Below is a list of each of the Coming Together contributors and the date they’ll be publishing their post. Oh, yes, I’m in there like a dirty shirt, on February 3. My charity was the ACLU.

1st – Alessia Brio
2nd – Lisabet Sarai
3rd – Remittance Girl
4th – Heather Lin
5th – Ann Regentin
6th – Victoria Blisse
7th – Lisabet Sarai
8th – Sacchi Green
9th – Gia Blue
10th – Xan West
11th – Erobintica
12th – Andrea Dale
13th – Jean Roberta
14th – Nobilis Reed
15th – Robert Buckley
16th – Brenna Lyons
17th – C. Sanchez-Garcia
18th – Amelia June
19th – M. Christian
20th – Teresa Lamai
21st – Tilly Greene
22nd – Giselle Renarde
23rd – Aliyah Burke
24th – Annabeth Leong
25th – Raziel Moore
26th – Allison Wonderland
27th – Gayle C. Straun
28th – Daniel Burnell
29th – Lee Benoit

There are prizes to be won and e-books to give away, including my novel The Waiting Room.  Please join us, comment, blog it, and support the wonderful selection of personally chosen charities.  And remember, cold charity is Dickensian, but hot charity is Coming Together.

As one literary critic observed, “By the early 1990s, a peculiarly British form of disapproval had grown out of the notion that sex and serious literature made for uncomfortable bedfellows.”(Akbar 2010).

In his interview with the Washington Post’s Carole Burns, Martin Amis has famously said: “Good sex is impossible to write about” because ” you lose the universal and succumb to the particular.”(Post 2003). I find this an almost impenetrable statement. Either he means that no good literature ever deals with ‘the particular’ – which is a patently untrue statement. Or he means that ‘good sex’ is somehow less universal than bad sex. One has to wonder whether he’s simply coming up with badly formed excuses for his own limitations, or he has personally suffered a very bad sex life.

Howard Jacobson, in responding to critics who complained that his novel, ‘The Act of Love,’ did not arouse them, he said that it wasn’t his intention to do so (Akbar 2010).  But, in fact, there are certain portions of Jacobson’s book that would indeed be extremely arousing to any fetishist turned on by humiliation and/or domination (Jacobson 2010).

It’s not that literary novelists aren’t writing about sex. According to James Wood, “Houellebecq has become famous both for the pornographic fervor of his writing and for the theorizing he likes to do around his sex scenes” but his are not, it could be argued, representations of naturalistic eroticism (Woods 2012). Quite the opposite: they are perhaps an extreme example of how many contemporary literary writers have resigned themselves to writing about sex.

There is a sense that sex can only be written about ‘authentically’ when it is represented devoid of emotion or even self-reflection on the part of the characters. It must be portrayed with dispassion, mechanistically else it devolve into “erotica, with its cheapening effect of sexual arousal” (Akbar 2010).

It is ironic, then, that this studied avoidance of emotional, ethereal or passionate sex scenes has in fact led to literary sex scenes that are either totally absent or hyperpornographic: lacking depth, humanity or context.  The artificial and mannered decision to ensure that the reader’s experience is not cheapened by sexual arousal has, in fact, led to acclimatizing them to sexually fetishistic extremes: depersonalization, humiliation and extreme emotional disengagement. Very much in the same way that the Victorian sublimation of sex led so unsurprisingly to erotic strategies that now dominate the world of kink, such as erotic power relationships and sexualized corporal punishment.

It’s all very well for Amis, Jacobson and Houllebecq to publically rue the commercialization and trivialization of sex within our culture, because this is an undeniable social reality (Attwood 2009), but why do they insist not only on representing it, but also perpetuating it?

____________________

Akbar, A. (2010). “Bad sex please, we’re British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit? .” The Independent. Retrieved Jan 28, 2012, from http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/bad-sex-please-were-british-can-fictive-sex-ever-have-artistic-merit-2137741.html.

Attwood, F. (2009). Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Western Culture. London, I B Tauris & Co Ltd.

Jacobson, H. (2010). The Act of Love. London, Vintage.

Perkins, M. (1992). The Secret Record. New York, Rinoceros.

Burns, Carole. (2003). “Off the Page: Martin Amis.” Off the Page. Retrieved Jan 28, 2012, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36420-2003Oct29.html.

Woods, J. (2012) Off the Map: Michel Houellebecq’s naked nomads. The New Yorker 78

pornography, n.

