Modern-Day Sexy Bibliographies

If you're into the stuff I've been blogging about the last few days -- the mysteries of old forbidden books -- I must draw your attention to Scissors and Paste Bibliographies, which compiles information about old erotic books, such as a catalog of books published by the German Olympia Press.

You can pick up a lot of interesting detail there on the history of erotic publishing. See, for example, the fascinating page on Brandon House Library Editions, where you can see covers for books with excellent titles such as Clit Clique and Maidenhead Stories, as well as pick up some interesting historical notes on "the effective collapse of censorship [in the United States] in 1967."

A hat tip, as usual, to Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors, for alerting me to the work of Patrick J. Kearney, who maintains the site.

And An Index Can Be Sexy, Too

Did you think it was just bibliographies? Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors presses the case of the sex appeal of the index as well:

Actually, there are times when I think the book's index is the best part of, and possibly even an excuse for, the whole enterprise [referring to the Victorian sex history, My Secret Life]. You might, for instance, look up "Spending" and find the following citations:

my first
involuntary
on writing paper
on a silk dress
on silk stockings
against a looking glass
against a door
in a woman's hand
copiously
baudy ejaculations when
is the most ecstatic moment of life
happiness of dying whilst

This makes me think fiction ought to have the index, too. I suppose there's something similar going on with tags -- which I have certainly used to explore sites such as Oysters and Chocolate. On the other hand, the list puts things in a much funnier format. I'd love to see one of the erotic novels I love gifted with an index like this.

The Sexy Trail of Ownership

One thing I appreciate about Geoff Nicholson's book Sex Collectors is that it reminds me of the thrill of the chase of erotic objects -- the way it is when they have to be physical and they have to be found. With the exception of a few serendipitous volumes (such as a copy of Best American Erotica 1996 that I found at a library book sale when I was, ahem, probably a little too young for it), I started reading erotica online because I could actually handle buying it online.

It still makes me nervous to buy a physical copy of a Harlequin romance novel, or to be seen in public with it, though I force myself to do these things occasionally as a sort of private political statement. A lot of my erotica is electronic, partly because a lot of it is published in e-book only form, but also because it's a lot easier to buy Women Who Love Wearing Leashes Volume Three (*) when only me, my credit card company, Google and whichever technology companies are currently tracking me are likely to know about it.

But Nicholson is reminding me of how cool a physical object can be -- not just because it's nice to have something you can manhandle a little, but also because it can be sexy to think about who else has manhandled that very item.

See, for example, his discussion of My Secret Life (**):

published between 1888 and 1894, the great Victorian eleven-volume, two-and-a-half-thousand page, infinitely obsessive and detailed account of one man's genuinely extraordinary sex life.

Patrick J. Kearney ... says that My Secret Life "is probably the most collectible and desirable of erotic texts, but certainly not the rarest." It was first published in Amsterdam, though the book itself claims to have been published in Belgium. ... Previous owners of examples from that first edition are said to have included the Satanist Aleister Crowley, silent comedian Harold Lloyd, movie director Josef von Sternberg, and George Mountbatten, the second Marquess of Milford Haven. It's perfectly possible that some of these people, especially the Hollywood crowd, owned the same copy at different times. Today I believe there are copies in the British Library, in the Kinsey Institute, in the private hands of Karl-Ludwig Leonhardt, and in the library of the late Gerard Nordmann.

While it can be kind of disgusting to think of who might have pleasured him or herself with whatever sex book or object you're holding, in this case I find the trail of ownership pretty sexy, mysterious, glamorous, and so on. The forbidden nature of the object makes knowing about it or owning it feel like being part of an exciting secret society.

I don't think this is just about anonymously written Victorian literature. I once moved into an apartment that came with a stack of sexy romance novels left by the previous tenant -- the kind that, at the time, I'd never have had the courage to go buy at the store, but was very interested in reading. The mystery of the discovery, and the physicality of the experience, added to the appeal of the books. I've often wondered about that previous owner, who in my head was a knowing teenager with some idea of how much those books would be appreciated by a fellow.

I love e-books, not least for their convenience and the publishing possibilities they've opened for many writers today. However, passages like the one I quoted make me remember why the smell of paper can be so exciting.

