Remittance Girl's Blog, page 5

“I’m Not Fucking, I’m Talking to You”, or I Could be Fucking You.

[image error]In Lacan’s Seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in his attempt to explain how sublimation of desire works and how closely it is tied to language, he says:

Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drive, without repression. In other words —for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s what it means. Indeed, it raises the question of whether in fact I am not fucking at this moment. 1

There are usually two reactions to this passage: the first is that it is unnecessarily crude, and the second is that talking is not fucking and it doesn’t feel remotely the same.

As to the first, it never ceases to amaze me what incredible volumes of writing intellectuals do on the subject of the erotic, the drive, desire and jouissance, while managing never to get down to the nitty gritty of what most people are often thinking, which is: this is about sex, right? Why doesn’t it ever sound like it’s about sex? If you look at almost the entire body of academic and theoretical writing on sex, it is stunning how strangely reticent anyone is to just come out and say the words, use the imagery and offer examples that are concrete and overtly sexual. Academics and theoreticians are master-sublimators. In fact, after three years of combing through texts on eroticism, I’d say they make a veritable fetish of it. I suspect there is a very specific neurosis, suffered by intellectuals, about speaking about sex directly unless it is medicalized. It does, of course, bring out the hysteric in me. I read along thinking: what are you actually telling me, and why aren’t you really telling me? If I were a practicing psychoanalyst, this might be interesting but I’m not and I just find it annoying. Recognizing that I’m never going to get the satisfaction of an answer, I settle – like any good hysteric does – for knowledge.

The second reaction intrigues me more: talking is not fucking, or is it?

If you’re not much up on Lacanian theory, I’m about to take you on a bit of a wild ride.

As babies, before we begin to get a handle on language, we need things and we want things. We cry when we’re hungry, or wet, or tired and – unless we live in a place of a lot of disruption (a war-zone, a place of famine) – we get those needs met pretty quick. But we also want things – something  – and often we really don’t have any idea what we want. In babies, you see it when they get cranky. When no matter if you’ve fed them, changed them, cuddled them, they still carry on crying no matter what you do. Drives parents mad.

Once babies start to acquire language, it is still very seldom that they actually linger in a miserable state of need very long, but now they have a little language, you get a better idea of what’s going on. They want something, and they don’t know what it is. They say banana, and you hand them one, and they throw it on the ground. They want ‘Mum’ but even when they get a cuddle, they still whine. Sooner or later, everyone gets smart and starts suggesting things: Oh, honey, you want a cookie, don’t you? You want your blankie? Your teddy bear? The kid takes the cookie, still not exactly satisfied, but stuffs it in their mouth. But the fact that the cookie sort of stops them from throwing a full-on mortifying tantrum is the clue.

We have needs – which are usually met fast. We have wants – which are at first simply a sense of wanting SOMETHING – that triggers a parent’s solicitations. And those solicitations hardly ever satisfy at first. Mostly, they just reassure us that our parents are paying attention to us, and love us, and dislike seeing us miserable.  Some have theorized that all ‘wants’ (as opposed to needs) are really a ‘want’ for a gesture that indicates we are loved. Of course, you can’t ‘give love’. You can only show love. 2

But as a child’s acquisition of language becomes better, this transfer of information works both ways. A child can tell you what he or she thinks they want – but this is often fraught with frustration – because it’s so very often not exactly what they want. However you can also tell the child what he or she wants. “You want some ice cream, don’t you?” As often as not, this backwards fulfillment of want works just as well.

What is clear is that, as much as we do learn to say what we need, we never really learn to say what we want – because what we really want has no fixed target, so whatever we say we want and get is ever only somewhat satisfying. This is desire. There are needs and wants before we acquire language but, once we enter the world of language, we desire. And desire is always at least partly fallible.

There are some theories that what we all want is that perfect satisfaction of the mother’s breast – food, warmth, affection, love – on tap whenever we need it and all ‘wants’ are really just wanting that one thing. 3

I don’t know that I buy this. I’m not sure anyone really knows what that lack – that want that cannot be addressed – is. But it’s there. And you know it’s there every time you’re honest about the lack of total satisfaction you feel after you’ve gotten what you think you wanted. It’s not that we’re spoiled or cranky. It’s just the way we’re made.

But let me put it another way: let’s pretend that before a baby learns our human language, they have their own language that’s in their heads. But it’s stuck in their heads. It’s not phonetic, really, and when they try to speak it to us it’s garbled and unintelligible. Kind of like your cat meowing at you. It wants something, it’s trying to let you know. You feed it, pet it, let it out, and it still meows at you. FUCK! What the hell does it want. Screw it – we’ll never know.

Luckily, you can teach human babies language. The problem is, babies don’t have interior dictionaries and there is no qualified translator. Whatever that thing the baby wants is NEVER translated. We just learn to settle for less, or something distracts us. So the dialogue looks like this with baby.

Baby: WANT!

Mom: Want a cookie? (Holds up a cookie)

Baby: Bwaaaahhhhh WANT!

Mom: Oh, you want to cuddle Mister Bear? (Pushes the teddy bear at you)

Baby: BWAHHHHHH WANT!

Mom: Oh dear. (Cuddles you) I know what you want. You want your bottle.

Baby: Bwaaaahhhh (fuck, this is futile) Oh, Look! A bottle. That’s cool! Oh, yum. Applejuice! (Gets distracted by a bug on the carpet).

As time goes on, the baby figures out that the whole “Bwaaaahhhh WANT!” thing never works. It learns to skip to the chase and settle for the cookie. After a while it begins to associate that wanty feeling with whatever it gets handed. Sooner or later, it just learns to say “Me WANT COOKIE!” That’s sublimation. And thank god for it. Otherwise we’d all be having toddler tantrums in the middle of the supermarket aisle all the time.

This is the theory of how language shapes want into desire. So, whenever we talk, there is a ghost of desire that rides on the process of our language. After all, it’s why we learned to talk. There is always a ghostly desire for satisfaction that comes along, like a shine, on everything we say.

Now, as much as most of you feel that sex is a need, like food or water or warmth, it’s not. People can go their whole lives without having sex and not die. It might be a necessity on a species level, it isn’t an individual necessity. It’s a want and, pushed through language, it is a desire.

I think this is why we get such pleasure about talking about sex. It’s like a double whammy. The subject of our discourse is sexual desire, and there is this shine of desire riding on using language anyway. Of course, it used to be even better – when it was socially frowned upon to talk about sex. Then it was a triple whammy – the subject was sex, you weren’t supposed to be talking about it which made it thrilling and transgressive and more desirable (if also a little uncomfortable) AND you were using language which also was piggy backing this shimmer of desire.

As a writer of erotic fiction (and writing is a kind of talking) I can assure you that while I’m talking to you, I’m absolutely and without a doubt humping your leg. Promise. And when you’re reading, you know it. You’re doing the same thing back. So, erotic fiction writers sublimate, too. We’re just not so good at it. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s why a lot of intellectuals find us beneath their contempt. We just don’t sublimate enough.

