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?

Roman a Clef -- Let's do Lunch

People always like romans a clef -- you know, novels about famous people with the names changed. Because everybody likes to get an inside view of the rich and the famous.

But the concept has come to have a different spin for me since a set of conversations I had with some old friends from where I used to work -- call it BiFi, for Big Important Financial Institution.

As day jobs went, I pretty much liked working at BiFi. The pay was ok, the benefits excellent, the management fair-minded, and my fellow workers smart, literate, and supportive of my writing. I still go to lunch with groups of BiFi and ex-BiFi folks once in a while.

And so, about a year ago, I went to a luncheon and told Sarah, who's also retired, that I was writing full time now. She was really excited about it and so I gave her the URL to my web page. A few months later at the next luncheon, Sarah sat down next to me and told me that she and her book group (some members of which still worked at BiFi) had read my book.

"Great," I said. "Which one?"

She looked at me as though I shouldn't even have to guess. "Oh, Carrie's Story, of course."

Of course. The one I wrote (as Molly Weatherfield) with whips, chains, ponygirls, slave auctions, and equal-opportunity wall-to-wall kinky sex. The one where I dreamed up a motormouth twenty-year-old bike messenger to play out a lifetime of my inmost fantasies.

Who wouldn't chose Carrie's Story? Especially among the people I thought I had a basic business casual workplace relationship with.

Appalled and abashed, I hid my face in my tortellini, but my curiosity finally got the better of my befuddlement.

"So, Sarah, what did you and the group think of Carrie's Story?"

"Well," she said, "we liked it ok, but we were really mostly interested in how you know all that stuff, like where they have the slave auctions."

Right. I've heard this before. I've tried to explain that everybody who has that kind of fantasy life pretty much comes up with the same details. I don't understand why, but it's been true ever since the Marquis de Sade invented Sodality of the Friends of Crime, in Juliette. For some reason, the idea of a secret society, based on excesses of unequal power, really ups the fantasy.

I often like to speculate why this is true, but I wasn't going to get any help from Sarah.

"See, it's a fantasy," I said. "A shared fantasy. Kind of a sociological thing. You know, it's really interesting how..."

Sarah winked at me. Nodded. And winked and nodded again.

I tried to explain again and she interrupted me. "But it must be a true story," she said, "because there was this movie that Stanley Kubrick made, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman..."

Right, Eyes Wide Shut. Because everybody knows that if something is in a movie it's gotta be a true story. Especially if they used CGI to hype the orgy scenes.

"So what we really did," Sarah said, "during our book group meeting, was try to guess who Carrie really is, among the people who work at BiFi, you know. And we think we've got it narrowed down..."

And I have to confess to you that I was afraid to find out who they thought Carrie at BiFi was.

Just call it a compliment to my story-telling and world-building skills. I guess.

Gulp. Wink. Nod. Gulp again. Because none of you readers out there would ever make such assumptions, would you?

And for you other writers of hot-and-heavy stuff out there, has anything like this ever happened to you?

French Dressing

Her outfit was... a long dress with a full skirt, worn over a sturdy whalebone bodice gathered tightly at the waist, and over a stiffly starched linen petticoat. The low-cut neck scarcely concealed the breasts which, raised by the constricting bodice, were only lightly veiled by the network of lace.

This is the costume given to Story of O's eponymous heroine when she enters "the chateau," as it's called -- a regime of erotic submission she accepts as though in a familiar, recurring dream. The language is austere, depersonalized. The narrative voice refers to "the" rather than "her" breasts. And in fact, soon after, one of the "masters" of the chateau tells O that her hands are not her own, and that she has "lost all right to privacy or concealment."

O receives her instructions with the same unquestioning passivity with which she allowed herself to be dressed in her costume. Or at least that's how it's usually -- and to my mind not quite correctly -- described. A better word than "passivity," I think, would be "recognition," and of a very literate, sophisticated order.

Neither O nor her readers need to be told that the costume is a dolled-up version of that of a chambermaid, in cruel, absolutist pre-Revolutionary France. And when she's told that Pierre, "who will chain and unchain you, who will whip you... when the others have no time for you," neither she nor her readers is entirely surprised to find that Pierre is "dressed like the valet in some operetta."

The power relations in the chateau -- levels of hierarchy; iron and leather restraints; ritualized sexual obedience; and the screams and tears that the masters wrest from O and the other women in their long, lowcut dresses -- are rendered with eerie conviction. Oddly, though, what makes it so assured, so quietly confident, is its stagy predictability. This has all happened before, O thinks. And so does the reader. At the very least it's happened in the work of the Marquis de Sade, the aristocrat who lived through the revolution and the terror and who staged his own private versions of them in his over-the-top, bloody, sometimes yucky and sometimes wildly funny writings.

Sade dreamed about the limits of absolute freedom and the beguilements of totalizing system and domination. It's fair to say that he invented the genre of BDSM, though he probably wouldn't recognize it in the cuddlier, domesticated versions we're used to. But it's his genre that O enters, quite as Buffy (and Willow, and we) re-enter the world of teen movie horror for yet the umpteenth time. The real conflict in genre fiction, I believe, is the endless argument between the helpless part of us that wants – that has -- to go there once more, and the wisecracking intellectual part of us that can’t quite believe we’ve been suckered, again and forever seduced by the worn old props and operetta costumes.

It’s that conversation that I listen for in genre – the endless, two-sided chatter, the unashamed, ambivalent questioning that I strain to hear (and knock myself out to write) in romance and erotic fiction.

Does Your Mother Know?

Well, mine does now. That I write erotic fiction, I mean.

