It’s that time again – time to heat up the Internet with your hottest erotic prose. Today’s the 19th of January, which means it’s Sexy Snippets Day!
The ERWA blog is not primarily
intended for author promotion. However, we’ve decided we should give
our author/members an occasional opportunity to expose themselves (so
to speak) to the reading public. Hence, we have declared the 19th of every month at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association blog Sexy Snippet Day.
On Sexy Snippet day, any author can post a tiny excerpt (200 words or less) in a comment on the day’s post. Include the title from with the snippet was extracted, your name or pseudonym, and one buy link, if you’d like.
Feel free to share this with erotic author friends. It’s an open invitation!
Please
follow the rules. If your excerpt is more than 200 words or
includes more than one link, I’ll remove your comment and prohibit
you from participating in further Sexy Snippet days. I’ll say no more!
After
you’ve posted your snippet, feel free to share the post as a whole
to Facebook, Twitter, or wherever else you think your readers hang
out.
My day job is never boring because it is constantly changing. As I plan to start teaching three new English classes in the local university in January, a project I worked on during my last holiday break (December 2013) is coming to fruition.
Last year, I worked with someone who teaches English as an Additional Language to devise a test in English fluency/comprehension to be administered to first-year students to start generating some data about their ability to function in university classes. Unfortunately, the original test took three-to-four hours to write, and therefore it wasn’t practical to use in regular classes. Over the past year, a committee in the English Department has tinkered with the test and reduced the time it takes to approximately fifty minutes, the time-span of a regular class that meets three times per week. The current department head has asked me to administer this to my first-semester class on the first day.
I am curious to find out if the hard data confirms what I have observed over a quarter-century of teaching mandatory first-year classes to a very diverse student body. The administration has been recruiting students from other countries, many of whom have had to learn English as adults, and these students often beg me on the first day of class to give them a passing grade because they need it to complete their programs. They hope I can overlook their grammatical flaws. The more desperate they are, the more they are tempted to hand in plagiarized essays, and when the students are caught, they claim they had no idea this isn’t allowed. (In all fairness, they might not have understood my warning lecture.)
Locally-grown students aren’t necessarily better-prepared or better-behaved. Even students who speak English fluently, with a local (Canadian) accent, often tell me they didn’t want to take an English class because they have never understood grammar, and they hope I will overlook any silly little mistakes they might make. When/if I question the home-grown students about their backgrounds, some of them tell me the first language they ever heard was spoken by their immigrant parents, and it was not English. In all their years of public-school education, apparently no one ever explained to them the differences between English grammar and that of their mother tongue. Some local students grew up in households where reading was treated as a waste of time. In most cases, they decided that precision in written communication just wasn’t important.
I devoutly hope that if the new placement test (as it is called) shows that more than half of all first-year students really aren’t ready to study literature in English and write essays about it, the administration (and above that, the various levels of government that fund the education system) will find some spare change for more basic language-and-composition classes. I wouldn’t even mind teaching at a pre-first-year level, especially if this would mean that I would see more progress and hear less begging.
What does all this have to do with writing? A lot. I honestly don’t know whether the mix of students in my classes is a microcosm of the public at large, but the possibility scares me. Grammatical mistakes in their writing are only part of the problem. (Here are some examples: plural subjects with singular verbs, as in “the students studies real hard,” object pronouns used as subjects, as in “Me and Joe went to the bar,” and dangling participles, as in: “Flapping in the breeze, Dee looked up at the flag.”) These glitches are bad enough, but as some students claim, grammatical mistakes are not a huge deal if the reader can guess what is really meant.
In most cases, grammatical mistakes are accompanied by a lack of logic: contradictory statements, needless repetition, the startling interjection of commands to the reader (e.g. “This novel is about racism. Stop using stereotypes!”) An example of a tautology, or circular reasoning, is this sentence from an actual student essay on literature that I graded in December: “The end of domestic violence would stop men from beating their wives.” Duh. But what unnamed force is (or was) supposed to stop domestic violence, according to the work under discussion?
I jump between piles of (largely) unclear or inaccurate writing, and writing projects of my own. I often wonder for whom I am writing. Who, in general, reads erotic fiction? Is this audience more literate than the average person, assuming the word “average” makes any sense in this context?
The word “sex,” apparently so simple and so clear, really doesn’t mean the same thing to every person who hears or uses it. Over thirty years ago, I was told by my husband at the time that he knew some women who “masturbated” each other, but “they didn’t have sex.” The apparent lack of sex meant that these women weren’t really lesbians, according to him. And like most of the men I knew at that time, my husband was convinced that unwanted sex (especially if unwanted by the female partner) was very different from “real rape.” And sex, by definition, was both consensual and natural, so after sex had occurred, none of the participants had a right to complain that it should not have happened.
So when we write about sex, we can’t afford to assume we know how our words will be understood. (I always hope that a lot of sensory description will be clearer than abstract terms.) This problem is amplified when the more advanced (beyond the basic grammar of cock-in-cunt) varieties of sex are introduced. As the public release of the movie version of Fifty Shades of Grey approaches like a speeding racecar, widespread concern about its content is, if possible, more urgent than before. Will hordes of readers and viewers assume that the movie accurately represents BDSM (itself a very general term that needs to be clarified in specific cases)?