Lacan’s little quip isn’t as nuts as it seems. Although it is pretty flirty. The translation is: I would enjoy fucking you. It wouldn’t bring me absolute satisfaction, but it wouldn’t be half bad. However, I’m giving a lecture, so fucking you would be impolite. So, I’m going to decide that talking is as good as fucking (since both always leave a little something short of perfect), and talk instead.

Yeah baby.

 

 

 

 

Notes:

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. ↩Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Routledge Classics, 2005. Print. ↩ Bailly, Lionel. “Lacan In His Historical Context.” Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. Print. ↩

Porn Survey – Results & Thoughts

Firstly, I would like to thank all of you who took the time to participate in my very quick, informal porn survey. And an even bigger thank you to those who commented, elaborated, or offered their thoughts when none of the options fit the way in which you use porn. (Just a note, if you feel uncomfortable about having your comment hanging around, let me know and I’ll take it down).

It may seem like considering angels wanking on a pin’s head, but the reason for the survey was primarily to find out whether porn was used as a state-change tool or not. So you can see the questions fall into two broad categories – using porn when you are already horny, and using porn to either shift a state (e.i. from bored to horny, or from some other state to horny) or using it to attempt to change someone else’s state.

As you can see from the results, (click ‘view results) people mostly use porn once they’re horny, but a  significant number use it to GET horny. 40%! This is fascinating. The idea that we consciously decide to move ourselves from a state of non-desire to desire. In essence, a significant number of us actively manufacture desire.

Theorists like Zizek, following Lacan, have posited that culture teaches us what to want. And, more recently with the rise of intense consumerism, not only does it command us to Enjoy! but also positions us as beings that are somehow incomplete, not fully engaged in the social project, if we aren’t actively desiring. And, of course, we are offered ways to remedy our lack of desire.

You can see this, most notably, in that we are constantly presented with social ideals that valorize individuals in desirous states. Ambitious, hungry, envious, insatiable, etc. The activity of wanting is essential to the activity of consuming. Marketing and advertising techniques have moved, in the last hundred years from : ‘buy this’ to ‘want this’ to ‘need this’ to ‘be this’. So that being desirous has gone from being an occasional state of being to a permanent mark of a well-constituted self.

People who don’t want … uninteresting, unnatural, useless to the system of demand and supply.

It is even more enigmatic when women are not only valorized for their insatiability but demonized for it at the same time.  In our culture, she’s both a ‘fully actualized woman’ and a ‘greedy whore’.  So that even when you obey that implicit injunction to ‘enjoy!’, you are also punished and shamed for it. You can’t win. And it is my premise that this is exactly where they want you, because in that state of confusion, or trying to decipher the unintelligible mixed messages, you are at a permanent disadvantage, and therefore much more manageable.

For men, I suspect it’s been this way for much longer. I know men who really aren’t all that interested in sex, but feel they should be, as if their lack of interest is proof of some tremendous deficit in their masculinity. Which of course encourages them to do whatever they must to GET interested and, most especially, to be SEEN to be interested. But not too interested. If you’re too interested you get painted as a desperate loser. So… always interested and yet somehow… not really that interested.

It’s kind of amazing we don’t all go mad.

The irony for me is, that I think this dynamic actually engenders, in some of us, an active resistance to desire. i.e. ‘I do not want to be taught what I want’, or ‘I do not want to be shamed or manipulated into wanting’.

Anyway, in my ongoing project to formulate new transgressions, it is interesting that one transgression is not to want. How I actually tie that into eroticism is going to be tricky. But it’s interesting.

P.S. I have also noted that we seem to get a lot of pleasure not only from watching porn, but discussing what we watch, why, etc. That survey got me the most amount of comments I’ve ever had on this blog!

Thank you again.

 

The Laughing Man

[image error]Men don’t cry like women. I’ve always thought that most of the ways in which people say that men and women are different was bullshit. We’re not from Venus, they’re not from Mars, and all that gender stuff? That layer’s not as thick as everyone wants to believe it is. Maybe it’s just that I’m not all that womanly, but other than the dangling genitalia, I think we’re pretty similar. Not when it comes to crying, though.

The first time I saw a man cry I was thirteen. It was my aged, alcoholic godfather. A friend of my father’s and a writer of some repute, he was sitting on the linoleum floor in our kitchen, with his head tilted back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling. He didn’t make any noise. The tears streamed down the sides of his haggard face as if his eyes were organs whose only purpose was to produce tears. The shoulders of his dusty black suit jacket rose and fell in uneven jerky shrugs. I thought at the time that I should have at least been able to hear the breaths he was taking as his chest moved, but his body was utterly silent. The woman he’d been paying for sex, week in and week out for twenty-seven years had died.

Since then, I’ve seen hundreds of men cry. It’s what I do for a living – a profession that I just sort of fell into. In a way, I’m a lot like the woman my godfather wept over. Men pay me to watch them cry. Some want me to hold them. Some sit rigid in the worn, comfortable couch that sits under the window in my office and prefer me to keep my distance. Some talk and some say nothing. I’m not a shrink; I don’t give them any advice. I just watch them cry.

It usually takes a while. Sometimes hours. But I’ve always charged a flat fee; that way, they don’t feel rushed. It would be indiscrete to mention a figure, but let’s just say it’s sufficient. And it’s a curious thing: it costs most men a lot to cry. If I didn’t charge something that felt vaguely like the monetary equivalent of their resistance to the act, they just wouldn’t feel they’d had their money’s worth. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this isn’t about sense.

Of course, the flexible session length can make scheduling a little difficult, but they all seem to understand that it takes however long it takes. And god knows, men know how to hold it. If I need to postpone an appointment, it’s not usually too much of a problem.

Men come to me to cry for all sorts of reasons. Bereavement – that’s an obvious one. Failed relationships – more common that most women think. Professional meltdowns are another big one. But you’d be surprised at the variety. And sometimes they cry just to cry. Just for the sheer pleasure of being able to cry in front of a stranger who won’t judge them for it.

Very few of my clients want to acknowledge why they’ve come to me. It’s like they need to pretend that they’re there for some other reason. They want to believe I’m the accountant of their feelings, or the tax consultant of their heart, or if they’re semi-honest, they’ll treat me like a therapist. But that’s not what my card says. They know that’s not what I am. They just need to pretend. I’ve got one client who tells his secretary that I’m his mistress. As if that’s somehow more acceptable than what he’s really doing with me.

I remember the first time a client asked me to slap his face, just to get him started. That was hard for me, but it was a good lesson. Some men need something to jolt them out of their everyday way of being. I’m torn over whether it’s the pain or the shock that makes the trick work. And I know what you’re thinking, maybe I have a client who’s just a masochist that can’t admit it to himself. Hey, maybe. But he’s a good crier, and a good client. I’ve been seeing him once a month for a few years now.

Watching men cry, I’ve come to understand how hard it is to be a man. Sure, I know. You’re going to say that men don’t have it half as hard as women. And historically, they’ve had it a lot worse. But this isn’t really about whose had the hardest time. I just know now – it’s hard for men to be men. You think they’d just grow up knowing how to do it, but it’s not true.

