strong is their gut-level disgust of the act. For others, it’s not something that arouses them, but they can feel neutral about it and still enjoy the other parts of the story. For some, you’re ringing their dinner bell at such a basic level, that you don’t even have to describe its eroticism to have them in your pocket.

When I got these radically positive or negative reactions to the things I wrote, I did start slowly to form a picture of my model reader. They were someone who thought critically enough to defer immediate disgust reactions if the eroticism of an act could be made apparent to them in the story.

Time to fess up. I am never going to go out and buy an anthology on watersports. It doesn’t, as a rule, ring my bell. However, the two instances in which I read erotica that contained it and was aroused, were so different and yet, in some ways, so similar, they deserve examination. The two works in question were “My Wet Pet” by Julius (sadly nowhere to be found on the net now) [ Julius. “My Wet Pet” Erwa Storytime Listserve. Date Unknown] and the novel “Darker Than Love” by Kristina Lloyd. [ Lloyd, Kristina. Darker Than Love. London: Black Lace Books (1998)] Neither of these writers assumed a reader with a kink for watersports. They both eloquently focused on the sensory experience rather than just shoving the kink at the reader and both leave the semiotic implications of urine as part of a sex act open for the reader to interpret in their own way. Admittedly, in both these instances, it is the female doing the peeing and the power dynamics in both texts are strangely reversed. That might be why it works for me, but I doubt it. I simply have never read a heterosexual BDSM description of a golden shower where the male was the urinator that didn’t textually assume it would automatically arouse me as a reader. None of them came close to describing the sensation, the power dynamic, the emotional paradox of the experience. I’m sure there must be some out there, but I’ve never encountered one. When I do, I’ll let you know.

In the last decade of writing, I’ve also come to understand that many readers are looking for very sex-positive, very uninhibited erotica where the characters suffer not a moment of ambivalence in regard to the sex. On a personal basis, I find it very boring to write sex without paradox. I like my fictional sex with drama and I like the drama to be in the sex itself or at least its consequences or emotional ramifications. I write for readers who feel similarly. And that cuts down the number readers I can expect to ever have significantly.

When I conceive of the story, at stages during the writing and, most especially, during the polishing, there are about five people I have in mind as model readers. I don’t write for them, but I realize that I do write to them, in the intentional manner of a correspondent, if not in that precise form.

These are the readers I want to arouse. In that sense, these readers are lovers. It is not my aim to bring them to orgasm through the act of storytelling, but I absolutely want them hard or wet and mentally aroused as hell at times, during the reading of a story. I want the paradoxes I pose in my stories to be intellectually erotic teases for them. I want them to yearn for it all to come out right even if, knowing me as a writer, they know it probably won’t end in a happily ever after. I want the story to leave them feeling a bitter-sweet yearning in the same way a real lover kisses you at a corner to take their leave. It’s a good kiss, a kiss that speaks of possibilities, but it’s a complicated pleasure mixed with the pain of parting.

Most of all, if I had to describe my model reader in a single paragraph, I’d say that she or he is someone who can truly enjoy a story without having to absolutely identify with the characters. They are people who are excited by otherness. They enjoy a level of realism that many erotica readers aren’t looking for.

Of course, I get many more readers than this. And I can see by their comments often that I have not satisfied them. For instance, many women who read romance love my male characters but despise my female characters. They cannot identify with her adequately enough to step into her place in the story and instead feel a subtext of sexual competitiveness. Similarly, they get very upset when, at the end, the story doesn’t end happily. This doesn’t bother me. They made read some of what I write – they may even enjoy some of it a great deal, but they aren’t my model reader.

The truth is I’m never going to sell a lot of books. And for many erotica writers, especially with the success of books like ‘Fifty Shades’ and ‘Bared to You’, there is a pressure to sell books and make money. We live in a period where this is the predominant measure of success.

But, for those of you who are struggling to accommodate the marketplace, I’d like to offer this thought. A very few of us are ever going to make a living doing this. There is a valid and, to my mind, essential success in identifying who your model reader is and making them a happy and satisfied reader. No matter how small that readership may be, once they’ve found you and you have found them, there are life-long conversations had and an untold number of delicious seductions in your future.

While pondering this topic, I realized that other writers would have completely differing opinions in who they felt they were addressing when they wrote. I asked two colleagues, Kathleen Bradean and Raziel Moore for their takes on the issue:

Kathleen Bradean says:

When I’m imagining a story, there’s a group of people I envision reading and enjoying it. Most of them are erotica writers who think erotica can be literary and that erotica can be used to explore uncomfortable truths about humans. That may sound highbrow but it’s more like the flesh under a scab you’ve picked off—sometimes nearly whole, sometimes tender and sickly, and sometimes weeping blood. That rawness makes many readers uncomfortable. I envision the reader who won’t look away. I want the ones who lean in.

But that’s when I’m thinking about the story. When I write, the reader fades away. In a short story, there isn’t a lot of room to maneuver around, so each sentence has to be technically sound as well as develop character, evoke setting, move the plot forward, stimulate the senses, and arouse or disturb, worry… My focus is on the craft of writing so I get that right. What good is an idea if you don’t communicate it the best way you can? As if that isn’t enough to demand, hopefully my work has some aesthetic appeal. I am not a baroque wordsmith, nor a spell caster of ethereal mental imagery. My style is more like a Shaker chair. And while not fancy or embellished, it still requires craftsmanship. I can’t possibly focus on all that if I’m distracted by mental images of the reader enjoying each passage. I can see why a writer would though. I can see other writers using their words to seduce, or like love letters. That’s a rather charming idea. But it isn’t me.

Raziel Moore says:

Back when I started writing smut in earnest – I really can’t call it erotica at this point – I had one main motivation and one main audience. The motivation was to write stuff I found personally gratifying, mostly as wank fodder, partly to see if I could write anything at all. The target audience was me alone. Mostly. I wrote as self exploration. To name, and understand, and own the angels and monsters in my head.

If it had been _only_ me, though, I’d never have posted it to usenet forums, or eventually to free erotica sites like ASSTR. I wrote for myself, but also to show “them” what I could do. And I got feedback, in dribs and drabs, and eventually, fans.

Knowing that there were readers out there who react to my stories changed how I wrote. I didn’t think about it consciously for a long time, but it was there – this extra pause sometimes considering the possible reaction of someone besides myself. it grew on me slowly, unawares. Until I actually became correspondence-friendly with a couple readers.

When I know how someone _specifically_ reacts to my words, and I have a relationship with that person – even casually, or subject-specifically, my consideration of them as my reader is pretty unavoidable. I can anticipate, when I think about it, their eyes on the story. It doesn’t necessarily shift things hugely or overtly, but it is a partially known shape or shapes that I am pouring my words into, and there’s a desire to fill that shape the best I can.

Nowadays, I have several good writer/reader friends, and things have shifted again. These presences take a much more active role in my writing. They are almost internal checks and balances for certain aspects of style, or characterization, or craft. These people I write to, in addition to myself, are people I want to _get_ my stuff (As well as get wet or hard at the right spots). For the most part, it drives me to write _better_, but I’d be untruthful if I said my knowledge of what they liked – the buttons I’ve learned or gleaned – didn’t influence some of the details of what I wrote. I write for these readers as well as myself now, and I think I’m better for it. And, as I move forward and write more, perhaps there will be more eyes over my shoulder, more shapes to fill with words.

