Back to Erotica

Back to Erotica

Last month, whilst on my way to experience yet more erotic behaviour, I listened to the new owner of Erotic Review Magazine talking about the re-launch, explaining why most of her contributors were going to be males.
I was affronted by the fact that she thought women were more or less incapable of writing decent erotic prose, if that is not deemed an oxymoron by some.
“Women are not passionate enough about sex and concentrate too much on feelings to be able to write raunchy stories”, said Kate Copstick. "It's almost like writing about food ... Ladies who lunch, should not really write about food because they don't really love food. They don't salivate at the thought of a great steak."

Believe me, Ms Copstick. I certainly salivate at the thought of great steak.

The counterargument to women writing about sex came from Kathy Lette. In her argument, she explained that her collection of short stories, “In Bed With….” had been a popular seller, thus proving that women could write well about sex and all things erotic. She continued by saying that a third of women were not achieving orgasm which showed men still had a lot to learn, with women well place to teach them.

I have a slight problem with Ms. Lette’s argument.
Firstly, her collection of short stories written by prominent female authors was quite frankly as erotic as a quick finger fuck behind the bike sheds, only less so. The writing was clichéd and stilted. It was full of big cocks, simmering lust, heavy breathing and Meg Ryan style orgasmic wails.
This brings me to my second point. Just because you are a female does not mean that you can teach a bloke how to bring you to orgasm. Most women don’t know what it is that makes them orgasm. Most women don’t want to touch themselves to find out, so are they really best placed to tell a man how to do it? Surely, if a third of women are not reaching orgasm (and I actually question this for I fear it is higher) then how can these women know what to expect?
Orgasms are not just going to happen by a slight manoeuvring of fingers, you know. I think it is far more complicated than that.

I sincerely doubt whether some of the famous female authors in Kathy’s book had actually experienced an orgasm, and clearly from what I had tediously read thus far in the book, they have never experienced the wonderment of a gushing tsunami of an orgasm.

Which brings me back to Ms Copstick, who I am sure would be honest enough to say that she has indeed had extremely wet and agreeable orgasms.
She argues that women are not passionate enough about sex and that they complicate and degrade the erotic by bringing feelings into the equation. She states that they concentrate “too much on feelings”.

Guilty as charged, Ms. Copstick.

When I am writing about sex, I absolutely want to feel it. Isn’t that the point? How can you have erotic, sexually explicit writing without feeling it in your groins as you write or read? I absolutely want to feel it because there is no feeling in the world as brilliant and sensational as sexual arousal and climax. And isn’t erotica without feelings just porn?

I am, of course, taking her comments out of context. What she is saying is that as a general rule, women find it difficult to separate the sexual act itself from the feelings associated for the person in which you are engaged in sexual liaisons. She is basically saying that women are too preoccupied with the emotions involved with sex to be passionate about the physicality of the action. She is saying that women are not passionate about sex itself, they are more likely to be passionate about the partner that they are having sex with. And to some extent she is right.

But this is not all women.

As a mid forties woman, I cannot be alone in being passionate about sex. How could you be anything but passionate about something that overwhelms and excites, energises and delights? How can you not be passionate about the one thing that sends you into oblivion that is life giving in its own right?
For me, sex is way too important not to be passionate about it.
What makes it all the more passionate for me is being able to enjoy sex with someone who is equally as passionate about it as I am, and is equally as passionate about me as I am about them. It is these feelings that Ms. Copstick might criticise. She might assume that I cannot write erotica because of ‘feelings’. I would counter argue that I can write better erotic material because of those feelings.

As with so many things in life, you cannot separate the mind, body and soul. If things are working well, they are embracing the power of all three. The brain, as more than one commentator has stated, is the largest sexual organ in the body, and I want this to be stimulated as much as my pussy and I cannot do this without recognising the power of the heart as well.
Physical, emotional, spiritual – they come together as a package, and when you consider erotica, then surely this multi-sensory, multiple intelligence idealism is befitting for something as important as sexual stimulation.

Anyway, returning to the idea of being passionate about sex, then I am extremely passionate about sex. In fact, if I cannot get sex for one reason or another, then I will find other ways of accommodating my needs whilst anticipating great and fulfilling sex in the future.
To this effect, I decided to take a walk into town yesterday to see if I could grab myself a copy of the Erotic Review. According to the news items on the magazine, I should have been able to find it in my local WH Smith. Searching in vain, I disappointingly left the shop without the aforementioned tome and I am still keen to find the damn thing so that I too can make an objective comment on its articles and features.

This week, there was another article in the newspaper about the demise of Black Lace, and we are not talking “Agadoo” or pushing pineapples or whatever that ghastly pop duo sang about.
Black Lace, according to the article, was a sub division of Virgin books, with a specific remit for publishing intelligent erotic books written by women for women. They concentrated on novels rather than short stories and have a relatively successful readership.

So why the demise? The authors of the piece apportion blame to various things including the growth of the internet, the timidity of the Brits and the assumptions of the erotically challenged!
What they are clear about, however, is that there is an audience, and a growing one at that. It could be that the particular owners of this outfit just didn’t realise its potential, or pulled out just at the wrong time.
And the idea of the audience is borne out by the number of comments that were made about the piece, some 366 to date.