I could mention a specifically Canadian example of the misuse of the term “rough sex” to describe the nonconsensual treatment of at least nine female complainants by the minor male celebrity who dated them, but I am running out of space. Suffice it to say that by all accounts, the women accepted invitations to the man’s house because they were willing to have “sex” with him, according to their understanding of what that meant, but what the host dished out was something else entirely. This case seems to involve more than a tragic misunderstanding, but it does show the need for negotiation in good faith whenever two or more people get naked together.
Meanwhile, I keep advocating accurate expression and large vocabularies as sexy things that can lead to wonderfully satisfying encounters between (say) a reader and an author. Am I indulging in intellectual masturbation? It’s hard to know.
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There are moments in my life that stand out like shiny new coins. These moments are clearer, crisper. They’re full-blown, high definition, three D, and thoroughly enhanced. Amazingly enough these vivid moments usually involve the simplest acts, and yet somehow, in their simplicity, they encompass the fullness of being in this body on this planet at this time. And for those brief few moments, I feel like I actually truly GET IT. The sun breaks through the clouds and the mysteries of the universe are revealed. Then, everything goes back to normal, I go back to my routine and life moves forward to the next shining moment.
I’ve always referred to these times as Eucharist Moments not because I’m religious, but because the original meaning of Eucharist in Greek is thankfulness, gratitude. Because those moments are so complete when I’m in them, what I feel is thankfulness, gratitude that I’m me, and that I am even MORE me than I realize.
I remember one such moment when my husband, Raymond, and I were in Philadelphia. We had driven all night to get there. It was summer, hot, humid and thick. We were there for a series of meetings, the details of which escape me now. But the Eucharist Moment is as brilliant as if it had happened only yesterday.
We’d been out in the heat most of the day playing tourist. We didn’t have a lot of time, and we wanted to see the Liberty Bell and all of the other historical sights. By the middle of the afternoon, we were parched and positively wilted. We were too tired to go out for a late lunch so we stopped in at a small local shop and bought a box of Ritz crackers, a small jar of peanut butter and some Lipton teabags. Back in our hotel, Raymond ran down the hall for ice, and I made tea in the complimentary coffee maker, tea which we then poured over the ice into the small hotel room glasses. I don’t remember where we got it, but we had a plastic picnic knife. We ate peanut butter spread thickly on Ritz crackers and wash it all down with freshly brewed iced tea while we discuss the adventures of the day.
I’ve had a lot of great meals in my life in a lot of nice restaurants and in a lot of amazing places, but I’ve never had one better than that one. The shades were drawn and the room was cool and quiet after the noisy heat of the street. The tea had that lovely crisp, bronze bite that only freshly brewed tea has, and the aroma of it filled the whole room. We sat with our bare feet kicked up on the coffee table, passing the plastic knife back and forth, spreading peanut buttery goodness on crunchy, crumbly crackers. We ate until our t-shirts were covered with crumbs. We ate until we were both replete and drowsy and happily, quietly amazed that we were actually in Philadelphia, seeing all the things we’d only ever read about in history books. Afterwards we napped sprawled across the king-sized bed, and when we woke the sun had gone down. It was the simplest of experiences, and yet it still, all these years on, shines in my memory.
The best writing is full of Eucharist Moments. Anyone who has ever read a story or a novel that is too full of the grocery lists which makes up every day life knows how boring that is, and how quickly they lose interest. Good writing, good stories and novels that stay with us long after we’ve finished them, the stories we just can’t put down, are a stringing together of those Eucharist Moments, those moments of clarity, those moments of sloppy poignant full-frontal, in-your-face humanity.
Not surprisingly those moments are as fabulous to read about as they are to write about. Eucharist Moments in a story are the next best thing to being there. They draw us into the plot in the same way they draw us into life. They are the points where the story reaches out to us, touches us and becomes a living, breathing thing. They may last only the length of a few words, and they’re seldom longer than a single page, which is just as well because the intense purity, the clarity with which those moments shine would be too much to bear for 250 pages.
The best writers, at least in my opinion, know how to string those Eucharist Moments together, leading the reader from one to the next, to the next, through to the end. Those moments are the lighthouses along the darkened,
rocky shore that is the plot of a story. They move us forward to discover what secret the writer has hidden at the end of the journey. And if it’s well done, the end of the journey is never the end because it will have been written in such a way to create in the reader her own Eucharist Moment. The power of these moments is that each time we have one, we’re changed. What writer doesn’t want to tell a story that changes her reader? What writer doesn’t want to be changed by the story she writes?
This is just as true of erotica as it is of any genre. Stringing together sex scenes is not creating a story. The story is the path between the Eucharist Moments, and sex scenes can often be the Eucharist Moments. They can be the moments of pure, unabashed joy. They can be the moments of clarity, of revelation, when the writer is able to give us a peek into the soul of a character. Sex lends itself to Eucharist Moments because of the vulnerability it demands, because of the exposure it forces. That’s apart of the reason I enjoy writing erotica. Though sex is not the story, sex affords wonderful opportunities for Eucharist Moments, places where the light shines through and the reader understands, yearns, empathizes, and experiences the character from the inside out. Then the journey of the story truly becomes intimate.
Happy belated Thanksgiving, and I wish you all many Eucharist Moments.
