Remittance Girl's Blog, page 37

Show Me, Don't Tell Me – Unless it's Sex.

There were some really great comments on my last post about the literary world and its aversion to including erotic sex scenes in literary fiction or eliciting arousal in readers. Laughingly, and perhaps a little brutally, I said that it might have something to do with individual authors and their own feelings of sexual inadequacy. But I'm hoping you realized that was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

However, Lauren posed a very valid question and I think it deserves a considered exploration:

"In all other scenarios, budding writers are drilled to show and not tell in their writing, so why is sex getting special treatment?"

First, I'd like to be upfront and say that I don't have a pat answer. In fact, this question forms one of the branches of what I'd very much like to research in my thesis.

It would be easy to say that we're hung up about sex. Well, we are. But are we anymore hung up about it now than we were in the 50′s and 60′s? Because those decades saw the publication of a number of novels which were quickly recognized for their literary merit and contained very explicit sex scenes and/or sexual scenarios that would send the legal teams of major publishers running for the woods these days.

Frankly, I don't think many of the most acclaimed literary writers today are shy about writing sex. Nor do I believe most of them could not do a pretty good job of constructing a very effective and steamy erotic scene.  Perhaps Martin Amis doesn't feel up to the task, but Howard Jacobson certainly is. Most good writers are. I think they are choosing not to.  And it needs to be noted that a number of them of them choose not to write graphic violence either.

I think there was a time – in the later part of the 20th Century – when it was considered revolutionary and innovative for a 'serious' novelist to write explicit and erotic sex.  These writers were writing this material at a time when, for the most part, media depictions of sex were very conservative. It's worth remembering that at the same time that Miller published the Tropic of Cancer, (originally published in France in 1934 but not legally published in the US until 1961), Hollywood still had the one foot on the floor rule – an interpretation of the Hays Code (basically, bedroom love scenes required on of the actors to keep one foot on the floor).

It's also worth remembering that, although the 1970′s US saw the legalization of 'adult' films and the establishment of movie theatres which showed pornographic movies, there was still a very strong class element as to who and who didn't go to see porn. There was a whole class of people who thought it beneath them to be aroused that way, but felt it was okay to be aroused by a good piece of literature. But with the innovation of home video, one no longer had to be seen entering a 'dirty movie theatre'. One could watch what one wanted in the privacy of one's own home.

The rise of feminism in the 70′s and the focus on the 'male gaze' (Lacanian in origin but appropriated and expanded upon in Laura Mulvey's seminal and groundbreaking essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema") also probably played a significant part in painting visual pornography as fundamentally evil.  So, whether you were from the right or the left, it wasn't considered acceptable to watch pornography, but it was perfectly fine to read the hot bits in Miller.

[image error]Sex has always been used to sell products, but during the height of the golden years of advertising, the strategy became much more focused. Psychology was used to measure its efficacy.  And progressively, from the late 60′s onwards there are very few products which haven't used sex either directly or indirectly as a marketing ploy. And the trend has continued with increasingly explicit associations between sex and perfume, alcohol, watches, airlines. Sexuality is now considered the single most powerful tool of marketing.

And, of course, although prostitution is still illegal in many countries, sex is obviously used to sell sex in whatever ways sex may be sold. Most notably as pornography, telephone and video sex and virtual sexual services on the internet.

In the past ten years, the appetite for sex scenes in TV, in music videos and in film has been so great, it is virtually impossible NOT to have – for instance – a  film which involves lovers that does not have at least one scene of them humping away at each other in bed. It really doesn't matter whether it is acted or real.

So one theory I have is that, because sex is such a present part of mainstream media – in both advertising and entertainment – many writers who pride themselves on taking their readers into new, forbidden and seldom traveled 'landscapes' in their fiction, feel that sexuality is such a familiar landscape, there's no compelling reason to take their readers there.

And here, as a writer of erotic fiction with pretensions of literariness, is where I fundamentally disagree. Because the imagery we have come to identify in many forms of media as sexual bears almost no resemblance to real human sexual experience.  We see sex in movies, on TV, in porn, in still images and we have all seen them so often, they have become the signifier of sex. It doesn't matter that they're acted or over dramatized or abstracted or stylized. This is what we are constantly told that sex looks like. And since we so very rarely see examples of what real sex looks like, it's not surprising that, in our minds, any reference to sex in something like text is far more likely to trigger mental images of commercial pornography than it is to trigger memories of our own sexual experiences.

I guess this is why I return to the discussion over what pornography is and why I feel that erotic fiction should be fundamentally different. I don't think it is a 'cheap trick' to arouse a reader, but I do think it's a cheap trick to do it using imagery that is clearly reminiscent of commercial pornography. When I write erotic scenes, I expend a serious amount of energy trying to make sure they are more likely to trigger memories of real experience than memories of mediated ones. And even when I write fiction about situations that most of my readers may not have experienced, whenever there's actual sex, I do my level best to keep to my goal of triggering real memory.