Etymology:  < Hellenistic Greek pi (adjective) that writes about prostitutes ( < ancient Greek pi- (see porno- comb. form) + – -graph comb. form) + -y suffix3 (compare -graphy comb. form), perhaps after French pornographie treatise on prostitution (1800), obscene painting (1842), description of obscene matters, obscene publication (1907 or earlier).
1.
a. The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; printed or visual material containing this. ¹

This is the OED entry, and definition (a) is the one which most people use.  I find the very definition to be problematic because I challenge the distinction between ‘erotic’ and ‘aesthetic’ feelings. Many feelings regarding representations of desire and pleasure are often both erotic and aesthetic.  Also, inherent in the definition is an implication that erotic feelings are shallow and aesthetic feelings are deep.

I find it helpful to reach back to the etymology of the word from the ancient Greek porno-graphos: writing about prostitutes.  It allows me to draw a broad distinction between the commercial and non-commercial arenas of eroticism.  So this is where I’d like to draw my philosophical line. My working definition of pornography is any material – written, photographic, filmic or interactive – that involves the exchange of money for material solely produced to elicit sexual arousal. And, I’d like to include in this any material that attempts to mimic pornography: i.e. certain types of amateur porn in which memes common to commercial pornography are obviously present.

Why do I focus on the ‘commercial’? Am I simply anti-capitalist?

No. Please don’t get me wrong. Sex has always been a commodity. Sexual gratification could always be purchased for a going rate in almost every society throughout history. I don’t, on principle, have anything against it.

However, the involvement of money brings the transaction into the public arena. Money, by its nature, is a public thing. Something that can be purchased for money is a product in the marketplace, and entails the civic and legal attributes that all public affairs do. The minute anything is ‘for sale’ is the moment it begs to be judged on solely economic terms. We can begin to discuss fair market value, value for money, fair exchange. Marketized sex becomes, then, fundamentally quantifiable.  If I pay for an hour with a prostitute but do not have an orgasm, I have a right to complain that I did not get what I paid for. If I purchase a porn video but it doesn’t arouse me enough to facilitate masturbation, I can complain that it wasn’t worth the money. Quantification has an interesting effect of decontextualizing whatever is being quantified.

What I find particularly problematic is that so many people have a problem keeping the paradigms straight in their heads.

A prostitute exchanges sexual pleasure (to their client) for money. They get the money, their clients get the pleasure.  Porn movies make products to sexually arouse their clients in exchange for money.  The actors in porn films get paid. They have sex that is recorded and consumed by others for a fee.  Pornographic magazines take pictures of sexually arousing situations and sell copies of the magazine. There is no mutuality of pleasure involved here. There is a transaction of pleasure for money.

It may be in the marketing interests of many types of commercial sex retailers (prostitutes, pornographers, strippers, cam-sex providers, etc.) to pretend that what they are doing involves mutual pleasure (and at times, it even might be true) but the fundamental structure of the transaction an economic one. Otherwise, they would not be in business.

People who have sex together, or get each other off, without the exchange of money are working on a different paradigm. It may indeed be just as transactional – pleasure for pleasure, pleasure for affection, pleasure of admiration – but it is fundamentally private because it doesn’t involve the transfer of capital.

This also means that, because money is not involved, the experience doesn’t naturally devolve into the quantifiable, which means it’s less likely to be decontextualized.

So, although I do write extremely explicit material at times, and there are portions of my writing that are written to be arousing to the reader, it is never pornography.  Because I do not write erotic fiction for money.

‘Aha!’ you say, ‘but you sell your books! Your stories appear in anthologies that are for sale!’ This is true enough.  My work may end up in an object that can be purchased for money, but its birth was never predicated on the payment of money. I did not write it for the purpose of receiving money for it. No piece of work I have subsequently had published has not first appeared on my blog for free.  So, if you’ve been my textual lover by visiting my blog on a semi regular basis, you have had the opportunity to consume everything I’ve ever written, free.

I have stumbled across readers who are so used to seeing their own sexual arousal as transactional, that they leave nasty little comments about how something I wrote didn’t turn them on and they’ve ‘wasted’ their time.  They are so used to viewing sex within an economic model, that even a reading experience that is absolutely free must, somehow, represent ‘good value for money’ to them, even when no money is being exchanged.

