Pam Rosenthal's Blog: Passions and Provocations, Even Now, page 4

List-mania

I mentioned that Carrie’s Story just made sheknows.com’s 12-must-read-erotic-novels list, and romance writer told me that actually, my motormouth BDSM heroine is on seven other lists on Goodreads, including (I’m just saying) “Instead of 50 Shades of Gray.” Yes, well, and then there was the Daily Beast list I stumbled on a few months ago called “Sexier than…” well, than you-know-what wildly popular book.

But my favorite list I’ve ever been on was Playboy’s intentionally provocative “25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written.” The original web page is no longer online, but Amazon picked it up, so if you’re interested, there I am (as Molly) as #12, between Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) and Erica Jong (Fear of Flying).

And here’s what Playboy editor Jim Petersen, who chose the list, told Susie Bright about why he chose Carrie’s Story:

SB: My friend Pam Rosenthal, who wrote Carrie’s Story under the pseudonym of Molly Weatherfield, is thrilled to bits you picked her novel for the list. What made Carrie stand out among so many others of S/M romances that have been published since Story of O?

JP:  I once went on a tour of San Francisco with a reporter who wanted my views on strip bars, fern bars, and gay bars.

There was a moment where we watched a string of topless dancers, and one woman came out and grabbed us by the eyeballs. She dominated. I could see “the intelligence behind the entertainment”— and that’s  why I responded to Carrie. I loved her attitude, intelligence, eye for detail. She was alive, compared to O— a story that is like watching a suicide.

Thrilled to bits. Yeah, that’s just about right. Jim, I love your attitude, intelligence, and eye for detail as well.

©2013 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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In Memoriam

Burr might be the best historical novel I’ve ever read. Julian‘s pretty great too, and Palimpsest is an irresistibly dishy memoir.

And if you haven’t seen this amazing face-off with William Buckley from early 60s TV, you owe it to yourself to check it out at http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/rip-gore-vidal.html

R.I.P. Gore Vidal.

©2012 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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A Confession. A Resolution. And a Rant.

First the confession. That I’ve gone a little gaga over a recent modest spike in Carrie’s Story‘s Kindle sales.

Have I been getting a little 50 Shades of Grey action for my own smart-girl-meets-moody-older-guy BDSM, w/a Molly Weatherfield, and going amazingly strong for a small-press book first published in 1995?

Maybe. But since checking out those numbers is a terrible timesuck, I’m herein also posting a resolution to cut the clicking.

And also to stop Googling “Carrie’s Story” “50 Shades” – even if the search did yield this exuberantly hilarious post that called 50 Shades the “choir-singing younger sibling to Carrie’s Story” and then went on to get a little raunchy.

The point being, as we all know, that it’s hard enough to do actual writing. Of novels. And that I’m one of romance and erotica’s slowest writers even without all that time-consuming clicking. Which makes me think that I ought to make a final resolution. To also stop gnashing my teeth about the stupid stuff I’m reading about women and kinky fiction.

Hell no. And herein beginneth the rant.

A feminist rant. Because it’s as a romance-writing feminist who’s spent a lot of quality time with my erotic fantasy life that I’m so mightily pissed off by the self-serving dumbness that’s being written about the vexed attractions of un-PC sex and sexuality. The tipping point in this case being Katie Roiphe’s Newsweek cover story a few weeks ago, which purported to let us in on a couple of big brave surprising secrets.

That young successful working women might have erotic fantasy needs social equality can’t satisfy.
That feminists are “perplexed,” and “outraged” by this situation.
And that therefore feminism is some clueless, useless, irrelevant call back to some mythical “barricades.”

Pretty standard Roiphe, I discovered when I checked out some of her other work: like a girl Columbus, her thing evidently is to “discover” something that’s been there all along, and then to congratulate herself for her boldness while conveniently forgetting that anybody – least of all any of those irrelevant feminists – had ever had similar (if not braver, more honest, challenging, nuanced, and radical) thoughts on the subject.