(*) Not an actual book, as far as I know. Though go ahead and write or publish it if you want, because I probably would buy it.
(**) For those with a healthy sense of irony, My Secret Life is available for the Kindle, here. I also found a few copies of the paperback Grove Press edition of the book.

If You Thought Bibliographies Weren't Sexy...

Check out these bibliography titles -- they're lists of erotic books compiled by the Victorian collector Henry Spencer Ashbee:

Index librorum prohibitorum: An Index of Forbidden Books (1877)
Centuria librorum absconditum: A Hundred Books Deserving to Be Hidden (1879)
Catena librorum tacendorum: A Chain of Books Which Should Not Be Spoken Of (1885)

As usual, the forbidden sounds quite delicious. If some publisher wants to start a line called, "A Hundred Books Deserving to Be Hidden," I think I will buy a subscription to the whole series. It makes me want to read every single one.

Hat tip to Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors, which is my current ongoing source of interesting sexual errata.

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.

Sex Marks You

This passage from Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors shocked me:

Sex and travel: in one model, what they might be considered to have in common is a kind of invisibility. You emerge from sex with, at most, a few scratches and bite marks. You return from your travels with a suntan. Sooner or later they all fade away. But not everyone wants this kind of invisibility. When sex and travel are over, you may still wish to have a keepsake -- a ring, a locket, a tattoo in the case of a sex partner; a model of the Eiffel Tower or a pack of lewd playing cards bought at the Musée de l'Érotisme as a souvenir of your travels. And very likely you will have photographs: pictures of the loved one, pictures of what you did on your holidays. These are ways of preserving the traces of a potentially all-too-traceless experience.

Overcome, I wrote in the margin, "Only a man could write this paragraph."

I generally enjoy Geoff Nicholson's writing, but for me this really underscored a key difference between male and female sexual experience. As a woman, unless I'm having lesbian sex, the idea of pregnancy is always looming. The sentence, "You emerge from sex with, at most, a few scratches and bite marks" seems absurd to me, because, at most, you emerge with a baby nine months later. Now, I spent my teen years in the South, and there were probably a lot of good conservative dollars put into educating me about the dangers of being a slut and the permanent life consequences thereof.

Let's also not forget about STDs, because you could emerge from sex with a life-threatening illness, too -- and that's something that also affects men.

To be fair, I understand where Nicholson is coming from. I've had the urge to mark someone, to claim that person, or to be marked by them. I've been aware of how only air held us together, some series of choices that could easily be revoked. I know what he's talking about.

But for me, this experience has always been fraught with tension, because on the other hand I'm aware of what a high-stakes game sex can be. How many times after a one-night stand did I simultaneously wish I could hang onto the person and worry that I'd collected some permanent and unwanted souvenir of the event.

I've never had a child, but I'm aware of the sexual allure of the idea of producing a life from a sex act -- in fact, a key part of the heterosexual sexual experience. It's stunning to me that Nicholson could forget that.

Sex Is Not Just Fun

Geoff Nicholson in Sex Collectors, writing about The Sexual Life of Catherine M.:

What I like best about the book is that at no point does it ever suggest that sex is fun. Sex is far, far more serious and important than that.

As an erotica writer, I can attest to how much work it can be to make sex fun, especially when I'm going for just fun. Some of the best-paying erotica publishers talk about wanting work that tells a story and has something at stake for the main character, while at the same time emphasizing pleasure.

This is indeed a tricky proposition. Leaving aside the issue of poor writing, which just makes sex feel fake, sex can often become heavy, sad, angry, regretful, uncertain, or poignant. I'm interested in sex in all its forms, so I like writing about it of all types. I like reading a fun sex story, but I also like reading a dark exploration.

Nicholson's assertion becomes particularly interesting to me when I think about what sex is like for me personally. I know how much art it takes to make sex sound fun when I write about it. How often is it fun in practice?

I would say that the times that are really fun are special, but there's also usually a lot of other emotion swirling around on the side. I remember once getting on top of my partner and riding him for a long time in a wild, sweaty way, using my full strength and stamina. It was incredibly fun. I came a lot, and I think he was really into the idea of my being so unstoppably turned on by him. It's a fun memory, but when I think back to it, I also think about the role of shame. I was really worried he would think I was weird, because of the faces or noises I was making, or because of what I was doing. He didn't, and so along with the idea of fun, the memory feels liberating and poignant to me.

