Graves' Cool Web, Sexual Discourse and the Erotics of the Unnamed

" …But we have speech, to chill the angry day, And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent. We spell away the overhanging night, We spell away the soldiers and the fright. There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear…" The Cool Web, Robert Graves I recently finished giving a very long online interview. Reading back through the final draft of the article, I was asked a question I didn't quite know how to answer. We got onto the subject of whether I felt a responsibility to portray fictional acts of kink in a realistic manner.  Somehow I went on to babble – very badly – about how I didn't like using the 'words' that are commonly used to identify acts. It wasn't my most eloquent hour. What I was trying to get at was that, in my fiction, I have instinctively shied away from the technical 'terms' for things, in the same way I shy away from using euphemisms.  This sounds like a contradiction, so perhaps a couple of examples are in order. I don't think I've ever used the word 'bondage' in a story, unless it was in [...]