Best Sex Writing 2009 (5 page)

Lauren says she embraces her new life as a stay-at-home wife, spending her days cleaning, grocery shopping, decorating, email- ing, “then waiting for Brett to get home.” Though she misses her family, she’s determined to succeed in her new role. “I see my life as helping Brett,” she says. I tell her it sounds like she’s giving up her personal freedom. She disagrees.

“Freedom,” she says,“comes from living within boundaries. It’s like driving. There are lanes and signs—which some might find constraining—but if they weren’t there, it would be chaos.” Stay in your lane, though, and it’s easy to get where you want to go. Be- fore I catch a plane back to New York, Lauren and I visit the mall to get our eyes done at a MAC cosmetics counter. Lauren looks modelesque in a range of plums; I look like a large leprechaun in a trio of lime greens. As we laugh together over that girly universal, eye shadow, you’d never know that Lauren fears for my marriage and maybe my soul, and I fear that she—a bright, passionate girl—is living a subjugated life.

I rub the green grub from my eyelids and mutter obscenities about evil makeup pushers as we leave the store. Lauren giggles, and we step out into the blinding Arizona sun. We agree—oddly, in a way only two women who have shared a beauty ritual can— that perhaps subjugation depends on your point of view. Consider Randy. Consider Lindsay, Paris, and Britney. Consider the thou- sands of American high-school students taking a sex-ed class that suggests the only thing you need to know about sex is how not to have it. For now, ours is a confused culture in a free country. Lauren and I find our car and, burning our fingertips on the hot metal, unlock it. Soon, to the tune of the Kelly Clarkson song, I mentally sing,“Go forth and search for love any way you can.”

An open letter to the Bush Administration

m istr ess m or gana m aye

San Francisco, California

My name is Morgana Maye, and I’m a small business owner living and working in San Francisco. I appreciate that your admin- istration strives to “create an environment where entrepreneurs can flourish,” but I’m writing today because, despite the president’s as- sertion that small business is “the heart of the American economy,” your agenda has adversely affected my business as a professional dominatrix. I’ve examined my business plan, my advertising, and the trend toward neoconservative sex negativity, but I keep com- ing back to the same gut feeling: you’re doing my job better than I can.

If wartime is good for prostitutes and lap dancers, it’s hell on dominatrices. The professional dominatrix makes her money for the same reason disaster movies make millions: people love to be subjected to their greatest fears while remaining realistically safe.

Production studios understand this. They will delay the release of movies about terrorist plots or natural disasters when such events have actually occurred.They know there is something in the con- sumer conscience that feels guilty about being entertained by mis- ery and destruction.

My work deals with the sexual fantasy of disempowerment. Fantasy is a tricky artifice. It relies, in part, on the assurance of impossibility.The same fantastical impulse that draws millions into movie theaters to watch zombies destroy the world brings men into my dungeon where they can enact a fantasy of their utter destruction without any real danger of being harmed. It’s cathartic, it’s entertaining, it cuts through all the bourgeois comfort of being white and male and landed, without actually subverting any of the comforts of being white and male and landed.

I explain all of this to you because over the past seven years your administration has successfully organized what has to be longest nonconsensual public edge-play scene in recent history. I look at your capacity to manufacture fear, degradation, torture, and absolute powerlessness, and I can’t top that. Your current policy of world domination is so excessive, it dwarfs any attempt by an independent contractor, like myself, to do so on a more person-by-person basis.

I have a better international travel record than Mr. Bush, a stronger right arm than Mr. Rumsfeld, and a better rack than Ms. Rice, but I don’t have anything close to your operating bud- get, and I adhere to a code of ethics and social responsibility that prevents me from competing with you on any real level. I was at the top of my field, a seasoned sadist and skilled edge player with more than a decade of experience, yet over the past seven years your campaign has rendered me a Pollyanna by comparison. You are bad for my corporate image, and are disenfranchising me from

the American Dream of profitable small business ownership.

