The yucky stuff. Not the fucked-up stuff. Not the normal kinky shit. The stuff that's just ick. That kinksters and missionaries alike want our sex to be free of. And I've heard better literotica at a jankity-crank little reading series at SF State than a thousand paunchy dudes on their knees in a thousand alleyways could write in a thousand years, no matter how clever and rock-hard they think they are.
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, both about writing in general and literotica in particular. As a fiction writer, I'm constantly butting my head up against entertainment, against indulgence. Am I trying to please my audience? Do I want to make them happy? Or ought I be serving some other, murkier master, one that may demand the impossible, like "say something entirely new in an old language in an old culture through an old subject matter" or the inscrutable, like "make them know that they are alone and not alone in the unknown world."
Literotica, I thought, would be so much more straightforward. What is the story about? Fucking. Which details do you include? The sexy ones. What are you trying to do with the story? Get someone off. Simple, right?
So I went to some readings, thinking maybe I could learn how to do it. I'm new to the world of literotica. I mean, I'd read some before, but always with a horny eye, never with a writerly one. So I was shocked to find, at a reading at Good Vibes, that some erotic writers are overly pleased with their own cleverness. They're sometimes dishonest. They sometimes embellish or ignore the audience's desires, are sometimes clumsily unaware of their privilege or unable to deliver. And sometimes --- wonder of wonders --- they're actually boring. In other words, they're writers. I wasn't sure how to feel. All I knew was I didn't feel like getting off, and I certainly didn't feel like writing erotica.
Then, this past Tuesday, I went to a reading on campus that I attend every week. It's not a polished or well-lit kind of thing, or one with many guidelines --- there are featured readers, but mostly it's a tipsy open mic in an empty rehearsal room, where people read whatever they've been working on, pretending that the casualness of the setting makes it any less difficult to share.
A skinny young man in a bright purple sweater, bending over and shaky-voiced with nervousness, read three pieces roughly grouped around a relationship and its aftermath. One of them was about scabies. And it was the hottest thing I'd heard or read in a good long time. Yeah, you read that right. Scabies. And it was totally fucking hot. Part of that was in the delivery, of course, breathless and poignant and just slightly self-depracating. But damn. It sure made me reevaluate scabies. And writing. And literotica. And made me realize what a twat I had been.
Recall: I was trying to turn to literotica to escape from the difficulty, so obvious in literary fiction, of balancing pleasure and meaning, honesty and beauty, newness, rawness, and polish. Thinking that the presence of orgasms circumvented those worries --- how silly! I should have known from the complexity and depth (and yes, sometimes inscrutability) of my own arousal and orgasms, and those of my partners-in-crime, that sex is hard, and beautiful, and tangled in webs of power and meaning, just like art is hard, and beautiful, and tangled in webs of power and meaning. Yes, literotica should get you off. But the best literotica, like the best anything, should get you off in a way that you've never got off before --- in a way that you didn't think it was possible to get off.
As Steve Almond puts it in "Tips for Would-Be Pornographers" (http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/out_there/documents/02844055.htm --- this is required reading!), "sometimes the secrets of the human body are funny-looking...I'd take a sweet, embarrassed pussyfart over a shuddering moan any day." It's not always the stories about stripteases or blowjobs in alleyways that do it, you know. Sometimes it's all about re-learning how to masturbate after a breakup, or accidentally getting jizz on your teddy bear, fucking an IT guy or a republican. Or, as it turns out, scabies.
Sex has not changed much, its just kids are being a bit more open about it than they were 15 yrs ago which is a good thing. I'd give you all big bucks to suppliment your magazine if I had it, but my income seems to have vanished along with the economy.
I wish we had a magazine like this when I was at university (I went to BU).. ouch. but that was many years ago, and frankly I think you all do a better job than Boink.
Thank you and keep up the good work.
ps. the yucky stuff is the best stuff (wink)
And as i was searching through the sight i run across one of the most mind probing ,disgusting and ...alluring,statements i had ever witnesed! in saying that,the rest of this "literotica"article only proved my initial judjements. which is why i think my endorphines are raging for the discovery of this magazine.this article is like a true "balls to the wall "person,you make that initial judjement "that we all do "and that judjement turns out to be right! someone who lets it all hang out like that is the perfect example of that unaldulterated,uninhibited,pure bliss that is the markings of something new and fresh which is much needed in todays almost "sheltered" and off the shelf views towards human sexuality.
First, the erotica, because of course you build to the most exciting example, right? There's a book entitled Sperm Wars that I probably don't have to recommend to you; I'm sure you're already familiar. Summer before senior year the night Harry Potter came out, a group of friends--all girls, naturally--and I were in Barnes and Noble. (The next day was also the reunion for my summer program, so I was hosting.)
Since it was a science program, we found it appropriate to gravitate to the science section, though we also wanted to be near the kids section. We picked up Sperm Wars, gasped a little at the reviews it got, and began to read aloud. The structure of the book, essentially, is this: one section of erotica, one section of analysis. The erotica isn't too traditional, though, because the topics the book wants to analyze aren't male fantasy #431: they're aspects of real people's sex lives--including, for example, sperm retention problems. I think the story's called "Wet Sheets."
Anyway, the stories turned me on. I wasn't sure why; they weren't anything like the typical fare I might enjoy or imagine myself enjoying. I noticed my friends reacting the same way. The best part, of course, was that everyone around us had no idea how we were getting off on this stuff: to them, it would seem something between scientific and squicky. But when you're in the moment, it's nothing of the sort.
Which brings me to the time when I was in the moment. Rewind to junior year, Easter weekend, the year when I first discovered--well, pretty much everything, from maintaining a relationship to how the more complicated parts of a girl's body work. I was at her place for Easter--she lived near Cleveland, I near Pittsburgh.
So you can imagine, by the second day, with two mostly inexperienced, desperately horny, totally high-school-"in love" teenagers, we were fumbling at each other's pants a lot, and awkwardly almost getting caught a lot. (I'm not entlrely sure why we never went to her room. I think she thought that her mother would "know" then, as though she didn't know already.)
Finally, at long last, we get a little time alone and she starts to give me a handjob, my first. I'm just about as happy as can be. In walks her mother. She glances over at us and sees everything. She doesn't quite smile, and she doesn't quite wink, but she comes damn close to doing both. I don't know what to do, but I don't panic or cover up or anything; I'm just motionless. Her mother tells us that she'll be making dinner in the kitchen--which is not divided by a wall or anything from the living room, where we are. My girlfriend kisses me hard--and keeps going. To this day I've never been so turned on.
Everything was wrong--we had been caught, it was her mother, her mother could still see if she chose to--but nothing could feel so right. It wasn't ordinary exhibitionism, which I'll certainly admit to: I've never, ever, had an exhibition-y impulse to be naked in front of the parents of anyone I'm attracted to.