______

Although not specifically referenced here, these works informed this essay in essential ways:

Umberto Eco (1996) “The Author and His Interpreters,” The Modern World: Porto Ludovica Website. http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_author.html (accessed 21 June, 2013)

Lucie Guillemette and Josiane Cossette (2006), “Textual Cooperation”, in Louis Hébert (dir.), Signo [online], Rimouski (Quebec), http://www.signosemio.com/eco/textual-cooperation.asp (accessed 21 June, 2013)

Roland Barthes. The Pleasure of the Text. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1975)

The Past is a Foreign Country

by Remittance Girl | June 12, 2013 | General | 12 Comments

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
J.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Setting stories in the past is an interesting and sometimes strangely satisfying exercise in futility. The past, like memory, is always partly fiction. We can do all the research we want, but because we are viewing the past from here and now, we will never see, never ‘read’ it like the people who lived in it when it was the present for them. We can never unknow the fact that the earth goes around the sun, or that the world is four and a half billion years old. We can never unlearn what it is like to experience communication that’s instant over great distances. We will never be as brave as those who knew that a simple infection could kill them, or that losing a baby in childbirth was a regular occurrence, or that being unmarried and pregnant made you a social outcast. We can know those facts intellectually, but because we can’t unknow our current reality, our emotional understanding of the harsh reality of the past is always wrapped in the cotton wool of time’s comfortable distance.

Moreover, there are simply facts that are not at our disposal at all, because they didn’t seem important enough to record. Those things are lost in the sea of time. We have to make them up if we want to write into the past. We have to use our best guess, based on a belief that human nature doesn’t seem to change as fast as other things, like technology.

No matter how many facts you can accumulate, and no matter how sensitive you try to be to other points of view, and other ways of experiencing the world, if you want to write a story set in the past, you need to be brave, do the best research you can, and then just make some stuff up.

One scholar who is worth reading about how to interpret the past, and especially regarding sexuality, is Michel Foucault. Honestly, any erotic writer who writes stories set in the past and hasn’t read his masterful work The History of Sexuality, needs to get off their butts and read it. Particularly of interest is the part power has played in our understanding of sexuality in a cultural context through the ages. It has changed radically. Get all three volumes. Used. But read them.

On the bright side, the people reading your work are also not in the past. And, so although they too might be fascinated by it, presenting a reality that is too alien to them might very well make your story unreadable.

There are periods I like to think of as fictional pasts. So many romances have been set in the Regency period that there are now two of them: the one that actually took place, and the one that exists in most Regency romances and is familiar to their faithful readers. Most Regency heroines own more dresses than the female members of the monarchy did at the time. Those ball gowns were exorbitant. And no one bothers to mention the menstrual blood staining the floor of Elizabethan dancing galleries. Readers often have limits to the amount of authenticity they’re willing to tolerate.

Most challenging of all is the writing of social attitudes of the time when then clash wildly with ours. When I wrote a story set during the Cowpore Uprising in India, a number of my readers commented on how racist the character Calum and other members of his regiment were. But the reality was that they were, by our standards, very racist. Not consciously, not maliciously but they were acculturated to believe that white Christians were superior to all other races. And yes, there were extraordinary individuals who rejected that sort of prejudice, but those people were few and far between. I was torn between a need to write the characters in a way I felt would be historically accurate, and knowledge that my readers might not make allowances for the realities of historic racism and find him completely unlikable. I’ll never know if I made the right decision. I just did my best.

This month, I’ve invited two other authors, both of whom write stories set in the past to discuss their process and their thinking. I felt we probably all went about it in different ways, for different projects and I thought having three people’s take on the task was more informative than having mine alone.

* * *

My first guest is Aleksandr Voinov, who writes mainly m/m erotica, much of which is historical. Here he reflects on his novel Skybound, published by Riptide Press.

On Skybound

When I had the idea for Skybound, I was in trouble. I had no idea about any of the things I was going to write about. Telling a WWII story from the German side, too, was a bit of a leap. Even Germans like me are used to seeing and reading about the other side, thanks to Hollywood, and what stories there are on the German side, they tend to be told from the heterosexual viewpoint. But the sources are all there, and even though I specialised in Medieval History at uni and gave Modern History a wide berth, I still had the “historical method” at my disposal. So I did what I loved to do at uni and started digging and accumulating material.

Above all, I wanted to get it “right”. I wanted to do justice to all sides and be as accurate as possible. Some of the people who lived through it are still alive, and their children and grandchildren, too, which I think adds an extra burden to be accurate and respectful.

I started by reading a history of the Luftwaffe (German air force), but that provided just the backdrop. I dug deeper, looking at fighter planes. My characters, a fighter ace and a mechanic (one of the so-called “Black Men”, thanks to his black coveralls) would care deeply about the planes, so I learned about the Messerschmitt Bf 109, how and why it was developed and how it was used. I spent time staring at the cockpit layout in one of the technical books, trying to transpose my mind into it. I dug deeper still and read a biography by a fighter ace; while lacking in grace in terms of prose, it did have the telling details that I needed, and a couple anecdotes that I took for my own use (I attributed the things I didn’t change). I’m blessed that there’s a the Imperial War Museum in London and there I exposed my Muse to the WWII fighter planes suspended from the ceiling there in the great hall–physical manifestations of memory, half warning, half forgotten nightmare. While they don’t have a Messerschmitt, the Focke-Wulf fighter-bomber still helped. I’m a total immersion kind of writer (I guess the equivalent of a method actor), I just gorge myself on impressions and details and generally soaked up the energy, filtering that one and all the WWII air warfare exhibits all through my rational mind as well as my emotions. What kind of man would fly those? And how would he be seen? How would propaganda make him look?

Now, German fighter pilots were heroes–as problematic as that term is–a very special breed, and while their record is distorted by years of easy victories against technically and tactically inferior forces, German fighter pilots had hundreds of kills and were the very top performers of WWII. Most came to grief, were lost, but some survived and entered German civilian aviation after the war. Knowing all this, my decorated fighter ace was easy, but I’m telling the story from the point of view of a mechanic. I couldn’t find any autobiographies of mechanics (nobody really cares about the small people, maybe?), though I did find something about the high regard of pilots for their ground crews in the pilot’s biography. All I had to do was “flip” that inside my head.

Felix is a romantic, a failed pilot (I researched how fighter pilots were trained and hence knew why he wouldn’t qualify), he’s even a bit of a poet. As a child of his time, in what terms would he express himself? What is his voice and what is it influenced by? The obvious choice is Karl May, a prolific German pulp adventure writer of the late 19th century who is still being read by children and adults. His work is overwrought, passionate, romantic, heart-felt, definitely kitschy, but it has a sense of adventure and honour and “for thee, brother, I shall die” homoeroticism that presses lots of buttons. Hitler loved May. Felix would have loved him, too, and I imbued some of his voice with a dash of May–a romantic hyper-reality that clashes with his job and the war situation in 1944/45, but it also clearly an escape from the drudgery and the hopelessness of the late war.