My favourite client – I’ll call him John – is an interesting guy. I’d guess he’s about forty-five, maybe a little older. He’s one of my oldest criers. I have to factor in extra time for his appointments because he needs to work himself up into something close to a blind rage before he can open the floodgates. Not that he’s uncivilized, or abusive or anything. When he first came to me, he’d try to build up steam in my office, but that didn’t work for him. He said I was just too nice. So, with a bit of trial and error, we figured it out. He needs to walk up and down the street in front of my building for about thirty minutes, working himself up into something close to a mute fury. When he’s ready, he comes upstairs, takes a seat on the couch and I ask him what’s wrong.

Then John starts to laugh. At first like a guy watching football on TV. Big, bright guffaws. Then it turns to belly laughs, as if he’s at a comedy club. But in a while, the laughing curdles. It gets glassy and thin and the tendons on his neck get tight, until the laugh has died down to nothing but a long rumbling chuckle. That’s when he begins to sob and, once he gets going, he’s a phenomenal crier. Loud and long, full-body howls. He lets it all out and there must be a lot in there to let out because it takes him a while to get through it.

I make a rule never to ask my clients what they’re crying about. Often they want to tell me, but sometimes they don’t. I leave it up to them to share if they want to.

But my laughing man? Never says a word. I’ve got a real sweet spot for him and, I’ll admit it, my desire to know what’s causing him his pain is almost too much for me to bear. But I know he’ll never tell me. He’s just not the type. It’s bad though. I know that much.

Sometimes, after he leaves, I need to take a break and have a good hard cry myself, on his behalf.

Lucy the Scholar

[image error]People joke about love at first sight because they know love has nothing to do with it. It’s uglier than that.

I met Lucy at a conference up at York the day before nature wrapped the whole of the country in the white blanket of winter.  In front of a long table piled with labeled sandwiches with fillings that sounded good but probably tasted like crap. Each little triangle nestled in artisanal bread that was curling at the edges.

“May contain nuts.” She read the label out loud and then looked at me. “May? How could they not know?”

“Covering their asses?” I suggested. I glanced at the nametag on her lanyard. She’d presented one of the morning papers on something to do with colonialism in science fiction. I hadn’t gone to it; I’d been delivering my own atrocity on gender-fluid aliens.

“They should stop dissembling and make up labels that say ‘We don’t give a fuck.'”

The way she said the word ‘fuck’ snagged my attention, pronouncing it with a long, yawning ‘u’, as if it the word had a moist hole in the middle, braced by who brutal consonants. Not the way people say it when they toss out the word in casual conversation. The way they say it in bed, when they’ve had one already but are craving another.

That was what made me look at her. She wasn’t beautiful, although I would come to think she was the most beautiful woman in the world. But just then, there, at that dismal lunch table, I only saw a pleasant looking woman, approaching middle age, wearing a black pullover and a beige skirt and sensible heels. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Too tight, as if to stress just how serious she was about her subject.

She was an imposter. That’s what I thought. Not a grave imposter – not a mergers and acquisitions manager masquerading as an academic – but something subtler, more enigmatic, and it drew me to her.

“How did your talk go?” I asked, following her over to one of the round, empty tables beneath an imposing window with a Gothic arch.

It was sleeting under an aluminium sky in the couryard beyond. There was an absurd bronze cow in the middle of the quad – a gift, apparently, from a rich, 18th Century farmer who wanted to remind the high and mighty academics where their funding actually came from.

“Oh, you know,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I got a few good questions at the end.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

I wasn’t at all sorry I’d missed it, but I was sorry I’d missed watching her deliver it. Sorry that I’d missed the opportunity to spot all the other ways in which she might have given her secret self away.

“Don’t be. I bored myself.”

“That’s a shame,” I said, and held out my hand. “I’m…”

But she looked down at my name-tag as she took my hand. “Francis.” Her fingers were cool and damp, but strong – almost too strong – as they curled around my hand. “Yes, there are no surprises here.”

“Oh, I beg to differ. There are always surprises.” I arched my eyebrow and smiled.

“Really? Like what?” And even though her response was light, I knew I’d launched my arrow in the right place because, just below her eyes, at the top of her cheeks, she flushed.

“People in the lunch line who say the word ‘fuck’ like they need one.”

At first she said nothing. I readied myself for a firm rebuff.

The flush grew and spread. “Did I?” she asked. Not with any coyness but like someone who genuinely didn’t know.

“Yes, you did.” That was the moment. Part of me realized the room was now full of other attendees, and several of them had brought their plates to our table and had availed themselves of the seats. But it just didn’t matter. “Do you?”

“Yes, I think I probably do.”

* * *

That evening, the snow began to fall. We were cocooned in a drab room at the conference hotel, where time had stopped and everything but Lucy had ceased to exist.

I tugged her jumper over her head and caught the sharp, fermented scent of nervous sweat. It plummeted down my spinal column and forced its way into my cock. And with the unzipping of her skirt, up rose the thick, cloying smell of her cunt. More than a smell, it was a command that make me drop to my knees, cup her panty-covered buttocks with my hands, and press my face to her crotch. My nose, my lips, my chin pushing into the saturated cotton, into the dense nest beneath, pushing the lips of her cunt apart. They were firm, engorged, ready to be split. And under all of it, against my tongue tip, the shameless, mindless little appendage that wanted, despite all her best efforts, to run her life.

Even on that winter’s night, on my knees, nudging her backwards with my face in her crotch, until her legs met the edge of the bed, until I grasped her hips and pushed her onto her back, I knew that I’d met my abettor. That nodule of nerves and I would conspire to have her all to ourselves.

Reclined, bra still in place, her body scored by the shadows of the paned window, she arched her hips for me when I dragged her panties down her thighs. The soaked gusset left a trail of effluvia along her inner thighs. I felt the cooling slipperiness as I pushed her legs apart to get back to her dark furred cleft. Its pink interior gleamed insolently in the poor light. Her hips canted up to meet my open mouth.

Greedy. She was so greedy. Above me, Lucy made curled, barbed noises the moment my pursed lips surrounded her demanding little sentinel. And something far less domesticated when I screwed two digits inside her. Buttery and smooth against the backs of my fingers, complex and cat’s-tongue rough against the front. I drew her clit into my mouth, snug against my tongue, and felt her muscles cinch my fingers together, drag them deeper into her voracious hollow, as if she’d take my whole arm if I let her.

I would have given her more than my arm. In that moment, and for many months after, I would have pushed, my head, my torso, my hips, my legs, into her. I would have fucked my entire body inside of her and looked out at the world from behind Lucy’s eyes. And perhaps, in a way, I did.

When she came, I pinned her to its agony, to teach her that no bucking or writhing or flailing on her part would free her from me. I brought her, trapped and thrashing against the barricade of my body, forcing her to come through me instead of beside me. The only thing that could escape me was the shredded, formless sounds she made as sinews locked, muscles jerked, and every orifice other than her mouth lensed shut in those long, jerking moments of her pleasure.

