Remittance Girl's Blog, page 15

Writing Abjection

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From Lars Von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’

I got a tweet the other day, from Zander Vyne, asking if I’d seen the rape scene in ‘Irreversible.” I hadn’t, so I watched it. Before you rush out to watch the movie, let me warn you, it is about as disturbing as film ever gets and I am unconvinced of its value.

Yes, I understand the reverse narrative structure of the film is a discourse on the payoff of sex and violence in cinema. Yes, I understand that the studied and realistic way the scene was filmed could be seen as a challenge to films that portray rape as bearable, palatable, even titillating.  I get all that.  But at the end of the day, I had to ask myself what I knew or what questions I had after seeing the movie that I did not have before. The answer was: nothing.

I wanted to consider the fictionalization / dramatization of abjection and whether it has much value as a mode of communication. There is a quartet of four films that, taken in pairs, intrigues me as to this issue.

Like “Irreversible,” Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist” is also spectacularly violent and sexually explicit (for non-porn).  In “Irreversible” two men set out to take revenge for the rape and savage beating of a woman they both love.  In “Antichrist” a husband and wife work through the tragedy of the death of their young son, for which they are, to some extent, to blame.  They both contain, as their subject matter, excruciating human experiences. In both cases, the remedy adds phenomenally to the trauma.  As a narrative journey, it’s no different from Romeo and Juliette or Hamlet or Oedipus. Tragedy piled on top of tragedy.

Both films set out to disturb their audiences, but to what purpose? The truth is that catastrophe often breeds more of itself. This sad, human truth is played out every night on the evening news.  What purpose is served by dramatizing a disturbing but woefully common occurrence?

I’m not suggesting fictional narratives need to be parables.  There are superficial parables to be taken from both films.  Revenge is almost never as satisfying as you think it will be, it never restores what you’ve lost and almost always diminishes your own humanity.  Toddlers require almost constant supervision. If you’re a mental health professional, never attempt to treat the people you love.

I found both films excruciating to watch, but for me, the difference in narrative value between “Irreversible” and “Antichrist” has to do with the more complex questions I’m left with.  For me, just being left with the reflection that the world contains some awful people who do awful things isn’t enough. Nor is the recursive notion that telling a story in reverse gives it more redeeming value.  It’s not enough.  However, “Antichrist” left me pondering a few things: why do we find sex the ‘unforgivable’ distraction? Why is it that, on the order of excuses for inattention, it seems the most despicable?  Why do we valorize and assume maternal love above all others? Why does maternal child abuse seem so much more horrific, unfathomable, indecipherable?

I’m not suggesting that ‘Antichrist’ is even close to perfect (or even justified in its excesses). It is a very peculiar film that reflects Von Trier’s own odd thinking on a literal embodied connection between sex, reproduction, motherhood, etc.  And towards the end, it gets annoyingly mythological and hyperbolic. To my mind, Von Trier could have exercised significantly more critical self-editing.  Nonetheless, I was left, after the disturbing experience of seeing the film, with some compelling ideas to think about and I’m not sure I would have thought about them quite as deeply had the film been less disturbing.

Similarly, I have recently seen “Twelve Years A Slave” and have been pondering my reaction to it in relation to “Beloved.”  I don’t want to debate production values.  “Twelve Years” is an incredibly well shot, impeccably acted film.  The violence in the film, although not on the order of either of the two films discussed earlier, is profoundly disturbing to anyone with any an iota of morality.  I can’t make a call on whether it is excessive, but the person I was viewing the movie with decided he couldn’t watch any more of it about halfway through. The violence is graphic and realistic, as is the unrelenting barbarism.

“Beloved” didn’t have the same budget and was not as well made.  It’s now showing its age and some people have, I think unfairly, disparaged Oprah Winfrey’s performance and suggested that her enthusiasm to champion the visual retelling of Toni Morrison’s book of the same name, blinded her to some critical considerations.  The film is reasonably faithful to the story structure of the novel, although it lacks the poetics of the language Morrison was writing in, and does attempt to iron out the lack of linearity in the storytelling.

Both “Twelve Years” and “Beloved” take an unflinching look at the realities of slavery.  They both set out, like many of the best stories dramatizing historical fact, to inform through the experience of an individual.  There is a certain justifiable pressure on any potential audience member to suffer through the relentlessly disturbing scenes in both films in order to honour the truth of that history.  And yet, to what end?

