Writing Erotica Forces Me to Think About Society

Erotic writers have a reason to be social activists too, especially if they are any shade of queer. Freedom to tell the truth about feelings and lifestyles can’t be completely separated from freedom to live honestly. In some ways, however, writing is exactly opposite from social action. Writing is usually done best alone, in a quiet room. Public displays of protest or solidarity require groups that grow into crowds. Filling the streets in support of an idea is a statement in itself.
-- from "Politically Incorrect" by Jean Roberta

I've been mulling over this quote for several days. More and more, my work has made me realize that I can't separate writing from social action. The deeper I delve into erotic questions that interest me, the more I find myself forced to take positions on issues I've spent a lot of my life afraid to speak up about.

For example, I'm genuinely and truly interested in characters who are seeking sexual autonomy—people who are developing a sense of what they like to do in bed and who they want to do it with. Often, this involves a difficult learning process of speaking up about discomfort or becoming aware of how it is that they came to be adults without learning this. Or it involves some sort of radical action (or at least action that feels radical to the characters) to claim their sexuality as their own. But this often leads me to larger societal considerations.


I'll use an example from a very short story of mine, "Too Much to Give," published in Go Deeper Press's Dirty Little Numbers.

Raul bought me a butt plug because he wants to fuck my ass. In that final frontier of male fantasy, he sees a chance to gain indelible proof that I love him.

As far as he knows, I’ve never even dared to remove the toy from its silk drawstring bag. To him, it’s as untouched and virginal as my asshole.

In fact, Raul's impression of the situation couldn't be more wrong. The narrator of this story loves ass play, but she does it on her own, in secret, with the defiant declaration, "My ass is my own."

I felt bold when I wrote this story because I was claiming ass play as something a woman would do for herself. To people immersed in erotica, that might not sound radical because we're surrounded by sex-positive refrains and stories that focus on female pleasure. I can tell you with authority, however, that in my own life, given the way I was raised, among the people I've known, in the relationships I've experienced, that is a radical, radical idea. My first experiences with anal sex were about coercion, trickery, pressure, and various men demanding love be proven to them. The story isn't autobiographical in a direct way, but it's certainly drawn from autobiography. I am incredibly aroused by anal play, but most of it is masturbation because I'm still feeling the echoes of all that coercion. And it's taken a lot of exploration to be able to claim this sort of play for myself, to make that part of my body feel as if it really belongs to me.


But here's where the story starts to widen into social action. Sure, I could tell this in a personal growth frame, talk about getting over difficult memories, or my own journey into expansive sexuality. But as I've explored this subject in this and many other stories, I come up against something bigger than me or individual players. There are fantastic books out there about anal sex and how it can and should be pleasurable for everyone involved (I particularly love The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women by Tristan Taormino). I've read plenty of articles about how commonly couples enjoy anal sex together. On the other hand, that's not the mainstream narrative I hear. I often hear anal sex brought up as the punchline to disturbing jokes, the threatened fate for a criminal sent to prison, the thing a woman has to do to keep her man, and more stuff I can't really bring myself to repeat. Books like Taormino's (or Rachel Kramer Bussel's collection of anal erotica, Baby Got Back) are an important counterpoint to the mainstream narrative, but when I was growing up, the idea that anal sex was something a woman might herself enjoy and do because she wanted to—well, that didn't even exist on my horizon.

The idea of sex as something enjoyed by both parties, the idea of enthusiastic consent, the idea of being able to withdraw consent in the midst of a sexual act—those are all things I've learned by reading "radical" books as an adult. And I don't think this is ultimately just about sex. I think it's about the seemingly radical idea that every person should have dignity and choice. I think it's about the need to get out of tired narratives about how "men only want one thing" and what "nice girls" do and don't do. I think this world desperately needs a broader understanding of gender and sexuality (because if you start reading stuff about gender theory and start to really understand where phrases like "all genders" are coming from, that's going to blow huge holes in gender essentialist ideas absorbed from society like the ones I just listed).

For me, on the tail of those realizations, I started to want to speak up and make change. I listen to the radio or watch television or read a book or play a video game, and I cringe at all the poison being transmitted. I'm sure I'm still believing some of it, or transferring some of it myself, but I want to do better.

