Unashamed, Unabashed, Unrepentant: Why Erotic Romance Is Good for Women

The PensFatales welcome Theresa Stevens today! Theresa Stevens is an author, editor, and the co-owner of STAR Guides Publishing and EditTorrent.

It’s no secret that I have some fairly strong opinions on gender equality, but those that know me best have always had trouble reconciling that with my love of romance publishing in general and erotic romance in particular. How can one be both strongly feminist and an unabashed lover of “those” books?

There are two answers to this question, the simple but dry one, and the more complex but more truthful one.

The simple answer is that in order for a patrilinear system to work, the sexuality of the woman must be controlled. Before modern medicine, the only way to guarantee paternity of a child was to prevent the mother from having sex with anyone other than the intended father. (It’s a lot easier to guarantee the maternity of a child: just witness the birth.)

This type of sexual partner limitation is fine as long as the mother is on board with this plan. After all, we might like to have a say in who fathers our children. But it’s also not fine insofar as it leads to double standards, economic inequality, and other abuses. Erotic romance and other open expressions of female sexuality take us one step further away from the days when feminine desire was demonized as a way of strengthening the patriarchy and limiting women’s power and social standing.

But that’s sort of intellectually detached from the real state of my thoughts on erotic romance. In truth, when I read a “dirty girl book” (as I like to call them, and it’s meant fondly), I walk away from the reading experience with an incredible feeling of sisterly solidarity. Part of being a woman, a fully alive and engaged woman, is being a fleshly creature with sexual urges and, lucky us, the capacity for almost limitless sexual pleasure. Yes, we want to explore that in the context of a romance, because that’s also a part of being a woman. Our hearts and bodies are entwined. But for too long, for centuries, we’ve been openly encouraged to embrace the heart and feel shame at the body. Not any more, and hurrah for that.

So when I read a book with a heroine who thrills at the sight of her lover, who craves his most decadent touch, who surrenders every corner of her sexual psyche to his loving exploration, then I see an alive and engaged female character. And I relate to her, as do other readers of this genre, because her body is my body. Her lover is my lover. Perhaps most surprising, her fantasies are my fantasies.

If there’s one thing I learned in four years as an editor at one of the world’s leading erotic romance publishers, it’s that these feminine fantasies are common and universal. Over and over again, we read the same sexual scenarios in submissions -- a powerful male body, a heroine swept away by passion, issues of trust and yearning and fulfillment playing out in countless variations on a single theme. So if these fantasies are so common, if we’re hardwired for this kind of desire, then why not celebrate it?

Erotic romance does exactly that. With a broad smile and a playful wink, these books show readers that they’re not alone. Others out there secretly thought the same naughty thoughts and even went to the trouble of writing them down and sharing them. These books allow women to explore their own sexual and romantic urges in a safe way, in a way that promotes understanding of self and sister, and perhaps most important, in a way that’s uniquely feminine.

To all of you writing erotic romance or aspiring to do so, I urge you to push forward and never hold back. Never think that your ideas are too outrageous or scary or personal. Be bold. Reach for the new position, the new setting, the new way of making your heroine’s thighs tremble. Give us a hero we can love, and then show us how to love him in mind-blowing ways.

Somewhere out there is a reader who fantasizes about the same thing, and who, upon reading your book, will smile to know she’s not the only one. She’ll take courage from your boldness. And she’ll find confidence in this silent connection to other women. (And maybe even find a new trick to use on her lover later. But that’s an entirely different blog post.)

On the Page or In Your Imagination?

At the first mystery writers conference I attended several years ago, a thriller writer taught a lesson that stuck with me: people's imaginations fill in the blanks of what they *want* to think is on the page, not what is actually there.

He said that people think his books are full of swearing, but they're not. He might write that a character swore, but it's up to the level of comfort of the reader to fill in the blanks of what that means to them.

I loved this idea that you could stay true to your characters while embracing a wide range of readers. And by that wide range of readers, I mean people like me.