For a very long time, I’ve tried to understand why I write and post my work. At it’s most basic, it might easily be described as a form literary exhibitionism. I write to be read in the way some women take off their clothes in public for the pleasure of being looked at. But I’m not, by nature, an exhibitionistic person. In fact, quite the opposite: I am essentially voyeuristic.

So, it is a bit more complicated than that. If being read was my only goal and gratification, I could write much more explicit and immediately sexual things. I’d have a far larger readership. Being ‘read’ is not enough for me. I need to feel you are engaging with me over the landscape of the story.

It is rare that I write anything that does not, at its core, have questions attached: why is this erotic to us? How does desire come to constitute our sense of self? How does pleasure/pain become a transcendental experience? Where is the line between rage and lust? The list of questions I am asking in my fiction goes on and on. Sometimes I proffer possible answers, sometimes I don’t. But there is an intense gratification for me in the communion I feel with readers when I know we are both drawn to and perplexed by these questions. It is a type of pleasure I feel. Especially when readers comment.

Anyway, I’ve been blogging a lot lately about the lack of well-written or arousing sex scenes in literary fiction, and musing over the possible reasons writers might purposefully chose to represent sex this way. The ERWA post goes on look in depth at what, according to reader-response theorists is actually taking place in the mind of readers as they read. And, taking that into account, some strategies for triggering lived as opposed to mediate sexual memories in the reader’s mind.

Please hop over and have a read: Writing Erotic: lived vs mediated experience

Also, while you’re there, read Ashley Lister’s very good practical post on writing exercises. It’s excellent!

However, Lauren posed a very valid question and I think it deserves a considered exploration:

“In all other scenarios, budding writers are drilled to show and not tell in their writing, so why is sex getting special treatment?”

First, I’d like to be upfront and say that I don’t have a pat answer. In fact, this question forms one of the branches of what I’d very much like to research in my thesis.

It would be easy to say that we’re hung up about sex. Well, we are. But are we more hung up about it now than we were in the 50′s and 60′s? Because those decades saw the publication of a number of novels which were quickly recognized for their literary merit and contained very explicit sex scenes and/or sexual scenarios that would send the legal teams of major publishers running for the woods these days.

Frankly, I don’t think many of the most acclaimed literary writers today are shy about writing sex. Nor do I believe most of them could not do a pretty good job of constructing a very effective and steamy erotic scene.  Perhaps Martin Amis doesn’t feel up to the task, but Howard Jacobson certainly is. Most good writers are. I think they are choosing not to.  And it needs to be noted that a number of them of them choose not to write graphic violence either.

I think there was a time – in the later part of the 20th Century – when it was considered revolutionary and innovative for a ‘serious’ novelist to write explicit and erotic sex.  These writers were writing this material at a time when, for the most part, media depictions of sex were very conservative. It’s worth remembering that at the same time that Miller published the Tropic of Cancer, (originally published in France in 1934 but not legally published in the US until 1961), Hollywood still had the one foot on the floor rule – an interpretation of the Hays Code (basically, bedroom love scenes required on of the actors to keep one foot on the floor).

It’s also worth remembering that, although the 1970′s US saw the legalization of ‘adult’ films and the establishment of movie theatres which showed pornographic movies, there was still a very strong class element as to who and who didn’t go to see porn. There was a whole class of people who thought it beneath them to be aroused that way, but felt it was okay to be aroused by a good piece of literature. But with the innovation of home video, one no longer had to be seen entering a ‘dirty movie theatre’. One could watch what one wanted in the privacy of one’s own home.

The rise of feminism in the 70′s and the focus on the ‘male gaze’ (Lacanian in origin but appropriated and expanded upon in Laura Mulvey’s seminal and groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema“) also probably played a significant part in painting visual pornography as fundamentally evil.  So, whether you were from the right or the left, it wasn’t considered acceptable to watch pornography, but it was perfectly fine to read the hot bits in Miller.

Sex has always been used to sell products, but during the height of the golden years of advertising, the strategy became much more focused. Psychology was used to measure its efficacy.  And progressively, from the late 60′s onwards there are very few products which haven’t used sex either directly or indirectly as a marketing ploy. And the trend has continued with increasingly explicit associations between sex and perfume, alcohol, watches, airlines. Sexuality is now considered the single most powerful tool of marketing.

And, of course, although prostitution is still illegal in many countries, sex is obviously used to sell sex in whatever ways sex may be sold. Most notably as pornography, telephone and video sex and virtual sexual services on the internet.