Perhaps I overestimate people’s imaginative capacities. But I once had occasion to visit the sub-basement of a recently closed old prison. It was more than 100 years old, and they had these stone isolation cells in the basement with nothing but a rusting link set into the floor and a bucket in a corner. I knew, without a doubt, that every possible violent, degrading, dehumanizing act that could be done, had been done to the people held in those cells. I didn’t need a movie or even a story to tell me this. I just knew.  Unbridled power always results in barbarity. Always. It is a fact of human nature that some of us will, given no limits, indulge in whatever level of cruelty we can get away with.

For all its incredible cinematography, its brilliant acting, and its scenes of violence and degradation, “Twelve Years” did not tell me anything I did not already know. It served me up almost two hours of dreadful tragedy, but informed me of nothing.  It left me with no lingering and complex questions.

“Beloved” on the other hand, not only did the job of serving history, but it also left me pondering universal questions that were broader than that particular piece of history. How do individuals with horrendous pasts tell themselves their own story? What happens to love or familial bonds when they are so completely out of your control? Who are you when you do not own yourself? What constitutes a violation of the spirit?

These questions, like the questions I was left with after “Antichrist” go far beyond the telling of a single, tragic event. Even beyond the experience of one group of people in one time, in one place. It is not that those histories don’t deserve to be honoured in accurate storytelling. But their relevance as more than historic artifacts or contemporary revisitation gives them a lasting and universal value. I think they serve to force a personalization, an ownership of those issues, which transcends the brittle idea of an individual or a group having the ownership of certain tragedies.

I believe in the value of disturbing narratives.  I don’t require happy endings or some gratifying redemption in every story. But there is a profound difference between a story that says ‘this is my pain, witness it’ and one that says ‘this is our pain, understand it.’

Outing, Slut-Shaming and Very High Price of Freedom

To my knowledge, there has never been a time or a culture that hasn’t suffered its share of hypocritical stances. Ours, at the moment, mostly revolves around sex. We use it to sell almost everything, we valorize people who use it as a weapon, we crave it, we demand that others should want what we want. At the same time, we publicly punish those who do not walk the very fine and murky line of being sexually alluring but not overly vulgar. Conservative women secretly devour Regency Romances full of sexual innuendo by the boatload, and publicly condemn Miley Cyrus for twerking. We are dellusionally nostalgic for time periods when we believe things were freer, when in fact, there was always hypocrisy and for women, it historically came with far worse consequences than it does now.

I just finished reading “Slut-Shaming and the Duke Porn Star” in the Guardian, and it pissed me off.

Let me make this plain: I have no problem with sexual brazenness. I have a problem with stupidity.  If you are stupid enough to believe that you can earn money for your tuition as a porn star and not have that eventually come to light, you’re stupid. I’m not offended about how she earned her tuition. I’m offended she was stupid enough to believe it would have no negative consequences for her.

Similarly, if you chose to fellate one or many people in public at an Eminen concert, and you actually believe no one is going to pull out their phone and video it, and post in on YouTube, you’re stupid. I don’t care that you’re a serial cocksucker. I think that’s fine. That you act like a victim of a terrible injustice for having to bear the consequences of that… that’s what offends me. Stupid.

When in comes to writing erotic fiction, or sex blogging, or taking pictures or videos of yourself and posting it to a public forum, or even sending them to another person… the same thing goes. I understand that you would like the freedom to be yourself and you enjoy the attention that being sexually outspoken, outwritten or outimaging garners you, but consider that our culture is still (for better or worse) very ambivalent about sexuality. There is a very good chance that you will be exposed at some point. You need to ask yourself, very seriously, if you can bear the consequences of that.

It isn’t fair that we’re so ridiculously hypocritical about sex, but as a culture, at the moment, we are. And that means that when you expose yourself sexually, you hand people, who may not have your best interests at heart, a tool with which to beat you. You really do need to understand this. Yes, it is an unforgivable betrayal to ‘out’ someone who does not wish to be outted, but you have to consider the worst case scenario – it may indeed happen. And if you can’t live with that, then you are better off living keeping your sexual secrets to yourself.

Publicly posting pictures, writing or discussing your sex life and your sexual fantasies is a form of exhibitionism. Please don’t fool yourself that you are being entirely altruistic. You enjoy the attention you get for doing it. But it is not without its price. The price is that you may not be able to control how much of yourself ends up getting exhibited. When it is more than you would like, when your desire for attention ends up getting you more attention than you want, or the wrong kind, please don’t pretend to be shocked and devastated. You KNEW this could happen because it has happened to many others. You took the risk. You enjoyed the risk. You got off on the risk.

It’s a bit like fucking bareback. It’s a cosmic injustice that there are venereal diseases. It’s a bit like skydiving. It’s a cosmic injustice that parachutes sometimes malfunction. It’s a bit like walking around in a conservative country with a miniskirt on and getting spit on and shouted at. It’s a shame there are cultures like that.