After, I bathed her in the dark bathroom, where only dim shafts of light found resting places on the ripples of the black water in the tub, or on the plane of her clavicle, or the hard curve of her knee. To cleanse her of her musk and her fluids. Not to be rid of them but to ensure that the next time they emerged I would be wholly responsible for their arrival.

She cooed, sensate and wordless, as I dragged the wet, soapy washcloth over her skin. She mewed when I kissed her: my mouth still briny with the taste of cunt, and hers lazy and sloppy at first – then hungry again, sucking my tongue onto hers. All it took was a soapy set of fingers under the waterline. Her legs spread, thigh skin squeaking against the porcelain tub. And there was my new best friend, hiding in her folds, demanding more stroking. More petting and more pinching, more thumbing and rubbing. Her hips pushed urgently upwards.

“What do you want, pretty Lucy?” I grazed the pad of my thumb against her swollen, sunken clit.

“You know. You know!” she hissed, reaching one hand beneath the water’s surface, clutching at my wrist, pushing my hand against her.

I dragged her arm out of the water and onto the side of the tub. “No interfering. Tell me and I’ll give it to you.”

“You know what. Fuck me.”

And there it was again. That lovely word with its brutal, violent edges and abyssal centre. The vowel as empty as her cunt.

I pushed a teasing index finger into her opening. “Like that?”

“Yes, no. More”

Adding another, and forcing them past all the fluttering muscles, I asked, “More like this?”

She groaned. Her hips bucked, making the water lap at the edges. The tendons of her thighs were rigid, pressing wide against the confining sides of the bathtub.

“More. More.”

My fingers stilled inside her. My thumb stopped circling. “You have a greedy cunt, Lucy. You *are* a greedy cunt. That’s your little secret, isn’t it?”

Her panting echoed against the dark tiles.  “Yes,” she said. It was so quiet. An assent lost in a breath.

I knelt beside the tub, and cupped my free hand around the back of her damp neck. I squeezed it tight. Damp tendrils of hair curled and tangles between my fingers. Nestling my lips close to her ear, I felt a droplet of her sweat on my lips, the salt stinging until I licked it away. “Show me what a greedy cunt you really are,” I hissed, and pushed a third finger up into her.

“Fuck me.” Her voice was sulky, needling. The walls of her cunt tightened like a prompt.

“No. Show me how much you want it.”

Lucy made a sound that began deep and closed in her throat, until need pried it out of her.  Her hips bucked once in the water, then again. Her arms tensed as her hands gripped the sides of the tub, and she began to move her body, to slide herself onto my fingers. She was hesitant at first, almost gentle.

I strengthened my grip on the back of her neck. “That’s not exactly what you want, is it?”

“Uh. No.”

“Show me how you want to fuck, Lucy.”

She was embattled. I felt it through her skin, heard it in her sounds, calling to what was possessive in me, to what delighted in her stubborn reluctance to lose herself in my hands. I wasn’t going to let her be some serviced rose. I would make her shed her petals, see them churned under in her convulsions and brew a perfumed soup of her flesh.

Each roll of her hips became more urgent, until she was using all her strength to drive herself onto me. Her movements and her noises lost every vestige of pride, of intellect, of decorum. She fucked herself with my fingers and I held her neck, forcing her contort her body into a headless thing, that drove and plunged and gorged itself full to bursting.

* * *

The next morning, the world was mute and white. Our feet squeaked like mice in the pristine snow as we walked through the grounds of the Minster, York’s old gates, and ancient battlements conquered by weather. Lucy, pink-cheeked and wool-wrapped, her hand in mine; I thought I’d conquered her, too.

I thought if I could keep her hungry to be what she had been that night with me, I would have her forever. That nothing could take her away from me.

But after the morning tea, when Lucy the scholar stood up and took her place at the podium, and began to speak, I knew I was wrong.

In conversation with Rose Caraway on the Sexy Librarian Podcast

[image error]Rose Caraway invited me to a long, rambling conversation on erotica, eroticism, and the concept of consent at her ‘Sexy Librarian Podcast’.  Her outstanding podcast is also available at iTunes.

Rose is one of those very rare people who have an almost overwhelming generosity of spirit for the craft of others. She reminds me that this is something I need to aspire to and work a lot harder on.

Meanwhile, check out all her writing and her wonderfully produced readings. They’re so fun.

 

All The Sex I Didn’t Have: The Complexity of Consent

[image error]There is a pitched battle going on over what counts as consent when it comes to sex. There are feminists who insist that sex following anything that isn’t a wholehearted, absolutely sober ‘yes’ is rape. And behind it, whether intentional or not, this has had the effect of heaping sex with more complexity and misery than it had already, turning any ambivalent sex into a crime and a tragedy of epic proportions, and casting me and millions of women like me as victims of successive rapes.

I don’t accept the title of rape victim from these feminists for the times I’ve had reluctant sex any more than I’ll accept the label of slut for the times I had it with unmitigated glee. I reject any authority that seeks to characterize my experiences without my permission, without consulting me.

I was raped once. Only once, and I was in no doubt about what it was when it happened. Neither was the man who raped me. Although I was initially interested, it quickly turned brutal and forceful and nasty. No one was confused about consent. In those days, because I had initially shown interest, it would probably not have been prosecutable, but it was rape. I was not a victim; he was an asshole. It didn’t ruin my life. It didn’t put who I was or my sense of self under erasure. It didn’t haunt my subsequent sexual relationships.

But since then, I have had sex that, by feminist standards, would be labeled as rape. I’ve had drunk sex, uninterested sex, and pity sex. I’ve had initially not so sure sex, I’ve had sex with some  (surprisingly few) totally inept partners, I’ve had sex when I didn’t want sex but I did want to comfort someone and give them a nice time. I’ve had sex because I knew it would bolster my partner’s self-esteem. I’ve had sex for the single purpose of cheering someone else up. Because I could.

The convenient thing about being a woman is that you can actually pull that off vaginally. It’s a lot more difficult for men, although I’ve had partners who generously attended to my sexual needs when they didn’t feel particularly horny. And I’ve given my share of sexually disinterested but emotionally invested handjobs and blow jobs too.

None of those instances were rape. Unwise sex, ambivalent sex, mediocre sex, bad sex, or sex for non-sexual motives isn’t rape to me. I was always able to call a stop to it if I had wished to. It might have taken a stern, unequivocal refusal, it might have even taken a good hard shove. Sometimes I did that, sometimes I didn’t. And the times I chose not to and just put up with it, it still wasn’t rape – because I chose. And YES, I chose. I am not ‘blinded and brainwashed by the masculinist hegemony’ into believing I owe anyone sex when I don’t want it. That is the most authoritarian, disempowering and pernicious lie of all.

This is why the current reformulation of ‘consent’ as nothing but wholehearted, avid, loud acceptance is flawed. Because, strangely, it takes my power of choice away. It brands me as a victim for all the times I had sex when I wasn’t raring to have it. And there’s very little daylight between that sort of authoritarianism and some Christian right-winger branding me a slut for all the times I had sex out of wedlock.

I want to ask you to do a little bit of an intellectual flip. It’s not easy, but I want you to try.

Why is the sex we have so much more important than the sex we don’t have?

