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Sex and Power, Night and Day

by | March 18, 2013 | | 10 Comments

Dreams and fantasies—we treat them as if they’re night and day. Night dreams speak to us in inscrutable codes that require the interpretation of Sigmund Freud or a book on dream symbols. On the other hand, our daydreams, sexual fantasies included, are generally read as transparent, a simple expression of will and desire. If you fantasize about being tied up by a billionaire, your husband had better get nervous the next time Bill Gates happens to drop in on your monthly book club meeting.

This literal view is often applied to erotica, sexual fantasy’s bookish sister, as well. Erotica writers (who we all know don leather corsets and thigh-high stockings every morning whatever their sex) write stories about their own experiences. Erotica readers in turn are highly disposed to act out these stories at home. I’ve been told by two different people that all the farm supply stores in Iowa sold out of rope soon after 50 Shades of Grey soared to fame. I suspect it’s an urban legend, but it proves my point. Our society is rather blinkered and literal-minded when it comes to sex.

This might be one reason why some people are hesitant to write erotica or openly share their fantasies. A woman who gets turned on by an aggressive lover obviously wants to be raped in real life and is ambivalent about sexual equality in society at large. If a man likes dominatrix stories, surely the only thing stopping him from signing on with an official domme is the cost. I haven’t yet seen a quick-n-easy explanation for the M/M boom of fiction by women for women (hmm, good old-fashioned penis envy times two?), but maybe that proves my point, too.

By simplifying sexual fantasy in this way, it may seem we succeed in transforming our uncontrollable, mysterious imaginations into something safe and explicable, while reminding us that unbridled sexual urges are weird, transgressive, and often illegal. In any case, it keeps people quieter about the steamy dramas in their heads.

Except erotica writers.

The apparent danger of a more complex, nuanced view of sexual desire is yet one more reason why sexually explicit writing must be denigrated as filth and trash. However, if you read an erotic story (which includes daydreams and fantasies) with a careful eye, I’m sure you’ll find it as rich and elusive and worthy of analysis as any literary short story. Freud already showed that can be done. But the recent attention to (and many would say misunderstanding of) BDSM got me thinking about how power infiltrates this process of reading and writing erotica at every level, even without rushing out to buy up the rope supply at your local feed store.

If you think about it, sex and power have something very important in common. From childhood on, we’re forbidden to discuss either openly. I hardly need elaborate on the fact that sexual information is deemed harmful to minors, but our society’s power structure is equally off limits. As children we’re not supposed to question the authority of our parents, teachers or other adults. Those who do are punished, if not physically as in the past, then by diagnosis of a behavioral problem and medication. And besides, we live in a democracy where everybody is equal, and if anyone is losing the race up the ladder, it’s their own lazy fault, so what’s to critique?

Nevertheless, in the media and our lives at school, home and church, we constantly witness the workings of both sexual feelings and power play, but we can’t acknowledge them honestly. At best, they’re hidden behind safe cliche. Thus, I would argue, these two forbidden elements of human interaction are forced below the surface, into the darkness of night, if you will, and can become suggestively entwined in our imaginations. Erotic stories break one taboo. Erotic power play stories battle two—which is why they may be so compelling.

Equally appealing, for me anyway, is the true pleasure of considering the possible “meanings” of a sexual fantasy and its power dynamics. There are no right answers in this exercise, of course. Rather the more possibilities you can come up, the better.

Take the ever-popular femsub story. The simple reading is that women naturally liked to be dominated by the superior male, and these fantasies are an honest expression of a timeless female desire. I’m a feminist, but to be fair, maybe there’s something to this (especially if you replace “female” with “human”). But take a closer look at someone else’s story or your own, and what else could be going on? Wow, the subordinate partner seems to possess power—less obvious but critical to the game. Because the dominating partner—whether boss or billionaire, duke or doctor—desires the sub and aims to know and please her.