It’s not just that you’re marketing yourself as a bigger, badder top. You’re taking the fantasy out of torture and domination and making it real, which is triggering that annoying consumer con- science and driving away my clients. The week the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke and pictures of naked, bound, hooded men were splashed on the cover of every magazine and on every news- cast the world over, I had two extended sessions booked con- sisting of twelve hours of heavy electro-genitorture, full sensory deprivation, and humiliating interrogation. One client canceled outright, saying it just didn’t feel right and that he was going to reexamine why he was “into all this stuff” anyway; the other asked if I could conduct the session in any room other than the dungeon, perhaps a kitchen where he could wear a frilly dress and wash my floor, and just feel “safe” for a few hours.

Your policies have stripped the sexiness out of being inescap- ably imprisoned for no reason and with no due process. In fact, the only subgroup of my clientele that has increased over the past seven years has been adult babies. You’ve reduced the world to a place where people just want to cuddle and hear a bedtime story. This is hardly an apt use of my skills or equipment, and certainly not a broad enough clientele for me to make my house payment. And if your out-domming me and driving away my clients isn’t enough of a complaint, I’d like to point out that the profes- sional dominatrix bases her sessions on the doctrine of preemp- tive strike. This whole policy of “I’m going to punish you before you’ve been bad” is so my shtick. I was employing preemptive strike before Mr. Bush’s daddy was in office the first time around; I have a published precedent. If shticks were copyright protected,

I’d sue and retire to the Bahamas on my settlement.

I’m not asking for a lot, but as a taxpayer and an American,

I have a couple of requests. You could stop advertising, for one thing. Previous administrations did a much better job of keeping their agenda for world domination on the down low. Besides, tops that tout themselves as ruthlessly as you do, especially in the face of bad reviews, always strike me as distastefully insecure. And since it’s doubtful in this era of self-imposed antitrust policy, how about a subsidy, or federal grant to compensate me for profits lost due to the unfair expenditure of $255 million dollars a day in Iraq? That comes out to about $10.6 million dollars per hours, or $177,000 per minute. For the cost of about five minutes of your time in Iraq I could pay off my mortgage and have a nice little nest egg for myself. I’ll get out of the business and leave your number on my voice mail as a referral for my clients.

Respectfully Yours, Mistress Morgana Maye

the Pleasure of unpleasure

k r istina l loyd

All writers get bad reviews; if you write erotica, your sexuality gets reviewed as well.Trust me, you sometimes need a thick skin to deal with this. We are all, as individuals, never more vulnerable than when we reveal our desiring selves to others, and smut writers do this on a grand scale. Sure, it’s framed within a fiction and no one can see us blush. But with that distance comes a space which allows strangers to pass judgment.

Here are a few things that have been said about me. I mean, about my books:

Most of the sex scenes are degrading—not arousing.

Great if you like the idea of being humiliated and called slut etc., not so great if you don’t.

Ilya is a man who truly doesn’t respect Beth in the least, doesn’t even like her.

You would think that an erotic fiction book would be at least a little bit sensual.

I pitied Beth more than I wanted to be in her place. One of the worst Black Lace books I have ever read. I found some of the BDSM disgusting.

Nothing against a kinky read but I don’t like mental abuse in erotic books.

Ouch!

My grumble isn’t really with negative comments; I think it’s par for the course when you’re a writer. And, I’m pleased to report, they’re vastly outnumbered by the very many positive, insightful, considered reviews my work has received over the years.

No, my problem is with the way erotic humiliation is so fre- quently misunderstood, reviled, and marginalized. I write a lot about women who get off on being used, degraded, and verbally dominated; about rape fantasy; about discomfort, conflict, fear. Pain isn’t my kink. Spanking is off my radar. Rough stuff and psycholog- ical humiliation is more my theme although, of course, the physical and the mental don’t form neat parcels for anyone. When I write about this and someone says “Ew! Gross!,” they’re saying that what turns me on is wrong.

An editor once reminded me that erotic fiction needs to focus on pleasure rather than be a vehicle for dysfunction. I was so stunned by this I didn’t eat worms for the rest of the week and almost quit

my basket-weaving. I am not dysfunctional. I am not damaged. And what on earth is “pleasure” anyway? It sounds suspiciously like scented candles to me. The notion that female erotica should be softer and more romantic is wildly offensive. Ditto the implication that a woman who wants to be dominated by a man must be lack- ing her own mind.
She
doesn’t want it. She’s merely a victim and it’s her damaged, self-loathing psyche talking. Oh, puhlease.

