Erotica's coming of age

Recently a friend of mine, Sharazade, was involved in a radio programme on copyright theft (which is prevalent in the erotica field but that's not what this blog is about). At the beginning of the programme the interviewer asked her what her books were about. Sex, she said; but she started thinking about it later, and of course even erotica isn’t purely about sex. As Sharazade says in her blog,

Sex is the vehicle, the conveyance, yes; but my stories are about desire, or attachment, or doubt, or adventure, or growth, or any of the many things that other novels and short stories are about. I almost always have a core idea that I wish to explore: Is it wrong to need reassurance of one’s attractiveness? What role do observers play in defining a couple? How does being covered (physically and metaphorically) affect your view of yourself? What circumstances drive us to ask directly for what we want? and so on.

In other words, erotica often addresses themes that can be found in a lot of other fiction, from history to fantasy to family sagas and ‘chick lit’. In some cases it addresses themes you might find in other genres too, from crime to horror to westerns. It just does so in a particular way. In fact, it often turns the question around and asks ‘what is sex about?’, or ‘what’s the driving force behind our fantasies?’

Of course these questions won’t be new to many readers of contemporary literature. Anyone who’s read Thomas Pynchon, for example, will remember passages dealing with intense and often rather fetishistic sex, and exploring different dynamics of desire. There are plenty of examples in Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day. Then there’s Hubert Selby Jr., with Last Exit to Brooklyn. And if you’re familiar with French literature, much of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work, such as Project for a Revolution in New York, revolves around extended and hugely detailed sadistic torture fantasies – though the intellectual justification for them is that they push at the boundaries of narrative structure and expose the linguistic tools from which narrative is constructed (often, actually, by deconstructing narrative into small fractured parts with minor variations in repetitions – not that you really needed to know that). And then of course there's the long tail of books prosecuted for obscenity in the past, some well-known (Radcliffe-Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and maybe some surprises there as well - have a look at this list, or the Wikipedia article on obscenity (which is mainly US-based and contains a few interesting observations that aren't particularly relevant here, such as the FBI's interest in online erotica).

But while eroticism has made appearances from time to time in ‘high literature’, it’s also now emerged from the shadowy interior of ‘adult bookshops’ and broken out of plain paper packaging to become a major genre in its own right. Erotica seems to have come of age.

The internet has helped, and so has Kindle. All the evidence is that people are prepared to read stuff electronically that they wouldn’t buy in physical form (Antonia Senior has an article about this in The Guardian). If you look at genre listings on Kindle the three biggest categories are, on the UK Amazon site, romance (about 18% of titles), crime/thrillers/mystery (15%) and erotica (12%). Other categories – fantasy, science fiction, horror and even ‘literary fiction’ have many fewer titles.

This is a rough guide because some books are tagged in more than one genre category, the categories themselves can be arbitrary (‘crime’, ‘thriller’ and ‘mystery’ aren’t always the same thing, but they constitute a single category) and what counts as a ‘title’ can be immensely variable – from a very short story to a thousand-page novel, with many erotica titles being on the shorter end of the spectrum.

It’s difficult to make an assessment based on sales because publishers don’t like releasing sales figures. When they do, erotica tends to be lumped in with ‘romance’, ‘general fiction’ or some other broader category. But all the anecdotal evidence suggests erotica is now one of the major areas of – what shall we call it? Textual consumption? – especially in ebook format.

However, erotica has had a sudden and unexpected boost in its public profile since two erotica titles, EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker, reached numbers 1 and 2 on New York Times fiction bestseller list in March 2012 (these positions were correct as of 25 March 2012; here a BBC News article about the books).

Plus, HarperCollins has decided to launch a new line of ebook erotica under the Mischief imprint, while Eroticon, a recent conference for erotica writers, ended up being reported in the mainstream press – see for example the report in The Independent and The Guardian. (I wasn't there, unfortunately - it was a busy weekend for me in other ways.)

If there’s a lot of it about, and that’s not purely because everyone’s looking for wank material. There is a lot of wank material out there, but there’s also a lot more than that. Erotica speaks to its readers about their lives and their concerns – their fears, uncertainties, doubts, desires, fantasies, fetishes and so on. And it doesn’t do that purely by talking about sex. It uses sex as a way to address all these other issues. It uses sex just like crime fiction uses murder, and science fiction invents alternative universes, to address the same kinds of underlying issues.