I don't like graphic violence or gratuitous swearing in my fiction. It's a personal preference, but there are a lot of people like me. I like to read widely within the mystery genre, but sometimes an otherwise-good book is too much for me and I have to stop reading. Sometimes these graphic details are necessary to tell the story, but usually they're not. My favorite mysteries don't need blood on the page to make my heart race in fear and contract in agony over the emotional rollercoaster the characters are put through.

The same principles apply to sex scenes. Well, except for the fact that I won't stop reading a book because it has too graphic a sex scene...

But the point is I still do usually feel that the most powerful sex scenes are the ones where the powerful interaction between the characters has been set up just right -- and then with a beautiful teaser to linger in one's mind, the characters are left to do whatever they do behind closed doors.

It's anticipation that compels a reader through a book, after all. Those set-ups and hopes that are finally realized. And I have a good imagination.

--Gigi

Martha Remembers Erotica

I was 14 years old in 1992. My family was moving from Tokyo, Japan to Brussels, Belgium and while in transition, we were forced to give up our house and live in a small hotel.

My parents couldn't handle me and my little brother locking horns so my dad handed me the keys to the company apartment in downtown Tokyo, gave me some cash, and wished me well until our flight to Brussels.

Those weeks, I was consumed with three things:

1. A super hot French DJ named David (that's "Dah-veeed" to you). My girlfriend and I tracked him from party to party. He was tall, dark and wore a trench coat everywhere. We spent hours on the phone every night, falling asleep at 3 or 4 in the morning after our conversation faded to mumbles. He told me his dream was to open a nursing home where residents, like his grandmother, would actually get decent care. Swoon me now, please.

2. Corn soup. I fed myself a carton (yes, they sold them in milk-like cartons) nearly every day.

3. Madonna's Erotica Video. I don't think the video had even been released yet, but everyone was talking about it, because it was going to be dirty. So dirty that the news was convinced it would never air. The nerve of Madonna! She even simultaneously released a book called Sex. What could such a book be about???

While they wouldn't release the music video, they did release the lyrics, and I specifically remember this couplet:

Once you put your hand in the flame
You can never be the same

Once my parents let me have that taste of freedom, of living on my own and deciding when I wake up, when I go to bed, what I eat, and what I do with my time, I didn't want to go back to being told what to do.

It's not like I went crazy. I met friends in the Roppingi district for shopping. I made a lot of corn soup. I watched a lot of CNN. I went to a lot of dances around town. I slept in my own bed every night, alone, and I never let anyone up into my dad's company apartment.

As an adult, I now have that right every day, but it's never been as sweet as it was those weeks, that little taste of adulthood in the middle of my adolescence. I vividly remember it better than I can even recall what I did yesterday.

I remember David's widow weak. I remember the smoky paprika spicing the corn soup. I definitely remember wanting, wondering, and waiting for Erotica.

Finding the Erotic in Fiction

by Lisa Hughey

Literature or art dealing with sexual love is the general definition of erotica. Nowadays, erotic fiction encompasses a fairly large market and frequently is very explicit in nature. There’s body parts and A into B and sometimes C, bouncing breasts, and throbbing erections, multiple partners, dom/sub, BDSM, M/M, M/F/M, M/M/F (there’s a difference but I’m not really sure what it is!) there is a contemporary mainstream market for the masses who are buying erotic fiction.

But I agree with Juliet that the truly erotic stems from the forbidden.

In The Piano, (thank you Adrienne for abdicating on writing about this topic!) for the most erotic scene in the movie, the characters have all their clothes on. The movie was somewhat shocking in that Harvey did the full frontal nudity thing. But the image of Harvey Keitel crouched under the piano, exploring that tiny hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking with a single finger, as if he could plumb the mystery of woman by stroking her skin? Hot, hot, hot.