For his actual job, I watched lots of YouTube clips. There’s lots of German propaganda newsreels on there, and I got a few DVDs too that were using German footage of the time. The interesting thing about those was that while it was definitely propaganda and “rah-rah-rah, we’ll smash them!” and “look how awesome we are!” I also saw the actual work being done, which was a lot more useful–no source is just a source, often reading it against the grain opens up treasures a writer can use. I watched ground crews pushing planes into line, refuelling, loading the bombs and machine guns. It was hard physical work, for one, but watching them helped me understand Felix. Then I watched modern footage of air shows to get the sound of the historical engines right for the scene when my airfield is being attacked by the Allies–no plane sounds alike, and my characters would be able to tell the difference. I spent a happy half hour talking to a British plane geek to work out which planes would be attacking and in what strategy and how these would perform against the German planes.

All in all, the story doesn’t have one sentence that’s not deliberate and researched to the best of my ability. Lots of writers might find these weeks and months of research for a mere 13,000-word story excessive. In that time, I could have written a novel quite easily.

But what the research did was allow me to write with authority and confidence about a world I knew nothing about. I feel like I’ve done the actual historical people justice, and I learned a great deal–I ended up completely fascinated, true to what my professor said when I challenged him on a boring assignment. He said, “Drill down deep enough into anything, and it becomes its own amazing little world.” It’s a small little world I learned to move freely in, building my story around and inside that framework. It was a fun challenge, and I can’t wait to go back.

* * *

My second guest author is Justine Elyot, who has recently finished her novel Fallen, which will be published by Black Lace in early 2014.

On Fallen

History is a strange thing. It has happened – it is fact. And yet it’s also highly open to interpretation. It seems paradoxical, but how many times have we opened a newspaper to find that something we had long held to be true has been found to be false? One of the lessons of history is that lots of it is a pack of lies, or at least, a jolly old London pea-souper of misconceptions and misapprehensions.

Writing historical fiction opens up yet another hall of distorting mirrors. What I am really writing about is my perception of that time. It’s been sewn together, piecemeal, through years of absorbing material, both fictional and non-fictional, about that period. I am viewing the past through a lens, and that lens is unlikely to be clear.

A fear of getting it wrong put me off writing anything historical for years until one day I grew tired of all the Victorian-set stories taking up houseroom in my head with no signs of buggering off and decided to do something about it.

Ever since I walked through Madame Tussaud’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ street at the age of ten, I’d wanted to replicate that feeling of being there in the past – without the waxwork corpses, but with the sense of immersion. Historical fiction offered me that opportunity. My favourite books took me to another world where people spoke, dressed, acted, thought differently and made me feel that I was there. This was what I wanted to give the reader in my neo-Victorian erotic novel, Fallen.

In a way, the preparation for it began at Madame Tussaud’s. From there, I went on to read everything I could relating to the 19th century (I remember the librarian raising an eyebrow at my borrowing Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor at the age of 12). I’m still doing it now.

But in Fallen, I am not only writing a historical novel. I’m also writing an erotic romance, so I have to try and be as true as I can to the Victorian erotic sensibility as well. This isn’t always easy – my protagonist writes pornography and it’s of a standard Victorian type, full of flagellomania and characters with names like Lady Whippingham. Much of what I’d read, in The Pearl, or elsewhere, was so far from anything most of my contemporaries would find sexy that I had to tone it down.

It’s a balancing act as much as anything. Be convincing, but be sympathetic to a modern ear. Write in a style appropriate to the period, but don’t go overboard with the multi-clause sentences and lose your audience. I don’t know if I’ve got it right – but if you want to find out, Fallen is published by Black Lace in early 2014.

Kill Your Darlings

by Remittance Girl | May 13, 2013 | General | 14 Comments

“I’m beautiful, I’m literary, please don’t hurt me.”

It was William Faulkner who said it. The venerable Samuel Johnson said something very similar. It really refers to lines or phrases, but can sometimes involve whole scenes. Received wisdom is that, if you come across a line or a phrase that makes you puff up your chest at your own literary or poetic brilliance, many accomplished writers and editors believe it probably needs to die.

First, I want to own up to the fact that I have not always followed this piece of writerly advice and I still don’t. But I think I’ve come to understand the rationale behind it a little better, and I have killed my fair share of darlings more recently, and shifted others.

I’m concerned with the ‘literariness’ of my writing. I care a great deal about the poetics of my work. I spend time frantically trying to avoid the many cliches to which it is so easy to resort when writing erotica. When I write sex scenes, I obsess about approaching them from at least a slightly fresher angle than most of the erotica I’ve read. I don’t believe my reader needs to be given a blow-by-blow description of intercourse, and I have a deep faith that language itself can evoke eroticism, and that you can brew metaphors that become new sites of eroticism for your reader.

But pride comes before the fall. I’m going to sound utterly arrogant when I say that I have forged erotic imagery that felt like it shone on the page, that made me think, ‘wow, you’re a fucking good writer’. The problem is that a lot of readers thought so too.

How can that be bad?

Well, it can. Because the moment you’ve forced a reader to look away from the story and think, ‘fuck, what a brilliant writer I’m reading, how poetic, how eloquent!’ is the moment you just kicked them out of the story. You’ve just interfered with your reader’s engagement with the fictional world in order to show off. It’s literary narcissism and it means you’re more concerned with literary bukkake than telling a good story.

Let me give you a brilliant example of a darling that sorely required execution. It’s from Rowan Sommerville’s “The Shape of Her.”

“He grasped the side of her hips, pushed her away and pulled her to him with a slap. Again and again with more force and velocity. Tine pressed her face deeper into the cushion grunting into the foam at each thrust.

The wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”

After being awarded the Bad Sex Award for this passage, Sommerville defended himself by saying it was a literary allusion, an homage to Vladimir Nabokov, who had been an avid amateur butterfly collector.

At this point, I hope you’re saying ‘who gives a fuck about your literary allusions?’ because you have every right to. Readers deserve better than literary in-jokes and canonical masturbation. The last line is both literary and fucking awful. If you were anywhere near being aroused by the passage, that line killed your mind erection stone dead, unless you happen to be one of the very few entomology fetishists out there.

Admittedly, I’ve never written anything quite so eloquent or out of place as that. But I once described an orgasm thusly:

“I can feel my orgasm long before it arrives, a plane in the distance and my body the control tower. The landing lights in my belly light up to guide it in. Gary’s cock has grown huge inside me and there’s a pleasant dull pain each time he thrusts upwards.”

Oh, good god, what possessed me? Landing lights? Control tower? What was I thinking? And yet, at the time, I thought it was a wonderful metaphor. It just felt so ‘right’.

Another problematic darling is the encapsulating and eminently quotable line. Rather than kill it, consider shifting it to either the beginning of the story, chapter or scene, or the end of one of those. It probably is a great line but if you impress your reader so deeply with your pithy, perfectly worded brilliance, same deal. You impress the reader with your linguistic abilities, but you interrupt their relationship with the story.