We erotic writers have not yet been completely accepted into the literary or social mainstream. From time to time, someone in this blog points out that we Don’t Get No Respect, or at least not enough. This claim is hard to refute.
The good news is that the solid wall between Literature (which sometimes wins prestigious awards) and Porn (which was largely illegal in the recent past) seems to have been crumbling for years.
The genre called erotica can now be mixed with any other genre, not only romance. Much has been said here about the uneasy relationship between erotica (fiction that focuses on sex as a means of transformation, or the focal point of a plot) and romance (fiction about the development of a relationship, usually heterosexual, usually with a happy ending). There have been laments about the ways in which Romance, as the elephant of the publishing biz, has steamrolled over literary erotica so that brilliantly well-written, poetic, hot-yet-philosophical works on sex per se are now harder to find than ever before. There is clearly some truth in this claim.
However, if explicit sex scenes are the hallmark of erotica, these can be included in works of fantasy (e.g. rewritten fairy tales or ancient myths), science fiction and its various subgenres (e.g. steampunk), historical fiction, murder mysteries or detective stories, social satire, and every other genre one can think of. Sex is so central to human life that sex scenes don’t have to be forced into a supposedly non-sexual plot. They can now be included in a kind of organic way, so that they serve the plot and the development of the characters.
Circlet Press was founded in 1992 to publish fiction that combines explicit sex (often queer in some sense) with fantasy elements, and this combination has since been taken up by other publishers. It’s even possible to find novels that combine more than two genres.
To give an example, I recently had to replace a fantasy novel in my “Sympathy for the Devil” English course (four fantasy novels by women, all with male protagonists). Unfortunately, a novel by Tanith Lee about an immortal kind of devil was suddenly unavailable. I replaced it with Death by Silver by Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold (Lethe Press, 2013), a double-authored steampunk murder mystery with double (human) protagonists who must clear away a London fog of interpersonal misunderstanding while eliminating suspects in a complicated murder investigation.
I introduced this novel to the class by inviting my colleague, the local expert in the history of detective fiction, to discuss the genre. I suspect that his colourful, student-friendly, 75-minute talk was the condensed version.
If I knew any local experts in m/m romance as a genre (with its contested origins in Kirk/Spock fanfiction or slash, based on the original Star Trek as a television space opera), I would have invited her/him/them to speak. I would have given the same invitation to an expert in steampunk if I knew of any in my town. (I can easily imagine the English Department of the university where I teach acquiring a specialist to teach steampunk classes in the future, possibly as an offshoot of speculative fiction or Victorian studies.)
Death by Silver actually features a primary relationship which is sexual from the beginning, but IMO, the novel doesn’t qualify as erotica because the sex is dealt with in a traditionally British way, behind closed doors (usually in one line of coy dialogue or a short paragraph at the end of a chapter). None of my students seem shocked, and several have told me they enjoyed reading, despite the complexity of the plot. (This, rather than the frequent hints of “unmentionable” sex, seems to be the only thing that slowed them down.)
It is easy to imagine a sexually-explicit version of a similar novel, and m/m erotic romance is definitely a thing.
Cross-genre fiction seems to me to be the way out of the impasse created by the economic and cultural dominance of mainstream romance novels. (Not to mention the cultural dominance of Romantic Comedy as a popular film genre, i.e. “date movies.”)
Not only can descriptions of sex be smuggled into literary genres that are generally more respected than erotica, the importance of sex can be shown in work that can find its way out of a literary ghetto.
Rewriting “classic” novels to include explicit sex scenes is only one way to cross-breed genres. Those of us who started out as erotic writers, and who aren’t willing to ditch the sex for the sake of respectability, might not achieve critical respect any time soon, but we can have fun spreading our wings.
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This post has been reblogged from my website, but I thought it was incredibly fitting given the month we’re in 🙂
If you’d have said to me two years ago—maybe even just a
year ago—that I would “win” NaNoWriMo, I’d have laughed at you. For those of
you that don’t know, NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a yearly
challenge which takes place in November. Writers sign up via the website and
challenge themselves to write 50,000 words in a month—in order words, a novel.
Or at least a good chunk of one. Sadly, I haven’t been able to take part this year.
I’m not a fast writer, but then nor am I a slow one. I sit
comfortably somewhere in the middle. But for some reason, last year I decided I
was going to give NaNoWriMo a go. I’d already done a ton of research for the
novel I intended to work on next, all I needed to do was getting the planning
done and I’d be ready to go. And so, having worked out that I’d have to write
2,500 per day for twenty days (I don’t work weekends, so I had to remove
weekend days from the equation), I figured it was still achievable.
Come the 1st of November I was signed up, had
everything planned out and once I opened that Word document, I quickly started
to fill it with words. I’m a bit of a word count watcher when I write, anyway,
so the only difference was, rather than simply updating the widget in my
website’s sidebar, I would also update on the NaNoWriMo website. I started off
really well, and was achieving my target each day. Of course, I dropped behind
my “buddies” at weekends, but soon caught up again on weekdays.
I have to admit, it was addictive. Granted, I’d already done
an awful lot of hard work before opening
that Word document, but it didn’t mean the writing was easy, especially as it
was the most complex piece of work I’d written to date. But somehow, come the
29th November (the 30th was a Saturday, and so the 29th
was my finish date), I did it. I hopped over that 50,000 word mark, copied and
pasted the text into the NaNoWriMo site to get it validated, and received my
winner’s certificate and badge. It was a fantastic feeling—I’d done it!