I honestly think this is what a lot of literary writers fear – that if they write explicit and erotic sex scenes, they'll be triggering memories of the last UPorn clip someone saw, instead of lived experiences in their readers. And perhaps that's because those are the images and memories that are triggered for them in writing the scenes. Perhaps this is why literary writers choose such empty, soulless, unerotic sex scenes when they do decide to write one: because we don't often have mediated representations of bad sex.

But, what I'd like to say to the likes of people like Martin Amis is… don't be lazy. Don't refuse to write erotic passages just because it's hard to write with a sense of authenticity.  It IS hard, but that's a challenge. The human mind is flexible and our language is rich. Writers who elect to write only what comes easily to them should consider hanging up their laptop and taking up other professions.

 

Why Good Writers Write Bad Sex: An Exploration of Literary Prudery

Last year, Arifa Akbar wrote an interesting article in The Independent: Bad sex please, we're British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit? I'll be honest, I've been ruminating over this piece for about a year. First, let me give you some quotes from prize-winning writers and critics as to why they purposefully write unarousing sex scenes:

"Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do — like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy." Martin Amis

"The only point in writing a 'he puts that in there and she puts this in here' scene is to arouse, and I'm not interested in doing that. Some critics who should have known better complained that my last novel, The Act of Love, didn't arouse them. It wasn't meant to. It was a book 'about' compulsive jealousy. It wasn't intended to make them jealous or otherwise titillate them." Howard Jacobson

"The best sex scenes are the ones that are quite clinical and precise. Colm Tóibín's short stories are quite good, there is a good sex scene in Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms; Dyer wrote perfectly reasonable scenes in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He just tells you what happens; what's not good is the over-florid writing that imbues sex with transcendental meaning." Jonathan Beckman

 There are a very few literary fiction writers who use sex, like any other part of life, as fodder for their fiction and write it accordingly: good when the sex is good for their characters and bad when the sex is supposed to be bad.

But on the whole, the the last 30 years have seen a massive trend – oh, what the heck, call it a fashion – to represent fictional sex with as much eroticism as a barium enema. And the telling thing is, they do it even when the sex between the characters is supposed to be excellent and meaningful.

This studied avoidance of leaving their readers with even a moment of arousal is telling, in my view. It tells me that they still believe they are the ultimate makers of meaning. It tells me that, although they feel perfectly free to engender sadness, frustration, disgust, etc. in their readers, they feel that sexual arousal is somehow beyond the pale. This from a group of people writing in the 21st century. Please don't tell me we've lost our hangups about sex. This valuing of all reader-responses over arousal screams of a truly unnatural social engagement with the concept of eroticism.

I write many sex scenes. Some are written with an eye to arousing the reader, some are written specifically to preclude it, some I leave open – with the traces of erotic imagery there for those who want to indulge. Many of my sex scenes are written with a view to triggering an ambiguous sort of arousal. A state of 'critical' arousal which, if I've written it well, invites my reader to be both aroused and analytical.

Maybe this is because I'm a woman and I know, despite the stereotyping, that both men and women can rub their tummies while walking. There is a myth that erotic arousal is the equivalent of a hormonal lobotomy. And, to adolescents, it is. But I write for adults.

Do these literary luminaries? Or does this deferral of any balanced and honest treatment of one of the most basic drives we have say less about a reader's capacity to do two things at once and more about these writers and their inability to grow past adolescence themselves?

There is an almost hysterical tone to the insistence that arousing your reader is a 'cheap trick'.  But underlying this denigration of a sexual response as a normal reader reaction to an imersive sex scene, I suspect, hides the spectre of author as either premature ejaculator, erectile dysfunction sufferer, or simply a fear that people are going to notice that you're a lousy lay. After all, if you never attempt to write anything but banal, hollow and utterly depressing sex scenes, then you never run the risk of anyone wondering if your hamfisted attempts to arouse in prose may, in fact, be a reflection of your lack of skill as a lover in real life.

Writers should not be timid in the exploration of any human experience. Nor should they fear "embarrassing self-disclosure", as John Freeman, the editor of Granta magazine, says. Yes, we've all had real experiences of bad sex. But to read the bulk of literary fiction sex scenes in the last 20  years, you'd think it was a fucking epidemic!

I've noticed this trend in other areas. It's as if, in the midst of this media fest of explicitness, we have become terrified of pleasure. Real pleasure. Not momentary, banal, cum and leave pleasure. But the authentically felt deep pleasure that arises from a surrender to the sentient and sensual beings we actually are. We think and we are aroused. And we manage, as grown ups, to do both at the same time.

Possible opening lines for Literary Erotica Novels

These days, I wax, but only out of nostalgia.

