Book Bottom II: Pornotopia and its Discontents

Warning: I'm in Theorygirl mode these days, trying to make a whole lot of interesting ideas fit together, which they don't quite yet.

But with Jane Lockwood's "have we lost our way?" post still in mind, and with my brain cells still wonderfully massaged by Katha Pollitt's fabulous wit and smarts, here are some further thoughts about erotica, pornography, and erotic romance.

It's the people who have a problem with porn -- even a simple aesthetic revulsion at the shaved and implanted phoniness of it all -- who are suspect now, and who have to prove their normality by insisting that they "like sex," as if sex were all one thing, like oatmeal. Imagine if you said, Yes I like sex, with the right person, in the right place, in the right mood, preferably after a lovely meal cooked by someone else; otherwise, frankly, I'd rather get on with Daniel Deronda.

That's Pollitt again in Learning to Drive. Is she right? Certainly I do think that there's a certain you-go-girl giddiness in the hype for the romance erotica lines. It's interesting these days how we're nudged in the direction of a kind of tickle-me-Elmo giddiness about sexuality. Doubtless a necessary corrective to many still-current pruderies and hypocrisies, but perhaps not the best inducement to make a book hang together.

Pollitt continues that, "in porn no one takes a night off, no one even rejects one partner for another they like better; they just have them both at once, and the meter reader, too, should he happen to drop by" -- or (I hasten to add) the hunky gardner in the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. Rock critic Richard Goldstein once put it more succinctly. "In porn, everybody wants it. All the time."

Of course, Pollitt doesn't seem to have read much erotica since the very male-oriented porn from the 70s, but it's possible that (mostly)-by-women-(mostly)-for-women erotica from the romance publishers is going in that direction. At least I gather from Jane Lockwood's post that there is some sentiment that it's possible to have too much of a good, friendly, down and dirty thing -- and that what you risk is losing the romance.

I'm not sure. Partly because I haven't read enough dirty books lately. My current w.i.p. has taken a lot of effort: the draft's due Monday and after I hit the SEND key I'll find out what's actually happening in the world outside my study.

For now, tho, I only have my experience, and a word, "pornotopia" -- from Steven Marcus's 60s lit crit book The Other Victorians, which introduced books like The Pearl and My Secret Life to a general readership. I don't remember Marcus's exact definition, but I've kind of adopted the word to mean a kind of alternative fictional world -- sort of another kind of dimension, where the ground rules are different, and sometimes the laws of physics and biology. It's a fun, friendly, sort of prelapsarian world. Even when you impose the power strictures of BDSM, it's got a kind of amplitude. It lends itself to episodic writing and ensemble plots (I like the ensemble aspect, because I often find romance novels awfully thinly populated).

But as to plotting: If you're a Shakespeare, you can get the dizzy wonder of A Midsummer Night's Dream out of it. But if you're not a Shakespeare, it can be hard to fit a plot around what's potentially endlessly episodic.

What's interesting to me is that when I was writing erotica-that-at-that-time-called-itself-pornography, I found that I desperately wanted a plot. And so did my characters.

In the Carrie books, a perverse dynamic began to take over. The bigger and friendlier my orgies got, the more seriously I and my characters began wondering about who really liked who best (or even loved them). Relationships formed just below the surface of the action as characters began asking themselves what they really wanted. I began to imagine little offstage tragedies (what's going to happen to Susan when Andrew realizes she's really into Steve?). I loved giving tiny subplots having happy endings (poor neglected Stefan, happy at last as Mr. Constant's boytoy!). I wrote a sequel, Safe Word to figure out whether Carrie's Story had really been Carrie's story at all, or Jonathan's and Kate's.

Which was one of the ways I drifted toward erotic romance.

About which I'm blogging today, at Michelle Buonfiglio's RomanceBuyTheBlog at LifetimeTV, to cap off Erotic Romance Week there and in honor of the mass-market paperback release of Almost A Gentleman. Please come by and say hi.

And about which I'll also be yacking on a panel with romance academics (whom you can also check out online at the Teach Me Tonight blog) . I'll be chatting with them in person, though, at the Popular Culture Association Conference in San Francisco next March. My contribution (which I hope will be provocative) will be called "From BDSM to Erotic Romance: Observations of a Shy Pornographer." I hope to attend in Theorygirl mode, except that by then I hope to have figured out all this out (partly through posts and discussions here).

