Stripped Down

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOREWORD

Tristan Taormino

 

 

 

 

What follows a multiorgasmic romp with the baddest butch in town? What comes before it?

There is no one formula for choosing the order of the stories in an erotica anthology. After doing this for seventeen years, I've developed my own variety of techniques, like pairing stories that focus on a similar theme from different perspectives. Or arranging them by tone, from soft to hard, like a carefully orchestrated spanking, where you start with gentle strokes and build to stingy slaps. Sometimes I like to fly from one end of the spectrum to the other, switching from reality to fantasy, from girlfriend to one-night stand, from epic to snapshot, from flirtatious first time to all-night fisting. It's about seeing the similarities and differences, and deciding how to offset them just so.

What struck me about Eileen's selections is how much territory they covered. They are full of love, loss, innocence, initiation, self-discovery, fear, revenge, enlightenment—and that's just for starters. As I put the stories together, I imagined each one as a step in an erotic journey. The journey begins with a long-term couple and the intense love and passion they share. Along the way, you'll meet characters who feel adored, challenged, schooled, surprised, and satisfied. Some take us to the edge of sanity and the brink of breakup; one goes beyond it to the death of a lover. But with death comes rebirth, and what better way to represent that than a story about a virgin nun and one about a baptismal? Personally, I love when journeys end with new beginnings.

Butches and femmes are featured throughout the book, but several stories focus specifically on how these roles define us, confine us, or sometimes do both. In one, two butch buddies left at home together by their girlfriends explore their desire for each other as they face their own fears and hang-ups about their identities. Assumptions about butch/femme, its rigidity and fluidity also play a crucial part in two surprising, edgy tales of erotic revenge.

Other sexual dynamics are explored as well, all fueled by the roles we play in the world—roles like mother, daughter, teacher, student, employer, employee—and the power dynamics we enact both in and out of the bedroom. A danger of using such familiar, timeless archetypes in sex stories is that they'll dive right into pornoland, where all housewives are desperate and gardeners hot. What's great about these explorations is that rather than being cliché, they are full of quirky characters and clever twists. If you think you know the story of sex with the boss, sex with the truck stop waitress, sex with
the delivery girl, or sex with the doctor, think again. Guys also pop up in unexpected places, as watchers and those being watched, as fodder for fantasies, and as objects of affection. And by
guys,
I mean those masculine-identified beings who may or may not have been born male, those who identify as trans, and some whose gender is purposely ambiguous.

Relationships are at the heart of the sex in all these stories. Since my work is known for its hard-core, raunchy fuck tales, I hesitated to even write that sentence because I was afraid it might be misunderstood. I don't mean just love or romantic relationships (although they're in here, too), and I don't want to imply there isn't plenty of panty-soaking material here. There is. The relationships I'm talking about may be established or brand new, committed or temporary, complex and layered or simple and straightforward. They're real and familiar. The writers in this collection explore what connects the people involved, what drives them to collide with one another for a moment of pleasure; they do it with honesty and compassion, sarcasm and wit. It's the relationships, however imagined, ambivalent, or intense, that makes the sex so hot.

Having a good fuck can be breezy and fun. But what makes sex transformative, what makes it possible to explore my outer limits or push my lover's boundaries is my ability to get under the skin. Similarly, what separates strokeable smut from smut that gets me off sexually, intellectually, and emotionally is the bond beyond the damp boxers and shaved pussies. I want to know what's underneath all that sweating and moaning. I want to see how our connections as much as our conflicts (with each other and ourselves) fuel our fucking. These stories do that for me. They strip down way past naked to show us what we can discover about ourselves through
our sexual encounters. The folks in these stories fuck, yes, but when they fuck, they find that they are tougher than they thought, gentler than people expected, hungrier, hornier, and more flexible than they've been given credit for. Here is love sex, revenge sex, stranger sex, and fucked-so-good-you-can't-think-straight sex in all its raw, sexy, messy glory.

So, what comes after the final story? Well, hopefully
you
.

