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.

I.G. Frederick’s site

Here are the rules:

• The fantasy must contain some element of non-consent.
• It must be a fantasy – i.e. you dreamed it up  yourself and it’s erotic to you.
• It doesn’t matter if you’re not a writer or you’re not very good with words.
• This isn’t about writing prowess, it’s about celebrating your sexual imagination.
• It doesn’t matter what gender or sexual orientation you are.
• It doesn’t matter if, in the fantasy, you are the ‘victim’ or the ‘perpetrator’ or both! Because if it’s your fantasy, you’re inventing both anyway. It’s all really you.
• You don’t have to identify yourself in any way if you don’t want to.
• It doesn’t matter how weird or raunchy it is.
• This is fantasy. Remember you’re the author of of it. You control the elements of it.
• Please don’t comment negatively about someone else’s fantasy. You’re welcome to say it’s hot, but if you criticize someone else’s fantasy, I’m not going to post that comment. This is just about letting it out, not being critical.
• Please remember that, if you might be offended by these fantasies, you’re a grown up – choose not to read further.

N.B. Any comments are (c) the author of the comment and should not be copied or used elsewhere, even when the comment is posted as ‘anonymous’.

You can click on this to see a larger version.

So, when everyone raves about mindmaps, you can see to some extent how useless they are. They explain nothing. They just map out the subject. But it’s a start and I think it contains hints of an explanation. I’d also like to point out that this is MY map of the subject. Someone else’s is going to look different – a masochist’s, for instance. And certainly a sadist’s is going to look VERY different.

I’ve broken it up into three large areas: Blood, Pain and Love. But I could have just as easily broken it up into emotional, physical and intellectual. The spheres don’t align exactly, but it’s pretty close. And there are themes that rear their heads over and over again in each of the areas.

The physical stuff is the easiest to deal with and the most quantifiable. Pain, in certain dosages, triggers a release of endorphins that makes you feel high. In many people, so does the sight of your own blood. I wouldn’t think it was a very efficient way to get a buzz, but some people really enjoy this way. It’s not the main attraction for me, but I can’t deny that it’s there.

The second easiest to deal with is the intellectual aspect of it. Letting someone cut you is taking a risk – and many people find risk erotic. In an optimum situation, you would do it with someone you trust, and submit to it as an act of trust. Blood, in recent times, has become a very dangerous thing. We are, hopefully, all aware of the pathogens it carries. So letting someone cut you is a risk to both the cutter and the person being cut.

Blood is a very semiotically heavy fluid. It is a lot like semen, in that it’s a life essence: if it’s not pumping through our bodies, we die. And there is an enduring paradox to it in religious terms: in Orthodox Judaism, blood is a ‘ritually impure’ substance. That’s why menstruating women are considered untouchable and why animals are slaughtered and hung to remove the blood. In Christianity, however, it has a purifying significance. People who ‘go to Jesus’ are ‘washed in the blood of the lamb’.  It also has magical properties. Transubstantiation is the ritual conversion of wine into the blood of Christ, during the mass. Meant to replay the event of the last supper.

In some non-Judeochristian religions, blood is used as a transactional vehicle. A fluid that can act as a bridge between the temporal world and the spiritual one. Hence the use of animal sacrifice in Santeria and Voodoo. I’m pretty sure it has serious symbolic value in other belief systems I have not mentioned. I just don’t know much about them.

Why am I mentioning all this? Because I’m a very cerebral person. When I see my own blood, shed by someone else, all those concepts and meanings are present for me. Perhaps not on a conscious level, but sub or semi-consciously, they inform the act.

The emotional aspect of it is the hardest for me to describe. I don’t enjoy pain. It doesn’t turn me on, but enduring it for someone else’s pleasure does. Deeply. This is why having someone offer, for instance, to spank me because I LIKE IT is a total turn off. It’s why well-meaning and accommodating people who are basically vanilla just won’t work for me. I had very kind people say… but seeing you turned on turns me on, so I don’t mind giving you some pain if it will arouse you. It’s very hard to give a coherent answer for why I just can’t go for that. It’s not a general state of arousal that interests me. They need to be turned on by my pain. And, just to add to the list of dumb things I require, they have to love me. The prospect of receiving pain from a sadist who feels casual about me… well, it isn’t going to happen.

Why? I think it has something to do with their struggle. It’s not too difficult for most people to hurt someone they don’t care about. Just look at the Milgram experiments.  But we all have boundaries for ourselves. We don’t normally allow ourselves to hurt people we love. It requires an urge of serious intensity to get past those boundaries.

So, I’m going to start using religious terms here, even though I’m an atheist, because our language isn’t as rich as it could be in discussing this issue.