However, the novel was far from finished. The challenge had
really broken the back of it, but I knew I still had a long way to go. I didn’t
stop writing, but I admit from the 50k mark until the end was a lot slower
going because I didn’t have that urgency pushing me to write faster. Not to
mention during November, I’d rejigged my days to make writing my priority.
Finally, in the New Year of 2014, I finished the book. It
was almost twice the length it had been at the end of November—95,000 words. So
personally, I still think I did pretty damn well to write it in that period of
time, and I’m delighted to see it out there for people to read and hopefully
enjoy.
The book has been incredibly well received so far, with lots
of four and five star reviews—so if you’re a paranormal romance fan, I hope
you’ll check out Pack of Lies.
*****
Author Bio:
Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and
erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over 100
publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include several
editions of Best Bondage Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica 2013 and Best Erotic
Romance 2014. Another string to her bow is editing, and she has edited and
co-edited a number of anthologies, and also edits for a small publishing house.
She owns Erotica For All, is book
editor for Cliterati, and is one eighth
of The Brit Babes. Find out more
at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk.
Join her on Facebook
and Twitter, and subscribe to her
newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9
Whoa! Almost slipped by me, what with everything else I’m doing, but I realized last night that today is 19th of November, which means that it’s Sexy Snippets Day!
The ERWA blog is not primarily intended for author promotion. However, we’ve decided we should give our author/members an occasional opportunity to expose themselves (so to speak) to the reading public. Hence, we have declared the 19th of every month at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association blog Sexy Snippet Day.
On Sexy Snippet day, any author can post a tiny excerpt (200 words or less) in a comment on the day’s post. Include the title from with the snippet was extracted, your name or pseudonym, and one buy link, if you’d like.
Feel free to share this with erotic author friends. It’s an open invitation!
Please follow the rules. If your excerpt is more than 200 words or includes more than one link, I’ll remove your comment and prohibit you from participating in further Sexy Snippet days. I’ll say no more!
After you’ve posted your snippet, feel free to share the post as a whole to Facebook, Twitter, or wherever else you think your readers hang out.
Lately, I showed the latest erotic anthology* that includes a story of mine to several fellow-writers in the university where I teach. One of my colleagues said the title (Forbidden Fruit: Stories of Unwise Lesbian Desire) is enticing. He jokingly said he wouldn’t want to read stories of wise lesbian desire. I assume that a lot of readers would agree with him.
The longer I write erotica, the less my fiction resembles my life. This is partly due to the amazing degree to which love between members of the same gender has become socially acceptable. I’ve been legally married to my female spouse since 2010, but our relationship started in 1989. We are both over sixty. We have steady jobs, as an academic and a kind of social worker for a non-governmental agency that enables disabled people to live as independently as possible. We own a house, where we live with dogs and cats. We have grown offspring who occasionally need—and get—our financial help.
My story in Forbidden Fruit, by contrast, is about a young woman who just can’t resist the “bad girl” who was once a ragged foster child in elementary school. The narrator’s willingness to share a reckless night of passion with Ms. Wrong is tinged with guilt because the “good girl” never helped or befriended her classmate, who is now running from the law and from folks with less mercy. Any sensible advice counsellor would have arranged an intervention for the “bad girl” years before, and would have advised the narrator not to open her door for her.
The other stories in the book are about other women on opposite sides of the law or from cultures that clash like the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story, that classic musical from the 1950s that was based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. At one time in the recent past, lesbian desire was considered unwise by definition. In our time, the stakes have to be raised: the women can’t just both be female in a world where heterosexuality predominates.
In the September 29 issue of Maclean’s, a weekly Canadian newsmagazine, lesbian columnist Emma Teitel writes about “The Power of Erotic Nostalgia.” She says:
“At the Toronto International Film Festival this month, I saw Breathe, French actress Melanie Laurent’s directorial debut about an intense, erotic friendship between two adolescent girls that ends in catastrophe. I’d feel guilty about spoiling that last bit for you, were it not for the fact that nearly every mainstream lesbian-themed movie ends the same way.”
By contrast, Teitel describes her own monogamous relationship of five years: “At 20, we fell in love and carried on a clandestine affair until we were discovered—and lived relatively happily ever after. That is, so far, at least.”
So if lesbians (and other formerly-marginalized lovers) of different generations are living in relative peace, not hunted down by the police, the mental-health establishment or the Inquisition, why are stories about dysfunctional, “forbidden” affairs still so popular?
According to Teitel, this phenomenon can’t be completely explained as an expression of homophobia and/or misogyny in the culture at large. She says:
“It’s not as though horny frat guys are responsible for the thousands of YouTube tribute videos dedicated to Natalie Portman’s twisted, erotic bond to Mila Kunis in Black Swan, or Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox’s literally demonic relationship in Jennifer’s Body.”
Teitel speculates that: “It may be that nothing beats erotic nostalgia.” Most queer adults can remember a first-time, coming-out affair as a scary, hidden, but very sexy experience. Living it is painful, at least some of the time, but remembering it can be exciting.
I suspect that for many readers, including the heterosexually married, “forbidden” attraction carries the same sexual charge. It also enables a reader to vicariously experience more danger than he/she would seek out in real life. No matter how many publishers seem to prefer erotic romance with happy endings to edgy erotica per se, the latter seems unlikely to die out completely.