What about all the times I didn’t have sex? Who will mourn those? What about the times, in much younger days, when I refused an offer of sex because I feared someone would think I was a slut? What about the times I feigned reluctance (because it seemed the socially right thing to do) and the person took it at face value and walked away? What about the time I wanted sex with a gloriously sexy colleague but didn’t accept the offer because I was in the company of other colleagues who might read my acceptance pejoratively?  What about the times I was so filled with self-doubt, so scared of rejection, I didn’t ask? What about the times I rejected an offer of sex because, although I was sexually attracted to the person, I knew his motives were powered by conquest and social positioning rather than an honest mutual exchange of pleasure? What about the times I refused sex because the other person was married?

Who will mourn for all those lost hours of sexual pleasure? No one. Because, just as with the times I had sex I didn’t actively want, the times I eschewed the sex I wanted, I was making a personal choice. And as hit and miss as this paradigm is, the fact that it is MY choice, and the ultimate power lies with me is, to my mind, the truly feminist thing.

Ironically, putting the entire responsibility to determine that consent has been given onto the initiator – most usually in our culture the male – robs me of the right to determine what constitutes consent. That may seem counter-intuitive, but consider it for a moment. If I decide that my consent entails a nod or a drunken kiss, I’ve just had my definition overridden.

Here’s my problem with the ‘consent’ activists: they’re lazy. They think, simplistically, that the core of the issue is consent. But it’s not.

The real issue is that we, as acculturated, socialized humans, have swaddled sexual pleasure in ridiculous layers of meaning. As much as behavioural scientists like to portray human sexuality as equivalent to animal sex, it just isn’t. Just because we also mash our genitals together and trade body fluids doesn’t mean we’re doing the same thing, or have the same intentions. And although some people, and indeed some cultures, claim they are simply animals acting on instinct, this is nothing but a ploy to escape the burden of choice, of agency and responsibility. Animals are mindlessly driven to mate. (Seriously, take a minute and go to youtube and find a video of dogs mating to remind yourself what a completely natural sex act looks like –  not actually that much fun.). We subverted and complicated our sexual instincts many millennia ago. We have made it glorious, delirious, fun, dangerous, ugly, violent… we have made it many things.

Historically, we have surrounded sex with taboos, rules, myths, sacredness and profanity. We’ve enmeshed it in a moral web. We’ve woven it, inextricably at times, with love. We’ve historically branded it as sinful when it didn’t involve love. We’ve territorialized it and commoditized it. We’ve scripted gender roles for it, placing males into the position of permanent aggressors and petitioners, and females into the position of prey and gatekeepers. We’ve brainwashed boys to base their sense of self-esteem on getting laid. We’ve brainwashed girls, until very recently, to base their sense of self-worth on their chastity. Then we medicalized it. With the rise of science, we started burdening sex with even more crap, identifying certain forms of human sex as normative and other forms as deviant. We started branding positions, frequency and responses as  normal or abnormal.

And even as sex has become more discussable and gender roles have become more malleable, advertising and Hollywood still beams out non-stop streams of cultural messages that complicate and use sex as a vehicle for meaning. We’re now exhorted to craft our personas, to productivize ourselves in relation to our sexual appeal. We buy viagra and breasts, we craft abs and surgically alter vaginas in our efforts to live up to wholly fictional, idealized versions of what a sexually attractive human being should be.

We will never have a truly unambiguous culture of consent until we have cleansed sex of all its implications, all its baggage of status, economics, moral and personal implication. That isn’t going to happen any time soon. Probably it never will.

And before you go mourning our loss of natural innocence, I’d ask you to consider that this may be a good thing, because if we managed to strip away everything, all the negative and positive layers of meaning that we have piled onto sex, our sex would look like that video you googled of dogs fucking.

But because of all this complexity, our consent or refusal will never be based on the consideration of the simple question: do you want sexual pleasure? Our answers will always carry the weight of this mess we’ve made of sex. Our consent will, if we’re even vaguely thoughtful people, always contain the ghost of reluctance, and our refusal will always carry a hint of regret.

But that is okay, because … guess what? It’s only sex. And we have the choice to make as much or as little of that as we wish. There are lots of choices we make that close down our options, from which there is no way back, which contain consequences we must live with for the rest of our lives. Luckily, with the use of a condom, sex isn’t one of them.

As a woman approaching the age of wisdom, I’ll offer some advice to the young: if you insist on having regrets, stop regretting the bad sex you had, regret the good sex you missed.

 

On Dominance in Erotic Fiction: A few Questions

[image error]One of my readers, Sally, left me some questions that I felt required a little more thought and more space than was available in a comments reply, so I’ve answered them here.

Her questions were:

1.) As an author of erotic fiction, what assets or personality traits do you believe make the male lead in a work of erotic fiction attractive to the ‘everyday’ reader?

2.) In stories regarding a Dominant and Submissive, why do you think readers have an impulsive reaction to be attracted to either or?

3.) a.) What is it about domination that the characters themselves find appealing? b.) And what do you think is it about the concept of domination that readers find appealing?

4.) What kind of connection do the submissive and dominant characters have to have? Is it both physically and mentally?

Not sure I can do this to Sally’s satisfaction, but I’ll answer as honestly as I can.

1. As an author of erotic fiction, what assets or personality traits do you believe make the male lead in a work of erotic fiction attractive to the ‘everyday’ reader?

I honestly don’t feel I have a lot of authority as an ‘author of erotic fiction’. I can tell you what I believe make a male main character work for me, but I’m pretty sure I’m not speaking for many other erotica authors. However, it’s fair to say that he does have to ‘work’ for me first, or I just won’t give a shit about writing the story. Also, I don’t know what an everyday reader is. If you mean a reader of mainstream erotica, then believe me when I say that I am pretty sure my stories don’t appeal to them at all if sales are any indication of this. But that’s okay, because I’m not all that interested in appealing to them. There are lots of writers filling that market already.

So, I’m going to tell you what I believe makes a male main character in erotic fiction attractive to me. Pretty much the same thing that makes a main character of any gender attractive in any sort of fiction: I need them to seem realistic, I need them to have credible, non-superficial flaws and tangibly unique qualities that make them unlike other characters. I need them to be able to change through the story. I need them to have agency and volition – to be agents of change rather than victims of circumstance. I enjoy writing erotic fiction that involves male characters whose erotic attraction doesn’t come from standard measures such as physical attractiveness or wealth. That’s a challenge to me as a writer and, I think, a pleasant change for the people who read my writing. So, I like to focus on the psychological aspects that make people attractive – the way they express themselves, the thoughts they have, the way they see the world and how they cope with adversity. Most especially, how they negotiate their own desires.

2.) In stories regarding a Dominant and Submissive, why do you think readers have an impulsive reaction to be attracted to either or?

I think some readers are very attracted to stories that agree with their own world-views and present a story in a way that most closely matches their fantasies. Others are a little more adventurous. Undoubtedly there are some readers who are sexually submissive and really only like stories told from that point of view, or stories that feature a dominant who is a projection of their own fantasy – and a story that deviates from that can really annoy them.