Our (unspoken) agreement is that she reads the romances, ignores the hardcore. Which works, I believe, because there are places in the heart (or such we might call it) where family really doesn’t want to go, even if your family is as important to your writing self as mine is -- and most especially my mom.

It was my mom who couldn't wait to introduce me to her beloved Jo March and Scarlet O’Hara. She was reading a romance novel when they wheeled her into the delivery room to have me, and these days she’s an all-purpose culture vulture, gobbling up midlist fiction and washing it down with her favorite Ann Perry with a chaser of Amanda (Cross or Quick).

She wanted me to be a writer. And during the long years when I was, shall we say, a non-writing writer, she never lost hope for me. I’m sure that she always believed that the veddy veddy writerly -- and extremely un-Brooklyn -- name of Pamela that she’d given me would someday do its magic, while I never quite lost hope that someday I’d produce something, publish it, and share the triumph of it with her.

But when I finally did publish something, it was Carrie’s Story -- Story of O retold in the voice of an overeducated San Francisco bike messenger with ambitious S/M fantasies and a penchant for literature, self-analysis, and anal sex. The cover of the current edition (tenth printing last December!) isn’t what I would have chosen, but you get the idea. Not a book you’d bring home to Mom.

Or to many people. At first I was very protective of my Molly Weatherfield secret identity. I was serious about not wanting to be contacted by… well, who knew who was out there? And I certainly didn't want to share my fantasy life with my then college-age son.

Or with my mother, even if she would so dearly have loved to know that I was writing at long last (for it seemed -- who knew? -- writing about extreme sex had been just the push I’d needed.)

But I was determined to keep it all a secret. Which included hiding the essays I (as Molly) had been publishing in the online magazine, Salon.com, about the great French erotic writers Dominique Aury and the Marquis de Sade -- because the author blurb and sometimes the text referred to Carrie’s Story. And much as I knew that my mother would have loved the brief, precious email I’d gotten from the noted author Francine du Plessix Gray, in appreciation of what I’d said about her book At Home with the Marquis de Sade—well, it just seemed too weird to introduce my mom to Molly Weatherfield.

Luckily, however, my mother is possessed of strange and mystical mind-reading powers. Okay, call it coincidence if you must -- but for me it was as though the band had begun playing the theme from The Twilight Zone when, at a family bar mitzvah (where else?) Mom suddenly asked me what I knew about the Marquis de Sade. Because bless her culture-vulture heart -- she’d seen “Quills” in Florida that winter, and she was wondering whether I might be able to supply her with a little literary-biographical background.

“Well, umm... yes,” I stammered. “Funny you should ask,” I mumbled. “Because actually…” I continued. And so I showed her the Sade piece (you can find a link to it on my web page if you go to the ABOUT PAM page and look for ESSAYS BY PAM) and a copy of the note from Ms. Gray. Which did make both of us awfully happy.

So was I silly to keep Molly a secret for so long? No, not exactly. Because a literary essay, even about an erotic topic, is quite a different thing from hardcore erotic fiction. So when a piece of my second Carrie book, Safe Word, came out in The Best American Erotica 2000, and when I told my mom explicitly not to read it, and when she did anyway (something about the conjuncture of one of her children and the word best causing her to take predictable leave of her senses)... well, sometimes it seems that a loving and overeager parent simply has to learn about life the hard way.

“What did you think of it?” I asked her. “It. Was. Very. Well. Written,” she replied, avoiding eye contact but clearly sadder and wiser for the experience.

I should add that my very wise son, (who's now a graduate student in Victorian literature) has never opened any of the Carrie books. But he has read my romances, and he paid me the best compliment anybody has ever paid my writing after he read an early draft of The Bookseller’s Daughter.

“It walks," he said. "It talks. It’s a novel. Congratulations.” Who could ask for anything more?

And to the writers out there: do you share your erotic writing with your family or do you hide it, perhaps behind your pseudonym?

Hi there!
I am Lacy Danes. I’m not really sure how to intro myself here, so I guess I will just jump in with how I stated reading historical romance.

I have always loved books with really hot sex in them. I would go on Amazon and search for books that were historical romance that had a sensuality rating of 8 or 9 and I would buy any and all I could.

I started reading Lisa Kleypas that way. I loved her and then moved from her to Susan Enoch. My mom turned me on to Stephanie Laurens from there; I started reading Mary Balogh, Jo Beverly, Sabrina Jefferies and finally the classics like Jane Austin. I too have never read Heyer. In the classics, I really missed the steam… the sex…. so I ventured to classic erotica.

A few of my favorites are Fanny Hill, The Pearl, My Secret Life, The Romance Of Lust and most stories by the Marquis De Sade. What I love about them is the way there are social rules, yet none, or there are rules and they break them. I don’t know if you would agree with that statement about the above stories, but for me sexually doing what some feel is indecent, is incredibly hot and when these books were written the content was VERY naughty. Hell it still is viewed as naughty.

I just recently picked up a small book that made me laugh and laugh. It is called the Autobiography Of A Louse. I have not finished it yet, the language is purple prose-ish and that is what made me laugh but so far it has been quite entertaining.

For me the stories in the above books gave me a glimpse into the minds of the men of the times. They show what they thought about sex or at least what they fantasized about!

Most of the classic erotica I enjoy is from the Victorian times. I love history and especially history of social sexual behaviors.

So here I am… my book WHAT SHE CRAVES releases in March of 2007. WSC is my first book and I'm still in awe that I am published. My stories always seem to involve some sort of kink. Whether that is a light form of S&M or strong women who wish to submit and please a man.

I look forward to meeting and chatting with you all!

Hugs and Kisses,
Lacy.