A walk on the wild side has always been a popular theme in erotica. The middle-class assimilation of same-sex, different-race, or generation-gap couples, and even polyamorous households (in some hip circles) may be minimizing the real danger of formerly “forbidden love,” but not the popularity of stories about it. And of course, there is still enough conservative prejudice to ensure that any love that is not strictly white-bread might really be threatened.
So is the theme of “forbidden love” inherently offensive? I don’t think so. We all crave excitement, as well as security, and we have to find some way to balance our clashing desires. I expect to write about the dangerous attraction of opposites for as long as I have the luxury of time and space of my own. I couldn’t write if I were dodging bullets.
*Forbidden Fruit: Stories of Unwise Lesbian Desire, edited by Cheyenne Blue (Ladylit Publishing, 2014)
Historically, erotic art (visual and textual) was produced primarily for men, by men. Yes, there have been exceptions, but the ones that survive are rare. It was only in the 20th century, and mostly in the latter part, that women began to produce erotic fiction aimed at women. This has been portrayed as emancipatory and, unarguably, it is. It filled a vast and silent gulf. For millennia we have known what men wanted, what they fantasize about, what arouses them. In a recent conversation on Facebook about Fifty Shades of Grey, Kristina Lloyd commented:
I think the reason the book spoke to so many women is because precious little else in our culture does when we’re talking het female desire. Give a bone(r) to someone starving, and they’ll pounce on it. The success of the book is about the failures in our culture. I wish we could chart a similar moment when it was suddenly acceptable for men to access and enjoy adult material without recrimination. 1970s? 18thC? Forever? 1
Once a book has sold 100 million copies, this is a pretty definitive sign that it has become acceptable, in the mainstream, for women to access material that arouses them. 2
It isn’t accidental that, since the 1960s, as the production and consumption of erotic material aimed at women gained momentum, so has the criticism of how women are presented in male-centered erotic material. It is only when both flavours are readily available that one can see the differences between them. In the past 50 years, feminists have raged against the objectification of women as objects of desire. We are more than the statues, the Madonnas, the Whores, the bountiful breasts and the warm wet holes you make of us. We’re not just breeding stock, or somewhere to put your cock. We are not that simple. See us – desire us – for what we truly are, instead of the facile, two-dimensional caricatures you’ve made of us! It was a legitimate demand.
Who would have thought that, suffering as we have from this diminishment, we would in turn come to produce material that commits the same sin? Yet, from the heady days of the explicit bodice busters until now, we have, with some laudable exceptions, fallen into the same trap. The spectre of the inscrutable Alpha male, with his money and his power, and his somewhat-but-not-impossibly-large-cock, his insatiable sexual appetite, his obsessive desire to please only the heroine and – by extension – us, has dominated the world of female-centred heterosexual erotic content. Christian Grey is its poster-boy, but his clones are everywhere. And, quietly, they always were. Consider Mister Darcy.
And there is little sympathy for the few male voices that speak up to complain about it. Partially for the same reason that very few women in earlier eras spoke up against female objectification; we are torn between our need to be known for who we are and our desire to be desired, even if imperfectly. Moreover, and like many women through the ages, men have participated greatly in their own objectification. It does seem a little whiny, after two thousand years of Venus De Milo, to complain that being simplified as a brainless, lust driven cock with a wallet is unfair.
But a few men have spoken up. Like their counterparts, they speak in the language of their own desire. Don’t we all? Nonetheless, the subtext is clear: please don’t make me a caricature. After trying his damnedest to get through volume one of Fifty Shades of Grey, my friend and sometimes co-writer, Alex Sharp, has recently written a piece I think every female erotic writer who sets out to craft male characters – especially the non-vanilla variety – should read: “I am he, and he is me.”
Good fiction writing embraces realism, even in its most dramatic flights of fancy. And, in my opinion, well-written erotica should attempt to embrace the eroticism in the entirety of the character or, at least, attempt an honest fictionalization of the problems of desire and objectification. I think that is the challenge that separates erotic fiction from pornography.
Admittedly, I’m torn. Desiring someone in all their complexity is a laudable aspiration, but I have several well-supported doubts as to whether, in the moment that lust takes us, this is even possible. Perhaps it is only now, with all our objects of desire so flagrantly on display, that we can begin to come to terms with the dilemma that so haunted Kant, the schism between desire and full knowledge of another. Jacques Lacan said that there is no ‘sexual relationship’; our projected desires are the product of the symbolic, muted world of controlled meaning that bears little relation to the real humans upon whom we heap our fantasies. Being a romantic, despite himself, he felt that only in love, in the terrifying Real of love, could we hope to overcome the watery barrier of symbolism and step out of Plato’s cave and into the blinding light of day. 3
So love in erotic writing should be the answer, right? Lord knows, the genre of erotic romance has well and truly eclipsed the erotica genre. It has all but swallowed it up, in no small part because Fifty Shades of Grey was marketed as erotica rather than romance. A large proportion of those 100 million sales have been to women who’d never read ‘erotica’ before. Now each time they pick up an erotica novel, they’re expecting romance.