My own erotic stories, incidentally. often have underlying themes that revolve around topics as varied as philosophy, social theory, inequality and economics, and art and literature. The very first erotic story I wrote, believe it or not, was an exercise in phenomenology. Erotic Review Magazine liked it and published it (it's no longer on their website but is likely to be republished in another format soon!).

But for now, the key thing is this: erotica is no longer in the shadows it was once forced to hide in. It's out and proud, it's clear that it strikes a huge chord with a lot of the reading public, and the best of it does what any good literature does - address the personal, emotional and social complexities of the world we live in.

Unusual excitement

Yes, I've been unusually excited today.

A novella of mine - The Vampire Skye, which I blogged about recently - has been nominated by The Romance Reviews reviewers for Best Book of 2011 in the GLBT Paranormal Romance category.

It's up against a strong field with stiff competition, and it's the first time I've been nominated for anything so I'll be very interested to see how it does.

Voting takes place on The Romance Reviews website (voters have to be logged in to The Romance Reviews) between 16 and 31 March, with results announced on 2 April.

If you'd like to read the novella before voting, just to make sure it's the one you want to vote for, it's available as an ebook from theAmazon.co.uk Kindle shop, the Amazon.com Kindle shop, the
Barnes & Noble Nook website and direct from the publishers, Xcite Books.

Just by way of a short description - it's a BDSM-themed lesbian vampire menage story set in a more-or-less present-day world in which the sovereign debt crisis has created public disorder and imposed cutbacks on the agency that manages the vampire situation and tries to keep their existence secret.

I was going to do a whole other blog on the social significance of erotica but it'll have to wait a day or two...

Vampire Skye reviewed, and some other stuff

First, the good news. Xcite published a novella of mine, The Vampire Skye, at the back end of last year and it's now been reviewed by BookAddict at The Romance Reviews under their GBLT topic heading (it's a lesbian story). The key bit is:

'It exceeded my expectations in world building, hot characters and erotic sex scenes. I look forward to reading more from this talented author. I recommend this to Sapphic readers who enjoy a paranormal story dominated by a sexy female vampire.'

The Vampire Skye is available in ebook and other electronic formats from Xcite Books, from the Kindle stores at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, in Nook format from Barnes and Noble and probably from other places as well.

And now for the annoying news: if you weren't previously aware of it, PayPal has decided to enforce regulations against its use as a transaction system for certain types of erotica, principally of the nonconsensual and quasi-incest varieties. The Huffington Post has the most concise reporting on this.

OK, so it's not the kind of erotica I write or read, and in principle my novella isn't affected (and nor is any of my other writing): but the regulations are being implemented in a typically hamfisted way and causing all kinds of problems for publishers who don't, actually, publish material that infringes the new guidelines. And why does a payment processor decide it's their business to have a moral stance on what people are buying, anyway? A legal stance I can understand: banks and payment processors have legal obligations to prevent money-laundering, etc. But would I, in my everyday life, continue to do business with any other kind of company that felt it should have a say in my moral welfare? Well, no.

There was, for those who are interested in the wider implications, a similar go-around with credit card companies last year: they threatened to withdraw facilities from companies that 'weren't consistent with their brand image'. I would have thought their image was that card transactions should be as easy as cash, but apparently not. It didn't affect a lot of 'adult services' providers anyway, who have long since bit that particular bullet and use a network of processing agencies that handle 'high risk accounts' - for an additional fee, of course. But publishers had to react, and Pink Flamingo, who publish my Secret Circus novel, ended up removing it from their own website (along with the majority of their other books) and selling via eroticbooknetwork.com, which uses different card payment processors who weren't affected by the shift in US card company policies.