_______

Lydia considered fate had been inexplicably kind to her. She'd survived the 90′s with nothing more than a mild case of chlamydia.

_______

Gilles was French. But he bathed with surprising regularity.

_______

On her return from the launderette, Jackie discovered strange missives scrawled on the cotton gussets of her knickers. One said: "Repent. The End is Nigh."

________

Now that masturbation had become fashionable, Russel eschewed all other sexual pursuits.

_______

It's amazing how forlorn a fuck machine can look once the apocalypse has arrived.

Come on. Your turn. Have some fun.

Wish You Were Here

from: missticy35@gmail.com

to: jmartin_jones@gmail.com

date: Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 6:13 AM

subject: Probably nothing

It started on my back. A vaguely tender spot that I absently rubbed at over the day. By evening it had become more painful. I undressed for my evening shower and noticed the upper left back was spotted with blood. That's when I stood in front of the mirror, craning my head back to look. Three long, deep scratches crossed my shoulder blade. They were scabbed up, but the skin around each of them was reddened and inflamed.

It's strange how we hurt ourselves. It would have been nice if the wounds had been the souvenirs of a wild night of sex, but they weren't.  I haven't had an adventure of that sort it a long, long time. This, it seemed, was just a reminder that I needed to cut my nails.

Three days later, I woke pleasurably moist with the leftovers of a fading but decidedly raunchy dream. Only when I climbed out of bed did I feel the pain in my thigh. There, standing out like a crimson tattoo against the pale expanse of skin on my inner leg was the unmistakable rosette of a particularly viscous love-bite.

Well. It looked like a love-bite. If I had to be honest, it had disturbed me for an instant. But in the acid morning light, reason kicked in and I chuckled at my ability to bruise with such artistic flair.

It was the third incident that really shook me. After a long and delicious Sunday afternoon nap, I woke feeling very sore. Down there. It was the first thing I noticed on coming to consciousness. Then, as I used my arms to sit upright on the sofa, I hissed at the pain. The muscles in my arms throbbed as if I'd been doing bench presses. When I rolled up my sleeve to look at one of them, there it was: a neat ring of bruise around my upper arm. I could almost make out the darker marks, where the fingers had dug into the skin. I had a matching set on the other arm.

I'm embarrassed to admit it now, but I actually glared at my cat, who was perched on the top of my living room bookcase like a furry vulture.  I wasn't thinking straight. By then I was a little scared.

The bruises kept appearing. Always after deep sleep. It got so bad, I went to my doctor after searching the web and reading that unexplainable bruises can be a sign of a number of illnesses. Being female, I discounted hemophilia, but there were types of leukemia with bruising as a common symptom.

My doctor ordered a battery of tests, after some very embarrassing questions and mutterings of battered woman syndrome.  The nurse who took the blood samples stared at the dark purple ring around my wrist and then smirked.

"It's … it's not what it looks like," I muttered.  She didn't believe me; I could tell. That only added to my feelings of fear, helplessness and a creeping sense of rage.

The tests all came back normal, and oddly enough, I was both disappointed and unsurprised by this. Somehow I just knew I wasn't sick. And somehow it would have been less frightening if I had been.

I didn't have a lover or an abusive boyfriend. I didn't have leukemia or any number of other nasty things that lead to inexplicable bruising. When I rose one morning with a twinned pair of scratches on my ass cheeks, I simply didn't know what to do.

I went back online and looked up stigmata. It was the only think I could think of that came close to explaining what was happening to me.

The problem was, I couldn't find a single recorded incident of stigmata in atheists. Apparently, you have to be devoutly religious to suffer from it. And hysterical to boot. Well, admittedly, I was starting to become a little hysterical, but only because I kept waking up with body damage I couldn't account for.

I began wearing white cotton gloves to bed, but that didn't help. Out of sheer desperation, I went and bought myself a pair of Velcro wrist restraints and secured my hands to the headboard every night for a week. It would have been a relief to wake and find I'd taken off the gloves or released myself in my sleep, but I hadn't. I'd woken up exactly as I went to sleep, except for the grab-marks on my hips, the bite-marks on my breasts, and a large, very hard to conceal hickey my neck.

I simply wasn't doing this to myself. Not physically, anyway.

So, after discounting almost every possible explanation, I decided to keep a dream journal. The technique is really pretty simple. If you allow yourself to wake up naturally, you often can't recall the contents of your dreams. You need to set an alarm clock that wakes you up at different times. That disrupts the normal pattern of emerging out of REM and into the lighter sleep mode where you forget what you've dreamed about.

It was recording my dreams that gave me the first clue: a kinky dream now and then is a kind of cool, but when it became clear that every time I woke up marked, it was preceded by – well, there's just no other way to put this – exactly the sort of stuff that you and I get up to on Second Life, that verges on the uncanny. Don't you think? In my dream, it's all dark and empty and I can't really see anything much. But I can damn well feel it!