But why stop there? I’m reminded of the controversial scene in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina where Bone transforms her step-father’s sexual abuse into masturbatory fantasies. Could femsub fantasies be a way to work through the subordination and repression women still face today? If the authority figure is ordering us to be sexual, then we can be obedient good girls by complying while also enjoying sensual pleasure. Could it be that a cool, distant dom also gives us permission to get off without the prescribed romantic relationship making us honest women?

For men, I’ve noticed that delayed ejaculation is a common power play device in erotic stories. What might be going on here? Might it recreate a man’s experience of sexual scarcity and helplessness, his satisfaction fully subject to the only important question on earth—will (s)he or won’t (s)he? Does it play with the reality that everyone, men included, are punished and ridiculed for sexual feelings outside of a very narrow scenario, and god knows exhorted to wait, wait, wait? Yet, doesn’t it also show a very macho self-control over a powerful desire? And the payoff is that we all know when the tension has been building for a long time, the release is all the more powerful.

Of course every fantasy and every story will have its own unique elements—my goal is not to endorse another form of simplification. Rather, I’d like to encourage erotica readers to enjoy power’s slippery lubricant along with the other more visible and tactile varieties. To me erotic stories are much more than a masturbation aid. They are windows to our unspeakable desires within and our complex relationship with our culture’s sexual values and myths without. The mystery of night and the intensity of day all mixed up together.

So bring on the billionare and let the fun begin.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman (recently released as an ebook) and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Unspoken

by | January 21, 2013 | | 4 Comments

By Lisabet Sarai


We were together in my living room, kissing – pretty hot  and heavy. After a while, I thought it was okay to move to the next stage, so I began caressing her breasts. “No – don’t…” she moaned into my mouth. So of course, I removed my hands. I was disappointed, but I figured I’d read her wrong.

She broke the kiss, sat back on the couch and gave me a look I really couldn’t interpret. “Why’d you stop?”

Now I was confused. “Well – you told me to. My mom brought me up with the rule that ‘no means no’.”

“I had to say no,” she replied. “I didn’t want you to think I was a slut. But I really wanted you to keep going.”

***

A male friend of mine recently told me the story above. We both shook our heads at the how easily authentic sexual communication can be derailed by societal norms, mismatched expectations, and personal secrets that aren’t shared. Of course, when you’re with a lover, much of the communication is non-verbal, but when the signals are mixed, how do you know what to believe?

This conversation started me thinking about safewords. A safeword may be the only unambiguous and absolute form of sexual communication in existence. That’s its sole purpose – to convey the message “Stop” (and that’s why the actual word chosen doesn’t matter). Once a safeword has been established, the dominant is free to ignore protests and refusals by the sub – to assume that in fact the sub doesn’t “really” mean no, regardless of what she’s saying at any particular moment. 

In both the real world and in erotic fiction, though, submissives are reluctant to invoke that escape clause. Part of the resistance is a sense that by using the safeword, the bottom will somehow disappoint the top. In fact, a responsible top needs to trust the sub will safeword if necessary – that’s part of the contract involved in the power exchange. A sub may recognize this intellectually, but feelings are a different matter. Using the safeword makes a bottom feel ashamed and inadequate, as if she doesn’t have enough stamina or endurance to take whatever the top can dish out. Subs crave perfection – safewording makes it all too obvious that their devotion is flawed.

(Note: this may of course not be true of all submissives. I’m speaking at least partly from personal experience here. Also, although I use the female pronoun for submissives, that’s purely for linguistic convenience.)

I wonder, though, whether there’s another dynamic involved. Specifically, I wonder if ambiguity or uncertainty, the awareness that there are things left unspoken by both you and your partner(s), actually contributes to eroticism. Certainly, knowing exactly what your lover is thinking and what he or she is about to do strips a scene of some of its tension. When a lover asks me, “What do you want?” I’m reluctant to reply, not due to embarrassment (mostly) but because I want to be surprised. I don’t want to script my own sexual encounters. I’d rather be spontaneous, and have my lover do the same.