And this is not about you or how brilliant you are; it’s about the story. So, when it comes to your edits, read through your piece and find those lines, phrases or passages which make you want to give yourself a manly, Hemmingway-style pat on the back. Ask yourself who is truly served by that line or phrase. Is it serving the story or your own writerly ego?

The Thistle In The Kiss

by Remittance Girl | March 13, 2013 | General | 7 Comments

Roland Barthes: Total Perv & Handsome Devil

The title of this post comes from the Dylan Thomas poem “If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love“. I went looking for it again, after many years, because I’ve been spending a lot of time these days thinking about language – its imperfections and the way it resists us when we need it most.

When I was in secondary school, I had the most marvelous English teacher. He was obliged to take us through Hamlet and the Merchant of Venice, Pride and Prejudice, and all sorts of poems which are undoubtedly wasted on anyone under about 35. We had to read T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas and, of course, most of the poems made fuck-all sense to us at the time. It wasn’t until I got older that I understood that most of the great poetry of the 20th century requires a hefty dollop of life-experience on the part of the reader, before it really communicates anything to you. Nonetheless, my teacher gave me a gift: a gift that would make little sense until I unwrapped it as an adult. He said, “Look, don’t try to reach for the poem. There’s no ‘getting’ a poem. There’s only absorbing it.”

Thirty-five years later, it was the assonance of the title I would remember. Not its message – because, with a good poem, the meaning changes subtly each time you read it – but the liquidity of the language. Its hidden whisperings between the cracks of the words and its sting of ear and heart. Its ‘thistle in the kiss’.

In his book “The Pleasure of the Text,” Roland Barthes talks about the pure hedonistic bliss of reading certain books. He differentiates between ‘texts of pleasure’ and ‘texts of bliss.’ When you read ‘texts of pleasure,’ he says, you are aware you are reading. You might stop and think how clever the writer is, how witty, how wise, but you are still dwelling in the culturally dominated world while your enjoying the book. With ‘texts of bliss’ you get so utterly lost in the process of reading, you are kidnapped, ravished, metaphorically fucked. Of course, it’s fair to point out that Barthes was French and the French can be relied upon to find the eroticism in practically anything. But when in doubt, I always feel it’s wise to take things on face value. When it comes to reading erotic fiction, there are texts of pleasure and texts of bliss. And the irony is, that for me, as a reader, some of the most blissful texts have not been the most explicit.

For me, two things contribute to offering a text of bliss. One is a story that disorients me. Being constantly reminded of wealth, physical buffness, and name brand products anchors me in the order of the everyday. Characters who have jobs that are alluded to – he’s a stock broker, she’s writes ad copy – but never actually take you deep enough into the world of what they do to overwhelm your assumptions, can never offer me more than pleasure. They can’t transport me. For bliss, I need enough detail to shake me from my rational moorings of what I assume a stockbroker does, to a place where he’s seeing patterns in the data or feeling the almost genital thrill of watching a stock price suddenly take off and go crazy. (Yeah, I know, you’re sneering at my choice of example, but I assure you, I’ve chosen it on purpose). But what I’m trying to express is that everyone’s life, when examined in detail, is a foreign land – a place of disorientation. It is only when we’re forced to assume generalities that we feel grounded and safe.

The second element that offers me bliss is language. We use language on so many levels. Despite what Derrida says, its worked for us very well as an everyday tool to get information across from one person to another with surprising levels of accuracy. Read any newspaper article: there is a very definite structure to them. What, where, when, who…sometimes how and why. And yes, we get it – it’s factual.

At five o’clock on Thursday, September 5th, in the city of Buenos Aires, three diplomats were seen masturbating each other in a public cafe.
(Okay, so I got carried away there).

Then, of course, there is narrative language, which carries an perspective and subjectivities with it.

It took Melissa a moment to realize what she was witnessing. Three men in suits, all seated around the marble-topped cafe table, nonchalantly stroked each others’ exposed cocks. Did the laws of Argentina allow this sort of thing? Was this the Buenos Aires version of the Cocktail Hour?

It’s more engaging. I could take pleasure from this text, but I’m still situated in the everyday world. Melissa’s reaction is civilized. The scandalous nature of what is happening is pointed out to me, so I can agree. My feet are still firmly on the ground here.

The language of bliss is not something any writer – or any reader. for that matter – can tolerate for long stretches. It is disorienting, uncomfortable, disruptive. It intrudes on the structure of our ordered minds. It lies to us, misleads us, sets up irreconcilable polarities. It sequesters us to a place of otherness, just for a moment, while somehow making it all about that moment.

Antonio’s soft, spitslick mandarin’s hand tightened around my cock. Hot, fat fingers muffled the sounds of the cafe. Each downward stroke sloughed away another layer of the world until the singular pleasure of the tug was the universe entire. A cockfisted climb towards the airless void. All the way up, I fed on shutter-clipped mental images: the arterial spray that would scald my face and spatter the wall if the bastard dared to stop stroking before I came.

I’m not suggesting this is a brilliant example. Just having a go at it myself.

The Apollonian & Dionysian Dialectic: Inner Conflicts and Revolutionary Acts

by Remittance Girl | February 12, 2013 | General | 8 Comments

A long, long time ago, in a land far, far away, there was a guy named Nietzsche who had a hell of a time getting people to spell his name correctly. He also had an unfortunate way voicing his opinions that makes him, to this day, rather annoying to read. However, all that aside, some of his ideas were so phenomenally clever (some of them were crap, too, but we’ll leave that for now) that they radically influenced almost all the European thinkers that came after him. And they do, to this day, as anyone who has read Camille Paglia (another thinker with an awkward mode of address) can attest to.

Nietzsche wanted to get past the whole, very Judeo-Christian good/bad divide. He wanted to explore what forces were working on man to account for the way they behaved. Living during a time when people had begun to fear their cultural spirit was flabby and weak, he could see that a great many people were just too civilized for their own boots. And being trained in the classics, he reflected back on his early education and came up with the concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian dialectic. He felt (probably because he didn’t know much about how appallingly Greeks treated women and slaves) that the Ancient Greeks had found a much better balance between their instinctual selves and their civilized yearnings.

What the hell has this got to do with erotica? Bear with me.

Apollonian forces are all the civilizing factors that allow us to get along with each other. They favour control over nature, discipline over instinct, rational thought over emotional drive. Dionysian forces are… you know, the opposite: chaos over order, instinct over culture, creative, libidinous, wild, violent, etc.

At the center of every good erotic story is a battle between the Dionysian and Apollonian forces within the characters. This is how great erotica manages to have conflict without writing a sub-plot about battling Nazi zombies.

Now, you might think that something like modern porn is wholly Dionysian – it’s all about giving in to base instincts and indulging in wild pleasures, right? But step back. Porn does have a hidden Apollonian side to it. Porn tells you HOW to fuck. It shows you what you should look like, act like, sound like. It offers a ‘fuck ideal’. Although you may not notice that with your hand around your dick, while the large-breasted blonde gets it up the ass and sucks dick at the same time, believe me, subconsciously, you’re being schooled in how to do it right. This is why crazy-like-a-fox Slavoj Zizek can say that porn is ultimately a conservative art-form and get away with it.

