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big book of orgasms book tour: interview with rachel kramer bussel!

06 Friday Dec 2013

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Today the feminist librarian is pleased to be hosting The Big Book of Orgasms (Cleis Press, 2013) book tour, featuring an interview with fabulous erotica anthology editor Rachel Kramer Bussel.

1. The Big Book of Orgasms is an anthology of erotic flash fiction at 1,200 words or fewer. What do you think are some of the biggest challenges and rewards of short-format erotica writing?

For some people, I think trying to tell a fully fleshed out story in 1,200 is difficult, especially if you’re used to having more room to set up the plot and develop your characters, but it’s certainly possible. For others, though, it’s a welcome challenge, and I get many more first-time authors submitting to my 69-story anthologies such as Gotta Have It and The Big Book of Orgasms than I typically do. The rewards are that you learn how to make every single word count; in my own writing, I’ve often had to pare down to get to the heart of what I want to say without giving up the heat and passion of a story. You learn how to write economically and it gives you an opportunity to write about things you may not otherwise devote time to. Flash fiction isn’t every reader’s or writer’s cup of tea, but I think it can be a good way to get yourself writing, especially if you don’t have a lot of time or are stuck agonizing over a given scene. Plus flash fiction can easily be expanded into a longer piece if that’s where the muse takes you; some of my longer stories started out with me trying to write to a shorter word count and getting sucked into the story, which is never a bad thing. As an editor, I appreciate the opportunity to publish three times as many authors’ work as I usually get, and I think it gives readers a wider range of choices.

2. I was impressed with the relative diversity of characters and story types in The Big Book. You have same-sex and different-sex couples, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans individuals, partnered and solitary sex scenes, and many flavors of sexual encounters. I often find erotic short-story anthologies to be fairly one-note, or featuring couples of mostly or entirely one variety (lesbian, gay male, straight, etc.), so this was a pleasant surprise. Did you make your selections with diversity in mind? Is the erotica market resistant to such “cross-genre” collections?

I definitely strive for as much diversity as I can get with each book, especially in The Big Book of Orgasms. I didn’t want readers to get bored, and I wanted to represent as broad a cross-section of what orgasms can look like and what they mean to various characters as possible. As an anthology editor I’m at the mercy of what’s in my inbox, so part of my job is making sure my public calls for submissions get spread as widely as possible and encouraging new writers to submit. In this case, there were a few elements I didn’t see as the manuscript neared completion, such a Tantric sex, that I felt were important, so I specifically asked a writer who I knew could write competently about that topic to write a story about it. In general, though, I try to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts, with what I’m given. I wanted this book in particular to appeal to as many potential readers as possible, to be the one book I would recommend to new erotica readers and be the book of mine that is the most accessible, due to both the ultra short format and the breadth of it.

3. In an era when erotica is increasingly available in free or low-cost formats, what do you think readers of a print/ebook edited anthology like The Big Book of Orgasms get that they would be unable to find elsewhere?

From my job as anthology editor to Cleis Press’s ongoing commitment to publishing both highly edited and beautiful books, I think the final product is something that’s clearly been worked on with a lot of care. I love the print edition’s size for its compactness. It feels different than my books with 20 or 25 stories, and I like that it fits easily in purses and some pockets. In terms of quality, I think everyone has different tastes so I don’t necessarily think it’s a matter or choosing between cheaper books and this one, but with The Big Book of Orgasms every single story has been selected and placed with care. What readers will get out of this book is a range of voices, from vanilla to kinky, male to female, solo masturbation stories, which I don’t often get to publish, and very creative ways of looking at the topic of orgasm within an erotic framework. This is the book I’d recommend to new readers of the erotica, and to people looking for erotica to read to or with their partners, because there’s so much to choose from.

There’s room for self-published work about niche topics, as well as flash fiction and full-length works. One thing I personally love about the erotica genre, as a reader, writer and editor, is the abundance of short stories. That’s what I started out reading, in the Herotica and Best American Erotica series, and I always marveled at the authors’ ability to tell such riveting, memorable tales in a short space. The rise of e-publishing means authors can publish at varying lengths and aren’t as tied to the demands of print publishing, but because there is so much erotica out there, readers can be more discerning and demanding in terms of what they are looking for, both content-wise and style-wise. No fetish needs to go untouched or ignored.

4. Recognizing that what’s hot and sexy will always be subjective (and vary wildly among humans!), what is one theme or trope of erotica that you would be happy never to read again?

It’s hard to say because what may appeal to one person may not be my thing. I’m as fascinated as anyone else by the phenomenon of dinosaur erotica, which, if the media interviews this year are to be believed, is more popular than my books. It’s not my thing per se because I’m not usually into science fiction but I think it’s great that so many people are both writing and reading in that genre, and that the marketplace for ebooks exists to support it. I personally find the fetishization of extreme wealth of the billionaire hero, a la Fifty Shades of Grey, a bit overdone. I’m sure there are indeed billionaires out there, but it seems so over-the-top.

5. What is a theme or dynamic you would like to see writers explore more often in erotic writing?

I’d like to see more stories about couples, especially long-term couples, both having adventures and grappling with real-life sexual issues and situations. I see some of this, but I like the idea of couples exploring new things several (or many) years into their relationships. It’s hard to say what I’m looking for—part of what I love about editing anthologies is that every single time, authors manage to surprise and awe me with their creativity. I don’t like to say “I want more of X or Y” and then only get X or Y in my inbox. If I ever dare to think I’ve seen or read it all, putting out a call for writing lets me know I certainly haven’t!

6. What upcoming project(s) are you working on that you’re excited to share with your readers?

I’m teaching my first Portland, Maine erotic writing workshop at sex toy store Nomia, on December 3rd, which I’m looking forward to, then one January 17th at the New York Academy of Sex Education. Then I’m doing something I’ve never done: two three-hour workshops pre-CatalystCon on March 14th, on erotica writing and nonfiction sex writing, respectively (details are on my website). Those are more intensive courses and include individualized feedback. I’m hoping to teach more workshops as well and my upcoming erotica releases are Lust in Latex, about rubber and latex clothing, and Best Bondage Erotica 2014, both out in January from Cleis Press. I’m taking submissions through March 1st for Best Bondage Erotica 2015 and will be announcing a few more calls for submissions soon as well.

Thanks to Rachel for stopping by and taking the time to answer my questions. You can check out The Big Book of Orgasms at Amazon.com, Cleis Press, your local independent bookstore or library (if you’re lucky!), or Powell’s online.

yep, I’m pro-porn. like I’m pro-fiction and pro-food.

16 Sunday Jun 2013

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Having just submitted my first work of original erotica for consideration for a Cleis Press anthology, I decided it was apropos to work out the writerly shakes by posting a bit of a rant about the recurring moral panic around pornography.

This is what a pornographer looks like.

That is, the idea that a body of work (sexually-explicit material created with at least a partial intention to arouse the consumer) might be studied using diverse methods of data collection and analysis, a wide range of primary source material within the genre, and theoretical lenses, adding to our body of knowledge about the human condition or the world we inhabit.

Last night as I was going through my RSS feeds, I noticed that The Guardian has discovered that some scholars study porn and that others object to the idea that porn can be studied as one studies, say, English poetry, American history, or cellular biology.