The only new thing about all this is that erotic writing has suddenly come to be seen as part of the 'adult services industry'. Adult services themselves have a long history of difficult and tangled relationships with the financial sector, as a 2004 article from Forbes magazine indicates (there's an earlier 2003 article as well). In the 2004 case a card processing company that specialised in adult services accounts had its agreement terminated by its bank, was taken on by another bank (weirdly, one based in the Mormon homeland of Utah, which raised many eyebrows) and was then taken over by a larger card processor that itself has since been bought out itself by an even larger one. The whole process resulted in payments to hundreds if not thousands of adult services companies being disrupted. Also, here's another 2003 Forbes article about how the whole banking sector blows hot and cold over the adult industry, often with banks soliciting transactions at one time and then shutting up shop when they find their involvement embarrassing. Unsurprisingly, the 2003 article fingers PayPal as a big transactions channel for adult services - and at that time they didn't seem to have any problem with it...

So publishers are now chasing their tails to set up more robust and morality-proof payments systems, and of course small independents and self-publishing authors are for the moment going to be the losers. No doubt in the longer term, new options will emerge. There are already anonymous internet banking companies, virtual currencies, token-based systems and the like and if PayPal and other mainstream companies want to impose their corporate vision in this kind of way, the likelihood is that other structures will come onstream fairly quickly and be used not just because people want to buy erotica but because substantial numbers of people will, on principle, no longer want to offer business to a company that tells them how they can and can't spend their money (though no doubt some people will continue to use them because they agree with their morals!).

And if they can decide erotica isn't something you can buy using their payment mechanisms... is that the thin end of a wedge that will mean they'll start making other restrictions on moral grounds?

Over on DeliciouslyDeviant...

... there's another short story on the theme of moving house. It's 1100 words, snuck in while trying to complete a couple of longer pieces.

Here's the link to it.

Okay, so it's not perfectly edited but I don't have time at the moment!

There will be, I think, two more on this theme of which the next will be on this blog, but give me a week or so...

Interview

Yes, it's been quiet here. I have some other stuff I'm writing that's taken up a lot of time, and I'll no doubt be banging on about it here, in due course.

Meanwhile here's an interview I just did with Xcite, just published on their XciteSexyStories website.

Capitalism as porn?

At the moment I’m writing a piece in which one of the protagonists works for a venture capital company. Several crabwise steps in the name of ‘research’ (that’s what I call it anyway) took me into an investigation of sexual customs, which led me to a description of prostitution in Ancient Greece. Don't worry, it's just the way my mind works. There were, apparently, three classes of prostitutes of which the lowest were the pornai: slaves or abandoned girls working for pimps, possibly in brothels. The etymology of the term pornai appears to be from the verb meaning ‘to sell’, thus designating them as items available for sale and purchase.

For the mildly interested, a discussion of prostitution in ancient Greece and Rome appears in Wikipedia.

Which leads me to the unsurprising speculation that if you wanted to describe capitalism as an ‘industrial system of porn’, you might be more accurate and more strictly correct linguistically than you’d think.

I’d be interested in comments from those of you who know Ancient Greek!

Sex and the homeless: free erotic short story

I may have mentioned that our move was delayed by a lawyerly fuck-up, as a result of which we had a night in a motel before the transaction went through. Hence the inspiration for this story - and you can judge for yourself how much or how little of what's laid down here actually took place...