I feel like a bit of a nutbag sending you this email. It just wasn't the sort of thing one can broach in the inline chat. But I just feel compelled to ask.

Have you been having any weird dreams lately?

MTC

from: jmartin_jones@gmail.com

to: missticy35@gmail.com

date: Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 4:36 PM

subject: re: Probably nothing

I just fitted out my new personal dungeon. I think you're going to love it.

J.

The Switch

From urbane and measured,

I can smell the turn

instantly.

A word, a tightness of sinew,

the everyday you is gone

in a blink of an eye.

In its place

is the creature

who hungers for me.

Tensed and rigid,

swollen and alive

with desire.

The flipped switch twitch

of the corner of your mouth,

you are my animal.

Monstruous predator

of my distant flesh,

slipped of leash

and instantly

moist

for

you.

A New Year and New Fun

I can now happily announce that ERWA (the Erotica Readers and Writers Association) blog is planning huge changes.

For those of you who aren't aware, ERWA is really the single most important erotic writers' group on the internet. It's public face has consisted of a website that featured, on a monthly basis, some of the best new erotica writing being produced. It also houses a treasury of extremely good resources for budding erotica writers. However, a significant amount of ERWA's most important work has gone on behind closed doors. It runs one of the best writing / workshoping / critiquing mail serves out there. But you have to join the group to participate and their mailing list protocol is a little archaic and fiddly.

Apart from its web presence, ERWA has had a blog for some time. One of its best features is its very current and extensive Calls for Submissions posts. If you have a hankering to publish your work, this is one of the best kept secrets on the web.

But I'm thrilled to announce that as of the beginning of 2012, the ERWA blog will be hosting bi-weekly blog posts by erotica writers. Taking a look at the line-up, the list includes some of the heaviest hitters in the genre. Ashley Lister, M. Christian, Craig Sorensen, Donna George Storey, Lisabet Sarai, Kathleen Bradean, Lucy Felthouse and Kristina Wright.

I was honoured to be invited to join that list. I'm so thrilled to rub literary shoulders with these people. They kick serious, heavyweight ass when it comes to writing on the wild side. It was the most wonderful Christmas present any erotica writer could receive.

Please join me at the ERWA blog monthly at http://erotica-readers.blogspot.com/. Check out all the posts and when each of the writers is scheduled to appear.  My posts are scheduled for the 13th of every month. I can't wait to hit a Friday. You just KNOW I'm going blog about the nasty stuff.

The Stand In: Version 2

I started this story a while ago. I thought I'd ended it and then today I realized I hadn't; that there was another voice in the story. It needed balance.

The shoulders were about right, she thought. The height – perhaps he was an inch or two shorter – but that didn't matter for much. Weight is something she'd never been good at estimating but perhaps this man was carrying just a little more muscle than was ideal.

Giving her drink a clockwise quarter turn, its thick base rumbled as it slid over the slightly uneven surface of the wood.

At least he was dark haired and eyed. Had he been blond, he wouldn't have served her purpose at all. And there was no question he was unattached, at least for the evening. No woman at his side, no ring on his finger and, were that not enough, there was the vaguely predatory look in his eyes. Not that it would have mattered in the least had he been married. Charlotte was not shopping for commitment. His eyes, more than anything else, told her that, on being approached, she would not be rejected.

With the lassitude of someone who has a necessary but unpleasant job to do, she stood up, wove her way between the busy tables, and took the stool next to his at the bar.

Up close, her determination wavered. Small details jarred with her requirements and she considered the wisdom, the ethics, the coldness of her plan. His hands weren't right. They were too delicate and their slightly ragged cuticles spoke of a nervousness that put her off.

But then he smiled. White, white teeth set off against a tanned face. The curve of his muscular back where the neat pale blue shirt tucked into his belted chinos. Maybe it would be enough, she thought.

And then the dance began. The way it always does and always will. The politeness that leads to the warm hint of innuendo. The light laughter about a light subject. The signs and symbols, the glance and the word that pairs any prospective couple to one another and separates them from the crowd.

Someone had trained him well. He listened far more than he spoke. And because of this – because she was waiting so intently to hear that indefinable thing that would either set her on her course or cause her to politely take her leave – there were some uncomfortable silences.

Without being obvious, she leaned in to the conversation, estimating the angle of his vision and its relation to the swell of her cleavage. Her head tilted artfully with the express purpose of exposing the length of her bare neck, so her hair brushed with demure invitation over her collarbone.

With the next sentence, his too-delicate fingers reached across the expanse of wood and brushed over the back of her hand. His knee nudged her stockinged thigh. And in a moment of self-consciousness, he drained the liquid in his glass, fixed his gaze to hers and said, "Wow. You're very beautiful, you know that?"

