Tag Archives: erotica

Why Write Erotica?

Debbie says:

We’re delighted to host guest blogger Mary Anne Mohanraj.

I was thinking about why I write erotica. It’s a different answer now than it was when I first started writing, twenty years ago. I was twenty years old; I had recently discovered sex, and was still kind of blown away. Hormones were running high; I would sometimes miss classes to stay in bed with my boyfriend. We had sex in all sorts of inappropriate places, getting caught more than once, just because it was all so intense and new and fabulous.

Add to that the complication of my family. My parents were very traditional; they’d had an arranged marriage, and expected me to do the same. They definitely didn’t expect me to do anything other than study in college — even holding hands with a boy was off limits. So when I started dating, and dating white boys, and then sometimes girls, and by twenty-one, being pretty firmly poly and dating multiple people at the same time — well, it caused an awful lot of strain
within the family. Lots of conflict. All of that fueled a strong interest in writing fiction about it, which lasted for a decade. That was when I wrote Torn Shapes of Desire and Silence and the Word, founded Clean Sheets Magazine, edited Aqua Erotica and Wet (two waterproof erotica books), and wrote Kathryn in the City and The Classics Professor (two choose-your-own-adventure erotica books).

Then I turned thirty, and around then I started my Ph.D. program in creative writing. I had started to get more interested in Sri Lankan politics and immigrant stories, which led to several years working on mainstream lit. That led to Bodies in Motion, which has only a few sexy bits. And then — then I had babies. Two of them, and for the next four years, I would describe my sexual orientation as ‘tired.’ I had almost no energy for sex, which is kind of ironic, considering where babies come from.

I worked on other books during that time — a nonfiction memoir still in progress, and a YA fantasy that my agent is currently shopping around. But when I started thinking about what I’d like to write for a Kickstarter project, erotica came back to mind, after a decade away. Maybe it’s because the children are now two and four, and I actually get to sleep through most nights; that leaves a little more energy free for extracurricular activities. I don’t have the same urgency to writing erotica now as there was when I was twenty, when sex was a battleground in my life. These days, no one is telling me I can’t have sex, including with women or multiple partners. (I wouldn’t be allowed to marry them, but that’s a different battle.)

I also feel somewhat less social/political urgency than I did — when I was writing sex twenty years ago, it was far more taboo in American society than it is now.  Back then, you had to go to an adult bookstore to find erotica (unless you happened to know about Anais Nin or the Song of Solomon).  Now big chain bookstores have tall shelves devoted to the subject.  I don’t shock people anymore when I mention I write erotica; they might be a little embarrassed, a little titillated, but they generally aren’t horrified.

It is a little awkward, being a suburban mom and writing about sex. Is it something you mention to the parents in your toddler’s playgroup?  It’s similar to the issues I have simply being bi and poly. With practice, I’m learning how to navigate those conversations.  I don’t tend to volunteer any of that information on first meeting another parent — but I also try not to hide it, should the topic come up.  You’re at my house for my son’s birthday party, and see a photo of me and Kevin and our ex-girlfriend, clearly romantic?  I’m not going to lie when you ask who that is.  I also don’t take the erotica off the bookshelves, even if it has my name on it.

So far, almost everyone seems to be coping okay.  Only one woman has asked me if being poly means I feel free to hit on her husband.

Despite the risk of an outraged reaction, I think writing sex in my forties is worthwhile.  I have new and interesting perspectives on sex now; the angle of view is different.  The stories I wrote then tended to be very individual, personal stories. Now, I’m at least as interested in how people’s lives are affected by the world they live in, and the political events happening around them as by the purely personal narrative. Can I connect that in an interesting and arousing way to their sex lives? I think so.  It’s going to be fun to try.  And more than fun — important.

I think it’s important for writers to write about sex. It’s traditional in most fiction to fade to black when you get to the sex scene. Many of my favorite writers advocate such practices, and some of them seem to find it almost … tacky to linger on the intimate details. But who we are in bed is a fascinating part of human nature. And if one prime purpose of fiction is to uncover the truths of the human heart, then surely just skipping over the intimacies of the bedroom means cutting ourselves off from a significant part of human experience.

People’s lives have been made, and destroyed, by whom they choose to have sex with. Marriages end, careers are ruined, sometimes over a single sex act, ill thought-out or carefully intentional. If the legends of Troy and Camelot are to be believed, entire kingdoms have been won and lost as a result of sex. As writers, we can be crippled by avoiding writing sex, especially if we’re avoiding it out of fear, or shame. Out of concern for what the neighbors will think.

I’m not recommending gratuitous sex scenes. I wouldn’t advocate gratuitous fight scenes either — or gratuitous knitting scenes, much as I love knitting. Any element in a story should serve multiple purposes — to advance the plot, to set the scene, to establish mood, to develop character, etc. But if we can use a sex scene to develop character, and especially if we can bring out an element of character that might not be visible elsewhere (for example, how many men in our society only feel comfortable speaking of intimate fears in the privacy of their bedrooms, with their partner’s head resting on their chest?), then I would argue that we might be missing a wonderful opportunity if we avoid writing that sex scene.

And more than that — a lot of pain in our society is caused by our silence around sex.  Maybe I’m naïve, but I believe that if we could actually talk openly and honestly about sexual matters, a whole host of social ills would diminish: less non-consensual sex, fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer STDs, and maybe even fewer broken hearts.  As ACT UP famously said, silence = death.