But there are. There are all these unfair things in life. And you have an obligation as a person who takes care of themselves NOT to be stupid and ignore the risks. You have every right to take them. It may be a revolutionary act to take those risks. But should it result in pain, please don’t pretend you didn’t know there was HIV or gravity or misogynistic cultures.

I decided to ‘out’ myself because I realized that if I was going to publicly argue for the value of erotic writing as a literary genre, I was going to have to put my name to that. I considered the consequences. I considered the consequences to those who were close to me. I decided that there is no freedom without risk, but that I was willing to suffer the consequences if they should come.

No revolutionary, no political activist, no suffragette or campaigner for equal rights will tell you that freedom is free. In order for us to get past our current state of deep cultural hypocrisy, we require people who are informed and willing to take the risk of being outed and condemned. We do not need another whining victim who is ‘stunned’ or ‘shocked’ that she couldn’t keep her porn-name secret.

 

To See is to Be Seen

Apparently I said something deeply offensive when I tweeted that, among the many functions that sex serves, one is to see yourself through the eyes of your lover. When it finally occurred to me why the statement might be offensive to some people, it depressed me. It’s political, of course. Although I realize it is fundamentally impossible to keep politics out of the bedroom, I often feel it does more harm than good there.

We find ourselves at an incredibly narcissistic point in our history and, god knows, I’m not immune to it (witness my last post). But somehow we’ve come to a point where we want to believe – and certainly the commercial entities who sell us things that help ‘define’ us want us to believe – that we make ourselves, and  can completely remake ourselves, that we are the sole authors of our own identities. Or, at the very least, that we have been since we had the agency to stop toddling.

True, the most formative years of our psycho-sexual development occur very young. And having a primary carer who looks upon and touches and interacts with you with the right level of admiration (not too much and not too little) has a tremendous impact on whether you instinctively feel that you deserve to be desired and loved when you grow up. Although the deepest scars to this part of our psyches may be done in early childhood, I still believe that we are not immune or unchanged by later experiences.

The gaze is a paradoxical thing. You cannot see the world without it seeing you back. You cannot gaze into the face of another human being without knowing that you are being gazed at too, and judged. It’s a dangerous thing, because they might not like what they see in you. In gazing, you expose yourself to the gaze of others. And you learn to know you are ‘other’ to them. You learn how to be the object of someone else’s desire. Or worse, you learn that you do not inspire desire in them at all – and you learn to live with that truth.

There is a humanist concept: intersubjectivity. It’s used in a lot of senses, but at its core is the idea of viewing others as fully rounded, complex human beings like you. Affording them the same complexity, the same emotions, the same desires and needs that you afford yourself. It’s a very nice idea and I think it is very possible to do that once you get to know someone well and feel for them. There is an aspirational goal we have been given to be sexually intersubjective as well. I’m not convinced this is possible. I think you can love someone that way, but reality is a string of continuous moments, and I think in the midst of erotic experience, it’s not possible. Or rather, it is possible, but then it feels a lot like you’re fucking yourself, which offers no risk, no jouissance, no peril, no adventure. And nothing feels as revelatory as knowing you are seen, in all your beauty and all your ugliness, by another, and still desired.

I think we really need our ‘other’ to be ‘other’ in those moments. And we need to be ‘other’ to them. To be strangers and strange, to be alien territory. To be in the erotic company of, not a clone, but an other. And hopefully you are very desirable other to them, and you can see that, feel it, know it in their eyes and their touch and their responses. There is an inherent tension in feeling the ‘wrapper’ of the other. You can’t see through their eyes or taste through their tongue or touch with their skin. You are together and yet you are separate. It allows you the erotic luxury of atomizing them. Of reveling in their otherness and of fearing it also. Because at some point, if things are really good, you get that ecstatic moment when, for just for a brilliant, blinding moment, the wrapper of the other dissolves and falls away. But it is only a moment and then gone; it is what you then seek over and over. Usually, coming up to the point of orgasm, or passed it in that flash of yearning that extends into the twilight past it. A good thing too, because it’s far too intense a place to be with all your intellect intact.

It occurs to me that, these days, we spend a lot of time not really seeing. We put labels on the objects of our desire as a way to categorize and peruse them at a superficial level for fear, if we look too long, they will look back at us. It is safe, quick and convenient to classify each other, and the things we desire with meta-tags and 50 years of marketing savvy has taught us how to do it. Look, this is the MILF shelf. Here’s the buff but mature and successful man shelf. Here’s the butch girl shelf. And the sweet but a geek shelf. We classify each other in our minds so we can imagine we know each other without actually seeing, and avoiding being seen. And it’s safer to be one of those labeled objects, too. No one is going to bother judging you in any depth when they can simply classify you. It’s quicker.