It would have been so much better had she been able to feel that natural swell of pride, followed almost predictably in women, by a need to attempt false modesty. But Charlotte didn't feel it. She didn't care if she was beautiful or if he thought she was. All at once she knew she could no longer sustain this pretense. She would either have to be honest about what she was after, or accept that she wasn't capable of following through. Draining her own drink, she gave him a kittenish smile – the kind calculated to assure a man that she was as far from being a threat as anything possibly could be.

"Come here," she murmured. "I want to make you a proposition."

His eyebrows – which really were far, far too sparse – arched flirtatiously. "A proposition? Now that sounds interesting." He bent forward, their faces almost touching and let her bring her lips up to his ear.

"Do you want to fuck me?"

For a moment, he said nothing. A noise that was uncomfortably too close to a giggle broke from his throat as he pulled back and looked, not into her face, but at some unspecified row of bottles at the back of the bar. "Um… well, yes. I guess I do."

"You guess you do? Or you do?" She forged seriousness into her tone. And beneath the words lurked the subtextual warning that she wasn't tolerant of adolescent behavior in a man.

"I do." He locked his eyes to hers, sensing that the offer might easily evaporate. "I definitely do."

"Good. Now here's the deal: I want to fuck you and pretend you're someone else. I don't want you to say another word, because you don't sound like him. Can you do that?"

He furrowed his brow and laughed again. This time it wasn't a giggle. He was trying to figure out if he should be offended. "You're joking, right?"

"No. I'm dead serious. Can you do it?"

"Do I look like this other guy?"

"Yes, superficially." This wasn't going the way she planned. She shook off the implications of the question. "Look, do you want to fuck or not?"

Yet another laugh. If he kept this up, she was going to have to leave.

"Sure. I…guess….Yes. You're hot."

"Fine. Then just don't say anything else." She forced a friendliness into her voice that she was sure sounded false. "We go up to your room. I give you the best blowjob you have ever had. We fuck. Everyone's happy. Okay?"

His eyes narrowed "Are you a…pro? Because I don't pay for it. I've never paid for it." The words came out in a rushed mixture of offense and embarrassment.

"No. It's absolutely free. No strings at all. I just get to pretend you're someone else. In order to do that, you have to shut up." Her patience and her courage were both wearing thin. "Can you do that?"

* * *

He kissed her in the elevator. Perhaps because he had begun to find the idea liberating. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out all the sensations that didn't seem right. He was tentative and gentle.

In the sterile hotel room behind the closed door, she could feel his desire growing, for stuttered moments she forced the idea of him, of his scent, of his touch into the thing she wanted it to be.

With her blouse off, on her knees, she undid his pants and unzipped him, pulling out a nicely proportioned, usefully erect cock, and set to work doing what Charlotte knew she did very well.

It throbbed against her tongue; it lurched as she drew the length of it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and began to suck. And she was there – where she wanted to be – pleasuring the only man in the world she cared for.

Blindly, she reached for his hand and pulled it to her head, urging him to get a grip of her hair.

His hand was gentle. His hips didn't thrust. He would not take from her what she was offering. The cruelty of the real crept up her chest and closed her throat. His scent wasn't right. The taste was wrong, too. Where was the urgent quiver of coiled pleasure in his hips? Where was the dark, deep growl that should slide down her spine as he breached her throat?

This wasn't right. This was flaccid, sluggish convenience. Good natured, casual consummation. It was not him. It would never be him. Nothing in the world would make it him. No trick, no silence, no amount of alcohol, no suspension of disbelief. And, to her utter horror, the poor bastard she was using with such spectacular lack of success realized that something was amiss.

"Hey, baby," he said, sounding as gentle as a man with his cock down a woman's throat can ever sound. "What's wrong?"

She gripped the base of his cock and finished him off as fast as she knew how. It took her less than three minutes to make him come, pull on her shirt, button it and get out of the room.

As she stood at the banks of elevators, fighting down her tears and jabbing repeatedly at the call button, he stepped out of the room.

"What the fuck did I do wrong?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"Then why the hell are you leaving?"

The doors to the elevator whispered open with a demure chime that sounded at once polite and impatient. She stepped in and closed her eyes until the doors slid closed.

"You're not him."

* * *

As the elevator began to descend, she pushed the stop button.

In the unflattering lighting and the cruel mirror of the elevator wall, she pulled a tissue from her purse and repaired the bleeding black stain of mascara that crept below her lower lids. She folded a stick of gum into her mouth to get rid of his taste, and drew a coat of new lipstick on top of the stained skin still smeared with a stranger's semen.