The most erotic movie I’ve ever seen was The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The sex in the scene was not really the erotic part. The set up is the wife and the lover are in the restaurant with the thief and if he finds out that they are lovers he will kill them both brutally. This is visually emphasized by the dead body on the banquet table adorned with other food and fruit. (It’s very dark) The lovers have sex anyway (in the bathroom). That scene is erotic. But because the threat of discovery is taken to an extreme level. It won’t just be embarrassing. The forbidden means death.



Because we are exposed to so much more explicit visual images and written language, writing the erotic scene (whether it’s erotic fiction or just plain fiction with a love scene) the trick is to find the forbidden in the relationship between the two and exploit it. Just as Sophie said, most of the time the tension in a sex scene is going to be the emotion between the two. The second the author sets up a reason why these two characters shouldn’t be together, the scene is ripe for the sexual tension to be exploited.

In my opinion, that’s what sets erotic romance apart from straight erotic fiction. The focus isn’t on the position or the place, it’s on the emotional impact the act will have on each character. As for the mechanics, the advice I was given years ago and still seems to hold is that if the scene makes you squirm in your chair, you’re on the right track.

And while writing sex isn’t my favorite element of writing, the truth is that sex or love is a natural and organic component of any love story. The physical expression of commitment and trust in a very vulnerable situation is always gut wrenching, if it is done right.

Lisa





ps. Who chose this topic? :)

pps. And I haven’t seen The Cook...in years so if I’m a little off on the details, sorry!

My Year of Reading Erotica

The PensFatales welcome Michelle Wiener, who is a freelance writer and editor, which is another way of saying she spends a lot of time online writing silly things on Twitter. She blogs about TV and other stuff here. She reviews mysteries and thrillers for RT Book Reviews, and she is THRILLED to be a guest on Pens Fatales.

<---- This is what she looks like when she reads the Internet.

Up until about a month ago, the tagline to my Facebook profile read simply, "I review porn." It wasn't entirely accurate, more about me trying to be flip than a factual description. What I was really doing was reading and reviewing erotic fiction.

It wasn’t something I’d set out to do. To be honest, my erotica frame of reference was limited to Anaïs Nin and a handful of stories submitted to alt.sex.stories that my long-distance boyfriend in college would email to me, which tended toward the "hot babysitter deflowers her 13-year-old charge" ilk. (I think he thought he was keeping the spark alive? Sort of endearing, but mostly missing the mark. By a lot.) (Also yes, I am that old.) (And nerdy.)

But I was about to lose my full-time job, needed something to keep me busy, and wanted to do something both creatively generative and challenging.

It was challenging. I think it must be very hard to write sex scenes, let alone scene after scene in book after book, and have them be always fresh and exciting and, you know, sexy. Who am I to judge an author or her readers on their proclivities, acts and language for such a deeply personal thing? Though I admit, I soon found myself compiling a list of words that completely turned me off. I won’t list them all here, but I will say that I never want to see a woman’s genitals referred to as a “crevice” again. I don’t want to judge! It may work for you! I just prefer the simple and obvious terms for sexy parts. (But not too clinical! “Labia” doesn’t work for me either.)

What disturbed me more than unfortunate language choices was a common theme I discovered in erotic fiction: female characters who are somehow unable or unwilling to own their sexual desires. They're either too shy, or uptight, or inexperienced, or repulsed-but-secretly-curious by practices they think (or think they should think) are disgusting. And what they need is the right man to show them the way.

I am not talking about one woman's sexual awakening or journey of sexual discovery. I'm talking about stories in which the ostensible hero of the story cajoles, coerces, or commands the heroine to sexually perform in a way that makes her uncomfortable at first . . . until she realizes that this is what she needed all along.

It's too close to "she said she didn’t want it, but she did" for my comfort. Worse are the stories in which the heroine is under the influence of some sort of mood-altering aphrodisiac drug while she has mind-blowing sex – sometimes without even knowing she’s been drugged. I don’t need to explain why this is disturbing. At the very least, how satisfying can the sex be, really, if she’s not fully present for it?