We have become cowards. We delude ourselves that we have hermetically sealed ourselves in the impermeable packaging of absolute self-definition. It saves us from encountering the gaze which tells us something we don’t want to know about ourselves. We self-affirm with masturbatory glee.

 

 

 

 

The Long Hard Look

Whether you believe in universal truths or you acknowledge that they are negotiated and constructed within cultures, it matters not. It is useful to entertain their existence. Being an atheist, I don’t think truths come from outside ourselves, nor do I believe most of them are timeless and unchanging. That being said, I still hold them in great regard. Especially when writing fiction.

When I read new writers of erotic fiction, one of the things I have most often felt the need to say is – you need to be honest. You are protecting your character because there is too much of you invested in there. As writers, we all write a little of ourselves into our stories, and we all have a tendency to protect ourselves. This is especially true, I think, with erotic fiction. Our understanding of what is erotic, how to be erotic, how to ‘see’ pleasure, use pleasure, give pleasure seems to reflect so strongly back on ourselves, it is hard to conceive of new eroticisms, because we fear that people will judge us if we veer too far away from the accepted (I don’t mean kink. We accept kink fine. FSOG sold 50 millions copies, so don’t fool yourself). Intuitively, it would make sense that the more secret and private and personal our acts, the less society would have to say about what is or isn’t recognizable or acceptable as proper erotic pursuits. But this is, in fact, exactly the opposite. Society offers us very rigid ideals of the right and wrong way to experience, pursue and satisfy desire. My last short story could easily be viewed as an anti-erotica piece. It is a portrait of the sort of person we most revile in our society: she fails in every way to be what society tells us a sexual person should be. Her desire is unrequited, she continually deludes herself about the outcome of her situation, she doesn’t even have the excuse of being unaware of what she’s doing or deriving some masochistic pleasure from her failure. She’s a loser and, more offensive yet, she’s not an unwitting one. She’s too weak to stop being one.

Hollywood has bred expectations that characters like this, in the course of the story, grow from ugly ducklings into swans. Either Emily should realize she’s pounding on the wrong door and find a better one to pound on, or Gabriel will suddenly realize what an idiot he’s been and finally reciprocate her feelings.

I wrote this story as an experiment in two things: in destabilizing expected narrative structures and in writing a consciously subjective character.

I’ve been taking a lot of photographic self-portraits this week and looking at them closely, attempting to ‘read’ myself honestly, to see if I could glean any truths. I have always had an uneasy relationship with my own visual image. Even from a very young age, someone would show me a picture of myself and I would have difficulty recognizing it as me. Of course, I believed that it WAS a picture of me – it’s hard to explain – but when I looked at the picture, the me I felt inside and the image of the person in the photograph seemed to be vastly different people. So I go through these phases of refusing to look at pictures of myself, and then taking a lot of them, as if I might cure myself of the disconnect by sheer, bloody-minded repetition. It scared me to think that, if I couldn’t authentically acknowledge myself in a photograph, how would I ever recognize myself in a story I was writing? Most writers assiduously avoid ‘Mary Sueing’ (take the test here to see if you do -  bit of a joke, but fun) but in this story, I set out to do exactly that. When I killed her, I cried. Then I laughed. Then I took the test above and realized I hadn’t Mary Sue’d at all.

So I’m back at the drawing board, trying to maintain a level of honesty in my writing. I’m back to taking pictures of myself and hoping the picture to give me some clue as to who this person is.

What I see, when I look at this picture, is a woman who both wants desperately to be loved and yet is already wearing the resignation of that scenario’s impossibility on her face. She wants to be genuine, but she cannot give up the control that being genuine entails. So she constructs truths for herself, and rules of superficial politeness, and she clings to those doggedly because, without them, she feels the whole of her existence will collapse in chaos.

I’ve always thought of myself as a person who deals with chaos rather happily, but apparently not.

 

 

Not One Before The Other *

Emily let the tiny, clothbound book fall open in her hands.  Like a woman spreading her legs, it offered up its unique scent. Beneath the musty, sweet smell that all old books have, this one surrendered hints of pine resin, tobacco and the tart creaminess of baby’s milk. Eyes closed, she brought the open tome up to her face and inhaled it again, more deeply, then looked at the title page.

On the left was an ornate engraving, a portrait of Sir Francis Bacon. On the right, legible through a gossamer thin sheet of onionskin, which whispered a rustle as she drew it aside with one moist fingertip was the name of the work. The Comedy of Errors, Cambridge, At the University Press, 1922.