Only then did Charlotte notice the tinny alarm, demanding that she release the elevator and allow it to continue downwards. The sensation of descent jarred her numbness. It reminded her too much of what it felt like peer over a cliff into a bottomless abyss. She forced herself to stare at the floor indicator above the door and count them aloud. Timing her utterances precisely to the soft chimes as each floor passed.

The lobby was shadowed and almost empty as she stepped out of the lift. Why hadn't she simply gone to her room? And then she remembered. A drink. She needed a drink. Several. Lots. Enough to shut her brain down and sleep the sleep of the dead.

Just as she turned in the direction of the bar, someone caught her arm.  She pivoted on the culprit and, in that moment, the rage inside her was monstrous. All consuming. Barely controllable.

"Wait a minute."

It was him. He of the reluctant blow-job. God damn it, she thought.

"What do you want?"

"Whoah. Jesus, lady."

She inhaled and swallowed and straightened her back. "What. Do. You. Want?" she enunciated.

"An apology."

"For treating me like…" His eyes slid sideways as he searched for the word.

"A whore?"

He considered a moment. "Yes, I guess so. Like a whore."

"You had your blow-job. You got your orgasm. What's the problem?'

"Fuck," he said, standing back, releasing her arm. "You're a piece of work, you know that?"

"Wasn't I clear about what I was after?"

He stared at her. Unmoving. Not speaking.

"Wasn't I?" Charlotte demanded, louder than she intended.  "Fuck, I need a drink."

"You need way more than one drink, lady," he said.

But she'd already turned towards the bar. Her heels clicking like flint on the polished granite of the lobby floor.

* * *

She was well into her second martini when she felt someone jostle her side and slip onto the stool next to her. Charlotte glanced unsteadily at her neighbor, little more than a hazy white blob, in the blue tinted mirror behind the bar.

"I'll have a…. Glenlivet on the rocks… and another of whatever she's drinking." The man said to the bartender.

Charlotte tilted her head to look at the owner of the voice.  "No. Not you again."

"Me again," he said, nodding a thanks as the bartender slid his drink in front of him.

It was too late. She was too drunk.  "Please," she whispered,  "Just fuck off."

He took a sip of his drink and then, noticing a fresh martini had arrived, pushed it over to her, careful not to let the clear liquid slop over the rim of the glass. He spoke quietly. "You know, that was the most dehumanizing experience of my life."

Eyeing the full glass, Charlotte nodded. "It probably was. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You were absolutely right. You made your offer very clear."

She let the tainted vodka sit on her tongue until it burned and then swallowed it. "So why did you accept?"

"I guess I just wanted to get laid."

They were silent for a moment.

"Don't get me wrong," he continued. "I've had my share of meaningless, casual sex. But that…" He took another sip of his drink. The ice cubes glazed his upper lip. "That was something else."

She turned her gaze back to the glinting row of bottles behind the bar. "I said I was sorry."

He sighed. Folded his arms on the bar top. "So, tell me about him."

"Who?"

"Him. The guy you wanted me to be."

There was a deadly, rusty ache gnawing into the back of her skull. All she really wanted to do was allow the void to swallow her up. She was sorry. It was obvious this guy was hurt. And he wasn't a bad sort of person. It was too easy to imagine what it would have felt like to be treated the way she'd treated him. She felt a prickle behind her eyes and blinked it away. "It doesn't matter."

"He matters to you."

Charlotte just shook her head.

"Why are you picking up strangers instead of fucking him?"

She cradled her head in her fisted hands. "He won't have me."

"Why's that?"

Breathing deep, she picked up the glass and sipped. Her hand unsteady. Liquid slithered over the edges.

"Is he unavailable? Married? Gay? In prison? Dead? What?"

Swiveling on the bar stool, she looked at him, trying to focus her eyes.  "He's not real."

The man looked at her, then tilted his head and blinked. "Excuse me?"

"He's not real."

His face crinkled into a puzzled smile. "Well, he's damn real to you, lady."

"Charlotte. My name's Charlotte."

"Steven. Kinda late to shake hands, I guess."

Even through the encroaching misery of a premature hangover, she could she the humour in that. "Yeah, kind of late."

"So…" Steven thought for a moment. "This guy – he's a figment of your imagination?"

"Pretty much."

"I don't believe it. I think he's real. He's gotta be real. You don't strike me as completely psycho. A bitch, yeah. But not totally off your rocker."

She shrugged. The movement made her stomach lurch. "I honestly don't know. Maybe he's a bit of both. Anyway," she said, easing herself carefully off the stool and rummaging in her purse for her wallet. "It's late. I'm drunk. I'm sorry."

"I'll get this," said Steven.  He motioned the bartender over and slid some bills across to him.

Charlotte tried to smile at him, but perhaps it came out looking strange. "Thank you."

"Are you staying at the hotel?" he asked, taking what felt like a paternal grasp of her upper arm.

"Yup."

"I'll see you to your room."