I’ll return to some of the comments in a short while, but I want to concentrate on the old argument of women and their sexuality.
I would suggest that the failings of Black Lace are largely due to the fact that women’s passion about their sexuality is still deemed to be slightly sordid. Kate Copstick and her determination that women cannot be passionate about sex does not help. She states quite clearly that we need to move away from the ‘slut’ label for those of us who show some liberation with female sexuality but glibly dismissing women writers only exacerbates this problem. Surely Ms. Copstick should be actively encouraging women to open up to their sexual desires and passions. We are not going to break down the very considerable and established views that erotica and sexual enjoyment is a man’s domain without embracing and encouraging the creativity and sexual learning for women, and that includes opening our eyes to the potential of good, erotic writing from women.
I am sure that I am far more passionate about sex because of the fact that I have had the opportunity to write about it, and to receive comments about my writing. This has encouraged me to explore the greater depths of my sexuality and being able to write more has further increased my sexual desires and sexual fulfilment.

But we have to get over this problem of sex and women. Women who enjoy sex are not sluts and until that is a mainstream view then any literature that even begins to suggest that women can be sexually liberated, sexually aroused and sexually stimulated is going to fail.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how we do this but I think it can start with the small seeds of people like me being more overt about their sexuality, in the right context of course.

As I said previously, there must be more people out there who like sex. There must be more women who are desperate to admit to their sexuality. There are equally, according to Kathy Lette’s quoted statistics, a vast amount of women who need to be rescued from the notion that they are never likely to experience an orgasm, and these women need to read about the experiences of women such as me who knows that orgasms do not just come from clitoral stimulation.

Women need to know.
They need to know how their insides bulge and become erect in just the same way that a man’s cock does when he is aroused. They need to recognise the various moist emissions from their body. They need to get a mirror down to their Fannies to see how every fold of their insides move and curve and redden at the thought or the touch of an experienced lover.
They need to read about this, and they need to know that it is women, real women, who have experienced this.

Women need to have their minds fucked.
And this is the real point of erotica as far as I am concerned.

One commentator on this article stated that there was a difference between porn and erotica.
“Porn is material whose primary purpose is to sexually excite its consumer. Erotica is material whose primary purpose is to make its consumer sexually excited.” Another commentator said
“I think there probably is a difference. If anything, it's that pornography seeks to stimulate the graphical explicitness, through visual and aural gratification, whereas erotica probably has a more imaginative and creative quality.”

I’d say that porn is the foreplay to erotica’s penetration. Porn is deemed negative whereas erotica has a slightly more positive and accepting spin but the real issue is that erotica fucks your mind in a way that the physical pleasures of porn cannot reach.
Women need to learn that great sex is not just about a physical act. Your mind needs to be totally fucked too. You have to feel the physical sensations and let that swarm over you, filling your mind with the very sensation you are feeling in your body, and if that can also come with a hearty dose of feeling close to the person you are having sex with, then so much the better.

Erotica enables this mind fuck.

You can look at, for example, a Klimt picture and see the aesthetic beauty of the female form. You can possibly feel the pleasure of the artist’s excitement but its erotic nature only comes into play when you allow your mind to swoop into another world, imagining, thinking and feeling sexually alert.
The same can be said for erotic writing. You can objectively read the words and get stimulated but it is only erotic when you are fully connected with the writing, when you are swimming in the sensations that it musters, when you allow and enable the words to overwhelm you - and enjoy!

The very best sex, in my life anyway, has been the sex when I have had my mind as heartily and lovingly fucked as my body. And to be able to write about such experiences in a hopefully erotic way, prolongs the enjoyment and anticipates the return of such pleasures.
This for me, is what Kate Copstick says is missing from some women’s writing about sex. They may have engaged the heart and the body but they have placed prominence on the feelings of the heart rather than the all absorbing divinity of the mind fuck.

Here are another few responses from the newspaper article.

“Porn/erotica is designed to sexually arouse, be it loveless images on the television screen or expertly crafted prose. Trying to elevate erotica to the level of art while leaving porn in the gutter is as blinkered as those fanboys who call their comics "graphic novels".”

“As the owner of material that could be classified as 'porn' and 'erotica' (including Black Lace stuff) let me assure you there is no difference between the two. I just asked Mrs Soddball what she thought the difference was, and she said that women call porn erotica because they don't want to think of it as porn.”

“There can be precious few situations in this world where you are more likely to encounter dishonesty than in asking women about porn. Women deny using porn to other women, to men, but worse, to themselves. And when they *do* admit to using it, they try to redefine it as something else.”

“I think the argument that women just don't like erotic fiction was tried when the imprint was started, but it survived for 16 years putting out up to three books a month. So unless something has happened recently to put women off smut there has to be more to the problem than women just not liking sexy fiction”.

“My issue is that most porn (not all - MOST) is aimed at men and completely ignores me - as a female, as a potential consumer, as a woman, as a person who would like to see women portrayed as more than just holes incapable of experiencing genuine, consenting, respectful pleasure when given by men.”

“Why isn't some one seeing the potential of female erotica in the UK? I don't think free smut on the internet is to blame, otherwise why does erotica sell in the US. They got no interwebs there? And hey, you can have a wank for free with your fingers but pretty pink vibes can sell for £100. This is capitalism. With enough backing, you could sell fresh air to people.”

“What really upsets me about these threads is the avid defensive of porn without the recognition that it's surely the bassiest, most baked beans on toast level of sexuality you can imagine.”

“Study after study shows that men are sexually aroused by porn and women aren't (this offends my feminist principles and I wish we were all raunchy but there you are) and I guess this discrepancy explains why Black Lace is, er, screwed.”

Still plenty to do but some signs of hope, I think.