***

So now we’re homeless.
The house we’ve lived in for the last seven years is sold. The keys are with the estate agent, the money is being sent from lawyer to lawyer in a chain that’s supposed to end with us taking possession of our new residence. Our worldly possessions are in a warehouse somewhere.
It didn’t work out, and we’re homeless.
This is because we ended up with two lawyers, one to sell the old place and one to buy the new. Unusual, I know, but it’s just the way the legal stuff gets packaged in with the estate agents’ deals these days. And it’s happened because just one lawyer, the one who’s dealing with the purchase of our new house, had to be contacted in the middle of an allegedly important lunch and said, on the phone, surprised, “Oh – you mean it was today you wanted to complete the purchase?”
Yes, it was today. That was the point of the emails and phone conversations we had over the last month, all of which stated clearly that today would be the day we expected to complete the deal. It still is today, but evidently none of the paperwork has been started, let alone completed.
So until it is completed, we’re vagrants. Middle-class vagrants with credit cards, certainly, but without a home to go to.
There’s a house, vacant for several months, waiting for us but we can’t get the keys. Meanwhile our bed, tables, desks, chairs, books, carpets, even our underwear and coffee mugs and handcuffs and floggers and gags and blindfolds, are all out of reach. They’re loaded into some warehouse on a nameless industrial estate because the removal company needs the truck to be somewhere else tomorrow.
Jen is incandescent. She rages, screaming at the mobile phone in my hand from three feet away but I have no doubt she’s burning the lawyer’s ears. I point out, only a little more calmly, that this is highly inconvenient. It’s going to cost us a hotel for a couple of days, storage for a houseful of stuff that doesn’t have a house any more, and additional expense to buy duplicates of things we can’t access because we can’t unpack them.
But the working day is almost over and there’s no prospect of it being resolved until tomorrow, unless we’re prepared to resolve it with a crowbar and hammer. Which of course would mean fixing the door when we finally get legal possession.
The least worst option is the local motel, which is three miles away next to a busy main road. It’s attached to a service station, though there’s a pub and restaurant adjacent.
We take the least worst option. But we have nothing to leave in the room, so the next trip is to the twenty-four hour superstore seven miles further on, in the next town. We need literally everything, from toothbrushes and underwear to comfort foods like chocolate, and instant coffee and teabags because motels never, ever, leave as many little sachets of coffee as I need, or as many teabags as Jen needs.
We split up, with me wheeling the trolley around the groceries aisles while Jen investigates the underwear section. Ten minutes later I find her with an armful of bras and thongs, which she dumps in the trolley along with a green dress with some ruching on it that says it’s size 12 but seems to have the dimensions of a handkerchief.
“You know I hate shopping,” she says. “So since we’ve got to be here and got to buy this stuff anyway, I thought I might as well buy stuff I know I’ll feel good wearing.”
An hour later she looks good wearing it, too. We’ve showered, changed, she’s wearing expensive underwear and the dress, which turns out to be clingy in all the right places, slightly ruched from cleavage to navel, and have a pleated hem. We go next door to the bar and restaurant, where she chooses steak and I have chilli burritos. She’s animated about the kinds of tortures we should subject the lawyer to, flashing eyes and moving long legs in ways that, I know, despite the table blocking my own view, are flashing well-toned calves at the rest of the room.
There’s another couple on a nearby table. They’re checking the menu, discussing it, the woman consulting her mobile phone. He’s maybe a little stockier than me, with thinning hair, wearing a black jacket with neatly-pressed jeans. She’s smaller than Jen, mousier in a way, cheekbones and jawline not quite so well defined. Light brown hair in a ponytail, wearing a short skirt, white blouse and fat tie that nods to the naughty schoolgirl aesthetic. The blouse is knotted at the waist and half-unbuttoned, so the tie has a function in preventing the front of it falling wide open. Short shirt, as in a seated position is only decorous with her legs firmly crossed and reveals an extraordinary amount of thigh. Oh, and shoes that aren’t remotely schoolgirl; bright red, five-inch heels, and a very retro chunky gold ankle bracelet on her left ankle.
They look like they’re waiting for someone but that’s their problem.
I do notice, though, as Jen pursues her flight of fancy about the appropriate torments for delinquent lawyers, we’re getting occasional glances from them.
A few minutes later I’m in the ‘smoking shelter’, the open-sided shed in the car park reserved for delinquents like me who occasionally enjoy tobacco. And the guy from the next table comes out, sparks up, and we chat. Random stuff, the kind of conversation men have when they don’t really know each other; the state of the economy, the types of car we wouldn’t want to drive. He tells me they’ve booked into the motel, the same place as us, for the night. And then he says ‘My partner, Honey, was eavesdropping your conversation. She was curious about what’s happened.’ So I tell him, and his eyebrows rise to meet the few hairs remaining on his head.
When we stub out our cigarettes and go back inside, Honey’s sitting at our table in earnest conversation with Jen. I catch the back end of a sentence: ‘…I really enjoyed it but it was two week before the bruises faded.’
Our meals have arrived and theirs, Honey’s and Vern’s – as his name turns out to be – follow shortly. And since Honey and Jen have already, evidently, been broaching sexually-related topics it’s a ribald conversation. They both have a quick, provocative wit and we warm to them.
By the time we get to ordering coffee, Honey looks intently at Vern, and then at us.
‘I guess you’ve worked out we swing,’ she says, ‘and Vern and I have been wondering… Actually, Ben, I like the idea of you between my legs, and I know Vern feels the same about Jen…’
Nothing like putting it straight out there. I don’t remember either of us saying straight out that we’ve done this kind of thing before. More than a few times, even though we don’t call ourselves swingers. Maybe something in the body language, the odd turn of phrase, the glint in Jen’s eye?
‘Well, it’s an offer,’ Vern says. ‘You don’t have to say yes. Have another cigarette and think about it, maybe?’
That’s what we do.
‘I like him,’ Jen tells me. ‘He’s charming and more than slightly wicked. I can go for that. And you were looking at Honey’s legs with your tongue practically hanging out.’
‘My best guess,’ I tell her, ‘is they came here to meet another couple that didn’t show. So we’re their plan B.’
She shrugs. ‘Their loss. Our gain.’

