Am I allowed to say the P word?

Well, sure I am! Read on...

I had a post and then my computer crashed. So you’ll just have to wait until I’m next rostered on for what I was originally going to talk about.

I’m going to my first SF/F convention in May -- Wiscon -- and I got on a panel! You guys will just love the title:

Porn Crushes the Patriarchy!

Here’s the blurb:

"Erotica for women is coming into the mainstream--novels from the pioneering Black Lace line are now available in trade paperback editions, shelved among the romance novels, which have long been described as 'porn for women,' and several major publishers (Harlequin, Avon, Kensington, etc.) have begun lines of women's erotica in the last couple of years. Publishers go where the money is, but what made the market favorable for erotica right now? Who's buying the books? Was the renaissance encouraged by online publishers such as Ellora's Cave? And does reading (and writing) porn really crush the patriarchy? "

Ok, I’m throwing this out to you -- where did the market come from for erotica and erotic romance? (and I’m sure I’m going to have to define the difference, I don’t know who the other people are on the panel)

Does reading/writing porn really crush the patriarchy?

Did I mention this is a feminist SF/F convention?

I am going to have so much fun!

I'll Take You There

Thank god our at-home wireless internet is unreliable, so that on some days, at least, I can go grab my laptop and write my novel without going online every couple of minutes... say to the Smart Bitches blog, which is one of my latest addictions.

This week, for example, I spent I don't know how much time at a recent Bitchery discussion of erotica and erotic romance favorites. Of course I got some warm fuzzies from having my own work mentioned. But the discussion really got interesting to me when it got around to the inevitable (these days) question of why m/m erotica is so popular with women readers.

You can read it yourself if you want to see what people said (and if I had it to do over, I would have been a little less tart of tongue -- thanks, Kassiana, if you're out there, for having taken my comment in such good humor).

But what I've been mulling over ever since is the question of how people "shop" for erotica. Which, it seems, is mainly to go for what they know they like -- to check the menu and order their favorite flavor.

I suppose we all do that. It's nice to have a menu of familiar, reassuring, entertaining choices. And who could ever have enough Cherry Garcia? Or in my case BDSM.

Except sometimes we don't. Like those times a trusted friend guides you to some wonderful little hole-in-the wall restaurant where there is no menu, where the wait staff doesn’t even speak English. And you go there, perhaps with some misgivings, because you trust your friend... or because you’re bored with what you already know you like… or perhaps you’re not sure anymore, what it is you know you like and what it is you like just because you've always liked it.

Which reminds me of the time when I had to introduce my friend Simon Sheppard, at a reading of his then-new book, Kinkorama, at Modern Times Bookstore. Now, Simon’s clearly a smart, talented, very hot writer – but it's also pretty obvious that he writes from a gay male sensibility that’s kind of foreign to me. And the men he writes about, while often attractive, are miles away from the ones you'll encounter in the recent m/m fiction written for women, or even the m/m stuff I dreamed up in the Carrie books.

I might not have bothered reading as much of Kinkorama as I did. But I felt I had a responsibility to introduce Simon intelligently and to represent his work fairly. Just call me Super(ego)Girl. My dreams begin in responsibilities.

So I read the chapter about daddy/boy sex, and even, with more than a little hesitation, the one about diaper play. And… well, it’s not that I’ve exactly changed my tastes, the stuff was still strange -- even challenging, as the menus describe some kinds of sushi.

But under the spell of Simon’s voice and smarts and writing skill, I felt myself taken to that strange, wonderful hole-in-the-wall place where there aren't any menus. And I closed my eyes and opened my mouth and tasted – who knows what I tasted? – jellyfish, foie gras, tobacco, absinthe? It sure wasn’t Cherry Garcia.

So I’m wondering whether any of the rest of you out there sometimes take the plunge, expose yourself to a new and different erotic sensibility? What was it like? Would you do it again? Do you trust a writer's style and sensibility enough to follow her where she wants to go?

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.