In the past ten years, the appetite for sex scenes in TV, in music videos and in film has been so great, it is virtually impossible NOT to have – for instance – a  film which involves lovers that does not have at least one scene of them humping away at each other in bed. It really doesn’t matter whether it is acted or real.

So one theory I have is that, because sex is such a present part of mainstream media – in both advertising and entertainment – many writers who pride themselves on taking their readers into new, forbidden and seldom traveled ‘landscapes’ in their fiction, feel that sexuality is such a familiar landscape, there’s no compelling reason to take their readers there.

And here, as a writer of erotic fiction with pretensions of literariness, is where I fundamentally disagree. Because the imagery we have come to identify in many forms of media as sexual bears almost no resemblance to real human sexual experience.  We see sex in movies, on TV, in porn, in still images and we have all seen them so often, they have become the signifier of sex. It doesn’t matter that they’re acted or over dramatized or abstracted or stylized. This is what we are constantly told that sex looks like. And since we so very rarely see examples of what real sex looks like, it’s not surprising that, in our minds, any reference to sex in something like text is far more likely to trigger mental images of commercial pornography than it is to trigger memories of our own sexual experiences.

I guess this is why I return to the discussion over what pornography is and why I feel that erotic fiction should be fundamentally different. I don’t think it is a ‘cheap trick’ to arouse a reader, but I do think it’s a cheap trick to do it using imagery that is clearly reminiscent of commercial pornography. When I write erotic scenes, I expend a serious amount of energy trying to make sure they are more likely to trigger memories of real experience than memories of mediated ones. And even when I write fiction about situations that most of my readers may not have experienced, whenever there’s actual sex, I do my level best to keep to my goal of triggering real memory.

I honestly think this is what a lot of literary writers fear – that if they write explicit and erotic sex scenes, they’ll be triggering memories of the last UPorn clip someone saw, instead of lived experiences in their readers. And perhaps that’s because those are the images and memories that are triggered for them in writing the scenes. Perhaps this is why literary writers choose such empty, soulless, unerotic sex scenes when they do decide to write one: because we don’t often have mediated representations of bad sex.

But, what I’d like to say to the likes of people like Martin Amis is… don’t be lazy. Don’t refuse to write erotic passages just because it’s hard to write with a sense of authenticity.  It IS hard, but that’s a challenge. The human mind is flexible and our language is rich. Writers who elect to write only what comes easily to them should consider hanging up their laptop and taking up other professions.

“Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can’t do — like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.” Martin Amis

“The only point in writing a ‘he puts that in there and she puts this in here’ scene is to arouse, and I’m not interested in doing that. Some critics who should have known better complained that my last novel, The Act of Love, didn’t arouse them. It wasn’t meant to. It was a book ‘about’ compulsive jealousy. It wasn’t intended to make them jealous or otherwise titillate them.” Howard Jacobson

“All the same pornography has no place in a serious book…It’s not the posture of people in bed which reveals their characters. You don’t advance the story by giving details of their favourite positions. You merely attract the reader’s attention towards very trivial points.” Graham Greene

“The best sex scenes are the ones that are quite clinical and precise. Colm Tóibín’s short stories are quite good, there is a good sex scene in Bret Easton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms; Dyer wrote perfectly reasonable scenes in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He just tells you what happens; what’s not good is the over-florid writing that imbues sex with transcendental meaning.” Jonathan Beckman

“Nobody needs it anymore…Not that long ago, people would read quality fiction (as well as, of course, lots of rubbish) to discover what actually went on during sex, how people did it. Virgins wanted information, and experienced people wanted inspiration. If you were too young or poor to buy pornography or instruction books and had to go to the library, it was a lot less embarrassing checking out Lady Chatterley than a sex manual.” Rhoda Koenig, co-founder of The Bad Sex Awards

 There are a very few literary fiction writers who use sex, like any other part of life, as fodder for their fiction and write it accordingly: good when the sex is good for their characters and bad when the sex is supposed to be bad.

But on the whole, the the last 30 years have seen a massive trend – oh, what the heck, call it a fashion – to represent fictional sex with as much eroticism as a barium enema. And the telling thing is, they do it even when the sex between the characters is supposed to be excellent and meaningful.

This studied avoidance of leaving their readers with even a moment of arousal is telling, in my view. It tells me that they still believe they are the ultimate makers of meaning. It tells me that, although they feel perfectly free to engender sadness, frustration, disgust, etc. in their readers, they feel that sexual arousal is somehow beyond the pale. This from a group of people writing in the 21st century. Please don’t tell me we’ve lost our hangups about sex. This valuing of all reader-responses over arousal screams of a truly unnatural social engagement with the concept of eroticism.