Then there’s the question of taboos and transgression. You want to violate the rules, to push the limits, to go further than you’ve gone before. At the same time, you’re scared and uncomfortable. You’re really not sure what you want, in fact. How can one simultaneously crave and fear being flogged? And yet some of us do, and that hovering on the cusp between desire and denial adds intensity to the experience.

I’ve been couching this theoretical proposition mostly in terms of BDSM, but it could well apply to non-kinky relationships as well. The sense of mystery enhances the thrill, especially when you’re with someone you don’t know very well – in a situation where sexual communication is likely to be the most fraught with uncertainty. If you knew everything running through your partner’s mind, your lust might well turn to disinterest or even disgust. Better to leave some things to the imagination – even if you risk misunderstandings.

In writing erotic scenes, I’ve learned to let each participant keep some secrets. I believe this adds depth and authenticity. At the height of passion, we rarely speak of our past  lovers – but they’re often present in our minds. Worried about rejection, we don’t share our deepest fears or our most fervent desires, even with long-established partners. And although I’ve always believed that open sexual communication is prima facie a Good Thing, perhaps that conclusion should be tempered by circumstance.

On the other hand, two erotic scenarios that most strongly push my personal buttons involve complete openness. The first is the notion of telepathic connection during sex. This is a familiar trope in romantic erotica, particularly in the paranormal vein, but that doesn’t necessarily rob it of its effectiveness.  There have been a few times in my life where I truly believed I was reading my lover’s mind, and vice versa. Despite the qualms I voiced a few paragraphs earlier, those were powerful, even life changing, erotic experiences. I’ve used the device in some of my own stories and it never fails to excite and move me.

The second scenario involves a D/s relationship in which the submissive is “forced” to confess her kinky desires. The master or mistress requires full disclosure – no matter how filthy the content of her fantasies. To refuse to speak would constitute disobedience. And so, despite shame and embarrassment, the sub admits her kinks. She is rewarded by the dominant’s acceptance and approval, in contrast to the condemnation that would be the consequence in the vanilla world.

I find this type of interaction incredibly arousing – both in fiction and reality. The Dom and sub are partners in exploring the depths of depravity. By revealing her secret needs, no matter how warped, the sub demonstrates her level of trust. Like using a safeword, this kind of revelation takes courage. A serious and skilled top will reward the bottom for being open – perhaps by bringing some of those fantasies to life.

Still,  there may be thoughts the sub doesn’t dare voice, even to the most accepting and amenable of Doms. Those (possibly very extreme) fantasies remain unspoken – but will the dominant somehow manage to intuit and act on them? (Perhaps using the mind-reading capabilities for which masters are known?) Don’t we all hold some things back, even from those with whom we are most intimate?

Sorry to ramble. I’m curious to know what those of you who haven’t given up on this post yet think. Is total openness desirable in the erotic realm? Or do the secrets
we keep add to the complexity and
richness of sexual experience?

Erotic Romance vs Erotica: Order vs Chaos

by | December 13, 2012 | | 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.)

Engaging the Senses

by | August 21, 2012 | | 7 Comments

By Lisabet Sarai

How do you make your stories come alive
for readers? One important factor is your ability to engage their
senses. When you give readers some idea of how your fictional world
smells, sounds, tastes, and feels, their vicarious experience becomes
more vivid and compelling. (I left the sense of vision off the list
above because most authors already describe how things look.) In
erotica and erotic romance, of course, sensory details become even
more critical, because sex is such an intensely physical activity and
because arousal depends so much on non-visual stimuli such as touch
and smell.

Personally, I find it quite difficult
to come up with effective sensory descriptions. All too often, I sit
there at my computer, a scene playing out in my mind, knowing how it
would feel, smell and taste, but finding myself at a loss as to how
to convey those impressions in language.