And they’ve discovered that some of those scholars who study porn have decided to start a journal dedicated to the subject (PDF), to be published by Routledge starting in 2014, and that anti-porn activists have accused these journal editors of being “biased” and “pro-porn”:

The journal, which announced its call for papers a month ago, and will be published by Routledge next year, marks a turning point in the academic study and treatment of pornography. It is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject and its editors – Feona Attwood, professor of cultural studies at Middlesex University, and Clarissa Smith, a reader in sexual cultures at Sunderland University – say it will offer a fresh cross-disciplinary approach and provide a focus for researchers working on porn.

However, a petition accusing the journal of bias, and demanding that Routledge either change its editorial board or rename it “Pro-Porn Studies” has attracted 888 signatures, including from senior academics in North America and Europe, people working with the victims of sexual and domestic violence and health professionals.

Gail Dines, a British professor of sociology at Wheelock College, Boston, and the author of Pornland, said that, while it was vital that pornography was studied and research published, she had grave concerns about the editorial direction of the journal.

Some of you may remember Gail Dines from my 2012 series on her Boston University appearance along with Carol Queen at a screening of The Price of Pleasure. It’s my personal opinion that she does nothing to enhance the discussion around the ethics of sexually explicit material because her own position has become so dogmatic that she is uninterested in genuine conversation with those who think about pornography in more nuanced ways.

I’m honestly kind of creeped out that she teaches and lives here in the same city I do. But that’s life.

I want to offer two inter-related thoughts about the anti-porn faction’s framing of Porn Studies as biased because it’s “pro porn.”

1) Pornography is a genre, nothing more. “Pornography” is the word we use to describe sexually-explicit materials, most often visual materials, created or used at least partially for the purpose of arousal. Pornography is a genre, just like fiction or poetry is a genre. We can talk about porn being unethically or shoddily made, or we can talk about porn that didn’t do it for us — I’m honestly not that into Longfellow’s epic poems or anything by Ian McEwan. I think Phillip Pullman let his atheist agenda impede good storytelling toward the end of His Dark Materials and after reading a couple of reviews of Lionel Shriver’s latest it sounds to me like she’s given in to unacceptable fat hatred.

But that doesn’t mean I’m “anti-poetry” or “anti-fiction,” and I certainly wouldn’t accuse my father-in-law who loves Ian McEwan of “pro-fiction” bias because he loves an author whose characters give me hives.

This is the sort of nuance that Feona Attwood, Clarissa Smith, Tristan Taormino, Violet Blue, and the others involved in Porn Studies, scholarship on pornography, and creating porn are advocating. There’s crap porn out there, I don’t think anyone is denying that — though like with fiction we’re all going to disagree on what constitutes “crap.” (As librarian Nancy Pearl once reminded her readers, one reader’s bad sex award-worthy scene is another person’s hottest fantasy.) There is also unethical porn, which “pro-porn” feminists have been vigorously discussing and working to advocate for decades — for the most recent discussions, check out The Feminist Porn Book and associated website.

If I had to sum up what I see as the “pro-porn” feminist stance on bad and exploitative porn, it would be the following: make better porn, and empower workers in the porn industry (including your own, if you’re a porn creator) to demand (and achieve) non-exploitative working conditions.

Dines and company, on the other hand — apparently over eight hundred people! — don’t see porn as a genre. They see porn as a single, monochromatic thing which in its entirety is harmful. They see pornography as a public health harm much like smoking while the Porn Studies folks see it more like pastry or even alcohol. Inhalation of smoke increases your risk of cancer; there’s nothing you can really do to make smoking healthy. Eating a brioche, on the other hand, or enjoying a glass of wine at dinner or a cocktail at a party is not per se a self-destructive activity. It’s all about how individuals relate to the food or drink. Do you eat compulsively? Do you shop at a bakery that sells stale rolls? Pays its employees under the counter with no benefits? Are you using whiskey to mask your depression? Has the chardonnay you opened last week gone off in the interim? Wine tastings and French pastry-making classes abound in our neighborhood, testament to the fact that people see alcohol and baked goods as two classes of foodstuffs that can be made well or poorly on a number of levels.

Which brings me to point number two…

2) Scholars are nerds, and we’re generally passionate about our subjects of study. You say “pro-porn” like it’s a bad thing. If pornography is a genre, like poetry or fiction, then it stands to reason that the people who  choose to study it — to build a scholarly career out of studying it — and/or are creating it are “pro” the genre. Don’t we want them to be? Accusing a pornographer or porn scholar of being “pro-porn” is like complaining Seanan McGuire is “pro-fantasy fiction” or the people on “America’s Test Kitchen” are “pro-food.”

Uh … yes? You’re point being…?

Back in the 18th century, there was, in fact, a moral panic about the effects of reading fiction — particularly its effects on girls and women (we’re flightly like that). Fiction, of any sort, inflamed the imagination and the imagination turned to sex. Reading fiction, in other words, led straight to masturbation and other lewd behaviors.

When I listen very long to those who protest against the production of porn, any porn, regardless of the context of creation, quality of production, or content, I admit that they sound about as shrill as the eighteenth-century moralizers with their warnings about how reading fiction leads to depravity.

It’s disappointing to me that so many people continue to take them seriously, instead of re-framing pornography as a genre like any other … one which we can choose to shape and reshape as we please. And study endlessly, like we study Shakespeare’s corpus or Buffy or the human genome.

politics, pornography, and combating queer isolation

28 Thursday Mar 2013

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cross-posted from the family scholars blog.

Conner Habib, an actor who performs in gay male pornographic films, was recently invited by a student group at Corning Community College (Corning, NY) to speak on sex and culture. When the college president found out that Habib, in addition to being a thoughtful and articulate human being, had appeared in erotic film, she took steps to cancel Habib’s talk and has apparently moved to further obstruct attempts to host the talk in a non-college-sponsored locale.

Habib has written an excellent piece about his own perspective on these events which can be read in full over at BuzzFeed. In the essay he reflects on the place pornographic materials have in mitigating the isolation sexual minorities can experience, particularly in rural areas. He writes:

Where I grew up, just outside of Allentown, PA, I watched, right through my adolescence into adulthood and early college years, while straight people paired off and experienced sex. They were able to engage with a basic aspect of human life that seemed unavailable and distant to me. Unlike today, there was no discussion about gay marriage, nor were there many gay characters on TV. But even if there had been, neither would have rounded out my experience as a man with homosexual feelings because so many of those feelings were — unsurprisingly for a young man — sexual. Gay sex was a lonely venture. It wasn’t easy to find, and was only mentioned in slurs and the butt of jokes. … Whether I bought it from the adult video store or, later, downloaded it, gay porn helped me encounter positive images of gay men enjoying the act of sex. Gay porn was a window into gay sexuality that was free of shame and guilt, and revealed a different world where sex wasn’t a lonely prospect, confined to the shadows or just my imagination.

Habib describes how, being a man of Arab descent, he receives fan mail from gay men in Middle Eastern countries who “[express] gratitude and relief for my having portrayed gay sex in a positive light on camera.”

Continue reading →

"the immediate problem … of how to represent women’s desire visually" [more questions about porn]

21 Thursday Feb 2013

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So I’m working my way through some of the classics of scholarly treatments of film pornography, most recently Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (University of California Press, 1989). It’s a book that in many respects has aged well, despite its heavy reliance on both Marxist and Freudian frameworks for discussing “fetishism,” commodification, sexual pleasure, and power dynamics. Williams pushes back fairly forcefully against anti-porn feminism, and — while at times too quick to concede that such-and-such plot or scene is misogynist — insists on complicating the assumption that mainstream, heterosexual “hard core” porn is de facto male-centric and anti-female pleasure.