There is something about the sin that the person who hurts me commits, and my ability to accept it and them – to love them through it and passed it. That sin on their part and that sacrifice on mine. That is not only erotic but transcendent for me. I get a sense of an intense bond being formed in the act. A union of redemption. As if the act of doing it this way redeems both people in the process.

In reading that explanation, I still fear I am not getting across the eroticism of it. But for me, it’s hideously erotic. I’d like to say it’s like the world’s most intense form of foreplay, but that would be relegating it to a prequel of a main show.  No, the cutting, the pain and the blood are an integral part of it. But during it, or after it, I’d chew through metal to fuck.

I’m not a masochist in the normal sense of the word. Perhaps a better term would be that I have a martyr complex. I’m not sure. Attempting to put a label on it frustrates me and makes me annoyed and defensive. But I guess that’s as close as I can get to explaining it all and I still think I’ve done a really bad job of it. Sorry.

Have I made any sense at all?

P.S. This is an attempt at an explanation for my earlier post and the eroticization of cutting. It is in no way an encouragement or endorsement of this sort of behaviour. Although I don’t want to make any judgements about others, I personally believe myself to be mentally ill for craving it.  This is unsafe behaviour and potentially a risk to your health. Yes, you can try to be careful and take as many precautions as you like, but make no mistake – open blades and blood are dangerous. Period.

Photo: Horia Varlan

I’m someone who doesn’t get bent about the sexual activities of others assuming it involves consenting adults.  However, whenever, whatever works for me as long as it doesn’t impact my own little portion of the world.  It’s very egocentric.

At one time, I was very active in ‘the scene’ of BDSM clubs, activities, play parties, secret email invitations, and the like.  It didn’t matter if I was single or dating someone or in a flat out monogamous relationship, I liked to go to those places to be around people that were openly accepting of alternative lifestyles.  I liked not being the freak in the room.

Except, as it turns out, I was still the freak in the room.

Unwritten dress code of latex, leather and fetish heels aside, it simply became something of an exhibition, a cold war, if you will, between levels of kink, or levels of awe the activity could inspire.  If you drew a crowd that could watch you hog tie your latest play date, or inject saline into the balls of some unsuspecting male sub (sarcasm intended here), then you knew yourself to be some sort of hit.  It became a race for toys and the biggest tool kit you could drag behind you without the use of a hotel valet.  It ties in what RG was suggesting in her piece, that in the competition to be the most free, the most accepting of alternative lifestyles, the most open-minded, we lost something else.

And when I realized this, the question of authenticity began.  Of course, excluding my time overseas (which shall remain a classified matter), all of these places had no blood, no bodily fluid, no sex rules.  I honestly thought, in my naiveté, that this had something to do with law, Texas is in the Bible belt after all, into which the stiff ruling hand of conservative (read Christian) leadership is heavily represented.  And yes, here in this great state, that is something that would not fly so well with the police were it to hit the radar.

But why, at the private houses was this still in place?  These rules were printed in the waivers you signed at the door to the club, but in a private house, they seemed to carry over.  I was confused.  In the effort to be so outwardly kink friendly, they had in fact shut the door very firmly on some things that I personally, found very arousing.  Blood.  Pain.  Sex.

Don’t mistake me here.  I’m not suggesting you can’t have pain without blood resulting, but my particular brand of sadism is rooted in those little red drops, and even in their absence, is rooted in the possibility, the THREAT of blood.  It’s one of those things that gets my dick hard.

You like that little rabbit fur paddle, I like steel razors… to each their own?  No.  That’s not how it works, I’m afraid.

A little clarification before anyone starts on a rant

I’m speaking in generalizations and my experience which is not your own.  My observations, my views gathered, and yes, from a male (and dominant) perspective, which I’m sure doesn’t represent the views of a submissive housewife in Des Moines, IA – or 99% of the population as a whole, because I like to fuck women with blood on them.  Let’s face it, that’s pretty fucking kinky.

And I’d like to also add that I’m very aware of STD’s and any number of blood borne pathogens, diseases and such that result from bodily fluid exchange – however, we are ALL adults here and if you don’t know your partner’s sexual history, don’t use protection and generally play roulette with your life, then a drop of blood that splashes onto the velvet sofa at a play party that you sit on a week later, isn’t going to be the catalyst to your STD infection.

Now onto my own little rant, excuse the gratuitous metaphors and similes…

The disempowerment we’ve allowed

I’ve been giving this some thought, honestly, after speaking with RG and reading what Tutivillus wrote on the topic – we’ve all sort of taken our own route on this, but in my view, it’s simply a chain we’ve wrapped around our own freedoms as adults.