I don’t think every writer has to write about sex.  You write where your passions lead you, and as I said at the beginning, for the past decade, I’ve been far more focused on other aspects of life.  But if writing about sex interests you, if the people we are when we’re in bed seems worth exploring, if you are as fascinated as I am by the role sexuality plays in our society, then please, give sex writing a try.  I would argue that as writers, we’re not only serving our art
by writing about sex, but we’re also serving a real social purpose when we pull back the sheets and uncover naked truths.

Also, when we do it right, it can be a lot of fun.

“Not Safe for Work” Revisited

Debbie says:

This post is not safe for work.

Here at Body Impolitic, where part of our core reason for the blog is to showcase Laurie’s nudes, we have thought a lot about the “NSFW” label on nude photographs. We generally use the label, for reasons I’ll get to at the end of the post.

A few years back, we linked without comment to Susie Bright’s rant on the topic.

NSFW is unmandated, unlegislated censorship — there’s no ballot to punch, no senator to harangue.

The great majority of NSFW warnings are the result of unconscious class bias, with the conceit of American ethnocentrism. It’s made a mockery of out of journalism and the First Amendment.

NSFW and its slippery slope of “assumptions” leads to stories and ideas of all kinds being banned, firewalled, off the grid in places from universities to major wire services.

Now, Roger Ebert is revisiting the question, following a column he did on Hugh Hefner with an embedded “Playmate of the Month” photograph (of Azizi Johari) from thirty-five years ago.

Azizi Johari, African-American nude woman, Playmate of the Month from 1975. She's sitting on a couch, nipples showing, pubic hair concealed by crossed legs, looking at the camera

As a writer, it would have offended me to preface my article with a NSFW warning. It was unsightly — a typographical offense. It would contradict the point I was making. But others wrote me about strict rules at their companies. They faced discipline or dismissal. Co-workers seeing an offensive picture on their monitor might complain of sexual harassment, and so on. But what about the context of the photo? I wondered. Context didn’t matter. A nude was a nude. The assumption was that some people might be offended by all nudes.

I heard what they were saying. I went in and resized the photo, reducing it by 2/3, so that it was postage-stamp 100 pixel size (above) and no passer-by was likely to notice it. This created a stylistic abomination on the page, but no matter. I had acted prudently. Then I realized: I’d still left it possible for the photo to be enlarged by clicking! An unsuspecting reader might suddenly find Miss June 1975 regarding him from his entire monitor! I jumped in again and disabled that command.

This left me feeling more responsible, but less idealistic. I knew there might be people offended by the sight of a Playmate. I disagreed with them. I understood that there were places where a nude photo was inappropriate, and indeed agree that porn has no place in the workplace. But I didn’t consider the photograph pornographic. Having grown up in an America of repression and fanatic sin-mongering, I believe that Hefner’s influence was largely healthy and positive. In Europe, billboards and advertisements heedlessly show nipples.

Ebert goes on to compare his own personal reactions to Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” to the nude of Azizi Johari.

Venus of Urbino painting, reclining nude woman on a couch with one hand on her genitals

I’ll throw in one of Laurie’s photographs here to make the contrasts more interesting.

fat African American woman lying on a couch

The two big questions in the NSFW controversy are:

1) What differentiates art nudes from erotic/pornographic nudes?

We have a peculiar cultural consensus that old paintings are art and contemporary photographs are erotica. In this case, the distinction is further confused by the fact that Playboy photographs are consciously and unambiguously intended to be erotica (and Ebert talks about how much more erotic he finds the photograph of Azizi Johari than he finds the painting). At the same time, it seems pretty clear that Titian also had conscious erotic intent in his painting, especially given the placement of the model’s hand. Laurie does not have conscious erotic intent in her photographs of nudes, and yet she is (as am I) very aware that any nude can have an erotic effect on the viewer. The same is true, to varying degrees, of most photographs of people, but nudes are still a special case.

In the end, the only important difference is in the eye of the beholder. Which takes us neatly to …

2) What are the workplace issues?

Susie Bright thinks the workplace issues are class-based, and have to do with the difference between prestigious publications and individuals or small publishers. This is actually less convincing given that Ebert’s column is in the Chicago Sun-Times, but she’s certainly not completely wrong, in the sense that browsing a Vanity Fair article with bare breasts will (often) get a different workplace reaction than browsing our site, or old Playmates online. Also, both Bright and Ebert are open about not having worked in offices for many years.

I work in a (liberal, friendly, open-minded) cube farm. I’m writing this blog from work and I’ve had all three pictures on my screen at various times. It’s an edgy choice. I’m at virtually no risk of getting fired, but I could easily get reprimanded. (At the same time, for a while it was part of my job to look at actual porn sites if their domain names were based on our company trademarks. That was much more nervewracking.) Because my job is not at stake, the biggest issue for me is not offending or triggering my co-workers. I really don’t want someone to come by and see something which bothers them, and I know the range of things that can bother people is very wide indeed. Certainly it would upset me to walk by a co-worker’s desk and see genuinely violent images, and I probably would ask the HR department to say something to the person involved (just as I do when one of my co-workers posts misogynist political cartoons where anyone who walks by is likely to see them).

And that’s why we tag our posts “NSFW.” Not because nudes are objectionable, not because Americans are prudes (see Ebert on this point), not because we think people shouldn’t look at the pictures. Obviously, we think people who are interested should look at the pictures. But because no one should lose their job for reading this blog, or looking at this site. And because all of us are bombarded with so many thousands of images every day that we can’t avoid and can’t screen, any little island of protection against the unexpected trigger is a relief.