I’m in Holly’s motel room, Vern is with Jen in ours.
Holly leans against me, warm and smelling of vanilla. Vanilla – something she’s definitely not.
Even in heels the top of her head only comes up to my chin. I take her ponytail and pull her head back, exposing her throat. Which I explore slowly and softly with lips and teeth.
She shimmies against me, works her way down my body, winds up kneeling at my feet and looking up at me.
‘Don’t be gentle,’ she says. ‘Right about now Vern will have your partner stripped and tied up, and he’s probably spanking her.’
‘You,’ I tell her, ‘are one provocative minx.’
She grins in appreciation. ‘You’ve noticed. Good.’
‘You deserve to be handcuffed and slapped around a bit before I fuck you.’
‘Do you really think so? Well, that bag on the table – the cuffs are in there. And some other stuff. You can slap my face if you like, until I beg to suck you off. After all I’m in the right position for it…’
The cuffs feel heavy, good quality kit. I put her hands facing palms together and remember to lock the ratchet – they’re tight on her wrists but can’t close up further by accident. I untie and unbutton the blouse, push it back to reveal tiny breasts albeit with large and well-defined nipples.
She grins at me. ‘When I was at school it was always a big deal. The other girls grew these enormous tits and I barely even needed a training bra.’
‘I’ve never been into huge breasts. More than a handful is a waste as far as I’m concerned.’ It’s true. I usually look at faces, hips, legs.
The ‘other stuff’ in the bag includes some nipple clamps, the clover style that squeeze harder if you yank on the chain. Her nipples compress quite far and the change in her breathing as she deals with them tells me they definitely get her attention.
‘I can’t wear those all night, you know…’
‘Maybe not,’ I concede, ‘but you can wear them until I’m done fucking you.’
She pouts at me. I yank the chain and make her gasp.
‘You could have just used the pinwheel,’ she says. There’s a pinwheel in the bag as well, but I was thinking of using it later, on her labia…
I use my foot to push her knees wider apart, revealing the reason she had to sit with her legs tightly crossed in the restaurant – no underwear. I grab her tie to pull her up from her haunches.
Face-slapping. Jen hates it. Honey, however…
Holding her by the tie I slap her across the cheek, telling her I expect an obedient and excellent blowjob. I expand on this theme using even more explicit language. I’m rewarded with a look in her eyes that’s half-reproachful and entirely excited. I’m rewarded with open lips and an expectant, questing tongue.
Honey is skilled. Tongue-strokes up and down my exposed cock, pushing and pumping motions at its base, swirls around its head. By the time she takes it in her mouth, it’s granite-hard and despite her petite size she seems to be able to take it all, lips right up against my neatly-trimmed pubes. I’m glad now I found time to cut them yesterday.
I don’t want, though, to come in her mouth. I want to fuck her. I use the ponytail to control her movements, slow her down. Her eyes roll up questioningly, trying to see my face, read my intent.
‘I want you,’ I tell her, ‘on the bed. Kneeling, face down on the mattress with your ass in the air.’
There’s a little, curled-up flogger in the bag, hardly more than half a dozen leather shoelaces gathered up into a small metal handle. I don’t use it. I take the belt off my jeans instead, wrap it around my fist leaving about fifteen usable ass-welting inches. I don’t use it immediately. I enjoy the sight of her balanced there, high heels pointing skywards; I enjoy the fact her skirt pulls up over her ass to expose her fully to me; I’m amused by the soft moans and wriggles while she waits, anticipating; and I enjoy the squeaks she makes as her clamped nipples drag across the mattress.
‘You know what,’ I say, ‘we never discussed a safeword.’
‘Don’t have one. The deal with Vern is, he just does whatever he wants.’