However. 

(You knew there was one.)

However, she keeps circling around this notion that one of the traps of cinematic pornography is that they have to depict pleasure on the screen (no argument there), and that male pleasure is easy to depict — via penetration (“the meat shot”) and/or ejaculation (“the money shot”) — while female pleasure is difficult (impossible even?) to successfully show on film. At one point toward the end of the book she writes that feminist pornographers, however much they may desire to revise the genre, are still confronted with “the immediate problem … of how to represent women’s desire visually.”

I guess I just don’t get the problem here.

Like … turn on the camera. Train said camera on a masturbating woman who, let’s imagine, gets off on the idea of the camera’s “gaze” as she’s climbing toward orgasm. Maybe, if you wanna get fancy you could use multiple cameras so as to ensure you get some close-ups of her face, or the curve of her spine as she arches, or the cant of her hips as she pushes her fingers into herself…

It’s just … not. That. Difficult.

I read my wife’s desire and pleasure visually on a fairly regular basis and — while, granted, we augment the visual with verbal cues and shared history — my visual processing in this regard has a pretty damn high success rate in that my visual perceptions of her enjoyment has a high degree of correlation with her own reports of what gets her off, when.

You read a body in ecstasy just like you read a body in anger or pain: through minute facial expressions, gestures, the set of the shoulders, the angle of limbs. You read a person’s willingness for partnered sex through all of the ways they physically express connectedness (or lack thereof) to the other person(s) en scene.

We don’t panic (film people, correct me if I’m wrong here!) over OMG how are we ever going to represent anger visually in this film!?

Why oh why is sex supposedly so freakin’ different — women’s sexuality specifically in this instance — that it’s a “problem” to capture on film?

(via, very nsfw)

(I’d argue male sexuality, also, is far from “simple” to represent through the visual tropes of erection, penetration, and ejaculation, but that’s maybe a post in its own right.)

What I suspect is that this assumption that women’s desire and sexual pleasure is a problem, cinematically speaking, comes from the pervasive belief in contemporary culture that women’s sexuality is mysterious and difficult to understand (while men’s is basically self-evident; again, an assumption that deserves unpacking). If women’s sexuality is this crazy mysterious thing that we don’t understand and that men find epically confusing, how are we ever supposed to imagine it visually on screen? A mystery is, by definition, something which can never be fully revealed unless it is solved.

Which is why, as Williams suggests, women’s sexuality in modern hard core porn, is often “solved” through gimmicks that render it somehow more visible, or displace it by letting male pleasure cues stand in for everyone’s sexual satisfaction in the scene.

I’m not as convinced as Williams is that all mainstream pornography is stymied by visualizing women’s pleasure. I think, at times, that Williams is too quick to assume — at least in this early work — that proof of desire requires, for example, genitals which can demonstrate arousal and climax on-screen.

And I’m pretty sure there are a lot of pornographers, feminist, female, and otherwise, who’d be surprised to learn that women were such difficult creatures to capture on screen. I wonder: would that make us some sort of weird supernatural being of sex? Try to capture visual evidence of our pleasure and we’d vanish from the silver nitrate on the film (or the binary of the pixels on the image card)?

to want them, to be them, or both? [perspectives in porn]

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

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So last week I reviewed an anthology of essays on pornography, and kind of in passing I asked why we generally assume that people watch porn because they want to fantasize about having sex with the people the camera’s gaze is trained on. That is, in porn marketed to men who like having sex with women, female actors take center stage and male performers are assumed to be exchangeable stand-ins for the Everyman Viewer. Women are cast with an eye toward what body types producers imagine their Everymen want to fantasize about exchanging bodily fluids with.

I don’t understand where this narrative assumption comes from.

Is that actually how the majority of people watch porn?

Because that’s certainly one perspective to take when consuming erotic material: the “would I wantonly ravish this person?” perspective. However the viewer/reader assesses the sexual attractiveness of a given performer/character (visual presentation, sexual style, aspects of character, voice, etc.), that question certainly informs how you enter into the fantasy of the pornographic scenario. If the answer to the above question is yes! it becomes easier to understand the motivations of the ravishers as depicted in said piece of smut. It’s easier to get drawn into the story, just as it’s easier to get drawn into any work of fiction when you care about the character’s well-being, or want to know what happens next.

I get that. There’s a reason I’m drawn to some relationships in fan fiction and not others; some character dynamics just don’t do it for me. Others do.

But I find this an unsatisfying and incomplete assessment of how people (read: “men” in most discussions about pornographic film) interact with porn. Why? Because it’s not the only way I — as a consumer/creator — interact with sexually-explicit material. And it’s not the only way people interact with fiction generally. We know this. And yet, somehow, when the question of sexually-explicit material is on the table all of our wisdom about the viewer/reader and their complex interactions with what they watch and read flies right out the window.

To whit, when it comes to porn, despite the fact I’m a voyeur by definition (reading/watching the characters/performers interact in sexual ways without literally being involved with them) my pleasure is often less contingent on the question “would I wantonly ravish this person?” than it is on the question “if someone ravished me in this fashion, how might it feel?” Or, “is this dynamic between them an arousing one? how is it making the actors/characters feel? why is it making them feel that way? The sexual activity depicted doesn’t have to be something I’d definitely find pleasurable in real life, but a successful pornographic or erotic narrative will encourage an imaginative connection, prompting me to explore how such an activity could be pleasurable to the performers/characters in question.

Like any good work of fiction, pornography and erotica asks us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes (or, you know, lacey knickers). And learn something meaningful or moving while we’re there.

So all of this leads me back to the question: Rather than assuming people sexually objectify the performers in porn, why don’t we wonder to what extent they’re identifying with them? After all, we’re human beings watching (or reading about) human bodies experiencing sexual pleasure. Doesn’t it make sense that we’d — at least to some extent — imagine ourselves into their situation as much as we might imagine being the person sexually stimulating them?

I look at this image and I feel the water washing across my skin (via)

I haven’t watched much moving-image porn, so perhaps the descriptions I’ve read of pornographic films are giving me the wrong impression here? But when I read synopses of films, I’m definitely aroused most often by imagining myself in the role of the performers whose pleasure is visible on screen. Like, if the film is going to show me a woman giving a man (or woman) a blow job, and it’s the giver’s body and facial expressions and responses we’re seeing, isn’t that the person we’d be likely to identify with — not the disembodied dick (or clit) that appears as a prop on the screen?

And no, I don’t think the answer can be as simple as “but dudes can’t/won’t imagine themselves into the position of a female performer because their bodies are different!” because I read plenty of erotic material in which the only bodies involved are male bodies and I definitely successfully identify with those characters. So I think we’re too quick to assume that anatomical body difference is a barrier to imaginative involvement.

Maybe it’s partly a (socialized or innate) gender thing? Recent studies have suggested that men and women generally interact with porn in different ways, with men being less flexible in what types of erotic imagery arouse them (women appear to be catholic in their tastes: it doesn’t generally matter whose bodies are depicted, or even that they be human bodies — if sexytimes be happening, our pleasure centers light up). But I’m tired of the simplistic assumption, without research to back it up, that men only interact with porn in a way that interprets the (female) actors depicted on screen as objects rather than subjects. At the very least, I’d imagine it’s likely viewers of pornography — just like readers of fiction or viewers of any other genre of film — switch imaginative perspectives, so that response to a question about who is being observed and who is being identified with would change over the course of the viewing/reading experience in complicated, unstable ways.