 

Tristan Taormino
New York City

INTRODUCTION: THE REAL THING

Eileen Myles

 

 

 

 

What a bunch of horny bitches dykes are. What a bunch of dirty little men. Filthy girls. As I read these stories in manuscript I observed a trend in which Massachusetts and New Zealand are both producing lesbian erotic texts on a massive scale. Somebody must've conducted special workshops in both those places 'cause it can't just be that this was a very hot year in Somerville or Auckland, or can it? Are there erotic writing sweatshops there? I once worked for an erotic writing sweatshop. There was an ad in the
Voice
for writers of adult fiction. The sweatshop in fact was a fairly hip loft in the thirties—in Murray Hill to be exact (Hi, Murray!). To even get an interview you had to drop off two thousand words at their office and wait for a call. The
call came and next I met with this older woman who was perhaps fifty and was white and her hair was curled and her face in my memory seemed huge in its pleasure at how good and talented I was at
this
. Her enthusiasm made me cringe. All I can remember about my sample (in which I believed I was writing for heterosexuals) was that some cops wound up fucking twin girls in the bushes of Central Park. I remember the girls blowing the cops and the story going into some detail about how the girls milked the cops' dicks. I felt convinced I was insane and now it showed, yet I remember needing to allude to the girls' innocence which was borne out by their mistaking the cops' dicks for tits. The woman smiled and smiled.
You're hired, Eileen.
And then she showed me the big machines. It was like you would be writing into something that made me think of Kafka's “In the Penal Colony,” the story that reminds everybody of everything. Because it's a story about a writing machine which everyone feels like already a little bit when they pump out prose. I would go in daily to the loft on Murray Hill and I would have to write about three thousand words a day for three hundred dollars a week. This was 1979 so the money seemed good, but still the work seemed impossible. Word-processors didn't even exist then so I was being hired to pump my dirty thoughts into something I had never seen before. It was like a combination of a teleprompter and a conveyer belt. My words would go away. The woman kept smiling at how good I was at “it.”
Writing dirty,
I thought. I felt like she was going to eat me, I meant literally or the machine would eat my mind. Or my brain would get milked. How would I feel after a day of it? An empty window in the combat zone, or a red light district. The curtain shut. No business. The job was going to solve a
certain kind of life that wound up getting solved some other way and now it is bringing me here.

Years ago, Patrick Califia (then Pat) led an erotic writing workshop in Boston (!!) at one of the last OutWrite festivals. I think I went with Heather Lewis. I was kind of obsessed with Pat Califia, having accidentally attended a single meeting of the Lesbian Sex Mafia and she wore a yellow sundress and was just unaccountably hot. It was her confidence, her calmness in that insipid dress. In Boston she made me want to do nothing else but write dirty. What else was worth it really?

And still I probably write less about sex than most of the lesbian writers I know. I write about so many parts of my relationships with women that it seems that that one, the most tangible reason I want to be with her or her, should probably remain private. But it never does. It always somehow comes bursting out. 'Cause that's sex.

Tristan sent me first one package, then another, then another.
Groan
.
I
needed to be writing this summer. When would I read all of this? Then I got sick. Or hurt my back. Something had me in bed for a week, maybe more, and what I had for companions were Peggy Munson's Christian cousins playing with each other's tits in the pool. I think it was the pool and their youth that made it hot. Or how one cousin felt weird about her tits so the other happily groped them. It was like healthy and even sweet, you know. Not in the family album, is all.

But, you know, it would be in ours. If there is an
us.
I feel it. Suddenly someone is fucking herself with a mermaid dildo. Quickly her “cunt balloons,” Julian Tirhma writes, but the ballooning almost decorated the sidelines, then flips to the foreground of the story. I liked that. Like doors kept opening
and closing. Then, in “After Lunch,” a doctor who's in the country to buy a house gets eaten by a waitress who used to be a cop. The doctor hasn't showered but the waitress likes her pussy tangy, she insists. In “Phoebe's Undercover Bon Voyage” a blonde's getting rigged up for a scenario with four enthusiastic cops and Skian McGuire details the differences in each of their uniforms (“a broad navy stripe up the legs of her sky blue trousers”) in randy masculine detail. What I loved about all the stories here is that your readerly inattention, or your attention on the peripheral thing, always buoys up the ballooning pussy. Two dykes are fucking at the beach (“A Case of Mistaken Identity”) while two guys watching them through binoculars from behind some rocks are thinking the butch is one lucky dude (he is), which clinches the dykes' mundane patter and graphic pumping being well, really hot.