Lines, Rules, Limits - #transgressive #forbidden #erotic

Are there topics you feel should be unequivocally banned from erotica? Subjects about which you would absolutely never read—or write—in an erotic context? Do you believe there are some literary lines that should never be crossed?

Many people feel this way about rape or other forms of non-consensual sexual activity. Yet studies (here, for example) have shown repeatedly that many women (and some men) fantasize about being raped or forced into sexual activity. In general, these women understand that imagined coercion is very different from real rape. Finding the former arousing does not indicate a desire for the latter. Nevertheless many readers, and publishers, object to exploring this topic in erotica.

What about incest? Despite the difficulty authors experience in publishing fiction that features sexual activity between adult family members, the taboo topic is a turn-on for a significant subset of readers. The wildly popular step-brother romance sub-genre has provided a “safe” way for readers to experience the forbidden thrill of being attracted to a close relation. I personally consider this as a bit dishonest. I’ve had incestuous dreams about my own brother. I’d never act on them, but that doesn’t mean the dreams weren’t a turn-on.

Bestiality? If sexual activity involving animals is so horrifying, why are shifter stories so successful? Not to mention the cryptozoological “taken by bigfoot” sub-genre? Forcing oneself upon a dumb animal in the real world would be immoral, but the beasts in erotic fiction tend to be anthropomorphised. The human participants feel some sort of sexual connection with the horny dog or the sleek, predatory tiger. I’ve read some amazing erotica based on human attraction to animals. Does that mean I plan to have sex with my cat? Of course not.

Sex with children may be a hard line. Adults getting sexual with kids too young to object or to understand is definitely wrong. There are no extenuating circumstances. But how do you define “young”? Is fourteen too young? That’s how old I was when I gave away my virginity, to a guy who was twenty. I knew exactly what I was doing (well, in theory, at least). During the teen years, desire is confusing and inchoate, but overwhelming in its power. Memories of that period, when every emotion cuts to the quick, offer tremendous possibilities for meaningful and moving—as well as tremendously arousing—erotic fiction.

My clearest personal line involves erotic fiction that portrays inflicting serious violence, physical harm or death as arousing. I avoid such stories when I can. I’ve read enough erotica, though, to know that not everyone agrees with this boundary. Are the people who write such stuff fundamentally evil? Am I qualified to judge?

These are not easy questions to answer. If you think they are, I believe that you’re fooling yourself.

The core issue relates to another kind of line: the line between imagination and reality. Is someone who finds a taboo topic arousing in fiction likely to perform such actions in real life? I’d argue that most readers of erotica distinguish very clearly between the fantasies evoked by erotic fiction, no matter how extreme, and the life they live outside of books.

Of course there are individuals who do enact this sort of forbidden scenario in the real world. There are men who kidnap women and hold them prisoners in their basements for years, who secretly abuse grade school kids, who screw their prepubescent daughters. These people have always existed. Does our writing about the sort of crimes they perpetrate encourage these people to commit these crimes?

Does an author who writes about a serial killer encourage murderers in the real world?

How much of the horror that people express about various taboo topics is rational, and how much is based on their personal discomfort? I will leave that question open for you to ponder.

Publishers and online venues don’t want to make readers uncomfortable. They’re also worried about getting in trouble with the law. Hence, they establish various rules about what content is and is not acceptable. These rules tend to be idiosyncratic, depending on both the personal beliefs of the owners or operators and their perception of their market. For instance, I had a publisher reject one of my stories once because they had a policy prohibiting the portrayal of priests and nuns in erotica. In the romance world, very few publishers will accept any work that includes bodily fluids (“golden showers” or “scat”) even though there’s no legal reason for them to reject such stories (and it’s possible to write about these topics with both grace and heat). These publishers are convinced their readership will find such content “gross”.

Perhaps you will consider me an incorrigible reprobate, but I am in favor. I believe we should have as few rules as possible.

In my view, erotica should not only turn readers on, but should also expand their perspectives. Sex is inextricably intertwined with so many other emotions—love, guilt, ambition, shame, anger, and compassion, to name just a few. Erotica derives its singular power from this psychological complexity. It’s not a safe genre, or at least it shouldn’t be. Sometimes the most arousing stories are the most disturbing.

Does that mean nothing is sacred, nothing forbidden? That’s something each of us has to answer for ourselves. There are few, if any red lines that I can discern. Defining what is and is not acceptable in erotica is a dangerously slippery slope.

Red lines in erotica remind me a bit of limits in BDSM. Limits are personal—the activities I totally reject might be the ones that most turn you on. Furthermore, limits can change over time. Tomorrow I might consider doing something that terrifies or squicks me today. Finally, the most erotic BDSM encounters often result from pushing limits—moving beyond the edge of what’s comfortable and familiar into new experiences and new insights.

My Inner Realist

By Sam Thorne (Guest Blogger)

Hot fantasies often evolve from daydreams based on hot men from various TV series. As I got older, I started developing characters of my own to fantasise about. I had to, because all these hotties were in endless series, matching themselves up with female leads and making themselves ‘unavailable’.