So, what's happened to me over time as I write is that I'm feeling Roberta's point more and more. I started out as an erotica writer by playing with my fantasies, claiming personal power, working out my own questions, and thinking about what I might enjoy. Then I came up against all the places I don't let myself look, and I started to notice how fenced in I'd gotten over the course of my life, and I started to think about why that is. As I tried to free myself, I found that it's not just about me. I want a different world. I started to understand and have more compassion for struggles other people are having. I started to realize that I can't stand by.

I've noticed that it's more comfortable to talk about these stories individually, as personal narratives only, as things I need therapy for. But that's part of what I've started objecting to. I don't think it's an accident that most people will recognize the phrase, "Men just only want one thing," and I think we all need to be thinking about why that is and the damage that belief is doing to people of all genders.

This is only one example of the path my writing has taken me down, and perhaps it's a clumsy one. But I've got a bunch of these. Writing erotica and really thinking about it (and also reading erotica and really thinking about it) has forced me to consider race, class, gender expression, sexuality, ideology—a huge list of social issues, basically. I never wanted to be a social activist—I don't like confrontation and I'm often afraid to speak up. I went to a protest in college once and left because I got scared.


The ideas are showing up, though, more and more—my zombie erotic romance, Run for Your Love, turned out to be about pacifism, domestic violence, and class warfare. Untouched, the book I just wrapped, could be described as a story about how one woman claims her sexual desires and needs as important and valid in their own right, even when they go against the desires of her super-hot, approved-by-society boyfriend (and if you'd like to have a very long conversation with me, sit me down and ask me why that was hard to pull off).

Whenever I talk this way, I'm afraid that readers will think I'm abandoning hotness for politics and that my work is going to become a series of treatises. That's not what's happening, though. As I explained in my post about revising for emotional honesty, this stuff is making my work hotter, more honest, more urgent. What's sexier than rebellion, after all? What's sexier than doing the forbidden, transgressing the rules, breaking out of what's always been and forging a path into something new, scary, and exhilarating?

I'm sure I'll be talking about this more, but for now I want to end with the question I've got about Roberta's quote. She contrasts writing and social action, saying writing is done alone and social action is often accomplished by filling the streets. But I find myself seeking community lately, discussing politics with other writers. I find myself wanting to fill the shelves with the sort of resistance I'm describing. I want to see a bunch of us writers making books that demand new and different cover art—people with different body types, people of varying races, people doing all sorts of things with all sorts of different people. Yes, I have to spend time alone to get the words down, but I've been wondering lately if writers ought to be gathering in groups more somehow. Should we be taking a page from social action?

Shameless

"She was his beautiful, impossible creature: a woman, not reared to live in shame." -- from "Sealed" by Laila Blake, published in A Princess Bound: Naughty Fairy Tales for Women (ed. Kristina Wright).

This story is a complex exploration of the myth of the selkie, wound up with the concept of consent, with some breathplay and rope not only creating erotic tension but symbolizing the nature of the relationship between the main characters. Laila Blake is a masterful writer, and it's well worth reading.

I want to talk about the line I quoted, though. This line just breaks my heart and makes my gut twist. Blake's description feels true to me—a woman not reared to live in shame would seem like a beautiful, impossible creature indeed. I just don't want it to be true.

I've thought lately about how, despite so much effort to focus on female desire and female pleasure in much of the erotica that's being published, there are these moments when the curtain slips and one can see how low the societal standard for those things is. That we should take shame for granted—that the idea of being free of it should be an impossible dream... I feel like all of us ought to be up in arms about that.

Jean Roberta engages with this a great deal in her work. Her book The Flight of the Black Swan is an impressive envisioning of sex enjoyed without shame, and I'm sure it wasn't easy to write.

I notice in a lot of my reading the many signals that writers are sending that this particular thing is "nice" erotica, not "shameful" erotica. Especially in erotic romance, there are all these things—the heroine is acting out of character, overcome by the hotness of the hero. She'd never normally behave this way. It's been a long time since she had sex really. A lot of this amounts to, "She's not a slut." And she needs to not be a slut or else it seems like the sex becomes too illicit to be enjoyed. There's a flip side, of course—the eroticization of shame. That's a powerful tool, and maybe important for resistance.

More and more, though, I'm thinking about the question Roberta's asking in her work. What would this look like without shame?