Similarly, a lot of erotic romance might look like two crazy fools engaging in ton-o-kink, and falling into the chaos of unending love (Dionysian). But actually, if they’re pairing up and planning on negotiating a mortgage together by the end of the story, they’re ending up in a very Apollonian place. Most romances offer the reader a ‘love ideal’. Society likes those neat family units.

What, I argue, makes good erotica far superior an art form to either porn or romance, is that it refuses to offer ‘ideals’. It recognizes that tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces, celebrates it, focuses on the storm of it, and leaves the reader with that battle unresolved.

Why do I think that’s good?

I think it mirrors our real, lived experiences far better than either porn or romance. In truth, we live with those competing forces all our lives. Even poor, uptight T.S. Eliot was left pondering whether he had the rakish temerity to eat a peach and let the juice dribble down his chin.

Writing characters who are so wholly committed to either the Apollonian or Dionysian sides of their personality diminishes your ability to take them through a good, meaty story. If your character is too ready to take the plunge, too accepting of all the chaos that indulging in the Dionysian entails, it’s going to be hard to effectively write any tension in the story. On the other hand, if your character is too hell bent on finding the right man with whom to settle down and start a family (or too hell bent on populating the perfect BDSM dungeon), you’ve got the same problem.

Revealing the inner tension of each character’s Apollonian and Dionysian side (and fighting your own Apollonian or Dionysian preferences to get them to a place of static commitment to either camp) will allow you to leave your reader with characters who will haunt them beyond the end of your story, because although the story may have ending, you allowed the universal battle live on.

Now, if you’re a savvy writer who wants to sell books, then right about now you are thinking… I don’t care what you say, Ms Philosopher Name-Dropper, people want ‘ideals’. ‘Ideals’ sell.

Yes, they do. They absolutely do. The public has been fed so many visions of an ‘ideal’ in the media, they’re completely addicted to it. When they don’t get it, they get pissed off, just like any junky who finds out his fix is actually almost all baby laxative.

And this is why I bring up Nietzsche and Zizek, and why I feel erotica is a fundamentally revolutionary, political act. Because I believe that feeding people ‘ideals’ is like handing them smack. And you can accuse me of being a patronizing, arrogant elitist – that’s fine. But all those unrealistic, ideal-driven narratives accumulate, and ultimately leave people constantly yearning for a reality that cannot exist, or comparing their lives to fairy-tale fictional worlds and feeling like, if only they were cleverer, smarter, richer, better-looking, thinner… everything would be perfect. And ironically, this tends to make them go out and buy stuff that promises to make them all those things. Corporate profits go up and people’s sense of self-worth, purpose and ability to cope with the ups and downs of a real life go to the wall.

When D.H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterly’s Lover in 1928, he did something utterly revolutionary. He wrote explicit sex scenes in a literary world that had never tolerated them. He wrote about sexual love between people from radically different classes in a world where that was a serious social transgression. He wrote the ending it deserved. Not a happy one, but one where the characters were left transformed by their experiences.

There is no use pretending that, in a world saturated in porn, writing explicit sex is transgressive: it’s not. And not only has fucking the help become acceptable, it’s a goddamned porn meme. But writing stories that offer no ideals, and don’t force the battle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian to a neat conclusion… that IS transgressive.

So do it.

The Limits of Language: The Metaphysics of Eroticism

by Remittance Girl | January 13, 2013 | General | 7 Comments

Die Grenzen Meiner Sprache, K. Rakoll, limited edition digital print, 2007.

In his book “Erotism: Death and Sensuality,” George Bataille admitted to an uneasy relationship with poetry. In fact, he bemoaned the poverty of language to express the experience of extreme eroticism. He begins the book with a long defense on why there is no objective way in which to examine or to discuss eroticism, because it is a wholly interior experience. And yet the Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz said that eroticism was to sex what poetry was to language. It was Michel Foucault, in his essay valorizing Bataille, who postulated that, as in death and other extreme human experiences, eroticism is a space in which language falters. Very often, said Foucault, the language we use to discuss sex does violence to it.

Is this going to turn into another discussion of the pornography / erotic fiction divide? Well, in a way it is. Because as humans, we are peculiar creatures, and we often come to understand things by knowing what they are not. But I hope this will also be an essay of encouragement to erotica writers; A way to say that writing about the erotic experience in all its richness and complexity a very difficult but worthy endeavor.

Why?

Well, before the Enlightenment, humans had a very good sense of what they were and what the purpose of their life was. We were put here to serve God. To do His bidding. To repay Him for the gift of the sacrifice of His son, on the cross. As Jacques Derrida observed, as gifts go, it was one with horrific strings attached. But nonetheless, within the Judeo-Christian world, as humans, our nature and our purpose was given to us. How well or badly we stuck to that purpose was judged in reference to something external and beyond us. God was our judge. Of course, Descartes presaged the end of all that, Kant compounded it, and by the time Nietzsche was stinking up the slipcovers and declaring the Death of God, we were on our own. We were responsible for describing ourselves, for engineering our own purposes, and for judging ourselves.

And if that’s the case, it should be easy to use language to do that, shouldn’t it?

What a number of 20th Century thinkers found out, especially in Europe where they get the funding to lie around thinking about such things, is that there are parts of the human experience that simply stretch language (our ability to conceptualize and communicate them) to its limits. And, it turns out, this occurs in very interesting places. Usually, but not always, at the extremes of experience. It is not unreasonable to believe that there is something important to be learned about ourselves in these places where language fails us, if only because of the phenomenon of the fact that it does. And it is not a coincidence that this European fetish for examining these limits of language is also the place where people feel that literature can contain a hefty dose of erotic writing and still be considered literature.

As unappetizing as their works might seem now, two writers really braved the frontier and lived (through the survival of their works) to tell about it. Sade and Sacher-Masoch. Ironic, isn’t it, that both these writers were obsessed with the extremes of the erotic. So much so, that many people don’t consider what they wrote as very erotic at all. But they eased the way for the many more palatable examples of the subject that came after them. And although a lot of ‘naughty’ writing emerged from Victorian England, and there was the mind-blowing anomaly that is James Joyce, it is not entirely unfair to lay the blame for why some of us take eroticism so seriously almost wholly on the French. Because even though they didn’t write it all, they published a lot of it, critiqued it, and generally felt it to be important enough to discuss seriously and, more to the point, philosophically.

Anyone who has attempted to write the sensation of an orgasm, without resorting to the cliche bullshit that has emerged as the babyfood of erotica, knows how insanely frustrating it is. Just describing the physical reality is hard enough, but the minute one attempts to describe how it feels, how it affects our sense of space, time, our perceptions of the other, present in the moment, etc., well, it’s a total bitch. All the very best textual examples of it have a suspiciously poetic quality to them. Because Octavio Paz was right. It turns out that the tighter we hold onto empirical, analytical language, the more abject our failure. So, one way people go about it is to circumvent the problem by not describing it at all, and leaving it to the mind of the reader to fill in the slippery (pun intended) details. Another is to opt for a sort of pot-throwing approach: using language as the clay, but letting the subtle chaos of unconscious – a kind of potter’s wheel – to do some of the work. Allowing the language to be slippery, lumpy, imprecise by using metaphor and surreality, rhythm, cadence, and semiotics to deliver an impressionist rendering of the event. This, of course, can result in some very nasty purple prose. But it can also result in something that approximates the sublime. It isn’t a particularly economical method; you have to be prepared to consign a lot of your efforts to the garbage.