I’m continuing to think about this question while reading Laura Kipnis’ Bound and Gagged (1997) and Linda Williams Hard Core (1989) this month. They’re both fascinating studies which have much to recommended them, though some of the debates they engage with are certainly dated. Still, on the watch for questions of perspective both authors seem only to nod in passing to the idea that male viewers might be watching the bodies in screen in less-than-straightforward ways. Williams, for example, seems to assume that heterosexual male arousal in reaction to viewing an aroused male body would be an experience of homosexual desire, rather than, you know, a response to the arousal of a body the viewer could imagine being. So it’s clear that even the leading thinkers in this field have taken this question somewhat as read.

What are your experiences with sexually-explicit material? To what extent do you find yourself wanting to be and/or wanting to have the individuals depicted or described? How does the voyeurism of engaging with other peoples’ (fictional or performed) sexual intimacy pull you in as an observer-participant? Do you tend to identify with all of the characters in a scene, or specific characters? To what extent does body type and physical sex contribute to your choice of character with whom to identify?

I’d love to hear your thoughts; if you want to share anonymously the form should allow for that — and I’ll try to monitor the thread carefully so that anon comments don’t end up in the trash if they are actually legitimate contributions (95% of my “anon” comments are just straightforward spam).

booknotes: histories and cultures of sexuality

05 Tuesday Feb 2013

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As promised, here is my round-up of recently-read titles having to do with various aspects of human sexuality, politics and culture.

Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade by William Benemann (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Let’s begin with the book Hanna referred to as the book about “mountain men humping!” Benemann takes as his subject a 19th century Scottish aristocrat, William Drummond Stuart, and through Stuart’s colorful life explores the contours of same-sex desire on the borderlands of “civilized” society. Stewart, a younger son who later in life inherited the family title from his older brother, came of age during the Napoleonic wars and served in the 15th King’s Hussars where he rose to the rank of Captain. After retiring from the army, Stewart traveled widely in the Middle East and North America — and in North America found the homosociality of the American West particularly amenable. Throughout his life, Stewart’s most enduring relationships were with men, including one French-Cree trader who he traveled extensively with and even took with him back to Scotland after assuming responsibility for the family’s estate; the couple lived for a time in one of the secluded lodges on the land, where Stewart kept all the material evidence of his travels abroad. According to Benemann, previous treatments of Stewart have gone out of their way to ignore the evidence of same-sex relationships in the Scotsman’s life. Benemann’s work is a thoughtful and nuanced challenge to this previous “closeting” of Stewart’s sexual self, taking those same-sex relationships for granted as a meaningful part of Stewart’s experience. Anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century Anglo-American sexuality and gender should definitely add this one to their reading list.

Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America edited by Thomas A. Foster (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Published as a companion volume to John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s seminal Intimate Matters (1988), this new primary source reader offers a thoughtful compilation of lightly annotated documents related to various aspects of sexuality in American culture from the colonial era to the present. A brief 225 pages, featuring selections from about seventy sources, this reader is best seen as a jumping-off point for further discussion and exploration rather than a source for full-text transcriptions. Each of the five chronologically-arranged sections are introduced with a brief preface on the sexual issues of the period in question, and each document likewise features a thoughtful introduction. While necessarily incomplete, given its length, Documenting Intimate Matters is admirably diverse in its socio-cultural and geographic scope as well as the genres of (textual) documents found therein. Some of my favorite include newspaper announcements from the 1780s-90s placed by men whose wives had deserted them to inform creditors the husbands would no longer take responsibility for their (ex?) wives debts; the angry diary entries of Frederick Ryman (1884)*, whose sentiments about women would not be out of place on anti-feminist blogs of today; and Susan Fitzmaurice’s 2002 reflections on the struggles of raising a child with Downs Syndrome in away that prepares them for a sexually active, sexually pleasurable, and sexually responsible adulthood. An excellent anthology for use in introductory classes.

*Full disclosure: Ryman’s diaries reside at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Family Pride: What LGBT Families Should Know about Navigating Home, School, and Safety in Their Neighborhood by Michael Shelton (Beacon Press, 2013). The latest addition to Beacon Press’s “queer ideas/queer actions” series, Shelton’s Family Pride is an accessible and nuanced snapshot of life in America for queer parents with children as we enter the 2010s. Centering the lived experiences of both LGBT parents and their children — through in-depth interviews Shelton conducted, as well as the growing body of relevant research literature — Shelton’s book should be on the bookshelf of every “family values” advocate (members of the Institute for American Values I’m looking at you!) as well as in the library of every queer activist and/or LGBT organization. While the title makes it sound like Family Pride is a handbook for queer families, in reality the volume is more of a status-quo assessment with some recommendations (from Shelton’s perspective as a therapist who has worked with queer families) for what queer families need in order to thrive. He does an excellent job of incorporating (I’d even argue prioritizing) the experiences of families who don’t often make “gay family” headlines: queer parents in straight marriages, parents who are in the closet, non-white families, families living with financial insecurity, families with uncertain immigration status, parents in prison or with a history of interaction with the law that makes calling the police for help an unthinkable solution to anti-gay speech or acts. My only quibble with Shelton’s framing is that he never explicitly defines an “LGBT family” as a unit made up of parents-plus-children in which at least one parent is queer — yet that is clearly his operational definition. I would have appreciated either a more explicit acknowledgement that this book focuses on parenting-while-gay OR an effort to include the voices of queer families that do not include children. We are, most assuredly, families too.

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal by J. Jack Halberstam (Beacon Press, 2012). While in Austin, I snagged a copy of yet another volume in the “queer actions/queer ideas” series — Halberstam’s meditation on the playful, anarchic queer feminism burbling up through the actions and expressions within youth culture. Taking pop culture references from Sponge Bob to Lady Gaga, Halberstam argues for the liberatory playfulness of more fluid sex and gender identities that — rather than requiring taxonomical fixity — provide a sandbox full of tools and opportunities for self-expression. I’m an easy sell on this score: while I am at times skeptical about the power of pop culture expression to effect political change, neither am I threatened by sex and gender anarchy. I am comfortable in my own gender (fairly conventional, by 21st century standards — though I’d likely have been a shockingly difficult daughter in many an earlier time and/or place) and sexuality (fluidly bisexual, married, monogamous). And I see no reason not to afford others the opportunity

Hard to Swallow: Hard Core Pornography on Screen edited by Claire Hines and Darren Kerr (Columbia University/Wallflower Press, 2012). This excellent anthology explores the pornographic genre of “hard core” films from a variety of perspectives: through the lens of history, film studies, sexual politics, and more. The majority of contributions focus on the United States and Britain (the editors are lecturers at Southampton Solent University, UK), and despite the negative connotations of “hard to swallow” virtually all of the authors take for granted that pornographic film as a genre deserves serious consideration. Pornography, it is assumed throughout, is simply explicit representation of human sexual activities; the messages of that representation can be positive or negative, depending upon execution and interpretation. My favorite pieces include: Linda Williams’  ‘”White Slavery,’ Or the Ethnography of ‘Sexworkers’: Women in Stag Films in the Kinsey Archive”; “The Progressive Potential of Behind the Green Door” by Darren Kerr; “Reel Intercourse: Doing Sex on Camera” by Clarissa Smith,” and “Interrogating Lesbian Pornography: Gender, Sexual Iconography, and Spectatoring,” by Rebecca Beirne. At their best, these essays go beyond commonplace assumptions about pornography as inherently degrading, as without cultural merit, as a male-only pursuit. Williams’ piece examines the subjectivity of women in early twentieth century stag films, wondering what light surviving films might shed on performers’ agency. Kerr, in “The Progressive Potential…” revisits a film that has been understood as misogynist and asks us to think, again, about the centrality of female sexual pleasure in the narrative. Clarissa Smith pushes back against the notion that performers in porn “just have sex on camera,” suggesting that engaging an audience in erotic fantasy is, in fact, a difficult role for which real skills are required (can we all say “duh?”). And finally, Beirne’s contribution explores the nuances of voyeurism, performance, and sexual subjectivity in the work of lesbian pornographers.