Personally, I really like to challenge myself, and invite my readers, to look at that power dynamic more laterally. This usually ends up destabilizing the apparent power dynamic. Sub and Dom are essentially ‘roles’ or ‘scripts’ that people agree to take on. But the actual power dynamic at play beneath the surface is more complex, and probably more equally distributed. For some readers, that reveal is gratifying, for others – it just interferes with their consumption of a fantasy they love.

I’m not knocking fantasy; I’m just not interested in writing it. I suspect most of my readers aren’t that interested in reading it. If they were, they’d have stopped reading me.

3.) a.) What is it about domination that the characters themselves find appealing? b.) And what do you think is it about the concept of domination that readers find appealing?

a.) What is it about domination that the characters themselves find appealing?

It would be a little disingenuous to answer that question without pointing out that characters aren’t real humans – they’re the product of the writer’s imagination. I’m not a mystic when it comes to writing; I don’t believe that characters ‘have a life of their own’ even though it sometimes seems like they do. But characters are usually based on real people, or an amalgamation of a few people the writer knows. So, perhaps the question is… what is it about domination that people find appealing?

Power is appealing. The ability to control one’s own destiny is appealing and the more power you have, the more likely – barring acts of God – you are to be able to do that. Sexual power is appealing, I think, because – in real life – most people feel a distinct lack of control when they find themselves in the throes of passion. So fantasizing and even performing in a position of control is very attractive, very erotic, for a lot of people. Even the most submissive subs tend to enjoy the power of erotic attractiveness they hold over their dominants. It’s not as clean cut as it is often portrayed.

b) And what do you think is it about the concept of domination that readers find appealing?

I honestly don’t think I’m able to answer that. I can really only answer for myself and my answer is a pretty complex one. I find the concept of someone who chooses a formal position of dominance appealing because, whether they know it or not, it requires a fundamental sacrifice. Dominants willingly take on the burden of much of the responsibility for what goes on between them and their submissive partners. That sacrifice is considerable. The risk is also considerable. If things fail, it is – at least formally – their fault it has failed, since they were the person with the power.

I also find dominants appealing because there is usually a deeply buried sense of their own powerlessness that drives them to want to claim control so overtly. It is often a desire born of a core sense of lack. To me, that makes them interesting and attractive as subjects to read and write about. Especially since no amount of power or control can ever really address that underlying sense of lack. It is always there, gnawing at them from beneath. Being dominant only offers them a short period of respite from that sense of powerlessness, which keeps their desire, their need for dominance always partly unsatisfied. Makes for good erotic conflict in stories.

I’d also like to add that there are two overt social transgressions to taking on roles of dominance or submission. Both involve saying aloud what is true but is forbidden to say in our society: that few of us have a lot of power or control over our lives. Much less than we want to believe we have. Much less that a supposedly ‘democratic’ and ‘free’ society pretends we have. So taking on the label of a dominant is a kind of challenge: if you’re a male brought up in a society where women are supposed to have equal rights, then claiming that role as a dominant is transgressive. You’re not supposed to do it, and there is an erotic thrill in breaking that rule. Meanwhile, if you’re female and claim dominance, that is even more transgressive, since historically women have had very little overt power.

But – and this might be counter-intuitive – I think taking on the label of submissive is even more transgressive. Contemporary society likes to pretend that women have an equal share of power, so overtly positioning oneself as a submissive woman is a lot like spitting in the eye of feminism. These days, that’s pretty damn transgressive. Meanwhile, taking on the label of submissive as a man is even more transgressive, because it is historically the position of women. Submissive men who demand recognition of their masculinity while placing themselves in sexually submissive positions are truly challenging mainstream concepts of gender roles.

On the whole, I think BDSM is a kind of formalized way of disrupting social norms: by making implicit realities explicit, by parodying and inverting gender and sexual roles, by turning pain and punishment into sexual gratification.

I’m sure other readers (because I am always a reader first) have very different reasons for being attracted to the concept of dominance. Maybe some of my lovely readers can give you their answers down below in the comments area?

4.) What kind of connection do the submissive and dominant characters have to have? Is it both physically and mentally?

I think that depends entirely on the story. Some people are only looking for sexual experiences. They enjoy the physical aspects of D/s or BDSM but have no interest in anything mental at all. I don’t personally really understand this form of interaction, so I don’t write about it much. For me, the interest lies in how the power dynamic plays out mentally. Of course, physical acts can act as a device by which the mental underpinnings of D/s are brought to the surface and explored in the narrative. But eroticism is never about acts or events, it’s always really about how those acts or events affect the person mentally and emotionally. So that’s what I try to write about. Sometimes not terribly successfully, because language is a very imperfect tool for conveying the reality of experience. But I keep trying.

I’m fairly sure Sally would greatly appreciate if anyone who cares to do so would volunteer some answers of their own. Please feel free to chime in!

Portals – 1

[image error]At the age of 32, Jeb noticed his life had been a series of portals. Looking back, he could count them off on his fingers.

At high school, he’d been the fat kid. School is hard enough on everyone, but it’s worse on fat kids. No one wants you on their team and the girls sneer at you. As if your desire were something preposterous, something absurd. At first, he felt sorry for himself. Then they infected him and their disgust was also his. Even in the privacy of his own room, with his hand around the insistent hard-on that nestled beneath his pale, white belly, he felt sick as he wanked, unable to bring himself off unless he closed his eyes or looked away. And when he did, he was someone else, in another body, not Jeb.

Then, slowly, anger blanketed everything else. The sneers, the exclusions, the rejections and the solitary ejaculations no longer had the power to shame him; they simply fed the anger’s ever increasing appetite. Jeb’s dreams were uglier and more violent than any horror film he’d ever seen. They snuck into his waking hours in short, splattered moments of wet, red revenge. He saw, in such vivid detail, how his ballpoint pen would pop through the eye, crunch through the bone and sink into the grey matter of Trisha, the girl whose locker was next to his. He swam through the sequence of punches it would take to shatter the jaw of Keith, the jock who sat to his left in civics class.

The images came so easy and flowed so freely, until the movie in his head seemed unending. And still the anger would not be sated. It’s terrible hunger scared him. He didn’t want to end up like one of the losers from Columbine, bringing a gun to school and blowing away all the people his hunger wanted to consume.

Jeb needed control. He would have control – of his body and of his mind. That’s when he joined a gym. It was a place to put the anger. Those sleek, gleaming machines that were built to resist him. The weights designed to absorb all the violence he could offer them. His own rebellious layers of adipose tissue and the pure, true flesh beneath it that could be burnished and revealed.

It took six months of sweat and agony, six months of turning the anger inward, against the jiggling chrysalis beneath his skin and brutally forcing his own metamorphosis. The fat boy was dead and, in his place, was a lean, muscled creature. There were no more sneers. No more rejections. But the anger that had taken up residence somewhere at the base of Jeb’s skull took no joy in his success. The invitations to participate in team sports, the blatant admiration of his female cohorts did not bring him the satisfaction he imagined it would. They did not want him, his anger told him. They wanted to be wanted by the edifice of meat his anger had constructed.