What bothers me is that these stories perpetuate the idea that women do not have sexual desires of their own. This is an old, old, stubbornly persistent idea. It's at the heart of slut-shaming. It’s used to justify sexual assault. Again, I don’t want to infringe on anyone’s particular kink – I’m down with fantasies of seduction and submission, though I think there’s a line that should be honored between seduction and force, even in fiction -- and I truly don’t want to insult anyone, but frankly – I’m insulted by these stories. They’re not sexy; they’re depressing.

And it got to a point where I just couldn’t do it anymore (pardon the pun; it was intentional). I really, really want to like the books I read. I want to lose myself completely in another world and meet interesting people and get caught up in their lives, and then I want to tell everyone I know how great the book I just read was. And I was having an increasingly difficult time separating my politics from my professional reaction, and I couldn’t very well write 750-word treatises for each book that offended me. I had to admit that erotica wasn’t my thing.

Which is not to say that I didn’t like any of the erotic novels I reviewed. I raved about quite a few of them. I learned that I prefer romance novels with spicy bits more than erotic novels with romantic bits, and that I prefer mystery novels to almost any other genre. So I’m reviewing thrillers and mysteries and crime novels now -- my mom says, "You're still reading about body parts, it's just that they're on dead people now" -- and I'm happier.

The fact that so many of them feature whipsmart female detectives who don't take no guff from nobody probably has A LOT to do with that.

I Give Up

--Adrienne Miller

Ok, so here’s the weird thing. It turns out I have nothing to say about erotica. No, really. Nothing. I know because I’ve been trying. All damn day trying. 

I got up this morning thinking I would pound out this puppy in an hour, hour and a half tops, and then enjoy my Cherrios. But no, I filled up my cup of coffee, settled myself down and stared at the blank document page, and stared some more. No words. No ideas.

Which is odd, on account of me being a romance writer and all. I’m not a prude, at least,  I like to think I’m not. I write love and sex all the time, but usually in scene form and with about 50k words of tension and lead up. But just a page or two about erotica in general, well, it just wasn’t working.

And it wasn’t that I wasn’t trying. I even watched The Piano. I love that movie. So beautiful. So sensual. So freakin’ sexy. If anything was going to grace me with a heap of inspiration for this post it was going to be some hot mute lady on face tattoo man lovin’. But, alas, no. Two hours later, I was thoroughly entertained, but still staring at any empty page.

I tried, then stopped. I started, then deleted. Nothing seemed right. I was too damned intimidated by the topic to even get started. A few hours later, I still am. So, I’m throwing my hands up. And in the place of a semi-decent post, I offer you this video of Rufus Wainwright singing about some of the things I can’t seem to say.

Feasting with Panthers: Victorian Erotica

--by Juliet

Back before I became a writer, I spent a lot of time painting. Nudes, mostly. Like this fellow -- half Greek, half Italian, all gorgeous:

Or this woman, a dancer with a certain flair for the dramatic:

But hiring models is expensive, and friends can only be prevailed upon for a certain period of time before they balk at sitting for hours on end in one position, with only the weak promise of hand-mixed mojitos at the end of it all.

What to do? I looked through artists' anatomy books for intriguing views of the human form, and even made my way through a good deal of porn...*yawn*. But then I found the mother-lode of lovely nudes -- Victorian Erotica.

Victorians, the posterboys and girls of sexual repression and angst, knew how to do sexy. The women have all kinds of body types, from skinny to beyond plump. The men are mustachioed and randy. They smile, they play, they cavort. They have personality.

And they're hot. Even today.

As an artist who loves to paint the human form, I know that what one person finds highly titillating, another skips over with no interest. But in general, a little mystery is at least as intriguing as overt nudity. A black stocking playing off a pale thigh, that muscular indentation on a man right below his waistline, a hint of a woman's breast peeking out from a lace bodice...