I write many sex scenes. Some are written with an eye to arousing the reader, some are written specifically to preclude it, some I leave open – with the traces of erotic imagery there for those who want to indulge. Many of my sex scenes are written with a view to triggering an ambiguous sort of arousal. A state of ‘critical’ arousal which, if I’ve written it well, invites my reader to be both aroused and analytical.

Maybe this is because I’m a woman and I know, despite the stereotyping, that both men and women can rub their tummies while walking. There is a myth that erotic arousal is the equivalent of a hormonal lobotomy. And, to adolescents, it is. But I write for adults.

Do these literary luminaries? Or does this deferral of any balanced and honest treatment of one of the most basic drives we have say less about a reader’s capacity to do two things at once and more about these writers and their inability to grow past adolescence themselves?

There is an almost hysterical tone to the insistence that arousing your reader is a ‘cheap trick’.  But underlying this denigration of a sexual response as a normal reader reaction to an imersive sex scene, I suspect, hides the spectre of author as either premature ejaculator, erectile dysfunction sufferer, or simply a fear that people are going to notice that you’re a lousy lay. After all, if you never attempt to write anything but banal, hollow and utterly depressing sex scenes, then you never run the risk of anyone wondering if your hamfisted attempts to arouse in prose may, in fact, be a reflection of your lack of skill as a lover in real life.

Writers should not be timid in the exploration of any human experience. Nor should they fear “embarrassing self-disclosure”, as John Freeman, the editor of Granta magazine, says. Yes, we’ve all had real experiences of bad sex. But to read the bulk of literary fiction sex scenes in the last 20  years, you’d think it was a fucking epidemic!

I’ve noticed this trend in other areas. It’s as if, in the midst of this media fest of explicitness, we have become terrified of pleasure. Real pleasure. Not momentary, banal, cum and leave pleasure. But the authentically felt deep pleasure that arises from a surrender to the sentient and sensual beings we actually are. We think and we are aroused. And we manage, as grown ups, to do both at the same time.

Let me leave you with a more enlightened view by Doris Lessing:

The description of what happens in the bedroom, between the sexes with all the power-play between the genders is a vital and valid documentation in literature

Lydia considered fate had been inexplicably kind to her. She’d survived the 90′s with nothing more than a mild case of chlamydia.

_______

Gilles was French. But he bathed with surprising regularity.

_______

On her return from the launderette, Jackie discovered strange missives scrawled on the cotton gussets of her knickers. One said: “Repent. The End is Nigh.”

________

Now that masturbation had become fashionable, Russel eschewed all other sexual pursuits.

_______

It’s amazing how forlorn a fuck machine can look once the apocalypse has arrived.

Come on. Your turn. Have some fun.

For those of you who aren’t aware, ERWA is really the single most important erotic writers’ group on the internet. It’s public face has consisted of a website that featured, on a monthly basis, some of the best new erotica writing being produced. It also houses a treasury of extremely good resources for budding erotica writers. However, a significant amount of ERWA’s most important work has gone on behind closed doors. It runs one of the best writing / workshoping / critiquing mail serves out there. But you have to join the group to participate and their mailing list protocol is a little archaic and fiddly.

Apart from its web presence, ERWA has had a blog for some time. One of its best features is its very current and extensive Calls for Submissions posts. If you have a hankering to publish your work, this is one of the best kept secrets on the web.

But I’m thrilled to announce that as of the beginning of 2012, the ERWA blog will be hosting bi-weekly blog posts by erotica writers. Taking a look at the line-up, the list includes some of the heaviest hitters in the genre. Ashley Lister, M. Christian, Craig Sorensen, Donna George Storey, Lisabet Sarai, Kathleen Bradean, Lucy Felthouse and Kristina Wright.

I was honoured to be invited to join that list. I’m so thrilled to rub literary shoulders with these people. They kick serious, heavyweight ass when it comes to writing on the wild side. It was the most wonderful Christmas present any erotica writer could receive.

Please join me at the ERWA blog monthly at http://erotica-readers.blogspot.com/. Check out all the posts and when each of the writers is scheduled to appear.  My posts are scheduled for the 13th of every month. I can’t wait to hit a Friday. You just KNOW I’m going blog about the nasty stuff.