A suitable offering. Not the best she’d ever found, but not the worst either. Better than the bag of Haribo jelly worms and the tattered retro paperback copy of Dr. No.  That was before she’d become adept at reading Gabriel’s understated reactions. He threw a lot of her offerings out the minute she left his shop, she knew.

* * *

On the bus, two seats ahead of Emily, a couple bickered.  The tall handsome Asian man had grown a mustache for Movember, and his girlfriend or wife with hair died a gorgeous cherry red- girlfriend, she guessed – didn’t like the feel of it when he kissed her. It made her nostalgic. She’d had those kind of fights. Too long ago to remember what they’d been about. Silly things. The things you fight about when you know someone loves you.

Emily had made this journey every week for ten years. As the bus rounded Hyde Park corner, the dread came on as it always did. Perhaps he wouldn’t be there? Sometimes he closed his small framing shop and went home early. There was never any way to know if her journey would be a wasted one. She’d never had a phone number for him, and he never called her. Then the next week, he’d be there and it was as if nothing had happened.

“Why can’t you just call me and let me know you won’t be there?”

“Life gets in the way, love. I get busy and forget. My ADD is terrible, you know,” said Gabriel with a charming smirk.

He didn’t have ADD. Emily had no choice but to accept the lie. He didn’t like having to answer to her, or to anyone. It was just the way he was. And, if she didn’t like it, she could always stop coming to see him.

He hadn’t always been that way. Early in their relationship, he’d been eager to see her.  She’d walk into his little shop, and he’d look up from his work and beam.  He’d pull her to him and his kisses always tasted of desire and pain and rage.  The churning chaos of him was hot and bitter on her tongue.  She had learned who he was by the taste of his saliva. As if he had been angry that he wanted her, but wanted her all the same.

In those days, they talked for hours and hours. He’d told her how broken he was: by his recently failed love affair, by his terrible, dark childhood.  As he touched her, as he kissed her, those things seeped into her skin, then under it into her bloodstream. And she swore to herself, to him, that she’d never hurt him like any of the other people in his life had done. He had been cruel at times, back then. Dismissive and curt.

“You’re just like all the other women I’ve known. Selfish, grasping bitches, all of you.”

“No. That’s not me,” she protested through the sting of his words. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m not that. I’m me. You know me.”

“I’ve had a fuck of a week, Emily. I’m mean and I’m cold right now. You should go.”

But she hadn’t gone. Because she understood.  She loved him and being with him, even in his darkest moods, seemed better than being without him. Time and a consistency of affection, Emily reasoned, was what it would take to make him feel safe with her.

“If you’re not going to leave, then I will,” he said. And he did, walking out of his own shop, slamming the door behind him.

Raindrops chased each other down the bus window, splaying the taillights of the traffic ahead. Safety was not what he had wanted or needed. Perhaps, in some part of him mind, he knew she was good for him but, as the years went by, nothing progressed. After she got the courage to ask him out and he’d deflected her invitations over and over, or simply ignored them, she came to understand that she’d made a terrible mistake. Gabriel might feel affection for her, but her inability to be the selfish, grasping bitch he had accused her of being guaranteed that he would never be with her. Not really.

She should have stopped then. When it was clear what he needed and what she could not be.  Still, she made pathetic excuses for herself. Rationalized and forged absurd and impossible futures in which he tired of fucking women he mistrusted and didn’t even like.  But it never happened.  Emily wondered if, perhaps, Gabriel needed to fuck women and break their hearts fast, like a series of revenge attacks to punish the whole gender for having the same sex organs as the few true monsters who’d hurt him so early and so profoundly.

As the years went by, it seemed as if she had figured right. The friendlier and more unguarded he became with her, the less he touched her, the less they kissed, the more lighthearted the flirting grew. These days, they talked about cooking and cats.

The traffic was terrible along Oxford Street. Emily checked her mobile for the message she knew he had not sent. Gabriel might not be the mentally healthiest person on earth, but she was far worse. Because she kept making the journey. She kept checking her phone. She kept turning up knowing with a blinding certainty, that he was never going to love her the way she loved him. And every time she romanticized her feelings, framing them as some laughable act of sacrificial chivalry, she spent the rest of the day despising herself.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to stay away. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to reorient her feelings and place them firmly in the realm of friendship. The year before, with some encouragement from a girlfriend, she had attempted to convince herself that all she needed was to meet someone else. There were lots of wonderful men out there. Men who would want her – really want her. And it turned out there were. Emily ended up in a hotel room with a perfectly nice, perfectly attractive man named Geoff. She’d let him fuck her six ways from Sunday. But no matter how hard she tried, she felt absolutely nothing. It took all her self-control to wait until she heard his breath slow into sleep before she dressed quietly, slipped out of the room, called the elevator and vomited heartily into the ceramic planter to the left of it.