The Victorians had all sorts of taboos to go up against, proper behavior and social mores that their passions led them to defy -- and defile. Their numerous taboos made all those naughty bits dark and mysterious and oh, so sexy.

Or was it just the flattering sepia-toned, well-lit photography of the day?

I love living in the Bay Area in the modern age, when feeling ashamed is shameful and we're allowed --heck, even encouraged to pursue our hedonistic ways. But it plays havoc with scandal, and rather deep-sixes the obvious titillation of doing what you're not supposed to do. What do people have to get outraged over anymore? You're having pre-marital sex? Duh. You're in an interracial relationship? You'll have beautiful children. Same-sex relationship? Tried it in college. Drug addiction? More pathetic than scandalous -- try rehab.

So is this what makes Victorian erotica so hot? Is it the obvious social repression, the constant knowledge of potential consequences that spurs on the exploration of the naughty and the downright lewd? And if so, is there a raging hot underworld of erotica in fundamentalist Muslim countries where a single act of infidelity could result in being stoned to death by one's neighbors?

The Victorians, despite laws against having Too Good of a Time, gave rise to a huge, vibrant culture of pornography that remains relevant today. Photography, painting, literature, poetry...it was one big old smut-fest, all wrapped up in bloomers and lace. Even now, Victorian tales of sex and depravity remain wildly popular.

They weren't bound by any of today's political correctness when it came to different cultures -- if it was sexy, who cared how accurate it was? Hence the ever- popular salacious harem motif:

Our modern vices were old news to them: drugs, threesomes, spankings, they did it all:

Oscar Wilde was one of the most famous Victorian-era authors of erotic novels. His tale of primarily same-sex passion and sensuality, Teleny, was wildly popular but brought him to the brink of public disgrace.

Wilde wrote to a friend that pursuing such erotic interests in his life and in his fiction
"... was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement ... "

And dangerous it was; Oscar Wilde paid for his sexual adventures with several years in prison for "gross indecency", and never recovered his health.

But when it comes to Erotica...don't we all want to feast with panthers, if only for a moment, and if only in our fantasies? If you're going to write erotica, take a gander at the writings left behind by the Victorian masters of the genre. And if you want to paint nudes, get yourself a book of Victorian photographs. And if you're just looking for some terrific Victorian raunch, check out Lady Winterbourne's Most Intimate of Diaries. You feaster, you.

Eyes Closed

Erotica. Yeah, I guess you could say I've written some. There are passages in my books that make me blush, but I keep hearing that people like them, so that probably means I've written them well enough to make people believe them. (And people want to talk to me about them. The sex scenes. Do you KNOW how I blush? I wish I didn't, but I do.)

Truth is, I can barely take credit for the good sex scenes.

You see, I wrote them with my eyes closed, arms stretched out, fumbling for the keyboard in the dark, trying to insert Tab A in Slot B as quickly as possible so I could move on to the next part of the book. I didn't think about whether it was hot, or whether I was getting it right--I am simply a very linear writer, and I can't skip scenes in order to write something that comes later. If it has to be a sex scene today, written while I'm the cafe, red-faced and uncomfortable, so be it.

The goal was to later go back and clean them up. I'm not a great first draft writer, but I'm an excellent editor. I love editing. So when I got to the sex scenes, I expected to have to do a lot of work.

But every time I've landed back at the sex scenes to edit them, I find that they worked the way they were written. It's as if by stepping back and being a little embarrassed and letting my characters have a little room to move, as it were, without me getting in the way, they were able to do what they needed to do. And I don't just mean have sex. That's easy. Mechanical.

My characters work things out by having sex. As Sophie says about sex being a mechanical box to hold emotion, my characters already know that after they hop in the sack, when they get out of bed (or off the floor, or out of the back of the truck), they are different people, with different needs and issues. Geez, it's practically like I planned it that way.