The entire anthology was absolutely worth reading, though I had quibbles with various assumptions along the way: one author, for example, claimed in passing that “the consumption of pornography … is an essentially private past time, indulged in as an accompaniment or prelude to masturbation.” Yes … but also, no. Reading/viewing erotica can happen in many contexts, only some of which are solitary, and doesn’t necessarily lead to masturbation for all consumers, every time. Likewise, the uncomplicated statement that pornography “began as a male-only pursuit,” even if the author acknowledges that “that male-ness has been diluted in recent years,” is to ignore the long history of female pornographers and women who have enjoyed erotic material. Women + sexual agency is not, contrary to popular opinion, a twenty-first century phenomenon.

I continue to be fascinated, too, by the assumption (apparently played out in the majority of pornographic film) that straight men don’t like to see male bodies centered in porn: from the descriptions of works and from the analysis of the authors it certainly sounds like in mainstream “hard core” (explicit) pornography, it’s women’s bodies on display for a presumed male audience. Granted I’m queer, so. But in general, what I find visually arousing is the depiction of people having sex. People having sex in ways I can then fantasize about enjoying like they’re enjoying it. Watching a woman orgasm on screen is hot (to me) because ohgodohgod I know what that feels like, and if I were in her situation I’d be coming too. So I’m curious what’s happening for men who watch porn in which the role of the male actor is basically a two-step process. Step one: Get it up. Step two: Ejaculate on screen. Like, isn’t that kinda disappointingly … thin on material that encourages imaginative projection of yourself into the scene? It’s just this thing I keep thinking about, as I’m reading these pieces that assume because women’s bodies are the bodies depicted, therefore the audience is supposed to imagine having sex with them (therefore be someone who likes having sex with women) rather than imagine being them (a person, male or female, experiencing sexual pleasure). How would we analyze pornography differently if we assumed the viewer’s involvement with those on-screen was a process of empathetic identification rather than (positive or negative) objectification?

Lots to think about … and I’m footnote mining Hard to Swallow for oft-cited authors and works so I’ve already got several other books on pornography on order at the library and look forward to reviewing them here!

why do I write (and read) fan fiction? [part three]

26 Saturday Jan 2013

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See part one and part two for the context of this post.

So having explored fan fiction generally (and why I’m drawn to it) and erotic fan fiction as a sub-genre of fic, and why I think it’s important, I thought I’d round this little series out with some thoughts on what draws me to the particular fandoms and pairings (relationships) I write … and what I’m trying to do when I write them. Besides, you know, enjoy the smut. I’m also going to address, below, a couple of questions I’ve fielded lately about the ethics of fic-writing practice.

Donna Noble (Doctor Who)*

Why write the pairings I write?

Well, so, it’s tempting to say that I write the things I write because I find them compelling and I just do, okay? On a certain level, trying to explain why you find the the fiction you like compelling is like trying to explain why you love your partner. It’s not really reducible to a bullet point list.

But on the other hand, I’m me. So of course I have some Thoughts on the subject. And it starts with the fact that I consumed a lot of erotic fan fiction at a point where I was beginning to actively think about relational sexuality and how sexual identity and desire worked in peoples’ lives (see post two). And I really enjoyed a lot of fan fic I was reading, mostly gay male pairings ’cause those were the fandoms Hanna and I were reading, but I struggled to find sexually-explicit lesbian pairings. And the femslash I did come across was frustratingly in-explicit about sex, or written by people who didn’t seem to fully grasp the possibilities of what two female-bodied people might do together, sexual-intimacy wise. Hetero and gay male sex scenes in fic (and, to be fair, in a lot of regular porn) work on a fairly standard narrative arc that culminates in penetrative sex — penis-in-vagina or anal sex — as The Most Bestest Form of Sexual Intimacy. It’s pretty much always orgasm-producing for both partners and sometimes it’s clear the authors (and the characters they’re writing) don’t consider sex to have happened until there’s been a penis inside a vagina or an anus.

Without a penis, what do you do?! Okay, yes, there are dildos and vibrators, but honestly not a lot of fics wade into the territory of sex toys very skillfully, and dildos in a lesbian sex scene too often just cue the author to assume sex with a dildo is about role playing het sex. Which it can be, but certainly doesn’t have to be. In my opinion, it’s much more fun to start without that penetrative-sex-as-goal model in mind and think about all the ways two bodies might come together (double entendre very much intended).

So I developed a (Queer, Feminist) Agenda. Which was to inject the world with realistic smut about ladybits. Smut that was tactile, visceral, about real bodies coming together and people making meaning out of the sex they were engaged in. And I’m an historian, so I started out pilfering from Downton Abbey, writing an eight-story arc about Sybil Crawley and Gwen. And I went on from there to other female pairings and eventually stuck my toe into the waters of m/m slash. It was kind of terrifying at first, pushing out into writing about men having sex — something I don’t have hands-on experience with. But I discovered that, at least the way I go about it, the characters take hold of the narrative regardless of gender and help me feel my way through giving them positive (and I hope realistic) sexual experiences! And in part, I was motivated by the same (Queer, Feminist) Agenda as I had been with writing female-bodied sex scenes: the be-all and end-all of sex for guys doesn’t have to be penetration.

I’m hardly the first person to observe this, but for people who are queer in some way, writing slash fiction can be a way to revise the heteronormative narratives of mainstream media. And, I’d add as a feminist, it can be a way to revise sexism and other isms as well. Watching a television show with primarily straight relationships and re-writing or filling in those stories to imagine queer relationships injects our experience into the cultural discourse. Characters on television, in film, in books, are assumed straight until explicitly identified as queer; fan fiction more often assumes that everyone is a little bit queer unless they’re proven to be straight. It’s a re-visioning of the world in which sexual variety is the norm — one part reflection of our actual experiences in queer subcultures, and one part wishful “what if…” thinking. Looking at my small repertoire of fic pairings, I’d argue I tend to choose characters who have the potential to — when queered in some way — disrupt the normative expectations about sex and relationships that we see in a lot of porn, erotica, and mainstream media — television shows, movies, etc., the original material from which fan fiction is born. Perhaps starting out as a critique of the original material, I often find my acts of fanfic subversion increases my pleasure as a consumer of the original material.