And here's my question: Why are we taking "reared to live in shame" for granted?

On Why It's Hard to Draw a Line Between Porn and Erotica

Periodically, I post thoughts on the porn/erotica distinction. This is one of the best ones I've found, again from Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors:

Most lines drawn between morally-acceptable expressions of sex (including literary erotica) and bad, perverse, unhealthy expressions of sex (including "porn") are scary because the vehemence of the line-drawers is only matched by the arbitrariness of the line.

This is from an essay called "Drawing the Line."

Being Defined by the Past

Another snip from Jean Roberta's excellent Sex Is All Metaphors:

I wonder why sex is usually treated as an exceptional activity which must be judged differently from every other kind. Most people acquire job histories over time as well as sexual track records, yet few middle-aged brain surgeons are permanently stigmatized for having flipped burgers in a part- time job as pre-med students. No one wants to be defined for all time as they were in the past.

This quote is from an essay called, "Retro-Shame, or the Persistence of the Past." I don't have much to add, except that I really like this point.

The Most Fun Suggestion I've Heard for Cooking Up a New Story

Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors includes a great essay called "The Fickle Muse," about how to cook up new ideas when nothing seem fresh. Advice about writer's block abounds, but I really like the physicality of Roberta's discussion of it:

Focusing on each part of your body in turn, from feet to head or vice versa, is the best way I know of to reawaken the Muse. And despite what prudish authority figures have told you about the animal stupidity of human flesh, physical feelings are rarely crude or simple. (For that matter, even animals have their own wisdom, as pet- owners know.)

Just for the moment, data on which genres are still selling well in a troubled publishing market have no relevance. Feet, arms, tummy and all the other parts connected to them don't care about the market. Neither do they care about deadlines, guidelines, negative reviews, wars in the blogosphere, or grammatical issues. There is a place for all those things, but they don't belong in a quiet room prepared for the Muse.

I don't really believe in writer's block as its own special thing, but I know slumps occur in people's lives and jam them up in various ways for various reasons. Roberta's advice seems like it would be good in any such case, and the full version of the essay gets a little more sensual in its description of how the body can be listened to.

Why Sex Writing Shouldn't Always Be Nice

I recently started reading Jean Roberta's Sex Is All Metaphors, and came across a great passage on the issue of "sex-positive" writing. As she explains, many editors ask that erotica be sex-positive, which generally means avoiding a certain standard list of squicks (including things like very extreme violence). Sometimes, the sense of "sex-positive" is extended to mean a general attitude about sex within the story -- that it should be empowering, pleasurable, and so forth.

I like to write and read sex-positive stories, certainly. I have a story for another time about how sex-positive erotica is actually what made me understand feminism and become willing to call myself a feminist.

However, not all of my writing and reading is sex-positive, and there are a lot of complicated reasons for that. Roberta gives a nice account of why sex writing needs a range that includes the very unpleasant:

If sex is all metaphors, it can't always be a simple way to get happy. Sex can be a desperate, doomed attempt to bridge a gap in credibility or understanding. It can be an extreme form of exploitation. It can be the event that turns a high school girl who is desperate to fit in into a target for contempt from everyone she knows. It can be an attempt to prove something improvable. Sex can be an act of self-hatred, or hatred of the other. It can be the means by which invading armies literally colonize the bodies of civilians, hoping to impregnate as many "enemy women" as possible. Sex, broadly defined, can destroy both body and soul.

Should erotic writers avoid saying anything disturbing about sex? The terms "adult" and "mature" are often used as euphemisms for sexual content, yet to avoid mentioning any negative emotions (guilt, hatred, rage, fear, despair, regret, etc.) in connection with sex is to limit oneself to a fairly childish view of the world.

I started writing erotica because it's the genre where I feel most honest as a writer. It's the subject on which I really have something to say. And I'd definitely be lying if I pretended all my experience with sex has been pleasant or positive. Sometimes, I feel strange about the range of my work. I worry that some of my dark work for Forbidden Fiction, for example, would freak out readers who enjoyed, say, my light piece in the Cleis erotic romance anthology, Passion. I also worry that readers who like the dark stuff will find my happy endings fluffy. But I need that full range to say all of what I have to say about sex, and I try not to censor myself in either direction.