The quandary, as I see it, is that love itself has been objectified. The very presence of the inevitable happy ending diminishes and even denies the terrifying truth of love: that it is seldom forever, that – like everything else – it changes, that its very volatility and instability is what makes it a dangerous place but also one of greater knowledge.
I’ve often contemplated the Judeo-Christian myth of the Garden of Eden, so often used as a metaphor for a state of perfect love. Its portrayal of humanity in a state of innocence, nakedness, and openness, before we ate from the tree of bitter knowledge, offers us an aspirational but ultimately impossible and fantasmatic vision of love. And I’d argue that most fictional romance presents this state as the final one; the scene fades on Adam and Eve, in all their natural glory, hand in hand in the garden of delight.
But isn’t love is more fittingly portrayed as the Expulsion from the Garden? That fruit we tasted was not only the knowledge of good and evil; it was the knowledge of ourselves and of each other. Love is the struggle to keep holding hands while carrying the burden of that knowledge on our backs. Assuredly, it has its idyllic aspects, but it also takes us through the rocky desolation of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. If we are to truly know each other, we must work to find erotic love in that dark and sometimes barren place as well.
So, I want to challenge you, as fellow writers of erotica, to try to forge the erotic there in that far more realistic landscape. We’ve spent too long in the garden; time to get out into the real world.
Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of genres including erotica,
erotic romance, and dark fiction. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her
husband, son, and four cats. Visit her web site, her Facebook page, and her Amazon Author Page.
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I’m putting together
a book of erotic fairy tales. I’ve already written several, including erotic
retellings of the usual suspects like Red Riding Hood, The Pied Piper, and
Cinderella. I’m often asked to tackle specific ones, and popular suggestions
are The Three Pigs and Beauty and the Beast.
I grew up with
Disney’s versions of classic fairy tales, but I have also read many of them,
and I’m very much aware of how dark and sinister most fairy tales are. I prefer
the stories in their original forms. Snow White was not only felled by a
poisoned apple. The wicked queen began her assault with a poisoned comb and
then a too-tight corset. The wicked queen also did not die in a fall off a
cliff per the Disney version. Granted, Disney’s version was pretty grim (pardon
the pun), but in the original tale she was tortured by being forced to dance in
red-hot iron shoes until she keeled over dead.
A friend of mine had
taken her daughter to see “The Little Mermaid” and she wanted to buy
the book of fairy tales so her daughter could read her favorite one. I warned
her The Little Mermaid does not get the prince in the end. I also told her about
how when The Little Mermaid walked she felt as if her feet were being cut by
sharp knives. Each step was excruciatingly painful. Neither fact was in the
Disney version.
Fairy tales are
chock full of symbolism that lends itself easily to an erotic retelling. Many of
these tales are about protecting the innocence of girlhood. Others were about
sexual awakening. Cinderella is one of the latter. Cinderella’s glass slippers and feet were small, hinting at her virginity and her intact hymen. Rapunzel is clearly
about a girl reaching womanhood, especially since she becomes pregnant in the
original tale. The tale dances around her pregnancy, though. The witch, unaware
of the prince’s visits, asks why her dress has become so tight. Then later,
Rapunzel is shown with two children. She had sex with the prince! Oh, horrors!
LOL Red Rdiing Hood was originally ravished by the wolf. In French slang, a
girl who loses her virginity is referred to as “elle avoit vû le loup” – she had seen the wolf. The connotation is
clear.
While it’s easy to eroticize fairy tales, it’s
also easy to fall into stereotypical traps. Cinderella’s prince has a foot
fetish. Snow White has a ménage with seven men. Red Riding Hood is accosted by
a rake. Rapunzel’s pubic hair grows out. It can be a bit tough to take these
tales in a non-stereotypical direction.
In addition to the
more common fairy tales, one friend suggested I eroticize The Dancing
Princesses, which is one I don’t hear very much about. That got me to thinking
about obscure fairy tales. Why not tackle one or two of those?
My favorite fairy
tale is very obscure. It’s Scandinavian, and it’s entitled “The Enchanted
Wreath”. This one is about preserving girlish purity in my opinion. Have
you ever noticed it’s always the youngest and most innocent of the daughters
who attracts the magic? Here’s the synopsis: (from Wikipedia)
A
man had a wife, and both of them had a daughter from an earlier marriage. One
day, the man took his daughter to cut wood and found when he returned that he
had left his ax. He told his wife to send her daughter for it, so it would not
grow rusty. The stepmother said that his daughter was already wet and, besides,
was a strong girl who could take a little wet and cold.
The
girl found three doves perched on the axe, looking miserable. She told them to
fly back home, where it would be warmer, but first gave them crumbs from her
bread. She took the axe and left. Eating the crumbs made the birds feel much
better, and they gave her an unfading wreath of roses, with tiny birds singing
in it. The stepmother pulled it off, and the birds flew off and the roses
withered.
The
next day, the father went alone and left his axe again. The stepmother was
delighted and sent her own daughter. She found the doves and ordered them off
as “dirty creatures.” They cursed her to never be able to say
anything except “dirty creatures.”
The
stepmother beat her stepdaughter, and was all the angrier when the doves
restored the wreath to its condition and the girl’s head. One day, a king’s son
saw her and took her off to marry her. The news of them made the stepmother and
her daughter quite ill, but they recovered when the stepmother made a plan. She
had a witch make a mask of her stepdaughter’s face. Then she visited her, threw
her into the water, and put her daughter in her place, before setting out to
see if the same witch could give her something to cure the doves’ curse on her
daughter.