I didn't. I think I got lucky in my last two books by writing characters that are smarter that I am. But in the book I'm writing now, I'm actually conscious of what I need to put IN that mechanical box (I'm trying so hard not to make box jokes), and I think I'm getting it more right because of it. The sex is more interesting, even in the first draft. There are real reasons for what they do, and consequences as well, just like in life.

I hope I'm keeping the hotness, though. Because motivated is good. But HOT and motivated is even better. If you know what I mean. And I think you do.

The Emotion Box

by Sophie

EROTICA

Guess what? I wrote a sexy book. Yes I did, and it was even published. It had stuff in it that makes me blush to think about. It was full-on erotica, as spicy as I could make it, though since then I have learned that as erotica goes it was rather tame. Still, a few people said nice things about it, and all in all I was proud of the effort. (Don't bother looking for it - I used a secret pen name. :)

When I started writing mysteries and young adult I gently closed the door on that chapter of my career and didn't look back. Once in a great while I visit the web site of the small press that published me, mostly out of curiosity to see if they're still featuring it on their list. Occasionally I get a royalty check - enough to take a couple of the Pens out for a fast-food lunch.

I have great admiration for people who write spicy love stories. It's hard to do well, and I'm very glad I tried it so that I understand the challenge of writing erotica, or erotic romance as my good friend Rachelle Chase frequently reminds me. It's an important distinction: an erotic romance is, first and foremost, a love story.

Writing flat-out sex is probably a challenge as well, but one of a different sort. I imagine you need an encyclopedic knowledge of all the creative and clever ways human beings have discovered to escort each other to heights of pleasure, and I'm not about to sneeze at that.

But er...sheer variety is not my strong suit. So to speak.

Um. Anyway. Recently I wrote the first book of my new series, a paranormal trilogy for Harlequin Luna under the name Sophie Crane (March 2011). I knew when I started it that it was about a post-apocalyptic world where survival was difficult at best, and earthly pleasures are few. So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when the characters ended up having sex. I mean, when there's nothing to eat but moldy Saltines and no TV or movies or alcohol, people are going to look for diversions where they can.

What surprised me was that the scene demanded to be told in fairly explicit detail. Now I haven't exactly been avoiding sex since my little foray into erotic romance: in every single one of my never-published books, in every Stella book, in everything except my young adult novels, people think about and talk about and sometimes even have sex. But I don't belabor the point. Why? Not because of any particular convictions about appropriateness of the subject matter or fear of offending people, but because it's not germane to the story. In the Stella books, if the poor gal ever does manage to get laid, I can't imagine it will improve the story much to know the details. Many of my readers have already let me know they'll cheer her on, but I doubt they are looking for particulars either.

In AFTERTIME it was different. Because Cass, my heroine, wasn't just having sex when she had sex. She was bringing everything to the table: her fears, her grief, her exhaustion, her quest, her fury. When she hooked up - and my, my, my did she hook up - it was an emotional release of a magnitude that surprised even me. It was a turning point, a moment of clarity, a bid for hope.

When Cass had sex, it represented a decision to keep on trying to survive in a world that had nearly crushed her. It was not neat or pleasant or expected; it was furious and violent and uncertain and messy - and every one of those details was important to get across the emotional importance of the scene. Leaving them out would have made the book lesser.

That's not a bad test for knowing when to be explicit.

I'm very, very proud of the love scenes in that series (though I am forbidding the kids and my dad to ever read them - uck!) I worked hard to get them exactly right, so that every physical detail was matched by the emotions behind it. I don't know how they'll be received - I'm sure they won't be to everyone's taste - but I am confident that I wrote the story of my heroine as it needed to be told, and in this story sex plays an important part.

I have this thing I say when Juliet and I do our Writing Emotion workshops: "Sex is a mechanical box to hold emotion." I think it's one of the smarter things I've ever said. Sex without emotion has its place and its readership; I doubt that readership is mine. People who like my books are probably character-driven, just like me, and when sex is necessary to tell the characters' emotion story, then that's what I do.