In this piece it’s as though smart women – from feminist sex educator extraordinaire Susie Bright to romance superstars Jenny Crusie and Susan Elizabeth Phillips – haven’t been exploring this vast continent for decades. As though the brilliant staff of Good Vibrations – San Francisco’s pioneering feminist sex toy, sex education, sex everything store – haven’t changed the lives of countless women and men by helping them find their physical, bodily ways to the wilder (or for that matter the safer) shores of desire. As though there hasn’t been a generation of wide-ranging discussion and debate among and between feminists about the pleasures and dangers of our own desires.

As though the huge market in erotic romance hadn’t even existed before someone told Katie Roiphe about 50 Shades of Grey. Or that romance readers haven’t been making their own forays into non-PC fantasy at least since The Flame and the Flower hit the shelves in 1972 (first printing: 600,000).

The story of how women got our own erotic reading still has yet to be told in its entirety. But if I were to try I’d begin by positing two distinct yet subtly related sources, both pretty contemporaneous. The advent of the bodice-rippers and of the sex-positive feminist discussion I cut my writing teeth on. I’d note the amount of queer and leftwing queer influence on sex-positive feminism and pay close attention to fascinating instances of crossover in the case of the bodice-rippers, beginning with Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ indispensable essay about her own feminist experience of romance fiction, collected in Jayne Ann Krentz’s anthology Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women.

I, alas, am far too slow a writer and untrained a researcher to attempt this (not to speak of hoping someday to produce another novel by Pam Rosenthal or Molly Weatherfield). But while I dearly hope someone takes it on — romance scholar friends, perhaps? Susie Bright, please? — in the meanwhile I don’t want anybody thinking that the advent of 50 Shades and all sorts of other stuff had nothing to do with feminism. For better and worse, it has everything to do with it, and I’d love to see this discussion.

And if this all makes me sound like a hundred-year-old scold who thinks younger women have to worship at the shrine of our earlier struggles — well then, don’t think of this rant as coming from the Pam Rosenthal who once belonged to the same proud pioneering Second Wave Feminist organization that produced Our Bodies Ourselves, but from the Pam Rosenthal who gets stares of disbelief when readers find out that “YOU?! Wrote Carrie’s Story?” And who relishes the moment of confusion when they discover that I don’t have piercings or wear torn fishnet.

Take it from the Pam Rosenthal who, a couple of decades ago was more than a little “perplexed” and “appalled” at my own wayward erotic predilections, but who was lucky enough be living in San Francisco during the years when feminists, feminists, were talking sex and sense, sexuality and sensibility.

If you weren’t there – or even if you were – you might want to check out either or both of these books:

Sallie Tisdale’s Talk Dirty to Me,  a gracefully written, personal take on the very scene that changed my life. Learning life skills like how to speak up when asking for what you want at the the porn video store or how to sell the right customer the right vibrator at Good Vibes, Tisdale learned how to find out what she needed to know about her own erotic self, during a more joyful era than this one.

Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Just published, this is a collection of meticulous, high-powered feminist essays by an anthropologist, theorist, and activist who changed the face of feminist academic studies and was one of the strongest influences on me when I was considering I might be able to write BDSM erotica.

Rant over. I feel so much better. Time to write some fiction.

But also do come say hi at the BDSM-apolooza at the Smutketeers blog next May 9 and 10, when Molly Weatherfield joins them for their BDSM-apalooza.

 

 

 

 

©2012 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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Happiness

"I think we've found our family," Jasper says to Marina at the end of The Edge of Impropriety.

It makes me particularly happy to think that I wrote these words back in 2008, before  my son Jesse ever met his now-wife Masha and now-daughter Sasha, and before they were joined by new baby daughter Rory just this past October.

Indulge the blissed-out aging hippie Jewish Grandma in me showing you just one pic of their beautiful family.

And imagine how thrilling it was that Michael and I were actually visiting them when Rory arrived, since we were in the East Coast already — for my Mom's ninetieth birthday party (talk about happiness and joy!) and so I'm feeling doubly, triply, exponentially blessed, and grateful to you as well, for letting me share.

 

©2011 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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Moments of Joyous Recognition

Or, to put it another way, I've been gobsmacked again.

This time by a reader of my Molly Weatherfield erotica, who invited me to come visit the alternative world where she and her partner hang out online, in the immersive digital universe called Second Life (SL), where residents (in the bodies of onscreen "avatars") romp through beautifully realized and gloriously diverse interactive spaces in search of pleasure and provocation, community and creativity.