Her
husband was distraught by the change in her, but thought it stemmed an illness.
He thought he saw his bride in the water, but she vanished. After twice more
seeing her, he was able to catch her. She turned into various animals, a hare,
a fish, a bird, and a snake, but he cut off the snake’s head, and the bride
became a human again.
The
stepmother returned with an ointment that would work only if the true bride had
really been drowned; she put it on her daughter’s tongue and found it did not
work. The prince found them and said they deserved to die, but the stepdaughter
had persuaded him to merely abandon them on a desert island.
Another obscure
fairy tale that made my radar is Hans Christian Anderson’s “The
Shadow”. This one could be turned into a tale of dark and light mistaken
identity. Here’s the synopsis (from Wikipedia):
Once a learned man from the northern regions of
Europe went on a voyage south. One night, he sat on his terrace, while the fire
behind him cast his shadow on the opposite balcony. As he was sitting there,
resting, the man was amused to observe how the shadow followed his every
movement, as if he really did sit upon the opposing balcony. When he finally
grew tired and went to sleep, he imagined the shadow would likewise retire in
the house across the street. The next morning however, the man found to his
surprise that he in fact had lost his shadow overnight. As a new shadow slowly
grew back from the tip of his toes, the man did not give the incident another
thought, returned to northern Europe, and took up writing again. Several years
passed by until one night there was a knock at his door. To his surprise, it
was his shadow, the one he lost years before in Africa, and now stood upon his
doorstep, almost completely human in appearance. Astonished by his sudden
reappearance, the learned man invited him into his house, and soon the two sat
by the fireplace, as the shadow related how he had come to be man.
The learned man was calm and gentle by nature.
His main object of interest lay with the good, the beautiful and the true, a
subject of which he wrote often but was of no interest to anyone else. The
shadow said his master did not understand the world, that he had seen it as
truly was, and how evil some men really were.
The shadow then grew richer and fatter over the
years, while the writer grew poorer and paler. Finally he had become so ill
that his former shadow proposed a trip to a health resort offering to foot the
bill as well, but on condition that he could act as the master now, and the
writer would pretend to be his shadow. As absurd as this suggestion sounded,
the learned man eventually agreed and together they took the trip, the shadow
now as his master. At the resort, the shadow met with a beautiful princess, and
as they danced and talked with each other each night, the princess fell in love
with him.
When they were about to be married, the shadow offered
his former master a luxurious position at the palace, on condition that he now
became his own shadow permanently. The writer immediately refused and
threatened to tell the princess everything, but the shadow had him arrested.
Feigning his distraught, the shadow met with the princess and told her:
“I have gone through the most terrible
affair that could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I
suppose such a poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has
become a real man, and that I am his shadow.”
“How very terrible,” cried the princess;
“is he locked up?”
“Oh yes, certainly; for I fear he will
never recover.”
“Poor shadow!” said the princess;
“it is very unfortunate for him; it would really be a good deed to free him
from his frail existence; and, indeed, when I think how often people take the
part of the lower class against the higher, in these days, it would be policy
to put him out of the way quietly.”
When the shadow wed the princess later that
night, the learned man was already executed.
Here’s another
unusual one I’d heard of from years ago. It borders on bestiality. It’s called
“The She-Bear“, and here’s the synopsis:
After his wife dies, a King decides that the only woman in the world
who matches his dead wife’s beauty is his own daughter Preziosa – therefore,
Preziosa must now marry her deranged father. He tells her that if she will not
marry him that very evening then ‘’when I am finished with you there will be
nothing left but your ears’’.
An old woman then gives the terrified girl an enchanted bit of wood
that will turn her into a bear when she puts it in her mouth. Preziosa – now a
bear—flees into the forest and resolves never again to reveal her true form
lest her father learns of her whereabouts. A prince discovers the wonderfully
friendly she-bear in the woods and takes her home to be his pet.
One day when she believes she is alone, Preziosa takes the bit of wood
out of her mouth to brush her hair. The prince looks out his window, spies a
gorgeous maiden in his garden and rushes out to find her, but she hears him
coming and quickly puts the wood back into her mouth. The prince searches
throughout the garden but he cannot find the maiden anywhere—in her place is
only his pet she-bear.
The prince becomes sick with lust for the bear-girl and begins to waste
away. On request from her son, the prince’s mother sends for the she-bear who
is now to reside in the princes bedroom, cook his meals and make his bed for
him. The prince becomes overcome with lust for the bear, and begs his mother to
let him kiss the animal.
While the mother watches and encourages them enthusiastically, man and
bear lock lips. They are kissing so passionately that the bit of wood slips
from Preziosa’s mouth and the prince finds that he now holds a stunningly
beautiful maiden in his arms. Rejoicing, they get married, and presumably
everybody lives happily ever after.
I may tackle these for
my upcoming new fairy tale anthology. There are others, too, many of them
Asian, that interest me. Look for my new book “Wicked Fairy Tales”
coming out in the fall.
Here’s information
and buy links for my two current erotic fairy tales:
CLIMBING HER TOWER
(Erotic Rapunzel)
Blurb: This isn’t your
mother’s Rapunzel.