Most of the time, she blithely lied to herself.  When she didn’t have the energy for that, she admitted her addiction and slid into days of numbed depression.  Days when it seemed it was not possible to sleep enough to assuage the terrible need for him or heal the appalling rawness she felt. As if she were walking around the city with her skin on inside out; with the meat and the nerves and the tendons facing outwards.

The bus stopped and the doors gasped open at Holborn. It was only two in the afternoon, but already the time of year and the rain had turned the light to a pale, aqueous mauve and the air was heavy with a cold, diesel-scented mist. Emily plunged her hand into her purse in a frantic and unnecessary effort to assure herself she hadn’t forgotten her offering at home. The slim, oilskin covered book was there, as she knew it would be.

Her mobile rang as she stood waiting at the lights. For a moment her stomach clenched and adrenalin surged through her veins, but even before she looked at the caller ID, she knew it wasn’t Gabriel. It was never Gabriel.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Emily? Emily is it?”

“Yes.”

“I got your name from a colleague of mine. He said you design wonderful websites.  We’d very much like to talk to you about designing one for us.”

‘Oh,” she said, flustered, eyes firmly fixed on the blinking green man on the crosswalk lamppost.  She turned right and picked up her pace. “Um, that would be great. Can I call you back in a about an hour? I’m just on my way to meet…” she hesitated, “a client.”

“Sure. That would be fine. We need some print work done, too,” said the man on the phone.  “You can do that as well, can’t you?”

“Yes, of course.  I’ll call you back.”

“Great. My number is…”

She was less than a block from Gabriel’s shop, straining through the gloom to see if the lights were on inside.  Scared he’d closed up early and, at the same time dreading the tinny ring of the bell above the door. The more she heard that little tinkle, the more she was sure it was a chime of derision. Absently, she switched off her mobile, dropped it back into her purse and stepped off the curb of the small street.

* * *

The car was one of those four-wheel drives designed for country roads.  It caught her at the hips, lifting her into the air until she came down on the bonnet, crushing her ribs. It wasn’t like the way they show it in films. It was faster than that.

As she lay on the rough road surface, unable to move, Emily looked up at a sky the colour of sleep and hoped the book hadn’t gotten wet. Even as the thought took her, she knew it was pathetic. A crushing pressure bore down on her chest, and it bubbled as she tried to breathe.  She coughed. Something broke and sent a shower of bloody saliva up into the cold air and spattered back down onto her face. There were voices around her. Panicked voices – she could hear them – but they were just so many vowels and consonants strung together.  All she could think of was Gabriel, who was never going to change his the way he felt. Never going to love her in the way men are supposed to love women.  Never going to wake with his arms around her. Never fuck her to sleep. Never let her taste his sweat. Never feel her erect nipples pressing against his back.  People weren’t supposed to think about sex when they were dying. She was never going to taste the first few drops of precum on his cock. Never bite into the tendons at his neck. Never feel the roughness of his stubble on her inner thighs. Never wrap her legs around his hips and thrust upwards. Never smell the salt on the palm of his hand. How odd that now those were the things that hurt. More than the legs or spine she could not move, more than the breath she could not take, more than the dark sky getting darker. She closed her eyes and tried, instead, to feel the pain in her body.

Ten years, she thought, is enough.

* * *

*The title of this story is the last line from the Shakespeare play, The Comedy of Errors.

Spam

That’s not what I meant

I sent

Notice of a good memory

I sent

Yesterday’s words

I sent

Black over blue

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Rapunzel’s missive

I sent

Saved up absurdity

I sent

Not a question

I sent

Unwisely

I sent

Poste restante, again

I sent

Inky cold fingers

I sent

Elvis Presley

I sent

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Abstraction: Desire and Disgust

Jacques Lacan once famously said ‘the Woman does not exist.” Like so many French theorists, it’s a confrontational statement designed to draw a response. It’s important to really read it with care and to know, above all, who is speaking it. Lacan was male. But it’s a fun place to start an argument – there are just so many ways to read it.

The most common way to read the statement involves Lacan’s concept of Other – that the understanding of person is based on a definition of what they have or lack. Men have phalluses, women do not. So their essence is described by a difference from the ‘norm,’ which is male and has a phallus. Yeah, semantic and not all that interesting to me.

Another is that this can be read as a statement that challenges the idea of there being a ‘category’ of things called Woman, or that there is some universal truth that can be said about Woman that could describe her.  There is something, I think, a bit of Kantian wishful thinking going on here in this one.