The fact is, words can never adequately
capture the nuances of sensory perception. Actually, all you can hope
to do is trigger the recollection of sensation on the part of your
reader. Your words must act as cues that evoke a kind of recognition.
Ah, yes, you want your reader to think, I know how my nipples feel
when I’m turned on – like I’ll die if someone doesn’t touch me. I
remember how my husband smells when we’ve been working out in the
yard all day and he hasn’t showered. I can call up the slightly
bitter taste of semen, the salt-and-iron flavor of blood. I know the
crinkly sound a condom packaging opening and the gasp of lube
spurting into a palm. Actually, of course, conscious thought isn’t
what’s going on. Descriptions evoke emotion via recognition or
imagination.

Starting this post (without really
knowing where I was going) led me to consider what strategies we authors have
at our disposal to work this little trick. It seems to me that there
are three basic methods for engaging the senses: adjectives,
metaphors, and mirroring.

Adjectives, of course, exist to
describe. The trouble is, the most obvious adjectives are frequently
overused. Again and again, I find myself describing skin as “smooth”,
voices as “low”,”rich” and “melodious”,
the scent of arousal as “musky”, the taste of muscular
flesh as “salty”. Bring out the thesaurus, I can hear you
say, and I do. However, it’s not necessarily a better solution to use
some other term that is less frequent in the language (and thus more
difficult to understand) or perhaps not exactly right for the
sensation I’m trying to convey.

Let’s try “smooth”, as an
example. When I dig out my trusty Roget, I find three inches of
entries in the index under “smooth”. I guess
“smooth-textured” is the closest to my meaning when I’m
writing (for example) about the feel of a man’s erect organ in one’s
hand or mouth. I flip to entry 287.9 (287 as a whole is “smoothness”)
and find the following:

sleek, slick, glossy, shiny,
gleaming; silky, silken, satiny, velvety; polished, burnished,
furbished; buffed, rubbed, finished; varnished, lacquered,
shellacked, glazed; glassy.

Aside from silky, silken, satiny,
and velvety, which
are metaphoric, which of the above adjectives would be a better
description for my hero’s penis than “smooth”? It might be
“slick”, but only if I’ve already dispensed the lube (or I
have a ménage
going on). “Sleek” seems to me to have a different meaning,
and also to be a strange description for part of a man (though you
might talk about sleek hair). “Gleaming”, “shiny”
and so on refer to the sense of sight, not touch. I would imagine
that my hypothetical penis would be “rubbed”,
but not in the sense mean here! I rather like the notion of a
“laquered” penis, but that would have to be a sex toy, not
the real thing!

So in fact, my
hackneyed adjective “smooth” may be the best choice, at
least among the options here. Sigh. (I’d be interested in hearing
other suggestions.)

Metaphors work by
explicitly stating or implying a comparison between the sensation
being described and some other well-known or prototypical sensory
experience. (Actually, an explicit comparison is called a simile, but
the effect is the same.) “Silky”, “satiny” and
“velvety” are all metaphorical when used to describe skin.
They refer to three different textures, associated with different
types of fabric. I’ve used all three of them – a lot. In general, I
rely on metaphor for the bulk of my sensory descriptions. Excitement
is likened to electricity or fire. Pleasure is described as melting
or boiling, compared to slow-pouring honey or breath-stealing race
cars.

Metaphors offer a
far wider variety of options for sensory description. First, one can
draw on the full range of natural and artificial phenomena as
potential sources of metaphor. Second, we already understand and
describe our experiences in metaphorical terms. We talk about
“burning” pain, a “heavy” heart, “biting”
sarcasm or a “bitter” argument. Strictly speaking, these
are all metaphors.

But metaphor can be overdone, too. I
know, because this is one of my weaknesses. Over-reliance on metaphor
to describe physical sensations can end up distancing the reader from
your character, rather than bringing her closer. This is particularly
true if the metaphor is “strained” (a metaphor in itself) –
if basis of the implied comparison is not immediately obvious or
possibly inappropriate. Overuse of metaphor can also make writing
sound overly precious and “literary”.