This erotic version of Rapunzel, “Climbing Her Tower” depicts
Rapunzel as a voracious woman who discovers the joys of kinky sex with a sexy
prince with a few unusual kinks of his own. This story includes BDSM, M/F,
M/F/F, virgin fantasy, and erotic shaving. You’ll get so hot you’ll want to let
your hair down as well! Let Rapunzel and her prince take you on the sexual ride
of a lifetime. Absolutely only for 18 years and over.
“”Climbing Her Tower” is an erotic twist to the fairy
tale Rapunzel. I sure love a good fairy tale and this hot and steamy tale
doesn’t disappoint.” — Beverly at Sizzling Hot Book Reviews
“Climbing Her Tower has all that and more. It is the story of
Rapunzel told with a bit of a BDSM twist.” — Hitherandthee from
Night Owl Reviews
WARNING: Rapunzel isn’t sweet and innocent. In this fairy tale erotica, she
tires of being a virgin and craves the touch of Prince Richard’s hands all over
her body. Although she begins naive, she blossoms with sexual excitement under
the watchful eye of her prince, who introduces her to BDSM, erotic shaving, and
deep penetration. He leaves her wanting more, and you will want more too!
This erotic version of Puss In Boots, “Trouble In Thigh High
Boots” is a story packed with hot, sexy, body humping adult fairy tale
erotica.
“Trouble in Thigh High Boots is a delightfully creative
retelling of the Puss in Boots tale. It is a tale that has been told myriad
times, but never in such a wonderfully imaginative way. The characters are
enchanting, and the story flows beautifully. The love scenes are
sizzling.” — Hitherandthee of Night Owl Reviews
WARNING: Tita isn’t your run of the mill Puss In Boots. She’s a cat
shapeshifter who turns into a mouth-wateringly sexy human woman with a sex
drive to match. This story includes M/F, F/F, M/F/M/F, light bondage, and
lactation. This erotic fairy tale will get you hot in all the right places.
Definitely for only 18 years and over.
I’ve got a confession to make. I’m addicted to House of Cards. I remember being equally addicted to the original 1990’s UK series, but the US Netflix adaptation is, surprisingly, even better than the British original.
Yes, the writing is excellent and the characterizations are superb, but what I most like about House of Cards is that it represents a very realistic but seldom written-about form of relationship.
The relationship between Frank Underwood and his wife, Claire, is a strange one. On the surface it appears to be a marriage of convenience – neither is sexually faithful and there appears to be nothing but a cool sort of companionship of purpose between them – but as the series goes on, we get glimpses into something more complex.
This is a portrait of two people who feed each other’s jouissance. Leaving the moral aspects of their individual actions and aspirations aside, this is love at its most powerful and revolutionary.
In her amazing TED Talk on the secret to desire in long-term relationships, Esther Perel points out that distance is essential to desire. Being able to see your partner from a distance, doing what drives and impassions them, allows you to maintain the stance of an admirer. It allows for the preservation of a certain level of mystery and of uncertainty, which keeps the embers of desire burning hot.
As married characters, Frank and Claire Underwood watch each other pursue their ambitions, execute their nefarious plans, as if they were each secret admirers of the other, aroused by their individual acts of ruthlessness.
When they finally come together, there’s an amazing erotic tension between them. It is never a ‘dutiful’ performance of marital obligation. They come together to give each other a sort of carte blanche absolution for being the reprehensible creatures they are. It’s a bit like watching scorpions mate.
After the never-ending parade of superficially written, poorly characterized and formulaic love-bonds that seem to be the norm in almost all narratives these days, it is refreshing and exciting to see a well-wrought portrait of something that isn’t pabulum.
Another interesting and complex relationship I have stumbled across recently is the novelized version of Macbeth by A.J. Hartley and David Hewson. They’ve done a magnificent job of digging into and expositing the compelling power dynamics between Lord and Lady Macbeth. Again, ambition definitely comes into it, but so does desperation, mania and regret. In this case, although Lady Macbeth is the instigator who gets the transgression ball rolling, there is a clever portrayal of how one hideous act leads inevitably to another, and there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
So many modern fictional romantic narratives are offered and consumed as models to aspire to, especially in erotic fiction. In this I see a tragic loss of the potential of fiction to examine the places we should never go in real life. This current need to make all kinky scenes safe, sane and consensual; this obligation to never represent negative, abusive relationships without clearly condemning them within the fiction, places all our fictions within the genre of YA or as thinly disguised self-help paperbacks.
It is as if we have decided that adults have no capacity to distinguish between fiction and reality and must be guided in their fictional adventures by an overbearing, authoritarian hand whose job it is to constantly nudge the reader towards a post-modern sort of ‘right thinking’.
This might be tolerable if most contemporary fictional love relationships were represented with any realism and complexity, but they’re not. Consequently, we are encouraged to judge our own relationships in the light of those that are not only fictional, but ones that aren’t realistic and revel in their own formulaic qualities.
“some narratives are not only symbolic rehearsals of social dilemmas and of the solution to these dilemmas: they are also performative structures offering ways of acting and doing.”
To me, this is the anathema of contemporary erotic fiction. It is a closing off of the possibilities of using fiction as a refuge from the rules of social reality. Instead, it has become a place where we are schooled, counseled and given exemplars of how to ‘do it right.’