I've never done this before. So I'm slow and clumsy. My "mollyw" avatar is still boringly generic-looking, not sure of her online manners and prone to bumping into walls.

But my guides are patient and generous. And the walls themselves (not to speak of the furniture, accoutrements, and not a few of the residents themselves) are gorgeous. Because what's particularly fascinating and impressive about Second Life is that its virtual spaces are built and designed by its users — customized, modified, and endlessly, gloriously embellished.

Of course the original designers and owners of the company were the ones who waded into the original primordial void of computer memory, to create light and darkness; cyberspace and cybertime; the laws of physics and the code of the avatars' virtual DNA.But from there (as I learned from Wagner James Au's lively book The Making of Second Life) they left it to the users, members, or residents (as they're variously called). So there are tools for building, courses on how to learn to do it, a virtual-money currency for buying and selling artifacts thus created.

All this in the service of enabling creativity and furthering desire. While for me, all this has made for moments of purely joyous recognition, to discover not only how elegantly and skillfully realized the SL adult erotic area of Xaara is, but how hauntingly familiar the landscape is to me. What a astonishment to find a set of creative imaginations so akin to the one I discovered in myself when I set my intrepid heroine on her adventures through the alternate world I created within the covers of Carrie's Story and Safe Word.

Oh, and it's pretty hot too.

More reports to come — especially after mollyw goes "shopping" for shoes, clothes, skin, and much much better hair.

But in the meantime, if you've had any experiences yourself in Second Life, I'd love to hear about it.

©2011 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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Sex and the Semicolon

Check out this funny post about erotic writing at the Risky Regencies Blog: http://riskyregencies.blogspot.com/2011/08/muphrys-law-and-writing-sex-scenes.html

Actually, I'm rather proud of that semi-colon. Anybody know what book it's in?

©2011 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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Molly and Me… a new contest soon

I was thrilled and flattered last April when an online discussion of my erotic novel Carrie's Story (w/a Molly Weatherfield) attracted 345 posts. Not bad, I'd have to say, for a book that was first published in 1995 (and which I would never have dreamed would still be in its 16th printing as I write this).Nor would I have expected it to be described so often as a "classic," not to speak of "one of the 25 sexiest novels ever written" (Playboy said that — check out their other choices here).

I couldn't make it to the discussion itself, but this time I'm planning ahead of time, to attend the Naked Reader Book Club next September 13 when they discuss the sequel to Carrie's Story, Safe Word. And to celebrate the event by beginning a new, erotica-themed contest next week, winner to be chosen on (natch) September 13.

The new contest will go up by this Friday, June 24.

But as I write this, you only have… um…3 hours and 23 minutes to enter my current contest at http://pamrosenthal.com/contest2.php, where the prize is 2 wonderfully funny and big-hearted, sexy and appealing, Regency chick-lit novels by the brilliant Janet Mullany — and a little chocolate too.

 

©2011 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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In Search of Cleopatra

And also of some of the origins of my own fiction.

Because my relatively recent fascination with the ancient world (indulged to the fullest in my just-posted History Hoyden's discussion of Stacy Schiff's magnificent Cleopatra biography) is the product of the loving research I did in order to understand the Regency classical scholar Jasper Hedges, in my very-soon-to-be re-released-in-mass-market, RITA-winning (just saying) The Edge of Impropriety.

©2011 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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For a Sharing of Life's Glories

My old friend Jeff Weinstein's wonderful blog post about the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire last week moved me to write about it, too, perhaps more from the p.o.v. of a historical romance writer.

And about a lot of other stuff that's important to me at http://historyhoydens.blogspot.com/2011/04/give-us-bread-but-give-us-roses.html

Hope you'll come check it out. It's even got a soundtrack.

©2011 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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Doonesbury on Love and Image

No kidding, Gary Trudeau's got my number in today's wonderful strip… at

http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2011/03/27/

If you feel any rapport with my sensibility (and if you don't I can't imagine how you got here — certainly not on the strength of my self-promotional skills) you'll want to read it immediately, once again at http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2011/03/27/

(anybody out there love Leo and Alex as much as I do?)

©2011 Passions and Provocations. All Rights Reserved.

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