Was it an effort to distinguish ourselves from swingers?  I’d bet that has something to do with it.  BDSM people don’t like the label of being swingers, because unlike ‘those’ people, we like to keep our lust in check.  Puritan much?  It’s as if BDSM became the marijuana of kink, a tolerable and (somewhat) socially acceptable method of getting a high without getting dirty.

Well I played with mud and dirt as a child, and I didn’t grow up as a mutant… just uber kinky.  And fucking, well, if you’re doing it right, you’re going to sweat and if I come inside you, it’s going to make a puddle on the bed that one of us will have to sleep in.

Distractions aside…

There is more.  Men can be clueless.  Women can be clueless.  Sometimes, we just can’t read the signs correctly.  We can’t pick up on the subtle details that a shrug can mean fuck off, or someone walking away mid-sentence doesn’t mean they want you to follow them.

It doesn’t mean we need some generic rule to cover the fact that the object of your desire can’t work up the nerve to say, ‘Look, I’m not interested.’  Don’t we owe this to each other?  When did our ability to defend our rights, our bodies, our interests, become so ineffective that we had to settle a rule in place to cover the ‘extreme’ eventuality that somehow, in this world, a connection might be made – one strong enough to say, ‘you know, I’d like to fuck you,’ or ‘you make me want to vomit, I wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire.’

For my part, I simply withdrew from the public scene.  I was always the rebel anyway – sniffing alcohol swabs as if they were cocaine.

And finally, he draws breath….

Ultimately, for my part, and the way I am wired, I just can’t see why, after making a mess of someone, and breaking them down to the quivering emotional and hopefully bloody mess, I wouldn’t want to fuck them.  I don’t see how in a world where kink is supposedly celebrated, if someone wants to publically share that with an appropriate audience, how you or anyone else has the right to say, put that shit away.  When did we lose the ability to walk away?  When did we start needing our lives spoon fed to our eyes?

And when will we stop accepting less than what we deserve?  When did we allow ourselves to become so damn disempowered that we need a rule to speak for us?

Photo by by Ronny Robinson

I get a lot of mail. It’s always wonderful to receive, but some of it is just very special.  So, with his permission of course, I’d like to share an email I received today from Harry Smith.

I masturbated, slowly, finishing some time ago, then lapsed into a post orgasmic dose.

My partner had sent a text “I am horny, I want you to spank me with your leather belt”. I got hard within the first three words because I knew that she would be wet even though she is at work.

I rubbed my hard cock through my shorts, my thoughts turned to what she likes me to do; not to shave, then rub my stubbled chin over her nipples, harshly. Then I move down her body, scraping her stomach and then her thighs, and finally rubbing her pubic mound, her lips and clit with my chin. I get covered in her juices which I make her lick off me. I can hear her tongue scratching my chin.

While I think of this I unzip myself and pull my cock out, unbutton my shorts, and rub myself. My mind is consumed by the thought of my partner groaning – which is loud so I have to put my hand over her mouth for fear that the neighbors will hear too much (but I have to say, the egotistical side of me likes the fact that I make her groan in pleasure)  I grip my cock, tightly, thinking of her holding it with her teeth, then dribbling spittle on it to lubricate it as she watches me masturbate.

But she is only here in my mind, I kneel up and my hand moves fast. Normally I would be straddling her as she rubs me, telling me to come on her tits, but that is for later. I rub hard and feel my cock swelling in my grip, then come onto the bed-sheets.

I phoned her to tell her what I had done and she laughs, knowing that is exactly the effect her SMS would have….

She is a controlling little bitch.

Harry.

And I’ve got such a thing for stubble!

They’ve moved to a lovely new site of their own. Please visit it at
www.portraitsofkink.com

___________________________

A while back, I proposed a project and asked people who saw themselves as non-vanilla if they’d be willing to answer some questions about themselves in the interest of providing greater insight and some reality-based templates for erotica authors to work from. (See the whole post here: Characters in Erotica – Dominants, Submissives, Sadists and Masochists ). I got a great many letters of interest and sent out a total of 28 questionnaires. I got back a total of 13 – just under 50%.

I’m not sure how a response rate of 50% gets judged. I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. And it needs to be acknowledged that the questionnaire was very long, required written answers as opposed to check-boxes or scales, and asked the respondents to go into a lot of depth about their early understanding of themselves – including some of the negative aspect of living outside the sexual mainstream. (Click here to see the full questionnaire).

Some respondents chose to stick close to the questions, some elected to use the questions as a guide and gave a more essay-style response and some went for a hybrid approach. I knew that this would mean the responses would not be consistent but I felt it was important to allow people to tell their stories the way they felt most comfortable. Also, this isn’t a sociology or psychology study. These are portraits for literary purposes and, as such, the approach, the tone, and the variation in the way the subjects addressed the questions all play a part in letting you know about themselves.