I could never pretend that those female leads didn’t exist. My inner realist is just too noisy and nosy. I had to write those female leads out—get them out of my way. If they were cool characters, they’d depart the scene after an amicable split, in a nice safe taxi. Naturally the newly-single hottie would be left distraught on the pavement, in urgent need of succour/hot sex.

Having said that, I’ve also mentally written out appalling female leads by making them evil and unfaithful, embarking on wild sex in the back of a car with some virile youth. Said car would immediately plunge into a mile-deep sinkhole. It’s a bit hard on the youth, but hey! He should’ve had better taste. The bereaved hottie is, of course, left distraught in a chapel of rest and in urgent need of succour/hot sex.

I’m sure you can spot a trend developing, here. And it’s been suggested to me that I might have not quite grasped the meaning of ‘FANTASY’.

I’ve tried cutting loose, but my inner realist won’t go on strike. She’s remarkably resistant to a sinkhole, won’t be sent away on enforced leave, be shoved off a cliff, married off to a Siberian tyrant, or silenced with gags. As a writer, I’ve learnt to accommodate her. I love reading about hard-ass women who remain mysteriously oblivious to their own beauty, but when I try to create them, they stagger rigid and two-dimensional across the page. Since I started writing heroes and heroines a little closer to home, the imaginative juices started flowing again. Just to be clear—I don’t write doormats. I just don’t see why my good-lookin’ characters should evade the trials that most readers put up with.

My heroes have that alpha streak, but it’s not prominent until they’re balls-to-the-wall. My heroines awake at two in the morning, their heads full of all those one-liners that would’ve been of some use during the argument they’d had hours ago. Celeste, the heroine of Single-Syllable Steve, has many things she’d like to say to bully-boss Ian, but she still needs to earn a wage.

She crept past his door. His chair was angled towards the window and he sat with his legs crossed, fingers steepled in front of his chest. She’d actually fancied him when he’d first swaggered in with his transatlantic drawl, his animated conversation, and Nordic blend of bronze and blond hair. The soft yellow light of the angle-poise lamp picked out the strong lines of his cheekbones and jaw in blurred shades of primrose and burnt orange. The image would make a good Rembrandt masterpiece. ‘Dickhead in Repose’, perhaps.

As the accountant in a nightclub, Celeste’s job becomes much more challenging when temporary bouncer Steve is forced to change in the staffroom (where she works) because Ian won’t fund the men’s room re-fit. The taciturn giant’s as silent as he is gorgeous, and while falling for him, Celeste wonders how the hell she’s going to get him to notice her with so many stunning barmaids and dancers around. Like a lot of us, Celeste is crap at flirting. But she knows what she wants. And when she makes her feelings clear, Steve more than rises to the occasion:

Two gentle fingers slipped into her from behind, making her whole body tingle as they pressed lightly in and then pulled out. He stroked her like that until she was reaching out to grip the corners of the mattress and unable to stop whimpering into her pillow. His fingers pulled away and when he pressed into her again, she barely felt the snag of rubber.

His left hand cupped her hip as he entered her, squeezing gently in reassurance as his huge cock broke through her slick but small gap. Steve was huge to the point that she snatched her face off her pillow in erotic shock as he started a slow but insistent dipping rhythm with his hips, filling her one careful, hard inch at a time. She’d never felt penetration like it. She felt herself clamping around him, juicing, even without him touching her clit.

Because I set a lot of stories in places I’ve lived in and which I know well, I’m asked whether I use a lot of my ‘real life’ for ideas. To some extent… yes. When I’m on an imaginative roll, I don’t want to have to stop to research the street layout of a town I’ve never been to so that things remain authentic. And like most writers, I sometimes lend my characters (male and female) some of my personal traits. However, I do have one personal characteristic which is relatively unique to me, and which will make a more prominent appearance in future stories. Like Steve, I’m deaf.

Deafness shapes the way people observe things. I’ve been severely deaf most of my life, depending upon hearing aids and lip-reading, and in the last couple of years progressed to profound deafness (pesky ear infections!). I was brought up ‘hearing’, which means I don’t sign, apart from a rudimentary knowledge of Sign-Supported English which I picked up from Deaf flatmates at University. People in my position don’t make much of an appearance in popular culture. Deafness is either presented as the curse of the elderly, or the form of a character who is deafened, and has to both learn to sign and deal with that huge chip that’s just appeared on their shoulder. Or the character is a member of the Deaf community (observe the caps!) and signs.

In the past, I’ve been asked by other writers whether my coverage of deafness is my way of being semi-autobiographical. I’ve been tempted to answer: “So, your blue, three-boobed alien from Snarg—the one with the massive libido and perfect hearing—that’s obviously you, isn’t it?” I could’ve made more of Steve’s hearing loss in Single-Syllable Steve, but elected not to, because it wasn’t there to form a plot point. He just happens to be a vast, sexy guy who doesn’t join in on what’s going on around him, giving him time and mental space to get to know Celeste.