And if you want to read more from Safe Word, the clue to my current contest is in the excerpt from that book, posted on my web page. And the prize? An autographed copy of Forbidden Shores, by Jane Lockwood.

Oh and as for my question -- well, do you think there's a difference between male and female-oriented erotic fiction?

Anniversary Musings: Love in the Western World, a.k.a. Lives of the English Majors

I mentioned on a prior post that my husband Michael and I recently celebrated our 38th anniversary with a very recherche product (which shall remain nameless) from Good Vibrations.

Amazing.

But mostly when we amaze each other, it's on a more everyday level, like still finding things to talk about and rediscovering ourselves along the way. Like a few nights ago when we were talking at dinner about the Big Serious Book I'm trying to find time to get into, Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Actually, I've read about 100 pages, and it's pretty great -- kind of a history of almost everything around us, by examining how different societies around the world developed different survival characteristics at different rates, and how this helped them develop hegemonies over each other and bash each other around.

Anyway, I was telling Michael about how much more reliable sharpened steel weapons were than stuff that's mostly good for bludgeoning -- when both of us realized we didn't know anything about the technology of making steel, except for the word "tempering." And that actually, the only thing we knew about tempering was from the theme song of a 1950s TV western series called "Jim Bowie," about the guy who invented some kind of steel knife. Which led us into an effortless, word-perfect chorus of:

Jim Bowie, Jim Bowie, he was a bold adventurin' man
Jim Bowie Jim Bowie, battled for right with a powerful hand
His blade was tempered and so was he
Indestructible steel was he
Jim Bowie Jim Bowie
He was a fighter, a fearless and mighty adventurin' man
(no pix, but if you want to hear the tune, here 's the Youtube link)

Amazing what a person remembers. And more amazing what a couple of people remember together. But then, those Jim Bowie verses were really pretty good: clever to take the simple "bold adventurin' man" and then expand it so elegantly in the last line -- alliteration and slant rhyme both).

In a sense, though, Michael and I grew up together. We didn't actually meet until we were 20 (almost children, it now seems to me), but thanks to TV and mass culture we already shared an erotic and artistic imagination.

At 11 or so, we each, separately, spent large amounts of time staring at this cover on the paperback book racks that were springing up everywhere. Staring and having funny feelings. Yes, I know her button says "anti-sex league." But to each of us (and maybe a lot of kids like us) it screamed SEX!! We found an old copy in Michael's parents' bookshelves, and have the cover framed in our hallway, as a reminder who we were "before we loved," as John Donne put it.

Of course, sometimes we saw the same stuff entirely from opposite points of view. As a kid, Michael found the chorus of the TV show "Maverick" theme song a bit confusing.

Riverboat ring your bell
Fare thee well Annabelle
Luck is the lady that he loves the best
Natchez to New Orleans
Livin' on jacks and queens
Maverick is the legend of the west.

(again, you can hear it here)

Why are the two apostrophes jammed up together, Michael asked me -- one to the riverboat and one to Annabelle -- and then why does the lyric hurry back to 3rd person? It seems a little disjointed, he said.

Really? I said. You mean you don't get the brilliant, romantic immediacy of the "fare thee well" jammed in like that? I was genuinely surprised he didn't love it as much as I did.

I think it's a girly thing -- that for the instant in time it took to sing or hear that line of the verse I and every little girl who heard it was poor, spurned Annabelle. Years later, I didn't have to learn how to write the quick emotional changes of deep third person pov (as it's called in Romancelandia). The riverboat gambler Brett Maverick taught me how fast and flexible, how headlong, precipitous, and shifting love can be. There you are with Brett, and before you know it the riverboat's sailing and he's off to follow his life quest. Evidently not the same heartbreaker for little boys (though I'll have to ask the gay guys in my book group).

At which point the other night, Michael and I went to YouTube, to explore a few more of those boy/girl (or Michael/Pam) differences. An early favorite of his being the noirish "Have Gun, Will Travel,"
which was a little dark for me back then, but which probably had a lot to do with making Michael the brooding, pretentious young existentialist I was ready to fall in love with at 20.