What I’d like to propose is another reading. First, I’d argue that ‘the Woman’ does exist. That this Woman is referred to everyday, by both men and women, as some ideal against which we try to measure what we desire or, if we are women, what we are. She exists in the abstract, is eroticized in the abstract and, one of the disappointments and fears of many men is when, in their interactions with a specific woman, a persona emerges and they are no longer ‘sticky.’ What I mean by this is that, deciphered, this data-rich person is giving off too much nuance, too much specific information and there is little room left on which to adhere the self- or media-generated desires of the other. They are ‘too full’ of themselves to be what you fantasized they’d be to you. The abstract Woman suddenly becomes a hyperspecific individual and disgust ensues.

It is easy to eroticize an abstraction. Like a sponge, soaks up a projection of desire or a projection of disgust and runs with it. She, the Woman, can be as bad or as good as you want her to be. She can be your virgin queen, your femme fatale, your slut, your whore, your old hag, your medusa, your virago. I would say that it is just as possible to do this with men and, in fact, this is done to with men constantly in romance novels. And so, by that definition, if ‘the Woman doesn’t exist,’ then neither does ‘the Man.’

It could be said that, today, specificity ruins the jouissance of this kind of erotic dynamic. And good pornography is all about abstraction. It’s only really effective if you can project yourself into it, step into the skin of one of the actors, and picture yourself in that place, in that moment, doing those things. Porn requires ‘characters’ who are constantly under erasure. But I would propose that it is part of the rather pathetic need to paint oneself as ‘good’ that we seek those unspecific interchanges. It’s far, far nastier to objectify someone, to drape your projected desires all over them, while fully acknowledging how dehumanizing it is to do that to a person.

I just don’t buy the idea of fully ‘subjected’ sexual experiences. Well, I buy them, but I find them terminally unerotic. Comforting and cosy, perhaps. But, to me, deeply unerotic. Because there are two edges to the blade of objectification. There are moments in sex, no matter how authentic and engaged and specific the experience, where one becomes a kind of hyper-object of desire to the other.  There is a place where even abstractions are too concrete. Where you lose your persona and become deindividualized, if only momentarily. These are what Bataille would call experiences of transcendence. It is also a point of erasure, but not so as to be someone else, but to be no one.

This is where my consideration is probably going to get offensive to some of you. Undoubtedly, there is rich kink to be had in modes of objectified desire; either being that object, or desiring it. But, as I said above, it cannot be transgressive unless somewhere, in your brain, you feel that this erasure of the real persona is wrong. There is nothing ‘naughty’ about being a ‘slut’ unless some part of you truly believes that being a ‘slut’ is wrong. There’s nothing transgressive about being sadistic unless some portion of your conscience really, honestly believes that hurting someone for the purpose of sexual enjoyment is wrong. As Foucault so admirably explored in his essay ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ you must truly feel that the limits matter in order to experience ecstasy in the going past them.

There was a time when we had lots of rules to break. When masturbation was dirty and unmarried sex was a sin. When taking a whip to someone was an obscene act. When fucking someone’s ass was an abomination. None of those things are socially transgressive any more. They’re all over the net and, if they’re all over the net, there is (regardless of the rampant hypocrisy) a high social acceptance for them. Even if we ‘say’ it’s ‘naughty’ stuff to make us feel like what we’re doing is somehow edgy, we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only edgy if there is an edge and you acknowledge the edge as a legitimate that shouldn’t be crossed.

This is why I say that my erotic fiction is not ‘sex positive.’ This is why I often write characters who have tremendously ambivalent feelings about what they desire and what they do. What they want is not ‘safe, sane and consensual’ in the landscape of their own morality. It would be easier to write erotic fiction set in time periods when there was a whole lot more ‘forbidden fruit,’ and I think that is why erotica set in earlier historical periods is so popular. There is a part of our culture that, I believe, feels a great nostalgia, for a time when forbidden fruit was hanging much lower and was easier to reach.

I don’t want what I write about to be labeled ‘sex positive.’ I don’t want you to think what my characters do is ‘okay’ and perfectly natural. There is a big difference between what is erotic and what is sexually satisfying. Dogs fuck. It’s natural and sexually satisfying to them. But eroticism has nothing to do with it. I aim to leave my readers a little disgusted, or at least hope they will notice that the characters are disgusted with themselves. There is no truly honest reaction to having transgressed except self-disgust.  If that isn’t present, then no real transgression has taken place, because your morality has not been challenged.

I find the desire on the part of erotica readers, writers and critics, to put themselves in positions of liberal moral rectitude to be a very sad state of affairs.

And exceedingly unerotic.

On The Other Hand

Perhaps instead, you come bearing other burdens accrued over a lifetime of seismic events. With a pulse like a warzone, and a tick at the corner of your eye. Torn between a craving for sanctuary and bloodrush of the precipice. A smile that isn’t and a throat dry as doubt.