I enjoy writing stories about women unabashedly enjoying sex and knowing their bodies. I enjoy writing stories about elder folk, late-in-life lesbianism, about people having sex when their bodies don’t always work the way they want them to. I like writing fic in which it’s taken for granted (by me, the author, at least) that men can, and do, enjoy a full range of emotional intimacy, body insecurities, carry baggage from damaging relationships, enjoy sex that isn’t always fucking. (In fact, I have yet to write a fic that includes men having anal sex.) I like writing the vulnerability of desire, about what it means to expose to another person just how much you want, and (often even more frightening) what you want. I like writing sex that includes awkward conversations and misunderstandings and bodies that frustrate and fears that overwhelm — but that all ultimately circle around that moment of knowing and being known that can come when people get naked together, in every sense of the word.

The ethics of slash: a few final thoughts.

Aside from the ethics of porn, which is a topic about which much ink (and internet bile) has been spilled, the ethics of fan fiction (or, more generally, “transformative works”) is itself a topic for discussion on the internet and beyond. Hanna and I belong to the Organization of Transformative Works, a non-profit organization that advocates for the practice of fan works and also runs the Archive of Our Own project, which seeks to collect and preserve fan works online. They publish a peer-reviewed journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, that explores fandom in its infinite varieties. So if you’re interest is piqued and you’d like to delve into the politics and culture of fan creation — or poke around and read some fic or whatever variety! — I really can’t recommend them highly enough.

What I wanted to do here is touch on a couple of ethical issues that have come up recently in conversation with friends — namely the ethics of “m/m erotica” written by women, and the practice of writing RPF or “real person” fic.

Can, or should, women write erotica about gay men?

Periodically, there are internet-based wrangles over whether or not “m/m erotica” — which in the world of published romance/erotica generally means “gay porn for girls,” or (usually) women-authored fiction about gay male relationships marketed to a (presumed straight) female readership — is ethical (see for example here and here). The question is whether the m/m genre is exploitative, a hetero appropriation of gay male culture. The practice of writing erotic fan fiction is overwhelmingly a female one, and male/male pairings — as I write above — generate an incredible amount of enthusiasm, from both writers and readers (who appear to be, again, overwhelmingly female).

As an aside: fan-fiction writing as a feminized activity is something that deserves attention, and I have no doubt someone somewhere is doing incredible work on it. I think there’s a lot to explore in that dynamic — and I’m looking forward to being a part of the conversation, along with people who’ve done way more research than I into the phenomenon.

But back to the ethics of being a woman writing/reading porn involving men having sex with other men. Which is something I, a cis woman, do on a near-daily basis (see above). I admit that, when the articles about m/m erotica appeared, I did some soul-searching about it. When people suggest an activity might be exploitative it’s pretty much always a good idea to take their position seriously and listen to what they have to say. But. Here’s my thing about the case against m/m erotica: it basically comes down to an argument that if people of sexual identity A create or consume erotica about (fictional) people of sexual identity B, particularly if there’s a dynamic of social privilege in the mix, that’s per se a problem.

But sexual identity isn’t some sort of siloed, static thing — or at least I don’t experience it that way. Our sexual identities, desires, practices — they’re messy and complicated and shift over time. Preferred sex and/or gender of one’s actual partners aside, we can have fantasies and enjoy porn about practices we would never want to actually engage in. And, I would argue, we can find porn about bodies and practices we don’t per se find arousing, arousing because so much of sex isn’t the geometry of bodies coming together but (see post two) the narrative surrounding that context. Recent research is beginning to support this notion, particularly for female-bodied persons. As J. Jack Halberstam points out in the recent book Gaga Feminism (Beacon Press, 2012):

People are not asking why it is that gay men do not, generally speaking, produce any [sexual] fantasies around femininity, while lesbians produce lots of fantasy environments that include men or masculinity. When, in The Kids Are All Right, the lesbian couple watches gay male pornography to spice up their sex life, the scene was met with incredulity, especially from gay men. Indeed, a gay magazine journalist called me and asked me to comment on this bizarre (to him) scene. I responded that lots of lesbians watch and like gay male porn, straight male porn, and everything in between … [According to sexual response studies] while men, gay and straight, tend to respond in inflexible ways to erotic images of men and women (straight men want to see female bodies, gay men want to see male bodies), women, gay and straight, tend to respond in flexible ways to images of men, women, and animals. (p. 87-88).

So my point is that what sounds like a fairly reasonable call for non-appropriation (“what do these straight women think they’re doing, fantasizing about gay men!”) becomes tangled really quickly.

To use my own example: I’m a bisexual woman in a same-sex relationship with another woman. Does that mean I’m only “allowed” to be involved in reading/writing porn featuring two women? Are threesomes okay — or not, because I’m not in an open or poly relationship? If I write about sex involving male bodies, is it okay because as a bi woman I’m sexually attracted to men? But then it would be okay for straight women to write gay porn also, so maybe I’m only allowed to write porn about hetero pairings? But I’ve never been in a straight relationship, and identify as part of the queer community — so maybe that’s off-limits as well. But if I’m part of the queer community then we’re back where we started: maybe I get to create and consume porn about same-sex couples because I’m part of a same-sex couple?

So you end up on this merry-go-round of factors that could be used to determine who is or isn’t “qualified” or ethically able to create certain types of sexual fictions. And I think that that sort of policing ultimately impoverishes us all. If we started saying that straight people could only write or enjoy porn about straight folks, and gay men and lesbians could only write or enjoy porn about gay men and lesbians … not only would we miss out exploring the sexual diversity of humanity through the imaginative act of writing and reading, but we’d also be ignoring that there are people who don’t fit into these neat and tidy categories of the self.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for critique. Hell, in my book, there’s nothing in the world so sacrosanct as to be beyond critique. And I absolutely believe that there is porn out there that fetishizes queerness for the straight gaze. I mean, I wouldn’t be writing porn in the first place if I hadn’t gotten frustrated with the conventions and stereotypes I saw being recapitulated over and over in the porn I was reading. So I think anyone involved in writing erotica should be open to conversation about their work, open to hearing people say, “Hey, that thing you did there in that story rubbed me the wrong way, and here’s why.” It’s not a requirement to engage, but I would hope the resulting conversation could be an opportunity for growth for all involved.

What are my feelings on “real person” erotic fan fiction?

Yup, it’s a thing in the world, people writing (often erotic) fan fiction featuring real-life celebrities. Often, though not always, these celebrities are the actors portraying the characters that these same authors write other fan fiction pieces about. But there are also people who write erotic fan fiction about politicians, musicians, and other people in the public eye.

I had a follower on Twitter ask me last week what I think about the practice:

I responded:

 

And I’m not sure I have a whole lot more to add to this “short answer” response. Characters (whether portrayed by actors or written about in a text) are characters not human beings. We joke about how they take over our brains and insist their own version of events, but at the end of the day they are human creations — not humans themselves. They have no independent bodily autonomy or agency. They have no legal or social standing as persons. Real people do.

Real people can create erotica or pornography that involves themselves and offer it to others (friends or strangers) to enjoy consuming — as long as everyone’s staying safe and is able to consent without coercion I’m down with that. I even think teenagers technically under the age of consent should have the protected right to create erotica materials involving themselves and share those materials with their peers as part of their own sexual exploration. Obviously this raises questions about how to give them a safe space to explore their sexuality without being exploited, and I agree that’s a conversation to be had. But the general principle is: we should all have the creative license to explore our sexuality in textual and visual ways and share it as we desire.