I have been over the moon with the results. I’ve found the whole project incredibly informative. It’s given me a lot of insight into how people grow into their kinks, and when and how they integrate them into their lives. Some felt strongly that it was a deeply  significant part of their essential being and others felt it was simply an aspect of it. Some found it easy to live with one foot in the vanilla world, others found it impossible.

Mostly, I’d like to express my respect for everyone who took the time and thought to participate. Opening oneself up to this very personal, very intimate inquiry is an act of great generosity. It’s easy to blog when you’re in control of the things you want to reveal or keep private; giving answers to someone else’s questions is not as easy.

I gave a lot of thought about how to present these portraits. Should they be presented all at once, one at a time, or perhaps present them in pairs. Should I pair like with like or opposites?

Ultimately I decided that there really was no like-with-like or opposites. These people all represent points on a very complex continuum. They all deserved to stand on the page individually.  So I’ve decided to post one profile a day to avoid the propensity we all have for making comparisons or for perceiving of something as having less value because it comes in an abundance. All of these people are unique. And all have been gracious participants.

by Duncan Holmes

Just a little note to let you know this is still (sort of) happening. I got 24 acceptances to participate. Yay.

I got about an even number of subs/bottoms/masochists to doms/tops/sadists. Yay

So far, 7 of the subs/bottoms/masochists have sent me back their responses to my questions. Yay.

So far, NONE of the doms/tops/sadists have sent me back their responses.

er… boo?

Someone remarked that fictional submissives are often drawn in a far more realistic manner than their opposites. Perhaps we’ve found out why.

So, sigh… it was not my intention to only represent one side of the power dynamic. What I wanted to offer readers was a landscape. Sadly, that might not be possible.

We’ll see.

The problem is, I don’t think any of this is erotic literature – which should be, first and foremost, intelligible.  It should also, I think, be able to speak to more than just the initiated. If a story on shoe fetishes doesn’t even attempt to communicate the attraction of the fetish, then it’s basically trade literature written specifically for the sub-culture that already practices it.  Also, literature – any literature – should say something true about us. It should speak to us, not just as women or men, kinky or vanilla, gay or straight. It should be able to reach over those boundaries and invite people in to understanding.

This isn’t to say that simplistic portrayals of kinky characters can’t be arousing. They can. But it is objectification – the simplistic representation of what the writer or the reader, or both, desire. And although that might be good fun to read, and absolutely wank-worthy, it isn’t (by my definition) erotic literature. It’s pornography. I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense. It’s not an insult to either the writers or the readers of this type of material. However there is, in my mind, a very definite difference between material that only appeals to the libido and distills desirable character traits down to their essence and that which represents it in a more holistic and multi-dimensional way. Fantasy is very arousing. But for me, the complex truth always has a more lasting erotic impact.

Undoubtedly, erotica writers tend to focus on the type of sexuality that intrigues them the most. So there are lots of kinky people out there who also write erotica, but being on the inside isn’t always an advantage. As a writer, you need to at least have some idea of what the view looks like from your reader’s vantage point. This can be extremely difficult if you have been, for instance, a member of a BDSM community for so long you can’t remember what it’s like to have vanilla sex.

So, in the interests of fostering the writing of more realistic, compelling and engaging kinky characters, I’m inviting people who are practicing doms, subs, masochists and sadists to provide a portrait of themselves as people. If you would like to participate in this, I’d be very grateful. However, I want to limit my portraits to people who have identified themselves within the spectrum of kink for an extended period of time, and have, after a period of introspection, become comfortable in their understanding of themselves. You don’t have to be a member of a scene, or publicly ‘out’ at all. Just be comfortable with your orientation for a reasonable length of time.

I will provide you with a list of questions for anyone willing to participate and I’d appreciate you using it as a guide. You don’t have to answer all the questions, or answer them in the form they are presented, but I would appreciate you touching upon at least some of the issues and subjects I ask questions about.

If you’re up for it, please email me at remittancegirl(at)gmail(dot)com with the word Portraits in the subject line.

Deserts by Interzone

My twitterfriend @Interzone_Inc is an electronic music composer from Sweden. His work is dark and abstract and ambient. He has done me the honour of setting some of my smaller flash pieces to music. These comprise part of an album called ‘Deserts‘ which is available for download free at the Interzone Inc Site.

These aren’t ‘songs’ per se. If you haven’t listened to much contemporary electronic music, you may find it a little hard to handle at the beginning. But just think of them as sound landscapes or the aural version of abstract paintings. Turn off the lights, close your eyes, lie down and put the headphones on. It’s a very different kind of listening experience if all you’ve ever listened to were structured songs.