Given the Right Partner and Circumstances...

I wish it felt more acceptable to disclose kink -- it would save so many later incompatibilities.

For my part, I suffered in a vanilla marriage in part because I didn't take my need for kink seriously. I did disclose my kinky experience and thoughts at the outset of that relationship, but in a tone of contrition, along with promises to "get over it" and "not give in to that behavior anymore." I feel this was mostly because I didn't have any sign at the time that it could be acceptable to be kinky, given the right partner and circumstances.

Problems like this seem pretty widespread to me. I recently came across the following passage in Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors:

Henry Spencer Ashbee was part of a coterie of Victorian bibliophiles, collectors, and sexual adventurers who shared a theoretical and practical interest in flagellation. ... The idea of this group of rich, serious, outwardly respectable Victorian men getting together to discuss flagellation, no doubt in a bookish, scholarly, high-minded way, strikes me as infinitely depressing. It may have struck Ashbee's wife, Elizabeth, in much the same way, though no doubt she took it a lot more personally. In his introduction to Prohibitorum Ashbee tells us that flagellation "has caused the separation of man and wife" and I suspect there's a deliberate ambiguity there about whether he means its occurrence in books or in real life. ... Having a husband who's obsessively interested in flagellation may not be the recipe for a happy marriage, regardless of where he keeps his collection.

After reading this, all I could think was that having a husband who's obsessively interested in flagellation might be the recipe for a very happy marriage, given the right wife. I'm glad for kink events and sites like Fetlife and anything that can help kinky people find each other, thereby sparing themselves and prospective vanilla partners from the pain of this incompatibility.

I still think there's too much shame floating around. There's all kinds of titillation going around about Fifty Shades of Grey, but from what I've observed, there's still a heavy aura of shame about it -- shame directed at people who are turned on by the book, as well as shame within the book directed at the character of Grey himself.

Erotica in the Open

J. Blackmore asks on her blog whether erotica writers have become a community of people writing for each other, somehow losing touch with the mainstream world:

I'm not sure if, in a post-Fifty Shades world, we can afford to be that insular. That book is decidedly not OK with the BDSM sexuality of its, uh, hero, and yet it's being held up as a stunning success in the markets of kinky and erotic fiction. This makes me think that a lot of people are not finding us, don't know what other stuff is out there, or how to find it. That makes me incredibly sad.

The frenzy over Fifty Shades is bewildering to me. As people have commented before, Fifty Shades is not the first erotic book aimed at women to sell a boatload of copies (see, for example, Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden, and, um, the entire Harlequin catalog). To some degree, I think this is a media event -- people at various media outlets feel they have to follow each other writing articles about the inexplicable success of this sex book (sarcasm here), and that feeds more articles and more sales. Why this book? Who knows? -- it happens that way sometimes.

But is erotica insular? I do think things that are specifically erotica concentrate in small press editions, dark corners of bookstores, and e-book publishers who of necessity market to the tech-savvy. A big thing Fifty Shades has going for it is massive publisher support, cross-platform availability, displays in stores including the supermarket, and so on.

If Fifty Shades encourages more mainstream publishers to get into more erotica, that'll be good, I think. It might pull the erotica section out of those dark corners.

I think there's also a packaging issue going on -- Fifty Shades doesn't have a red cover on it, or a picture of a shirtless man, and I think some of the shock is that the book sells anyway. But this is part of a larger trend that's already been happening. Harlequin has its Luna line, which is fantasy romance. A lot of fantasy books for a lot of years have been full of explicit, erotic scenes, BDSM included (see, for example, Jacqueline Carey or Terry Goodkind). I respect Fifty Shades' sales, but it doesn't really seem unique to me. Sexy books have been selling well for quite some time, I think it's just that a lot of the world didn't realize what was going on.

I'm holding out hope that this will increase people's willingness to go looking for the erotica tag, rather than sticking to books that have a lot of sex but are being marketed primarily as something else (say, fantasy).

Disclaimers Matter

Several erotica publishers I have encountered require writers to have characters use condoms whenever it's at all reasonable for them to do so. Others include disclaimers warning that characters may not practice safe sex, but that this is not an endorsement of their behavior. It might seem like it's not a big deal (don't we all know about safe sex?), but I think it is.

One of the big moments of sexual maturity for me came when I learned to draw a line between fantasies I want to enact in real life and fantasies I only want to read about. This sort of disclaimer helps create that distinction.

It's occurred to me recently that such disclaimers are even more necessary when an author is writing about BDSM or various extreme acts. Fantasy BDSM is often quite different from the reality. There are obvious distinctions, like whether or not safe words are being used. But there are deeper ones that may only be clear to people with actual experience with BDSM. For example, I find that many authors don't depict emotional effects in a way I find accurate. I often don't see aftercare (for sub or dom or both). And the list goes on.

Given the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, this has been on my mind a lot. I read an interesting post by avflox on how the book portrays BDSM:

I wasn't far into the story when I realized that Fifty Shades of Grey not only sets people who live a BDSM lifestyle back decades in terms of being understood by society, but that it eroticizes dangerous practices as well, especially for those who are new to this aspect of sexuality and looking to incorporate it into their lives.

The post's author goes on to provide an in-depth analysis that's well worth reading.

But I think such problems aren't only present in Fifty Shades of Grey. I've read plenty of erotica that created similar misconceptions. I think that a disclaimer would be a nice start -- and, ironically, it's often the sort of thing I see from people who have more familiarity with the actual practice of BDSM, and might be inclined to write more realistically in the first place.

Here's some language from the disclaimer before Deliver Us, an m/m BDSM novel by Lynn Kelling:

This story depicts fictional BDSM. The characters are not models for the Safe, Sane, and Consensual forms embraced by most current practitioners of BDSM. The author takes license with the use of BDSM for dramatic effect. It is not recommended as a manual for how to practice BDSM.

I think this kind of thing is necessary -- perhaps even more necessary than having characters use condoms. Many of us were taught to use condoms in school, but many of us have never been taught much about BDSM. What I like about this disclaimer is that it might make someone Google "Safe, Sane, and Consensual" (the capital letters help there).

Kelling's novel is full of hot scenes that I wouldn't actually want to see happening in real life. That's fine -- the book makes clear that they're fantasy, and that they're not to be emulated.

Like it or not, erotica is the main kind of sex education a lot of people are getting -- I know it was for me. It's nice to see a dose of reality.

(For the record, Kelling's book is published by Forbidden Fiction, which has also published several stories of mine.)