I get a lot of pleasure from unpleasure, from being made to squirm, from hating it and loving it all at once. All those who are with me, say “Ay!” One of the most moving erotic scenes I’ve ever read is in Stephen Elliott’s
My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up
. The narrator, a male submissive new to the BDSM scene, after hours of being tied, gagged, hurt, and demeaned is fucked with a strap-on. Elliott writes:

I had never been entered before. She leaned across my back, wrapping one arm around my chest and gripping my neck with her other hand, occasionally squeezing my windpipe so I couldn’t breathe for a second. I cried again, but it was a different crying. I was very comfort- able. I don’t think I had ever been comfortable before.

“Comfortable” might seem an odd word to use in this context but I think it’s perfect. For me, it’s that sense of dreamy, egoless relief that arises in the tension between pleasure and unpleasure. Subspace, to use the jargon.A lot of my characters (jeez, I can’t think who they’re based on) get off on being treated badly,on being distressed,reduced,shamed, and scared. They’re not screwballs, nihilists, emotional masochists, or lacking in self-worth. It’s a sex thang.They can still function.

Beth, my central character in
Asking for Trouble,
is a woman ex- ploring her taste for sleaze, danger, submission, and humiliation. Ilya

is the enigmatic stranger she’s newly involved with. She confesses her fantasies to him: “I just like picturing things where I’m being used, objectified, degraded, that kind of stuff. It’s liberating. I’m in someone else’s hands. I’m not being me.”

Once upon a time, academics wrote about Black Lace books and the new phenomenon of women writing porn. One academic, analyzing
Asking for Trouble
, quoted the above dialogue and said,“So once again then, we see in the woman who liberates her sexuality and embraces eroticism the simultaneous flight from selfhood.”

Huh? Flight from selfhood? Isn’t half the point of sex the way in which we can transcend ourselves? (What’s the other half? Some- one remind me? Oh, yes: cock.) In
Split
, my spooky puppets-and- bondage novel, I explore what submission and degradation mean a little bit more. Kate is falling in love with Jake, the strange and beautiful curator of an isolated puppet museum in the Yorkshire Moors. She’s gradually coming to understand how the power im- balance of their sexual relationship fulfills her:

He breaks me down, strips me of inhibitions, and when I’ve sobbed and climaxed until I don’t know who I am, he wraps me in his arms, so soft and tender.

Do I sound like a masochist? I don’t feel like one. The point isn’t the pain and I don’t suffer. Or rather, I go beyond suffering and into a new space. If I could get there without it hurting, I would. I think that’s why I like it when Jake calls me ‘slut’ and makes me feel bad. It takes me there, helps me lose myself […] and it’s as if I’m in a nothing space, floating. I am so free there.

It’ssuchafeelingtobefreeofyourself.Ididn’tunderstand it at first. I think it scared me but I’m getting to know and understand it. I’m coming to realize that I want this not

because I’m worthless and I must suffer. It’s because I’m human and life’s tough. Letting go is so powerful. Sur- render transforms me. I adore oblivion.

Kate, like Beth, is a woman conflicted about her sexuality. I think this is true of a lot of people whose kinks are on the dark side, and I think this is okay. We hear a lot about “sex positivity” and having a “healthy” attitude; and while I applaud the sentiment it leaves me feeling a tad uncomfortable. It seems so neat, clean, and tidy, and leaves little space for angst or doubt. Where we want to go and what we want to do or be done to us can be disturbing, terrifying, up- setting, and exciting. It’s pleasure but not as they know it. Accept- ing conflict and contradiction is a significant part of accepting our messy sexual selves. I’m sure “sex positive” was originally meant to encompass this but it’s easily miscast to imply unproblematic happy- jolly-fucky sex. It can make me feel dirty, and not in a good way.

I like brutes and bullies with a nice line in contempt. I like back alleys, seediness, and squalor. I like scary scenarios that make my heart beat faster. All these things break down the ego and strip away the veneer of the civilized self. And when you’re without that constructed identity, when your dignity and self-respect have been put on hold, then boundaries shift, inhibitions are lost. If anything, those who like to indulge in being broken down need to have a very secure sense of self. They must be continually piec- ing themselves back together again afterward.