They walked across the deserted lobby and waited at the bank of elevators.

"What floor?" he asked, artfully steering her into the nearest one.

"Oh… god. Um… 22, I think."

He pressed the button and they rode up in silence.  Charlotte swallowed down the nausea as the vertigo gripped at her guts. She fished her card key out of her purse and squinted at the number on the neatly branded paper pocket. "22015″.

"I'm sorry about your guy," he muttered as he half-led her, have pointed her down the long, vapid corridor.

They stopped when they reached the door to her room.  She made a sloppy attempt to pat him on the shoulder. "I'm sorry. I just can't fuck you. I just can't do it."

Steven shook his head and took her card key from her, deftly inserted it into the slot, and pushed the door open. "Lady, I wouldn't fuck you if you were the last woman on earth."

Charlotte gazed at him and nodded. The tears began to spill over her cheeks.  "I really don't blame you. Good night."

States of Grace: Reader Innocence, Happy Endings and the Writer as Responsible Sadist

"Your virtue!" said the lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; "I shall never survive it.

Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

Academia puts a high value on the ability to read critically; to deny the text our heart and view it with an analytical, objective mind. From the early of the 20th Century onwards, we have made a practice of withholding our commitment to the narrative lure novel and called it an intellectual virtue. The subtext here is that really 'bright' people don't suspend disbelief when they read. So it's hardly surprising that literary theorists have, for the most part, looked down on the readers of genre fiction – especially romance – and it's hardly surprising that they find little value in reading them. If they could ever drop their ultimately jaded eye and fully indulge in a well-written piece of erotic romance, what they'd find was that Barthes was not entirely correct in his assessment on the death of the author.

One thing I have learned from my recent research into how the happily ever after convention affects the reading experience is that, for erotic romance readers, the writer is very much there through the text. Not as a part of the narrative, but as a silent partner in the reading experience. Because it seems pretty clear that these readers to feel, very strongly, that in picking up a novel, before they even start reading, they've made a deal with the writer: "I'm trusting you with my heart. Don't let me down."

To truly enjoy a good romance, you cannot read it with your head. You can't be permanently on the lookout for lapses in political correctness or offensive gender role modeling. You can't play spot the narrative devices or play Where's Wally with the stock characters. Romance is about love and, in a way, it requires the reader to be willing to fall in love with this journey of love. Erotic romance readers commit very deeply to being emotionally open to the text. They give themselves over in a way that is spectacularly uncritical.

But they aren't stupid. They won't give over with no safety net. The Happily Ever After (or Happily For Now ending) is not just the way the story ends. It is there as a promise at the very beginning of the reading experience as a gesture of good intention on the part of the writer. Erotic romance readers have a very high tolerance for narrative conflict. Characters are routinely and  gleefully put through horrific trials – both physical and emotional. And readers will sink into the story unflinchingly with the one sacred understanding that, no matter how rough the going gets, it will  be worth all the suffering because, in the end, there will be happiness. The ending is not only redemption for the characters, but also for the reader and ultimately for the writer.

And when writers, for any number of reasons, are felt not to have kept up their part of the bargain – offering the reader a less that solid happy ending – romance readers get furious. They feel emotionally abused because, in a way, they have been emotionally abused. Yes, that abuse was consensual, but it also came with a solemn promise attached and that promise was not kept.

There was a time, at the height of the traditional modern romance boom, when the definition of what constituted a happy ending was extremely clear. The story had to end with a betrothal at the very least, if not a wedding. Sometimes stories offered postscript chapter of a portrait of wedded bliss that included babies.  But in erotic romance, the definition of the 'Happily Ever After' closure has changed quite radically.

Most readers have not escaped the pressure to acknowledge that no believable story can ever end  'Happily Ever After'. They acknowledge that they have no model for what that looks like because it doesn't exist in the world. Consequently, the expectation of the level of the lovers' commitment varies enormously. No readers I interviewed required a wedding. In fact, many of them scoffed at the proposition. Some only required that the couple mutually acknowledge their couplehood.  Some required words or a gesture that signified a deep and unbreakable bond through life. What seems to be satisfying to almost everyone is that the story end with the couple having acknowledged their emotional commitment to each other and signaled their heartfelt intention to stay together.

This, it seems, makes the reader feel that whatever travails have happened through the story, it was worth it. Many of them remarked that the more harrowing the conflicts and hardships in the narrative, the more valuable the emotionally secure ending.

Learning these things, it's hard for me not to find the metaphor of an S & M relationship appealing – with the writer as sadist, the text as scene and the reader as masochist. Erotic romance readers give their sadistic writers a lot of leeway to take them to incredibly painful places, but there must be aftercare in the form of the HEA. Any writer who withholds it is going to have a hard time finding playmates.