Mirroring is the third alternative for
engaging the senses. Don’t go looking up this strategy in your
writing text books; I just came up with this name, though I’m sure
many of you use this technique, consciously or unconsciously. What do
I mean by mirroring? Instead of describing the sensations themselves,
you describe the character’s thoughts and/or reactions to those
sensations.

Here’s a short excerpt from my BDSM erotic romance novella The Understudy. It uses all three techniques, but
relies quite heavily on mirroring. I’ve highlighted in red the
sentences where I’m using the character’s reactions or thoughts to
imply sensation.

****

Geoffrey positioned himself between
my splayed thighs. “Remember, Sarah,” he said. “Be still.”
Then he rammed his cock all the way into my cunt in one fierce
stroke.

The force
drove the breath from my lungs. The fullness made me suck the air
back in. If I hadn’t been so wet, he would have torn me apart, but
as it was my flesh parted for him as though sliced open.

My pussy
clenched reflexively around his invading bulk, but otherwise I
managed to avoid moving. His eyes, locked with mine, told me he
approved. His hardness pressed against my engorged clit. A
climax loomed, then faded away as he kept me there, motionless,
pinned to the bed.

He pulled mostly out. My hungry
cunt fluttered, empty for an instant. He drove back into me, harder
than before. I strained against the bars,
struggling not to jerk and writhe as his cock plunged in and
out of my cunt like a pile-driver.

God, it felt good! His roughness
somehow heightened the pleasure. I was his, to
use and abuse. His fuck toy, just as he had said. At that moment, that was
all I wanted to be.

****

I
am not holding my own writing up as a model here. I’m merely trying
to illustrate what I mean by “mirroring”. There’s very little direct
description of sensation in this passage but I hope that it evokes
the intensity of this experience for my heroine.

I
don’t know if this analysis is any help. It’s still agony to come up
with vivid, original sensory descriptions. I remember recently, for
instance, I was trying to describe the smell of freshly brewed
coffee. How would you convey that unique sensation? You recognize it
in an instant, but what are the characteristics of the smell?

Warm.
Rich. Dark. Earthy. Sweet? Stimulating. Mouth-watering (that’s
mirroring, really). Complex. Chocolatey (a metaphor). Roasted (but
can you really smell that)?

I’m
getting nowhere here. Maybe you’d like to give it a try. Maybe you’ll
be more successful that I am. And I’d love to know what techniques
you use to engage your readers’ senses!

Why Fifty Shades of Grey Matters

by | July 14, 2012 | | 28 Comments

Vanessa Redgrave as the masochistic nun
in Ken Russell’s The Devils

On the social consumption of sin as spectacle & its exploitation in the marketplace

I’ve run across a number of erotica writers who’ve said they haven’t and won’t be reading Fifty Shades of Grey.  In all honestly, this blows my mind. You can try to dismiss it, as many critics have, by calling it ‘mommy porn’. You can deplore its writing style – lord knows, even die-hard fans don’t attempt to defend the poor quality of the prose. But you can’t ignore the fact that it has now sold over 20 Million copies in the US. In the UK it became the fastest selling novel of all time.

As writers, it is important for us to interrogate its success and to attempt to understand what it means for the genre, for levels of explicitness in mainstream fiction, and for the way publishers are going to inevitably behave in the light of it.

I have a theory.

Less than three years ago, some very prominent writers and agents in the publishing world told me, flatly, that there was no market for erotica. It was unsaleable. It was a niche product that held little interest for them and would tick along at its own obscure pace. You can put sex in your murder mystery, or your sci-fi novel, or your romance, they said. But a straight-up erotic novel, with sexual desire as a central theme, was simply not saleable.