But I’ve only used the example of the orgasm. And I don’t want you to think this even begins to describe the challenge of writing the erotic. Because, pulling out to a larger view of the challenge, erotic desire is even harder to get a handle on. And sure, you can use the image of a hard cock to symbolize erotic desire, but it’s a piss poor symbol. It equates to how erotic desire plays out on the body, but it gives no hint at all as to what erotic desire does to the mind.

Pornography does a marvelous job of showing you the surface of what’s going on when people get all up in each other’s business. For the most part, it shows us sex. People going at it. And if we weren’t such complete species bigots, a filmed sequence of dogs fucking should also do the trick for getting us in the mood to fuck. But I’d ask you to accept the premise that to scratch the biological itch is not, in itself, erotic. If we’re honest, we’ve all have experiences of getting off and shooting our respective wads, that were utilitarian rather than erotic. But if Bataille and Paz are right, and eroticism is not about copulation, reproduction, or simply physical sexual release or even the fleeting, purely physical pleasure of orgasm, but rather the strange excessive meaning we have piled onto the human sexual experience, the mental pleasure present in the erotic moment that often lingers afterwards or even rears its head when there’s no prospect of an erotic encounter in sight, then pornography fails utterly. And, in all fairness, so does a lot of erotic fiction.

One of the reasons I think it fails these days is because we have come to mistake any form of sexual experience for an erotic one. I encounter this a lot, when someone on twitter DMs me and says: ‘Wanna see my cock?’ You may laugh. But think about it. This COULD be an erotic experience if I personally thought that there was something deliciously dirty and transgressive in gazing on a nameless, disembodied cock. If I was brought up to believe that such a symbol of decontextualized sex was inherently bad. Sadly, I wasn’t. To me it’s just a biological specimen out of its jar. Now, if the person offering to show me the cock is an exhibitionist who has some sense that showing his erect cock, while withholding the rest of his presence, is somehow dirty or bad or nasty, it might very well be erotic for him. But on the whole, it’s just a matter of a very utilitarian urge to get off and a vain hope that a few words from me with make the process slightly easier. In a way, it’s an attempt to complete the process more efficiently. The truth is, a lot of sex is just this. There’s nothing wrong with it; its the human animal following his misguided and very confused instinct to spread seed. But its not necessarily erotic. This is why I feel Bataille is right. That eroticism requires some form of conflict, of personal transgression – even if that transgression doesn’t seem particularly transgressive to anyone else. As Octavio Paz said: “Sexuality is general; eroticism, singular.” This is why one person’s porn is another person’s eroticism. The mistake is in assuming we are going to always agree. The art is in judging when we do.

Another reason why we might fail is because we try to insert love as a central site of eroticism. It isn’t that love cannot be present in eroticism. For some people, getting there without it is just not an option. It is simply that a lot work that straddles the erotica/romance divide ends up moving the focus by mistake. This phenomena of erotic transcendence is an admittedly emotionally, one might even say spiritually, dangerous place, if one reaches it at all. And for many people, going to that space with someone you don’t trust is too frightening to contemplate. How many people can you honestly say you trust, but don’t love? Of course, some of those people you can name are out of bounds, because of the taboo of incest, or because they happen not to be the right gender for your particular orientation. But on the whole, if you love someone, you trust them, and this allows you to go to that exhilarating, awe-inspiring, frightening place with them. So love may be a prerequisite for even attempting the journey, but not for the experience itself.

For me, some of the most successful erotic fiction involving romantic love occurs when one of the characters loves but does not trust the other, or trusts but does not love the other. Because either of these states are socially problematic and set the stages for some kind of transgression that enables the opening of the door to eroticism.

And this leads me to the last of the examples I’ll offer of where writing the erotic can be difficult. There is a word that is used often in philosophy, critical studies and among those of us who count angels on the heads of pins: Alterity. It means ‘otherness’. But what makes it a good word is that it encompasses the very strange dilemma we, as individuals, face every day of our lives. It is The Other. The one who is not us. Everyone but you. There’s a lot of funny stuff that happens when you study how we relate to The Other. And it gets even weirder when we let that Other into our personal space. Weirder still when we touch the Other, or the Other touches us. Here, for instance, we get a strange and beautiful paradox, examined eloquently by another French guy by the name of Jean Luc Nancy. When someone kisses you, and your lips touch, are you kissing them, or are they kissing you? Are you feeling your lips being met, or meeting theirs? Yeah, it’s a headfuck, I know. But when it comes to the realm of eroticism, you can see how we are getting into a place, with regard to this paradox, that gets freaky strange. When I thrust into you (just pretend I have a cock, because sometimes, I’m convinced I do and no one else can see it), am I penetrating you or are you consuming me? What is more aggressive, penetration or consummation? If you just want to look at this from a purely physical perspective, as happens in porn, there is no paradox. But once you start to examine the interior experience of this physicality, it’s easy to get lost. It’s why people, quite correctly say, they lose themselves in each other. At the point where this is occurring, we lose what Bataille called our ‘discontinuity’. We stop being discontinuous separate beings. We get to somewhere beyond that, where I don’t know where my body begins and yours ends. And where sometimes, I don’t know where I begin and you end. We are at that fleeting moment of ego death. And how can I speak when I am not me anymore.

This is where language fails us. At this, often momentary, point of transcendence. There is no air in the void. Nothing to inhale and use to enable us to speak. And it’s over so fast. We fall back into our bodies, and our individualities, and it’s over.

To me, all good erotic writing attempts, in some way or another, to represent those experiences, those eerie little miracles that occur, even though ‘God is Dead’. My guess is that we are almost always going to fail to capture that state. But I believe that even getting close tells us immense things about who we are as humans and what we are meant to be, since it’s our job to do it now.

On the other hand, it has been theorized that eroticism is simply one of the grand narratives perpetuated by modernism, and is already dead. But that’s another post.

Erotic Romance vs Erotica: Order vs Chaos

by Remittance Girl | December 13, 2012 | General | 33 Comments

Hans Bellmer, The Brick Cell

There are probably a number of outstanding erotica writers out there who have written delicious novels full of BDSM kinkiness wondering why their royalty checks don’t look anything like those of E.L. James. This post is an attempt to explore why that is, and how the Erotic Romance genre is, philosophically and politically, almost the binary opposite of Erotica.

You would think that genres which predominantly focus on the nasty things two or more people get up to in bed would be closely related. Superficially, and commercially, they look very similar, but readers know they are not. Underneath the hood, ideologically, they stand almost in opposition to each other, despite the subject matter they share.