However: consent is key here. I imagine human beings have always developed fantasies around other actual people prior to full and enthusiastic consent being given — in the case of those we later become sexually intimate with — or in situations where those relationships will never flower, but we’re crushing hard anyway. This isn’t about policing personal imagination — have all the damn fantasies you want about whomever and whatever you find turns you on.

I’d argue, though, that in the case of fantasies about real live actual people who aren’t involved in the spinning out of those fantasies? Those stories or images are best left in private spaces: your computer hard-drive, your journal, whatever. I’m not thinking so much of regulation here — I’m not arguing we pull RPF from the Archive and ban people from publishing more — but I’m arguing that as a matter of common courtesy it’s kinda, well, rude, to put your fantasies about actual people who you have no relationship with and who aren’t consenting to have these sexualized stories or images created around them out into the world of the ‘net where those same people could presumably come across said stories by Googling their names.

If someone wrote an erotica story — even a really sweet hot one! — about me as me and posted it online and I stumbled across it, it would feel really stalkery and invasive to me. Like, my wife is the only one at this point in time who has my permission to spin out stories about my bits that way.

So yes, I do think there are boundaries and ethical considerations where fan-creation is concerned. And I appreciate that there are people within fandom who are willing and interested in engaging in ongoing conversations about those difficult aspects of the genre. What I do hope is that those outside of the genre will think twice before dismissing the practice wholesale as facile or perverted (in the not-cool way). Because I think fan engagement with (mainstream) creative works has a lot of potential to change and complicate the (mainstream) conversation about human sexuality.

*One of the pieces of fan fiction I’m most proud of is a Donna Noble/Idris fic completed for last year’s International Day of Femslash.

why do I write (and read) fan fiction? [part two]

17 Thursday Jan 2013

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See part one for the background to this post.

I’ve been letting this sit in my drafts folder for a couple of days and I’m starting to feel the weight of perfection closing in … so quickly, quickly! I’m going to try and get these ideas out there before I’m crushed by the tyranny of Unfinished Thoughts.

Why write erotic fan fiction?

Why erotic fan fiction indeed.

So a couple of things.

Building on what I wrote in response to the question “why fan fiction,” thinking about the lives of characters “off screen” (or after the novel or series is done) can often translate into imagining the playing-out of relationships that were established in canon. Not only do many mainstream novels (not just the ones for children and young adults) fade to black around sexual encounters, they often skirt the whole question entirely by ending the story arc with the get-together moment, or at least the early days of the relationship. Inquiring minds want to know what happens after — and once you get to beyond a certain age, it seems pretty clear that sexual intimacy is often (though obviously not always) a part of the “after.” It’s long been a habit of the heart, for me, to extend the existence of fictional characters to give them the relationships and experiences the main narrative only gestures toward.

Too, when I was re-introduced to the concept of fan-created fiction and other fan works, it was as a genre that focused heavily on “slash,” or fan work where characters’ sexual relationships (whether canon or not) were the central theme. If your only encounter with fan works is through reading about 50 Shades of Gray or the resulting mainstream news coverage of fan fiction as a phenomenon, you can be forgiven in assuming that all fan fiction is erotic. It’s not. I’m not sufficiently expert in the field to say what percentage of fan work is, in part or primarily, erotic (I’d guess a substantial proportion, but that’s also what I tend to go looking for so my sample is extremely biased), but erotica is not the only direction fan work can take. Yet it was a key factor in what drew me, as an adult, back into the practice of fan writing.

I read it exclusively, for awhile, but eventually I started looking for pairings and stories that I couldn’t find anywhere (more on that in part three) … in other words, I found a gap in the literature! And like any nerdy academic, once I’d found the gap(s) people weren’t exploring I determined to explore them. So pretty soon, I started writing, and people started reading, and people by their own account enjoyed what they read, and who doesn’t like positive reinforcement?!

You could also ask the question this way: Why write erotic fan fiction?

I find erotica in general a compelling genre, and one — as I’ve written before — that has a great deal of (often underestimated) potential to help us explore meaningful aspects of the human condition. But I often find erotic fiction of the non-fannish variety incredibly hit-or-miss. As a member of my writing group and I were bemoaning the other day, it’s often the case that you pick up an anthology of Best Lesbian Erotica or Best Erotic Romance or even the more theme-driven works (steampunk, quickies, food porn, BDSM, etc.) and at the most you find two or three stories out of twenty that dampen the knickers.

I always thought, you know, “different strokes for different folks” (in this case, ahem, quite literally), but then I discovered erotic fan fiction? Maybe it was just that I happened to re-acquaint myself with the genre at a time when I was ready to start thinking about sexual narratives in a more sustained way. Maybe it was because I was exploring my own sexual potential in concrete ways, and thus sexual knowledge, both fictive and non, were suddenly ever more compelling. This is part of the equation, surely. Fan fiction — the writing and the reading, the community sharing — has become entangled in my learnings and conversations about sexuality more generally and how we human beings narrate desire.

But as I’ve been turning this question over in my head the last couple of days, I think there’s actually another more … technical? … reason why fan fiction erotica has a higher success rate for me (in terms of capturing my interest as a creator and consumer) than erotica in general. And the reason goes something like this: sex gains meaning through context. There are different schools of thought about what makes for effective porn, and some people will argue — or even just take as read — that effective porn is effective precisely because it’s non-contextual and non-specific. That the characters are effective primarily because they are utterly interchangeable. One of the arguments for why so few male performers emerge as stars in the mainstream porn business is precisely this: that the ideal (male) porn actor fades into the background, is unremarkable enough that the (presumed hetero male) viewer can effectively erase the actor from the scene and insert himself into the action. But for me, the exact opposite is true: the more particular and real the characters in a given story are, the more heartbreaking and hot the sex. Because I’ve been convinced I should care. Sex acts are weird and messy and frankly ridiculous … it’s we (participants and witnesses) who imbue the acts with meaning. (You’ll say there’s a physical component as well, and I’m not disputing that, but consider the difference between being someone biting your neck out of the blue and sucking a hickey into your shoulder in the midst of lovemaking … it’s context that makes the physical activity feel good, not the actions in and of themselves.)

Intimacy can be the work of a fleeting moment or happen in the context of a life-long relationship, but without context sex acts themselves are, well, boring (to me, at least).

Fan fiction evokes context. True, the best fan fiction can stand on its own and be enjoyed by readers who know virtually nothing about the canon narratives to which the fic refers. Case in point, when Hanna first started sharing fic with me she was largely sending me stories written for anime and gaming ‘verses I had no context for. And they were still compelling and hot. But I think there’s a way that even just knowing these stories tie into a larger narrative encourage us to build context and imbue a scene with meaning. We don’t have to know every detail of that context, just that there is one. We’re encouraged to see the characters not just as conduits for sexual satisfaction, but individuals with full lives and the weight of personal history which they bring to their (fictional) sexual encounters.

As someone who counted fictional characters as intimate friends from a very early age, I guess it’s not a big surprise to me that the act of participating (as a voyeur-reader, or as an author-creator) in the intimacy of fictional characters feels real and satisfying in a way that more conventional types of erotic creation/consumption have not, for me.