I think this is the sort of thing Nicholson is talking about. Feeling liberated from deep personal shame is serious and important, not just fun. Erotica often has this subtext, and I love it for that. Holding out the promise of pleasurable fun is also really important, because to make it work and feel real, you have to be able to write characters who are truly capable of enjoyment, which often means characters who have moved beyond deep personal shame.

(Incidentally, I had already planned to read The Sexual Life of Catherine M. after I finish Sex Collectors. I will likely post a few things about it, too).

Originality is Overrated

I've worried about repetition, or things growing stale, in a lot of ways. As a writer, I don't want to be seen as writing the same kind of story all the time. As a partner, I don't want to use the same turn-ons and techniques every time. And sometimes I worry about whether I'm stunting myself horribly by using the same go-to masturbation fantasies for, like, my entire life.

Here are some reassuring words from Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors:

A moment's consideration suggests that a sex life consisting of never-repeated wonders would be as bizarre as it would be exasperating, to say nothing of impossible. The whole point of sex, surely, is that it's all about repetition. We know what we like, what gives us pleasure, and so we repeat those things. There'll be variations and novelties, there'll be inventiveness within the form, there'll probably be a few surprises, but the idea that every sex act might be some previously unexperienced and then unrepeatable form of escstasy is just plain silly. If it's any good, why wouldn't you want to repeat it?

It's a good point, and well worth remembering. Let's not underestimate the classics, or forget the pleasure they hold.

Who's Reading All This Erotica, Anyway?

People so frequently seem uncomfortable with the idea that someone is reading erotica, and I've seen lots of disingenuous attempts to identify who is doing all these reading. Most recently, this has come up in relation to Fifty Shades of Grey, with all kinds of weird speculation about "mommy porn." But it's an old conversation, it's often about shifting shame onto some group that the speaker doesn't belong to, and it usually sounds pretty silly. Here's a great example from Geoff Nicholson's book Sex Collectors.

[Gershon] Legman tells us in The Horn Book that collectors of erotica are either the "inexperienced young" in search of information and education or the "old and impotent...searching in books or pictures for the reviving of their drooping sexuality." "Few collectors exist between these limits," he says, and he reckons the young are in the majority. This seems so transparently untrue and such a downright weird thing to say that you have to wonder what his agenda is. When he starts talking about "these children, with their hopeless pornographic pamphlets, grotesquely illustrated as often as not with smeary photographs of old time pimps and whores in pointy shoes and torn stockings," his scholarly credibility seems to be sprinting rapidly toward the exit.

The quoted language sounds patently absurd, and you have to wonder where these assertions are coming from. I suspect a lot of the "mommy porn" speculation is going to sound just as absurd in a few years.

People read erotica. Which people? Plenty of people.

(And for those following along at home, I've indeed quoted several times recently from Sex Collectors. It's a really interesting book, and I'm likely to do it some more. It's on the Kindle if you want to check it out for yourself.)

Hey, Hey, Pompeii

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Art and Pornography

There was recently some discussion online about using "the wet test" when evaluating about erotica. I did a couple posts, one about reading erotica for reasons other than arousal, and one about writing erotica for reasons other than arousal.

I came across a great passage over the weekend that sums up my position, from Geoff Nicholson's book Sex Collectors:

Some people used to say that art was good because it was celebratory and porn was bad because it was masturbatory, but now we all say, what's so wrong with masturbation? Camille Paglia says, "What people call pornography is simply the moment when the physicality of the act becomes obtrusive to them." I say the difference between art and pornography is this: you can masturbate to art if you want, but you don't have to. It still has an appeal and a function even if it doesn't get you aroused. Whereas if a piece of pornography doesn't get you aroused, then it's a complete failure, and few things are worse than failed pornography.

I found this a useful distinction. I think what I was trying to get at with my earlier posts was that I see erotica as art. However, when I started to read it, I read it as porn -- I wanted to get off. I think its purpose is still confused, and writers and readers approach it as art or porn or both, not always being clear what they're going for.