Or for me, with this cross-dressing sequence from one of my childhood favorite movies, "Calamity Jane," which I saw when I was 8 and which thrilled me with its image of a girl doing stuff a girl wasn't supposed to. It probably had as much as anything to do with my writing a cross-dressing romance, Almost a Gentleman a gazillion years later. A romance (I have to add) whose new mass market cover is hardly about to cause any shy, word-drunk, imaginative eleven-year-olds to stare and sweat and have funny feelings in their stomachs. I doubt it will prepare anyone to fall in love. But then, Almost a Gentleman's no 1984, so fair's fair.

Great popular art of your childhood?

Romantic or erotic intimations from words or images?

Stuff that made you who you are before you quite knew what hit you?

Deep Purple

Sheesh, you crumpets write fast. Huge, envious, admiring congrats to all of you who have new books coming out soon -- I won't have one until Fall 2008.

But there will be re-issue of Almost a Gentleman before that. Which was my first published romance novel, an erotic Regency about Phoebe, who's spent three years in successful male masquerade, and David, Earl of Linsley, who's the first man to make her want to be a woman again.

It'll be out December 4. It's already on Amazon, and I'm happy to be able to tell you that it'll cost half the price of the old, trade paperback edition. So I'm hoping that I might get some new readers -- up until now my stuff has been in trade (read bigger, more expensive) paperback only.

No male torsos on the cover, sorry to report, just some pretty people done in nice hot purple, the lettering in gold foil.

The prose is less purple but just as hot.

Here's the book's first undressing scene, in which Phoebe protests David's "lordly" behavior.

"Well [David replies], I am a lord, don't forget. I try to be a good, honest, and decent one, but the fact of the matter is that I own rather a lot of land. And I’m afraid that the habit of being lord over all that I survey is a hard one to break.

"Now go stand there by the fireplace." This time his slap on her rump carried a little more force with it. "You know the spot. It’s where the lamplight meets the light from the flames and makes you look so bewitching."

He loosened his legs from around her hips. Slowly, she backed away from him toward the warm pool of golden light. One walked backwards, she thought, after having made one's curtsies at court. In respect, in humility . . . but hardly with the slow, lustful, provocative movements she felt herself employing. Lord of all that you survey, are you, sir? Well, we shall have to see about that.

...The light flowed over her as she reached the spot he’d described.... Her skirt blew softly about her legs; she could feel warm currents of air from the fireplace even as her naked breasts lifted and tightened under his eyes.

His gaze traveled slowly downward. She raised her chin, preening for him, slowly arching her back as a cat might do. Peering at him through her eyelashes, she watched the corners of his mouth twitch.

...[and a little later] She hadn’t expected to flaunt her naked quim quite as readily as it seemed she was doing. Perhaps she’d taken encouragement from the sigh that had forced his mouth open as he stared at the triangle of chestnut curls on the plump mound rising below her belly. Oh yes, she’d enjoyed both the sigh and the intensity of his eyes upon her.

She rubbed her thighs together to try to control her excitement.

"Keep them parted," he growled. He winced immediately after, embarrassed at having revealed the extent of his impatient desire.

But she was beginning to feel rather impatient herself. Although this game of displaying herself for his pleasure was a most provocative one, perhaps it was time to move on. Well, she had only the corset and the shoes and stockings to remove now. Frowning, she tugged at the laces at her back.

"My lord."

"Ummm."

"There seems to be a knot that I can’t untie. Would you help me . . ."

"Well, hurry on over here, then."

But now he was becoming careless, too. For if he’d really wanted to continue with this game, she thought, he would have turned her around and concentrated upon the corset laces, instead of fumbling absently with them while he nuzzled her breasts.

It didn’t matter. There hadn’t been a knot. The corset fell to the floor at his first tug on the strings, as she took advantage of his momentary surprise to unknot his cravat.

He shook his head. "You’re headstrong, disobedient."

"I’ve been a man for three years," she told him. "It engenders habits that are hard to break."

Hope you liked it, and -- if it's new to you -- that you'd like to buy the new purple version.

Though if you'd prefer a free copy of the old version (with larger print and decorous cover), you can enter the contest on my website to try to win one (and read another excerpt as well).