Modern erotic romance novels conform to the mythic structure of a classical comedy described by Northrop Frye. People meet, they become lovers, chaos ensues, but social order is finally restored in the form of a wedding. Although most erotic romances no longer end with a wedding, the ‘Happily Ever After’ convention is maintained through the explicit culmination of the romance in some sort mutually agreed upon serious and long-term emotional commitment to each other. By the end of the story, we are left with a stable ‘family-like’ unit. We go from order to chaos to order.

Even when the pairings in an erotic romance are non-normative, i.e. gay, lesbian, bi or trans romances, they still ultimately pay obeisance to the prevailing cultural dominance of a ‘normative’ relationship structure: two people, together forever. Even when the story revolves around a menage, it either ends with a pair at the end, and the third party neutralized somehow, or an hermetically sealed threesome that, for all intents and purposes, results in a place of domestic order.

No amount of wild, kinky or transgressive sex in the middle can mitigate the final conservative outcome of a neat, socially recognizable and culturally settled bond. The outcome of all these stories is essentially a conservative one. One that supports and perpetuates the prevailing social order.

I cannot recall who said it, but one very famous murder mystery writer once said that her readers were people who had a very passionate love of justice. No matter how gruesome the murders or thrillingly evil the murderer, he or she is inevitably caught and made to answer for the crimes. The convention of the genre demands it. The readers expect it and are left disgruntled and unsatisfied when the implicit promise of the narrative is not delivered.

I would echo this by suggesting that, no matter how explicit, licentious or debauched the sex, erotic romances promise something similar. These two individual characters with their chaotic taste for erotic adventure find each other and this perfect matching up of desires neutralizes whatever destabilizing influences they might have on society. The inevitable pairing at the end guarantees the reader a return to emotional and sexual order. Erotic Romance lovers are essentially ideologically conservative in their appreciation of a restoration of the social order.

But, according to Georges Bataille (the French writer and thinker who spent more time considering eroticism that almost anyone else on the planet) this conservative social order and eroticism are almost mutually exclusive. Eroticism, said Bataille, is a uniquely human phenomenon that results from an excess of sexual energy. (Unlike almost all other animals, humans indulge in sex far more than the continuation of the species demands. Our instinct to have sex might be procreative, but our desire to have it far outstrips the needs of nature.) This excess, this eroticism, is a dangerous and destabilizing force, he said. Which is exactly why all cultures, in one way or another, have attempted to control the effects of this energy and why so many of our religions, taboos and customs are especially focused on matters of sexuality and violence. Foremost amongst the mechanisms used to control these desires is the institution of marriage and the promotion of monogamous, procreative relationships.

Bataille, Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, and others have made interesting observations on how one of the most effective ways to control humans within society is through work. Work occupies us, distracts us, commits us to the social order. Spouses, mortgages, and 2.3 children turn out to be a very good way to keep us occupied, working to support them. So the myth of the romantic ideal of the permanent single partner whom we lust after in perpetuity and love eternally serves that hegemonic structure well. Perpetuating that myth through erotic romances encourages us to aspire to that myth in reality, make it our loftiest of all goals, and ultimately to internalize and validate that authority and its rules of social order with enthusiasm.

But the reality is that eroticism is a fleeting, liminal human experience. It does not – cannot – last long. And it would not be so attractive or precious to us if it could. Erotic heights are by their nature impermanent, chaotic, and fundamentally transgressive. Our greatest erotic experiences occur right at the edges of the limits imposed not only from without (in the form of prohibitions, taboos and religious interdictions) but more importantly, at our inner limits of the rules of behaviour we have internalized. Erotic ecstasy is the place where we lose ourselves, not just to another, but to the structured world. This, of course, cannot be sustained. Or rather, it can only be sustained in death.

A person who gives themselves permission to enter this state of erotic rebellion is an anathema to the fabric of social order, since none of the rewards that society can offer them have any value in that moment. They are in a state of revolution against the stable, against categorization, against limitation, against even language itself. And this is what lies at the heart of all the best erotica. This essentially transgressive, anarchic, unconstrained state of being.

It took me a fairly long time to fathom why I, as a writer and reader, had such a deep antipathy toward the narrative structure of erotic romance. What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I like a good love story? Why can’t my characters end up blissfully happy and together forever? I have come to feel that the underlying text of the story-form of the erotic romance is a type of conservative social propaganda. Not ‘unfeminist’ as some feminists have claimed, but simply reflective and supportive of the status quo as regards all our positions as productive, functioning and controllable members of the current social structure.

I am, at heart, deeply anti-authoritarian. And although in my everyday life, I am a quite a law-abiding, acquiescent citizen, I am not interested in taking that part of my world into my fictional writing.

The eroticism that does interest me lies in the opposite direction: that place of impermanence, transgression, and dangerous erotic experience. Its very instability is what I find so blindingly beautiful, intriguing and exciting.

So it is really not so very surprising that, despite the veneer of transgressiveness, Fifty Shades of Grey has done so much better than well-written, more erotic, more informed pieces of erotic fiction. Because beneath all the surface naughtiness, E.L. James’ ‘global shocker’ strongly reinforces a very stable and conservative social order. And, the truth is, most readers are far more comfortable with that.

(And before anyone jumps all over me, I would like to underscore that I’ve used the word ‘conservative’ to mean ideologically at home with the status quo and traditional social structures. I haven’t accused anyone here of voting Republican.)

We Deviants. We Happy Deviants

by Remittance Girl | November 14, 2012 | General | 19 Comments

In the past month, the subject of how to discuss what we write has come up an uncanny number of times, from diverse quarters. I have a friend who writes erotic fiction, but never admits to it, because his wife doesn’t like it. Another fellow writer says that he is uncomfortable about admitting what he writes, because he has children and (this must be an American thing) worries that people will somehow feels he’s an unreliable father if he writes erotica. I know many erotica writers who use a pen name because they fear an admission of what they write will imperil their careers.

When people, in everyday sorts of interchanges, ask me what I do, I say I teach and I write. They’re never all that interested in what I teach; they ask me what I write, and I tell them. Since the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, the next inevitable question is: oh, so you write stuff like Fifty Shades of Grey? No, not really, I say.

Their reaction – the knowing smirk, the sly wink and, occasionally, some far too TMI confession – constantly reminds me that what we do is still considered deviant and transgressive.

In the world of academia, it’s even more interesting. As a graduate student, you spend a considerable amount of time going to seminars, interacting with other graduate students, and the question of your research comes up all the time. In the last 2 months, I have had to sit in a group and fess up to exactly what I write and what I’m researching over and over. From time to time, I will encounter a genuinely thoughtful response: wow, what a compelling area of study! Good luck with it!

But more often than not, after the initial, very studied attempt to appear unfazed, I am met with the same ‘wink-wink, nudge-nudge’ follow-up that I receive from non-academics. Frankly, it depresses me. I suspect, being an intellectual snob, I expected something more intelligent from my colleagues.