‘Hmmm… in that case you’re lucky I don’t have any power tools with me…’ I’m teasing her, now. ‘Should I ask about the most frightening thing he’s done to you?’
‘That’s easy. Make me go abseiling with him down some fucking huge cliff! Though when I got to the bottom he did tie me to a tree and give me a good whipping, so it wasn’t all bad…’
‘Is Vern going to be upset if I mark you up?’
Honey chuckles at that. ‘No, he’ll just tell me it’s my own fault and thrash me again for it!’
I mark her up. A dozen good swings that echo loudly off the bare walls of the room. I see her pussy glistening at me invitingly.
There’s a roll of condoms in the bag as well.
She doesn’t hold back when she comes. Grinds into me, gasps, moans, squeals, yells. If there’s anyone in the rooms next door they’ll be in no doubt what’s happening.
When I take the nipple clamps off I make her bury her face in the pillows to muffle the yelling as blood flows back into tortured flesh.
There’s more, later, because we keep going. I never do get round to using the pinwheel on her pussy, though.
At one point I tell her all our dungeon furniture is in my lockup, but once we have the house sorted we’ll have a dedicated playspace there.
‘You’d look great dangling naked in chains there, once we’ve got everything set up.’
‘You’ll have to give me your mobile number,’ she says playfully. ‘Then maybe we can make it happen.’
Just before dawn there’s a soft knock on the door. Vern, returning. By that time Honey’s sleeping peacefully. He looks around the room, sees handcuffs and clamps and the whip lying on the bed, and smiles.
‘Good time?’
‘It was. We didn’t have any toys with us, though. How did you get on?’
‘Well enough. I had a roll of bondage tape in my coat pocket, and we improvised. I’ve left her tied down to the bed, blindfolded, so she won’t know it’s you coming into the room.’
‘Ah, but she will. She’ll know as soon as I fuck her.’
He shrugs. ‘You can always do other stuff to her first…’
I leave him with Honey, pad back to my own room, find Jen exactly as he said: spread-eagled naked on the bed, held fast with bondage tape, and blindfolded with more tape around her eyes held in place with a stocking over her head. She’s clearly been well-used. Her pussy, and the wet patch on the sheets, tell me that. As do the vivid scratches on her breasts and thighs.
The click of the door wakes her, puts her on high alert, and I drag the other stocking from the pair gently across her skin, sensitising it, before using a rolled hand towel to smack her pussy.
But when I fuck her – no need for a condom this time – of course she knows instantly the girth and curve of my cock, every vein on it, and relaxes shudderingly, helplessly, into the welcome embrace of an orgasm. Her twentieth of the night, for all I know, because she’s multiorgasmic.
I don’t bother untying her afterwards.

It’s not the kind of motel that does breakfast, so we don’t see Vern and Honey in the morning. We have coffee and return to the business of harassing our lawyer until we can get legally into the new house. It takes most of the day. This proves that lawyers can get their act together really quickly when they need to, though of course we’d have been better pleased if it had happened in a more leisurely way, but starting earlier and resulting in completion yesterday.
Jen’s mobile buzzes an SMS text alert, mid-afternoon. She just smiles and taps back a reply. I know that smile, ever so slightly twisted and smug. It’ll be from Vern. Eventually she shows me the message: Next time, slut, I won’t be so easy on you. I’ll bring the hood and the candles. No, she doesn't explain what happened to make those items relevant. Her reply? And the magic wand you promised, please!
Half an hour later, just as we’ve picked up the keys, I find a text message on my mobile. Got the house yet? When can I dangle in your chains?
Just got keys, I reply. Dangling possible anytime for delinquent schoolgirls!
I have other outfits, she texts back. How about a delinquent lawyer look? That should encourage you…
Yeah. It surely would.