You can leave your sentences unfinished, not because I know what you’re going to say, but because I trust time to ripen them. One day at  dawn, they’ll give up their bitter juices and stain my skin. I’ll press my face into the palm of your hand and scream obscenities. I’ll rub my lips raw against the bristle of your beard and bleed against your lips. Bruise myself against your hips. Weep into your hair. Leave the crescent moon lines of my fingernails on your ass cheeks when I drink you down.

I’ll leave my blood on your sheets and strands of dark hair caught up in your fingers. You will invade me with words, core me with belligerent intentions and wound me carelessly. I’ll call you a cunt, curse your mother and then forgive you and come against your thigh. I’ll throw books at you and miss. We will fight on bridges, fuck in alleyways, trade cruelties and be ashamed. You will turn me from human to animal and back again in an afternoon.

My mouth will flood when I think of you. I won’t be able to tell my cunt from my heart. And I’ll never find a way to forget your name. That’s what I want.

 

 

All You Ever Wanted

Isn’t this all you ever wanted? A place to spend the saved-up piggy bank of quotidian fantasies? I’ll do you and all your acronyms, baby. The glossy, stunned-faced pornographies of consumption, clutched so long in your sweat-slick hands, chicken-choked in the heat, the two-stroke engine of every banal wank you’ve ever had.

All the positions with a bit of tie me up and slap and tickle just to feel the edge, so you can pretend, if only for a while, you’ve joined the club of lucky others who have more fun than you. I’m easy; I’ll smile or I’ll cry with your cum on my face and your dick in my cunt, and the faint red marks of some half-hearted trip to leatherland fading on my nice white ass.

The eye contact while I suck your cock,the ooh-la-la squeals at the mess dripping down my tits and onto regulation black stockings. The drool around the gag and the distorted nipples caught in cut-rate clamps you bought off the internet. Do you know how easy it is to give you all and nothing?  The soft-serve cone of merchandised sex, meme machine of prepackaged erotic Everests of your pale perversions: these I can deliver with the patient ease that every woman learns. The tired list of self-congratulatory cum shots.

And when all the sightseeing is over, and you can’t get hard anymore, I’ll shower you off, walk away and forget your real name within an hour. If I ever knew it at all. If I cared enough to ask. All you ever wanted, baby.

The Impossible Eroticism of Time

I’ve always been obsessed with history. I wank against old walls, moisten while reading about the Spanish Civil war, the Crusades, the Inquisition in South America, the Russian Revolution, the Long March. It has taken me a long time to unravel why it is that history does this to me and why, when I visit places that have a narrative past, my skin is on fire the whole time.

Climbing the stairs of an ancient Buddhist temple in Siem Reap or Bagan, wandering through the narrow lanes of the Temple Bar, spotting the indecipherable insignias above the doors to the chambers.The faded oxblood tiles on the floors of Tuol Sleng, and the black of the monochromatic photographs turned to powdery charcoal behind the misted glass in the room where they hang the pictures of the soon-to-be dead. The pernicious, clinging sand of Jordan. The brutal insistence of the creeping vines that weave their way through ancestral tombs in Java. Nature unmakes us with every tick of the atomic clock.

Touching it too. The brittle, crumbly sandstone in Oxford abrades my fingertips. Cheek pressed to mottled, rain-stained walls. Decay and dust. Time erodes the world into airborne fragments of a past-bearing virus. It gets into my lungs, lodges there and infects me. And for days I am sick with love for the place. Not for the place now, but for what it has been. Even the greedy, green scent of the giant carnivorous trees of Highgate, breaking the bones of the dead to make their meat. The iron-red water, sleeping in ancient cisterns. Fish nibbling away at the feet of stone columns. The grit on the wind tastes of a thousand, thousand years of saying goodbye.

History is my pornography. The past doesn’t require my compassion or my pity or my measured response. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” said Shelley, but that’s not what I do. Not despair, but a throb between my legs. Perhaps despair and a throb? Yes. That, then. Both is better.

The past, however much we fool ourselves, is not real. The real is lost in time and we weave narratives out of what remains. We write histories. The monks, the starving children, the burning witches, the gutted soldiers and the drowned Jews. All dead, now. And what do I care for for their dead cares? I take their corpses as I please. Drink up the lingering stink of their stale miseries. A perverse voyeur of what is beyond my reach to change, or fix or even to remember.

It is the impossibility of putting any of it to rights, the sadistic discipline of time’s obscene rule. The longer, more savage great march forward. There is no going back ever. It’s forbidden. That’s why it turns me on to contemplate it.