“Your virtue!” said the lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; “I shall never survive it.

Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding

Academia puts a high value on the ability to read critically; to deny the text our heart and view it with an analytical, objective mind. From the early of the 20th Century onwards, we have made a practice of withholding our commitment to the narrative lure novel and called it an intellectual virtue. The subtext here is that really ‘bright’ people don’t suspend disbelief when they read. So it’s hardly surprising that literary theorists have, for the most part, looked down on the readers of genre fiction – especially romance – and it’s hardly surprising that they find little value in reading them. If they could ever drop their ultimately jaded eye and fully indulge in a well-written piece of erotic romance, what they’d find was that Barthes was not entirely correct in his assessment on the death of the author.

One thing I have learned from my recent research into how the happily ever after convention affects the reading experience is that, for erotic romance readers, the writer is very much there through the text. Not as a part of the narrative, but as a silent partner in the reading experience. Because it seems pretty clear that these readers feel, very strongly, that in picking up a novel, before they even start reading, they’ve made a deal with the writer: “I’m trusting you with my heart. Don’t let me down.”

To truly enjoy a good romance, you cannot read it with your head. You can’t be permanently on the lookout for lapses in political correctness or offensive gender role modeling. You can’t play spot the narrative devices or play Where’s Wally with the stock characters. Romance is about love and, in a way, it requires the reader to be willing to fall in love with this journey of love. Erotic romance readers commit very deeply to being emotionally open to the text. They give themselves over in a way that is spectacularly uncritical.

But they aren’t stupid. They won’t give over with no safety net. The Happily Ever After (or Happily For Now ending) is not just the way the story ends. It is there as a promise at the very beginning of the reading experience as a gesture of good intention on the part of the writer. Erotic romance readers have a very high tolerance for narrative conflict. Characters are routinely and  gleefully put through horrific trials – both physical and emotional. And readers will sink into the story unflinchingly with the one sacred understanding that, no matter how rough the going gets, it will  be worth all the suffering because, in the end, there will be happiness. The ending is not only redemption for the characters, but also for the reader and ultimately for the writer.

And when writers, for any number of reasons, are felt not to have kept up their part of the bargain – offering the reader a less that solid happy ending – romance readers get furious. They feel emotionally abused because, in a way, they have been emotionally abused. Yes, that abuse was consensual, but it also came with a solemn promise attached and that promise was not kept.

There was a time, at the height of the traditional modern romance boom, when the definition of what constituted a happy ending was extremely clear. The story had to end with a betrothal at the very least, if not a wedding. Sometimes stories offered postscript chapter of a portrait of wedded bliss that included babies.  But in erotic romance, the definition of the ‘Happily Ever After’ closure has changed quite radically.

Most readers have not escaped the pressure to acknowledge that no believable story can ever end  ‘Happily Ever After’. They acknowledge that they have no model for what that looks like because it doesn’t exist in the world. Consequently, the expectation of the level of the lovers’ commitment varies enormously. No readers I interviewed required a wedding. In fact, many of them scoffed at the proposition. Some only required that the couple mutually acknowledge their couplehood.  Some required words or a gesture that signified a deep and unbreakable bond through life. What seems to be satisfying to almost everyone is that the story end with the couple having acknowledged their emotional commitment to each other and signaled their heartfelt intention to stay together.

This, it seems, makes the reader feel that whatever travails have happened through the story, it was worth it. Many of them remarked that the more harrowing the conflicts and hardships in the narrative, the more valuable the emotionally secure ending.

Learning these things, it’s hard for me not to find the metaphor of an S & M relationship appealing – with the writer as sadist, the text as scene and the reader as masochist. Erotic romance readers give their sadistic writers a lot of leeway to take them to incredibly painful places, but there must be aftercare in the form of the HEA. Any writer who withholds it is going to have a hard time finding playmates.

]]> http://remittancegirl.com/blogpost/states-of-grace-reader-innocence-happy-endings-and-the-writer-as-responsible-sadist/feed/ 15 http://remittancegirl.com/discussions/at-the-heart-of-pornography-is-sexuality-haunted-by-its-own-disappearance/ http://remittancegirl.com/discussions/at-the-heart-of-pornography-is-sexuality-haunted-by-its-own-disappearance/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:03:35 +0000 Remittance Girl http://remittancegirl.com/?p=3942

How have representations of sex become so banal, so unthreatening, so uncritical? Because the body and sexuality are liberated as signs and only as signs. Through the sign-system, Baudrillard contends, ‘sexuality itself is diverted from its explosive finality’ and transformed into ‘promotional eroticism’ or ‘operational sexuality’.

“Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality” by William Paulett

I’m having to keep my mind on two things these days – my paper on the function of the Happily Ever After convention and trying to carve a cohesive and intelligible statement for what the critical portion of my PhD studies will examine.

There have been myriad discussions on this blog about the nature of erotic fiction and how it differs (or should differ) from pornography. I’m not the only erotic writer to wrestle with this question, but it has haunted me for almost as long as I’ve been writing.

I have said often that I am extremely interested in sex and sexual desire as a lens through which to look at the human condition. That there is a unique exposure that occurs in authentic moments of erotic desire that can strip away all our contrivances, our courtesy, our sophistications. And please don’t get me wrong: I write with the intention to arouse. But not at a specifically genital level. My aim is to prompt the reader into what I would call an aroused state of self-reflection.

At the same time, we find ourselves in a culture of pornography – constantly bombarded by sexual imagery as a way to sell things: sex, of course, but almost everything else as well. The memes and the language of porn has become so ubiquitous, it eclipses the act it was designed to represent – erotic acts shared between people.

I am not your run of the mill romantic. I don’t think that people have to be in love in order to have the best kind of sex. I do, however, think there needs to be an acknowledgement of the humanity of the other.  Some essentially complex value in the desired. I think most people would agree that there is genital sex, and then there’s the kind of sex that fundamentally changes you. And that kind of sex is not the kind you find in a particularly casual encounter.

I want to pause here and explain that objectification and dehumanization can be very erotic. But only when it is intentional. Only when the essential importance of that humanity is there, like a ghost, in its very intentional absence.

One of the great problems in trying to write the kind of erotic fiction I try to write is that the grammar of the erotic has been, for the most part, appropriated by a consumer culture that has employed it with the aim of commodification.  Originally pornography was not free. It was sold, like the services of a prostitute are sold. It was sexual stimulation in exchange for money.  The language that had once been used only behind bedroom doors, only in secret diaries, only in whispers, became the public language of the porn industry. So did the acts. But of course, because early pornography sought to establish its authenticity to its audience, it developed some incredibly strange memes in order to prove that what was being portrayed was ‘real’. The most obvious example of the is is the ‘money shot’ or the ‘come shot’, devised in order to prove that a real ejaculation had taken place. There are, of course, more subtle ways in which pornography attempts to establish its realism – with extreme close-ups of penetration, vaginal spasms, etc.

These memes, along with the language of the explicit, first became the preserve of porn and then, by a strange reversal of phenomenon, were fed back into people’s concept of what real sex should look like. Now you can see amateur ‘money shots’ on PornTube – where ordinary people are intent on showing what great sex they are having by adopting porn memes. It’s not that we don’t believe they’re really having sex. The ‘money shot’ or the ‘cream pie’ is no longer about proof of the real; it has become the real.

How does one write authentic representations of desire when the grammar of desire has become inextricably bound to the marketplace? When the depiction of a face-fucking no longer bears the semiotics of a purposefully sexual objectification but now simply triggers a memory of the last porn film you saw?

Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. His works are notoriously hard to read and his lectures aren’t much easier. But one of the things he talked about was how pornography – the over-exposure of sexuality – makes realism in sex impossible. I don’t agree with him. I think he came to believe that the media and people’s interior lives had become intertwined to the point where they were indistinguishable. Personally, I think he just spent too long studying examples of incidences where it had. I still believe there are lots of people still having very real sex that doesn’t look anything like pornography. But I think his point was very well made. I’ve met a lot of people who can’t seem to tell the difference between commercial representations/reenactments of sex for the purpose of performance and entertainment, and the authentic experience of humans who want nothing but each other’s pleasure.

I think it is my job as a writer of erotic fiction to keep producing representations of the complex, messy and sometimes unlovely beings we become when we really do experience erotic desire and when we do have real erotic experiences.  And to point out that, when we do this, there is not just pleasure, but many other things.

p.s. if you’d like to have a little taste of Baudrillard, YouTube has a series of his talks on “Seduction, Sex and Pornography“, but again, I warn you, he’s hard to understand and not just because of his French accent. However, there are a number of writers who’ve distilled and summarized his ideas very well. And one of them, William Pawlett’s book, is online in PDF form: Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality.

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