In some ways, writing a character with a hearing loss does keep my fantasies ‘within reach’, but quite honestly, I include the deafness issue occasionally because it’s a nice mental holiday from the effort of remembering that my character can hear. What does this mean in practice, as a writer? Well, I have to keep an eye on my plots, remembering that that some situations can be sorted out with a simple phone call (not an option for me). I have to remind myself that conversations can be carried out while someone’s got their back turned, or an odd accent (or huge beard), and I need edit carefully to strip out the huge number of action-tags related to reading body language. It’s fun… but tiring!

In one upcoming story, Purer Than The Driven Snow, my hero Adam is a paramedic and mountain rescue volunteer at an Austrian Ski resort. An unabashed Casanova, all his senses are in perfect working order… but he’s still completely blind to the fact that Rosie—one of the girls with whom he shares an apartment—has fallen for him. She disguises her feelings well, venting her frustration at his louche behaviour through constant criticism of his housekeeping, his morals, and his wealthy background. Their domestic arrangements threaten to go up in flames when Adam sleeps with Marisol, their third housemate, but then he gets the rescue call that changes everything. His injuries give him more rest and recuperation time than any man would wish for, but the unwanted opportunity for self-appraisal reveals a few interesting truths about his own desires… and Rosie’s.

Adam’s fun to write. Superficially, he’s a lad with very little sexual self-control, and he’d typically be described as a ‘piece of work’. On the other hand, he genuinely cares about the people he rescues and the girls that he lives with, and he’s capable of great protectiveness and kindness. I enjoy putting my male characters through the mill, seeing them emerge stronger and more sensible on the other side of their ordeal.

Adam’s ordeal is physically extreme, but in Irrepressible, another WIP, my male lead Andy has to contend with a great deal of snobbery. Andy is supposedly Maria’s ‘bit of rough’, some temporary fun to remind her what it’s like to have a sex life while she brings up her young family as a single parent. Dr Maria Sansom is the daughter of wealthy parents; Andy’s a buff, ‘oafish’ carpenter who likes his nookie and beer. But as Andy’s place in Maria’s life expands beyond the bedroom door, she sees him dealing with her toddler like an expert and thriving throughout his trial-by-five-year-old. She comes to realise that there’s no way that Andy can be ‘temporary’, even though everyone else in her life seems to disapprove of him.

“She wants you.”

Maria barely heard Andy’s words for the howling overlaying them and snatched Livvy from his hands as he stood at the kitchen doorway, holding the tot out in front of him like a cop delivering a suspect package. From Livvy’s general aroma, she could understand Andy’s urge to delegate the costume-change moment, but she was genuinely curious to know why he’d collapsed into the nearest kitchen chair, his head and arms flung back, his entire body coated in sweat.

The view wasn’t unappealing. The ‘Ria’ in her wanted to lick every dewy bead of that sweat off his toned, tanned body, streak by streak. She shook her head clear of the temptation and shot him a sweet grin. “You ok?”

“Your boy’s… a terror.”

“I know.” There was no point in denying Ethan’s inbuilt villainy. “What’s he been doing to you?”

“Unfair-rules football!”

Her giggles broke free even before she reached the kitchen door to take Livvy for her nappy change. “Did Ethan keep changing the goalposts?”

“The goalposts were the least of my bloody worries! It was me versus about thirty small people, most of them apparently playing rugby rather than football, and every time I got near their goal they either invented a new version of ‘off-side’, or awarded themselves a penalty for me picking my nose or scratching my leg!”

Maria set Livvy down and nudged her gently towards her bedroom. As Livvy took off happily, in expectation of clean pants, Maria took a few steps back into the kitchen and claimed Andy’s mouth in a long, hair-raking kiss that left them both as breathless as Andy had been when staggering through the kitchen door.

He shot her a brilliant grin, even as he pulled away. “That was nice. Not great for my oxygen supply, but really, really nice.”

I like touching on emotional themes that most readers can relate to, like being close to two people who can’t stand each other, or having to stand one’s ground against someone who will always have the upper hand. But I try to do so in a light-hearted way, not distracting too much from the hot sex that takes place when my characters’ passions ignite.

 

I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of my inner realist. So I’m going to make the best of her and write about men who’d I’d happily tackle into bed, and women who deserve their place alongside them. No sinkholes for Celeste and company!

Single-Syllable Steve has been released into the digital wilds. You can get a copy through Amazon, or download a copy from eXcessica.com. If you’d like to join a mailing list to get details of upcoming releases from Sam Thorne, please contact samthorne100 [at] outlook [dot] com

About Sam

Sam Thorne is an editor, occasional feller of trees and new author from West Sussex, England. After nearly a decade of editing within the civil service (and helping fiction-writing friends get to get published in the meantime), she’s branching out from editing and working on her romcom novel to give free rein to her hotter fantasies.
 
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