I also think the energy of the fan community feeds into this: virtually all of the fan writers creating smut in this context are also readers — we swap work, we are one anothers’ editors, we cheer on stories, we’re invested in the (fictional) relationships working, so perhaps there’s something in the very activity of co-creation that’s … erotic? It’s similar to the really good energy you get in a class where everything gels and a critical mass of professor and students are pushing one another toward mutual heightened understanding? The relationship isn’t just between the reader and the characters, but also the writer-reader and the reader-writer; even if fan fiction is penned (or typed) by a single author, there’s usually a whole network of fellow fans around that author who create context for the work itself. And I think somehow that gives the relationship(s) and sexual intimacies within the work a unique intensity of meaning.

Stay tuned for part three, where I muse more specifically about why I write the particular types of erotic fan-fiction I write…

‘after pornified’ book giveaway! [free stuff]

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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My friend Anne Sabo has given me three signed copies of her recent book, After Pornified: How Women are Transforming Pornography and Why it Really Matters (see my review here). And I would love to pass them along to you!

The only requirement is that you read and review the book by March 1st, post the review to Amazon.com and whatever other blogging or book-themed social networking site (GoodReads, LibraryThing, etc.) you choose and send the link to me.

Psyched to start reading? Leave a comment by midnight this coming Friday (so 12:00am 1/19/2013) on this post including an email where I can reach you and sharing, via link or description, one of your favorite pieces of erotica (can be any medium). I’ll be taking all eligible entrants and randomly selecting three via the slip-of-paper-in-a-bowl method.
On Tuesday, January 22nd, I’ll contact the three winners by email for a mailing address and send out the books via first class mail.

Let the commenting begin!

why do I write (and read) fan fiction? [part one]

10 Thursday Jan 2013

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This topic has been kicking around in the back of my mind for awhile, in nebulous form, and then in the past couple of weeks I’ve (coincidentally?) found myself engaged in discussing theories of fan fiction and erotica writing with several friends via email, as well as the wonderful women of my #firstthedraft writing group. With encouragement from #ftd, here are my thoughts in blog post form.

I actually think the question why I write erotic fan fiction has several layers, and I’m going to unpack them successively: why fan fiction, why erotic fan fiction, and why the specific fandoms and pairings that I’ve chosen write. I also want to emphasize, because this is the sort of thing — both in terms of fandom and in terms of porn/erotica — about which people have Big and Important Feelings, that I am speaking very much for myself here. This is a post (or, rather, a series of posts) about why I write the erotic fan fiction I write. I am not attempting to synthesize the phenomenon writ large or pass judgement about what are the Correct and Right ways to approach the activity. I’m only trying to respond to the question people have asked me in various ways: Why do you do this thing you do? What do you find enjoyable about it? Is there anything you find troubling about the practice?

For all of you who have asked those questions, I’d love to continue the conversation in comments — so please do participate if you feel so moved!

Note: It will be unsurprising to most of you that my thoughts are lengthy. So I’m breaking this post into three sections, the first of which is below. Parts two and three will be forthcoming and will be linked from this post as they go live.

Why write fan fiction?

So I’ve only been consciously participating in online fan spaces and reading/writing fan fiction identified as such for about five years. However, retroactively I would argue that my present practice of fan fictionalizing is only the most recent manifestation of the way I have always, since early childhood, interacted with fictional narratives. Some of my earliest memories are from around the age of five or six spinning out stories about my favorite fictional characters — at that time stories like Little House in the Big Woods and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. My childhood psycho-temporal spaces felt … porous. My parents never judged us in our childhood practices blurring that line in our imaginative play. (This seems important, because I did know families where the children were schooled early and often on what was and was not “real” and judged harshly for flights of fancy.)

So I had an active imaginative (and often, with friends and siblings, collaboratively imaginative) inner life growing up. I put myself to sleep telling stories about “what happened after…” the end of my favorite books or series; my favorite characters became imaginary playmates; and in adolescence the nearest and dearest of those characters were part of my coming-of-age in intimate ways. They became active participants (as much as fictional characters can be) in my exploration of sexuality and relationships. I not only rehearsed the good and the bad (and the smutty) that actually appeared in the books that I read … but I spun out elaborate stories incorporating my nearest and dearest (fictional) friends, and myself, building relational networks, families, and developing (hypothetical) sexual intimacies in various ways. In retrospect, I think this alternate universe I inhabited in my head helped me process a lot of the new information I was taking in — physical changes, emotional upheavals, learnings about what it meant to be an adult in a variety of ways — without feeling overwhelmed.

Without boring you to tears giving the world-building details, the space I created was one where I could literally move back and forth from childhood and adulthood, exploring the confines and capabilities of each mode of being. Imaginatively living an adult life elsewhere helped me approach my teenage years as if I had the confidence and experience of an adult.

In addition to being useful psychically and emotionally for me, I think the spinning out of private fan-fiction-like scenarios fed my insatiable desire to know more: to know about character motivation, to know what happened next, to know what the characters were thinking and feeling about events that took place, to know what might happen if event X or conversation Y took place. There’s a great passage in one of E. Nesbit’s Treasure Seekers books where the narrator informs the reader that lots of everyday things have happened (like eating and sleeping and going to the toilet) that he hasn’t bothered to write down because those are all the boring bits that everyone does but no one wants to read about. Fiction necessarily revises for a tighter narrative, and things get left out. As a reader, I wanted them back in — so I put them there, and molded them to my own particular specifications.

In those years, I encountered both professional and amateur fan works (from my mother’s little stories about the Pevensie children that she penned for us at Christmastime to fan art to the Star Wars sequel novels to Neil Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan”) but I wasn’t actively participating in fan communities. I had friends who did (for example, a friend who was active in an online forum for writing stories inspired by Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels) but didn’t hear a lot that drew me into active involvement. There was lots of interpersonal drama and litigation fears and, hey, I was already writing/imagining on my own so why bother with the added complication of other fans with their own vision and agenda?

But I got my fan community “reboot” (so to speak) when I met Hanna and she re-introduced me to the activities and pleasures of being a fan — and this time, being a fan as part of a wider network of fans enjoying the same work(s) of whatever medium. Obviously the Internet had come along in the meantime, and as I was already involved in the feminist blogosphere I had some sense of how online communities work and what their pleasures and pitfalls are. Over time, the language of fandom bled into the language of feminism and became part of my social experience, as feminism had, both on- and offline.

These days, I really enjoy the positive energy of the fan circles in which I run. I enjoy that fans feel license to take joyful pleasure in things and create works inspired by those things. I enjoy the way those creations are shared freely and embraced by the fellow creator-consumer audience. I enjoy the practices of “gifting” works and creating “inspired by” pieces which complement one another or build off another fan’s work. I like how the currency of fandom is mutual appreciation and celebration of amateur creation. (And simultaneously I’m much better able than I was as a teenager to ignore or minimize the drama and intensity which can overtake online communities of any kind. I’ve learned, in other words, when to close the internet browser and walk away!)

So I write fan fiction because I always have, and now know that this practice has a name! I write fan fiction because I’m always hungry to know more, and to make the fictional characters I love known to me in ways that go beyond the bounds of a single novel or series or television show or film. And I enjoy participating in such a positive, creative space that is outside of the economies of wage-work. I purposefully decided not to pursue a career as a writer in part because I wanted writing to be something that I could always come to voluntarily, without worrying whether or not I could pay rent. (I don’t think this is a better or purer way to approach writing than writing as a job — more power to those who do! It just wasn’t for me, and I appreciate that I can continue to write and find readers in this playful alternative space.)

Click here for part two: “Why write erotic fan fiction?“