But they were wrong. I think that the rising levels of explicit sexuality in film, television, and the ubiquity of porn on the web meant that there was a large mainstream audience whose tolerance for and interest in fiction with heavy erotic content had been growing for years. And it is a comment on just how out of touch mainstream publishers have been with their market that, with a very few exceptions that were associated with individual authors, they did not cotton onto it. Many, many well written erotic novels, with good character development and credible plots, came across their desks and they slush-piled them.

Along comes Fifty Shades of Grey. A novel that started off as Twilight fanfic, and gained a considerable devoted audience within that context. Its author, E.L. James, is a retired television executive who had some advantages over most erotica writers. She knew the media landscape and the concept of ‘audience’ very well. She understood her own work as ‘marketable property’. She had a keen sense of how to pitch the work just right to convince publishers that they should reconsider their ambivalence toward erotica. But mostly, I think she had an instinctive understanding of how a mainstream public needed to find engagement with kinky sex, while providing them with a moral escape clause.

Fifty Shades of Grey does an interesting dance with the explicit. It revels in the details of the taboo of BDSM while seeming to condemn it. Like the torrid pseudo-journalistic pieces written about Tiger Woods’ illicit affair, it whispers to a rather creepy corner of the mainstream psyche which has a propensity to enjoy the titillation inherent in a sin while, at the same time, censuring Mr. Woods for being such a faithless bastard.

And many, many readers love this. They can masturbate furiously to the scenes played out in the Red Room of Pain, while waiting for the heroine to cure Mr. Grey of his perversions.

 I am reminded of the masses who enjoyed the spectacle of the Salem Witch Trials or denunciations of heretics during the Spanish Inquisition. 

“She consorted lewdly with the Devil!” the inquisitor proclaims, partly for the judges but loudly enough to entertain the masses. He lovingly details the proof of her perfidy. The women gasp and feel a quiver between their thighs right before they all scream, “Burn the witch!” If you’ve never seen Ken Russell’s “The Witches“, based on the historical events of the trials of the witches in Loudun, France, in 1634, you should. He understood and then illustrated the eroticism and hypocrisy that plays out in these sorts of public discourse on morality and sin with an insight that few others have.

I don’t think a large portion of mainstream society has evolved much since then. And for erotica writers, who usually situate themselves firmly in the sex-positive camp, this is very hard to comprehend. We write novels about how erotic experience and the exploration of new sexual territories helps us grow as individuals. For us, sex in a doorway. Very often our themes are about revelation, completion, redemption through experience. Not through shame or rejection or closing down our sexual options.

From the point of view of mainstream publishers, Fifty Shades of Grey is simply a very successful product. In the last year, in the editorial boardrooms in London and New York, large publishers have spent time analyzing the success of the novel and figuring out how they can get on the bandwagon.  They may not be risk-takers when it comes to new literary product anymore, but they’re damn good post-game quarterbackers. The moral dynamics that underlie FSOG will not have escaped them, nor will the poor quality of the writing.

If you had hoped to produce a ‘better written Fifty Shades’: “Thirty Shades of Grammar” or “Eighty Shades of Character Development” or “Twenty-Six Shades of Plot”, I don’t think your efforts are going to be appreciated.  Publishers have proof that the vast majority of people who have bought, read and enjoyed the series simply don’t care about the quality of the writing.  In fact, its very hamfistedness may play a subtextual role in convincing the reader of Anastasia’s innocence and her genuine desire to cure the perverted Mr. Grey.

Of course, in the over 40 million world-wide readers, some of them will wish for and seek out better written erotica. And there will be some who are emotionally and sexually honest enough to admit the BDSM in the novel was what drew them to it and felt unaccountably let down when the heroine finally succeeds in leading Mr. Grey into the vanilla light.  It will not be a large percentage of them. And, consequently, there will be something of an upsurge in erotica sales for years to come.

But I don’t believe it will be the explosion we are hoping for. I genuinely hope I’m wrong in this, but I don’t think I am. Nonetheless, we may have gained a few more intrepid souls.

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

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