So when, at a end of semester party, Trisha – of the 36D tits, the cotton candy glossed lips, and the perfectly plump cheerleader’s ass – got down on her knees and offered to give him the first blowjob of his life, Jeb’s anger accepted the service as no more than his due. As if he’d already had a thousand of them. And when she angled her head awkwardly, and gazed up at him with her heavily lined, black fringed eyes and her mouth full of his cock, all Jeb could see was a girl who’d watched enough porn to have learned the trick of looking like she sincerely wanted him to come down her throat. Even as he came, the anger derided him for his pathetic susceptibility to the banal meme of that eye contact.

Jeb kneed her away before his cock gave up its last spurt of come. It spattered on the olive carpet between them.

Trish’s carefully constructed expression of hollow-cheeked rapture had turned to ugly, unguarded hurt. “What the fuck?”

Stuffing his cock back into his jeans and buttoning them back up, Jeb muttered, “Yeah, what the fuck,” and left the party.

The memory of that encounter provided Jeb with many subsequent self-administered orgasms, but it wasn’t the hot, close, wet sensation of the mouth around his cock, or the image of those sticky pink lips losing their pigment on his shaft that inspired them. It was those precious seconds of shock, of wounding, of ego demolition on her face.

The Dinner Party – 9

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In the back of his car, Gilles Massé watched his latest acquisition’s face as he caught her nipple between his first and second fingers and squeezed. The whimper she emitted was a satisfying combination of pain and need.

Carmen, his beloved, his wife, his partner in crime, had her hand up the girl’s dress; he could smell the girl’s cunt and hear how wet she was. So full of illusions, this one, so full of desire: it made his cock ache.

No woman had ever understood him the way Carmen did. No matter who he brought into their bed, she never once objected, never doubted his love of her; she was a jealous woman, but not sexually. In the act of understanding him, Carmen had allowed Gilles to understand himself better. He would always crave the decimation of innocence, and the quelling of rebellion and, when Carmen could no longer offer those things, she sought it out for him in others.This one next to him, he could feel the great battle going on inside her between innocence and corruption. It was one of his deepest pleasures to be instrumental in deciding which side won.

He stretched his arm along the back of the car seat and wound his fingers through Isabel’s hair. Trapping the strands, he pulled her head back. Her eyes were closed; her lips were parted, breathing in sharp, short, bursts of air. He put his mouth close to her ear and whispered: “Avez-tu faim, ma petite?”

The girl moaned, her hips arched in response to Carmen’s hidden attentions.

Removing his hand from her breast and, unbuttoning his trousers, Gilles pulled the fly down with deliberate slowness. He freed his cock into the cool, darkness of the air-conditioned car, stroking its length idly for a moment, before pulling Isabel’s head into his lap.

“Eat, then.”

Even before her lips, he felt her breath, hot and ragged against the sensitive dome of his cockhead. In the car’s dark interior, he couldn’t see her, but the sound of Carmen’s fingers plunging wetly into Isabel’s cunt blended with the hiss of the outside world as the car cut through the night and the empty city streets. He envisioned the girl’s lips, her momentary hesitation, and allowed himself to close his eyes and smile before pushing her head, her mouth, down around him.

Her plump lips closed deliciously around his shaft and he groaned, feeling the hot cave of her mouth surround the head. The desire to suck, he knew, was primal and automatic: born out of the intense pleasure she experienced between her legs.

Gilles opened his eyes and looked over at Carmen. She had slipped onto the floor of the car and had pushed up the girl’s dress, revealing the pale roundness of an upturned ass cheek. Carmen kissed and nipped at the girl’s flesh while she fucked her slowly with her fingers.

Isabel’s moan vibrated down his shaft, and the stroke of her tongue against the underside of his glans made Gilles twitch. She wasn’t expert at this, but she was very, very willing. Gilles raised his hips slowly, even as he pushed Isabel’s mouth further down onto himself, until the head of his cock brushed against the back of her palate. He nudged harder, and the girl gasped once, and gagged as he pushed the head through into her throat.

“That’s it,” he hissed, holding her head.

She would have fought and withdrawn, he knew, if it weren’t for the fact that her whole body was relaxing under Carmen’s onslaught. Gilles felt the girl’s throat constrict, silently, as he breached her throat again and again. Tiny violations to train her body to take him there.

He could feel it in her mouth, as she began to orgasm. Suddenly, the warmth that enveloped him pressed tight around him and he felt the sharp edge of her teeth around the base of his cock. She groaned and her throat opened, allowing him unfettered access. That moment, he always loved it; when a woman turned to nothing more than yielding flesh and spasming muscles. He fucked her mouth, and she sucked him willingly, taking him to the root of her own volition. The noisy, wet sucking sounds filled the car and presaged his climax. He drove it forward, fuelling it with visions of the liquid lust he was about to pump down her willing, naive throat, infecting her with his corruption.

Gilles grunted as he erupted, bathing himself in his own hot semen. Isabel moaned and gagged as the second shot flooded into her mouth. He felt her fight, then, to pull away, but he held her head down and gasped as the third, weaker spurt raced up his cock and emptied into her.

Even in the midst of his pleasure, he knew the girl would be angry with him for the brutality of this treatment, for using her mouth the way he had. No matter, he thought to himself, she will learn to love it soon enough.

As his neurons stopped firing, he felt the warm wetness of his cum trickle around the base of his shaft. Gilles thought of ordering her to clean him up, but reconsidered. Perhaps this was enough for one night. Even as he thought it, the girl’s mouth began to suck around his softening cock, swallowing. Her sweet tongue swirled around him, gathering up the trickles that pooled at the base. He sighed as she cleaned him, a delightful and unexpected act of submission.

It wasn’t until he opened his eyes again, he realized why: the girl was now bent over his lap, with her knees on the car seat and her pert ass in the air. Carmen had not ceased her attentions. Even as she penetrated the girl’s cunt with her fingers, she was licking and tonguing her ass.

It was a magnificently perverse mind that could use and direct another’s body in this way, so subtly and yet so effectively. God, he loved her; her power, her surrender, her descent into his realm.

Between Gilles’ legs, his cock twitched into wakefulness.

“A la maison, Kien, s’il vous plait.”

The Dinner Party – 8

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At 3 PM, Isabel phoned David and asked if he could meet her.

“It sounds urgent, Izzie. Clandestine.” David had an uncanny way of making quite ordinary words sound extraordinarily obscene.

Isabel laughed. “Don’t be so dramatic. It isn’t like that.” She paused. “Well, not really.”

“Then what is it like? No hints?”

“Well, you know how, before explorers used to go off to the edge of the know world, they’d write their last will and testament? Just in case they didn’t make it back?”

There was silence for a moment on the line. “Ye-esss?”

“Well, it’s a bit like that.”

“Oh, goody! The coffee place opposite the cathedral – say, ten minutes?”

“Done.”

Isabel straightened her desk, shut down her computer, and told Khanh that he could leave early, on her way out the door.

She walked the block to the cathedral and smiled as she turned the corner. David was already seated at one of the glass-topped outdoor tables, flirting with one of the waiters. That man was such a sucker for intrigue.