"At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance"

How have representations of sex become so banal, so unthreatening, so uncritical? Because the body and sexuality are liberated as signs and only as signs. Through the sign-system, Baudrillard contends, 'sexuality itself is diverted from its explosive finality' and transformed into 'promotional eroticism' or 'operational sexuality'.

"Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality" by William Paulett

I'm having to keep my mind on two things these days – my paper on the function of the Happily Ever After convention and trying to carve a cohesive and intelligible statement for what the critical portion of my PhD studies will examine.

There have been myriad discussions on this blog about the nature of erotic fiction and how it differs (or should differ) from pornography. I'm not the only erotic writer to wrestle with this question, but it has haunted me for almost as long as I've been writing.

I have said often that I am extremely interested in sex and sexual desire as a lens through which to look at the human condition. That there is a unique exposure that occurs in authentic moments of erotic desire that can strip away all our contrivances, our courtesy, our sophistications. And please don't get me wrong: I write with the intention to arouse. But not at a specifically genital level. My aim is to prompt the reader into what I would call an aroused state of self-reflection.

At the same time, we find ourselves in a culture of pornography – constantly bombarded by sexual imagery as a way to sell things: sex, of course, but almost everything else as well. The memes and the language of porn has become so ubiquitous, it eclipses the act it was designed to represent – erotic acts shared between people.

I am not your run of the mill romantic. I don't think that people have to be in love in order to have the best kind of sex. I do, however, think there needs to be an acknowledgement of the humanity of the other.  Some essentially complex value in the desired. I think most people would agree that there is genital sex, and then there's the kind of sex that fundamentally changes you. And that kind of sex is not the kind you find in a particularly casual encounter.

I want to pause here and explain that objectification and dehumanization can be very erotic. But only when it is intentional. Only when the essential importance of that humanity is there, like a ghost, in its very intentional absence.

One of the great problems in trying to write the kind of erotic fiction I try to write is that the grammar of the erotic has been, for the most part, appropriated by a consumer culture that has employed it with the aim of commodification.  Originally pornography was not free. It was sold, like the services of a prostitute are sold. It was sexual stimulation in exchange for money.  The language that had once been used only behind bedroom doors, only in secret diaries, only in whispers, became the public language of the porn industry. So did the acts. But of course, because early pornography sought to establish its authenticity to its audience, it developed some incredibly strange memes in order to prove that what was being portrayed was 'real'. The most obvious example of the is is the 'money shot' or the 'come shot', devised in order to prove that a real ejaculation had taken place. There are, of course, more subtle ways in which pornography attempts to establish its realism – with extreme close-ups of penetration, vaginal spasms, etc.

These memes, along with the language of the explicit, first became the preserve of porn and then, by a strange reversal of phenomenon, were fed back into people's concept of what real sex should look like. Now you can see amateur 'money shots' on PornTube – where ordinary people are intent on showing what great sex they are having by adopting porn memes. It's not that we don't believe they're really having sex. The 'money shot' or the 'cream pie' is no longer about proof of the real; it has become the real.

How does one write authentic representations of desire when the grammar of desire has become inextricably bound to the marketplace? When the depiction of a face-fucking no longer bears the semiotics of a purposefully sexual objectification but now simply triggers a memory of the last porn film you saw?

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. His works are notoriously hard to read and his lectures aren't much easier. But one of the things he talked about was how pornography – the over-exposure of sexuality – makes realism in sex impossible. I don't agree with him. I think he came to believe that the media and people's interior lives had become intertwined to the point where they were indistinguishable. Personally, I think he just spent too long studying examples of incidences where it had. I still believe there are lots of people still having very real sex that doesn't look anything like pornography. But I think his point was very well made. I've met a lot of people who can't seem to tell the difference between commercial representations/reenactments of sex for the purpose of performance and entertainment, and the authentic experience of humans who want nothing but each other's pleasure.

I think it is my job as a writer of erotic fiction to keep producing representations of the complex, messy and sometimes unlovely beings we become when we really do experience erotic desire and when we do have real erotic experiences.  And to point out that, when we do this, there is not just pleasure, but many other things.

p.s. if you'd like to have a little taste of Baudrillard, YouTube has a series of his talks on "Seduction, Sex and Pornography", but again, I warn you, he's hard to understand and not just because of his French accent. However, there are a number of writers who've distilled and summarized his ideas very well. And one of them, William Pawlett's book, is online in PDF form: Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality.

Better Left Unsaid – Beautifully Read by Lady Grinning Soul

This Christmas, Lady Grinning Soul has done me the very great honour of including one of my stories, Better Left Unsaid, in her Christmas podcast.

She's got a gorgeous plummy voice and the podcast includes erotic poetry and stories from Jill (of Jack and Jill), Jilly Boyd,  Wyeth Bailey, some lovely pieces from LGS herself.

It's a delightful Christmas present!