Eroticism is a dangerous subject; so dangerous, in fact, that our society consistently prefers to deal with it at arm’s length by mythologizing it or turning its subjects into caricatures. Either that, or they try to reduce it to anthropological study. Eroticism is not sexuality, although it is often expressed through sexuality. It has more in common with religious ecstasy than it does with procreation. It is so mysterious to us, that we try and explain erotic attraction by aligning it with animal mating displays and successful reproductive strategies in the wild: i.e. men are attracted to red lipstick on women in the same way apes are attracted to females in estrus with inflamed backsides, or, masochists like to be whipped because it produces endorphins that get them high.

Let me put an end to this nonsense: male baboons don’t have fur fetishes and masochists are not drug addicts.

Eroticism is the story of our negotiation between self and other on a very deep, very visceral level. We are born alone, die alone, and yet, in extremely special circumstances, we sense that there is a way to escape the gravity well of our hermetically sealed existences. And very much like ecstatic religious experiences, profound erotic experiences offer us, if only for fleeting moments, that sense of there being something more. This is why, I think, so many of the French theorists, reflecting on eroticism, felt it was existentially connected to death – not death as a negative, but death as the greatest of all transformative experiences. What makes eroticism more interesting, to me, is that you can live to talk about it.

And that’s the challenge for erotic writers. It is easy to describe a sex act, easy to list the attributes of a person you want to fuck, easy to trot out the slang, the jargon, the tropes, the memes we have all come to recognize as signifiers for activities that lead to orgasm or ejaculation. This is the use of cliche in as much as we wave textual imagery in front of our reader that we know will predictably trigger the reader’s arousal: “He pounded into her tight, wet pussy.”

But that is mistaking pleasure for eroticism. Pleasure is part of eroticism, to be sure, but not its entirety.

The erotic experience, at its zenith (which may be at orgasm, or may be at some other point) renders us almost without language. To attempt to approach it, in writing, will never be entirely successful. Authors will often, at the height of an erotic moment, slew sideways into romantic love, as if that will do duty to fill the vacuum of language that the erotic experience leaves us with. I’ve certainly been guilty of this.

I don’t have an answer. But what I have learned is that eroticism is best understood as the journey to a fleeting and liminal state rather than the destination. There is no end-game to eroticism. It is about our yearning, not really our getting. We reach, we think we’ve grasped that elusive prize, only to find out that what we’re holding either is too slippery to keep, or is not the prize we were after.

Like pathos, like nostalgia, like joy, terror or sadness, eroticism is a way-station, not a terminus. However, unlike those other human experiences, our culture has not found ways to explore its depths or heights comfortably or unflinchingly. We turn its subjects into objects and depersonalize them because the spectacle of the real experience is thriling, utterly intimate, and overwhelming.

But our challenge, as writers of the erotic, is to take that on. Not to flinch, not to look away, not to cheat by reducing the acts or the characters we write to caricatures or myths, or take refuge in the more socially acceptable sanctuary of romantic love. And that’s why, unless our culture changes radically, we will always be transgressors in the literary world when we pursue the task of writing the erotic.

Contemporary Fiction Writing in a Cultural Vacuum

by Remittance Girl | October 13, 2012 | General | 6 Comments

As my novel sits with its publisher, being checked and line-edited, several interesting issues have come up, which have brought home exactly how badly fear of lawsuits have eroded our ability to place our fictions within realistic cultural landscapes.

My novel is called Beautiful Losers. This is the title of a number of novels, including a famous one by Leonard Cohen and a documentary film directed by Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard. But none of these are relevant. The title comes from a song by an obscure 80’s band called Clock DVA (you can listen to the song here.) Luckily, and strangely, titles are not covered by copyright.

But I wanted to pay homage to how much the song inspired me, in terms of atmosphere, so I opened the novel with a quote of the lyrics:

oh beautiful losers
you never seem to win
there’s something weird about your bitter erotic sin
you were so perfect
why did it end that way?
(Beautiful Losers, Newton & Turner, 1982, from the album Advantage, Polydor Records)

The novel is set in the alternative scene in Vancouver in the 1980s. The inspiration for and the atmosphere of the story really centre around a club called ‘The Luv Affair’ and the music of the period. The novel was peppered with snippets of lyrics that act as musical / literary mnemonics for the reader. At the beginning of one chapter, my characters are getting ready to go out for a night of clubbing. I opened the chapter quoting from the old Iggy Pop track ‘Funtime’.

Baby, baby, we like your lips
Baby, baby, we like your pants
All aboard for funtime.
(Funtime, Pop and Bowie, 1977, from the album The Idiot, RCA Records)

Finally, there were just some scattered cultural references. At one point, Sebastian, the delicious omnisexual member of the threesome is trying to persuade Shira, the narrator, to take the day off by telling her that her boss is a sweet guy and was, in his time, a notorious slut. It’s rumoured, he says, that he fucked Mick Jagger.

Sebastian stopped singing down the line at the top of his lungs and said: ‘You have the world’s nicest boss, Shira. Don’t lie. I heard the whole thing. Come on. Everyone knows Michael Fredrickson is an old queen! He’s a sweetie. Rumour has it that he fucked Mick Jagger back in the day, you know.’

Wow. That was news to me. I thought my gaydar was pretty good, but obviously I was wrong. Then I stopped to think about it. ‘Bullshit, Sebastian. He lives with a woman who bakes granola cookies.’

There was an evil chuckle on the other end of the connection. ‘That doesn’t mean shit in my world, girl.’(from Beautiful Losers, by Remittance Girl)

So, imagine my surprise when the publisher comes back to me, telling me I need to take out all the lyrics and all the references to people in the real world.

It’s not that they believe the lyrics cause the songwriter any intellectual or commercial harm. Nor do they really believe that Mick Jagger is going to be upset that a fictional character passes on a fictional rumour, that another fictional character may have slept with Mick Jagger. (And I do have to wonder whether, had the fictional character ‘rumoured’ to have slept with Mick Jagger had been a woman, would the threat of libel be as pressing?)

Everyone’s so damn scared of lawsuits, and so cognizant of just how long it might take to obtain permission to reproduce the lyrics, they’d rather not bother or take a chance. It’s easier to ask me to simply cleanse the fiction of any real cultural references – no matter how silly and clearly fictional.

So I did what they asked.

But it occurs to me that this paranoia of legal complications means that published works of fiction are going to be artificially stripped of any real cultural references. Out of fear, writers are forced to culturally decontextualize their stories.

Celebrities and the media organizations that profit from their existence get to use their images and personas to populate our visual and auditory world on TV, Newspapers, Posters, the Net, when it suits them for their careers. Songwriters get to impose their work onto us without permission in elevators, department stores, in advertisements, etc., but we are not allowed to reflect back the cultural landscape that results from this in our fictions. We are drowned in a sea of promotional messages everyday so we might be parted with our cash. But we have to pretend that none of this enters into our psyches or forms part of our everyday reality.

On the other hand, it seems conveniently permissible to mention any number of branded consumer products in fiction. Novels like Fifty Shades of Grey, Bared to You, and American Psycho (just to name a few) are stuffed full of designer labels the heroes and heroines wear, drive and consume.

How convenient.

The laws regarding intellectual property are not there to protect *us* at all.

Hot Chilli Erotica

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