“Hey doll, this is Hieu – isn’t he purty? Tell him what you want to drink so we can get that out of the way,” he said as she sat down opposite him.

“Mineral water, please.”

The waiter nodded and moved away. The minute he was out of earshot, David leaned across the table.

“‘Edge of the known world”? Good god, girl! I’m breathless to hear.”

“Carmen Masse came to visit me today.”

“Oo-oh. I hope you didn’t do anything to make sweet little Khanh blush.”

Isabel waved away the suggestion. “She brought me a contract for translation work.”

David’s face fell and he sat back in his seat. “If I’d known we were going to talk shop, I’d…”

“Just shut up and listen.”

David made a ‘pulling the zip’ motion across his lips.

“It’s for $8000 dollars US – for catalogue work.”

“Oh my GOD! You lucky bitch!”

‘Sh-h! I don’t think that’s what Gilles believes that’s what he’s proposing to purchase.”

“White slavery. How utterly delish.”

“David!”

“Okay, okay.” He settled down again and let out a dramatic sigh. “Did you sign it?”

Isabel sat silent as her water arrived. She opened the bottle and poured it slowly over the ice in the accompanying glass. Then, she took a long drink.

“Well? You cruel woman. Did you?”

She smirked a little.

“You did! Oh MY GOOD GOD!”

Half the outdoor cafe turned and stared at their table.

David looked innocent and then leaned over the table again. “But I though, you know – I though you didn’t enjoy yourself at that particular little…soiree.”

“I never said that, David. I just said I felt weird about it afterwards.”

“But you didn’t seem all that enthusiastic on Sunday, sweetheart. In fact, I was kind of wondering if my best friend wasn’t actually a spy for the moral majority.”

“I changed my mind.”

“You slut!” he hissed, sotto voce.

Isabel smiled serenely. “Look… I’m entering the lion’s den here. Just…”

“Just what?”

“If I start acting weird, tell me. Okay? Just keep an eye on me?”

David’s smile broadened and he wiped away a fake tear. “Oh, my little girl is growing up.”

“Seriously, David. I mean it. If I get…lost. Promise me you’ll come and find me?

The man’s face changed. All the affected campiness fell away.

Isabel implored him with her eyes. “Will you David? You’re the only one here I can really trust. You’re going to be my breadcrumb trail home. Promise!”

He nodded. “I’ll come find you, Izzy – no matter what. Don’t worry.”

* * *

Isabel went home early to prepare. She could have left at five o’clock as usual, but the lack of pressing work, and the butterflies flitting around her stomach prompted her to call it a day.

She took extra care with her grooming; all the while telling herself that it didn’t matter. The dress she chose was sleek and formal: a halter dress in burgundy silk, with an overlay of gold organza. It made the most of what little cleavage she had without, she felt, being overtly flirtatious. She chose a pair of gold strappy mules to go with the outfit.

In the bath, while still denying that she was making any special efforts for the event, she carefully shaved herself smooth under a steaming shower. Just the act of shaving aroused her, and no amount of water seemed to rinse away the juices oozing from her newly bared pussy. When she was finished, she ran her fingertips over the ultra-sensitive lips. It would have been nice to spend another fifteen minutes indulging in a bit of masturbation – just to relax her – but she was firm with herself and towelled herself off in a perfunctory matter. She still had to attend to her nails.

While waiting for her freshly painted toe-nails to dry, she buffed her fingernails to a high sheen and admired them for a moment. For a moment, visions of plunging her fingers into Carmen’s sopping cunt danced in her head. She found her nail clippers and carefully cut each fingernail down to fingertip level, blushing as she smoothed the edges until there was no sharpness left.

By seven-thirty, Isabel stepped out the door of her little alleyway house, and flagged down a taxi at the end of her street. The Mandarin was an ultra-chic, extremely expensive restaurant frequented mostly by the Japanese who liked a taste of Vietnamese food, but were paranoid about food hygiene. Isabel and David had often joked that it was where the stupidly rich ate street food at a hundred times the normal price. But tonight, Isabel stepped out of the taxi and climbed the red-carpeted stairs to the entrance having left her jadedness at home.

Inside, the restaurant design was based on a traditional Chinese house: several stories with a single interior courtyard. The walls were hung with 19th Century print portraits of the scions of the Chinese Vietnamese community. Stern looking dowagers and dyspeptic looking mandarins gazed down at her in their layered silk finery. Ornately carved wooden screens separated off the different dining areas, giving each table a modicum of privacy. A huge, gleaming staircase of dark mahogany surrounded the courtyard and led to the second floor, and a severe-looking waiter in a stiff black jacket led her up them.

Isabel was pleased to see that she wasn’t the first to arrive, nor the last. The Masses had a large circular table. Gilles stood up as she approached, as did three other men. Carmen gave her a wide smile.

“This is the newest addition to our team, Isabel Fletcher. I believe she’s partly a Brit,” said Gilles, addressing himself to the strangers at the table. He introduced her around. She shook each of the three Englishmen’s hands in turn, accepting the chair that placed her opposite Carmen.

* * *

All in all, Isabel thought the dinner had gone very well. No one got spanked for spilling wine, no one orgasmed between courses. In fact, the Masses and their dinner guests were the very model of appropriate behaviour.

From time to time, Isabel wondered why she’d been invited; most of the conversation had revolved around furniture design, market trends and the perils of shipping. But the gender imbalance at the table had been obvious; she figured she was there primarily for adornment. Far from being offended, she was rather flattered.

At about eleven o’clock, the party broke up. At the entrance to the restaurant, Gilles had bundled his clients off in a taxi, and Isabel was waving at passing cabs in hopes of getting the next one.

“Don’t take a taxi, Isabel. We’ll take you home,” Carmen said.

Gilles snapped his mobile phone shut. “Kien is just coming with the car. Anyway, I feel like a nightcap, don’t you?”

The question was directed not at his wife, but at Isabel. All sorts of feelings converged to war inside her, a cacophony of voices all speaking at once.

The sensible Isabel said. ‘Decline the invitation and go home like a good girl.’

‘Your dinner wasn’t for free – it’s time to pay up,’ added the cynic.

The adventurer said, ‘What are you scared of? Life will pass you by if you don’t jump in head first.’

‘How can you refuse the attentions of two of the most attractive people you’ve ever met? You should be accepting this with open arms,’ coaxed the lover.

The prude spat, ‘These people are degenerates and they want to drag you down with them.’

‘Remember Saturday night? You loved it. Don’t you want that again?’ whispered the slut.

Isabel shook her head to rid herself of the riot in her brain. “I… well… oh, why not!”

The sleek vintage Citroen pulled up to the curb in front of them and the driver got out. Gilles went around to the far door, and Carmen ushered Isabel into the back, and got in beside her. As spacious as the interior of the car was, Isabel was in no doubt at what was going on. She was the filling in the middle of the sandwich. The minute she felt the driver release the clutch and pull away, Carmen slid a hand up Isabel’s skirt and Gilles slipped his between Isabel’s halter-top and her bare breast.