Stories with the sex left in

by Olivia Knight

“So, what do you write?”
Say “porn” to most people and they’ll think of – well, actually they’ll choke on their drink and think of how to get air back in their lungs, but when they’ve finished, they tend to think of the following. Plumbers. Policemen. Firemen. Hell, the whole cast of the Village People. “Schtopp! Schtopp! Dis blue movie is not ready yet. Vere is his mustache? Vhy is he actually fixing ze fridge?” Sex toys. You, naked. Latex. Neighbours (not the soap). Teachers.

“And the girls you have to tell
To pull their socks up
Are the ones whose pants
You’d most like to pull down.”
- Philip Larkin (the dirty bugger)

Doctors and nurses. Nymphomaniacs. Special “institutions”. Whips and chains. The full enyclopedia of sexual variations from anal to zoophilia with special attention to group sex, m/m, m/f/m, f/f/m, f/t/m/f, and no, I don’t know what 't' stands for either. And I don’t write any of this. I write stories. With the sex left in. Fantasy, sci-fi, realist, magical realist, mainstream, literary – and with the sex left in.

Erotica is a minefield for sexual tropes. From the Black Lace guidelines, you imagine the editor under seige, valiantly defending the parapets against a relentless onslaught of jet-set businesswomen copping off on planes, fashion photographers in fetish clubs, and Arab princes with foot-long schlongs. Also, mystifyingly, an army of women taking scented baths. All these tropes are clichés that, for various troubling reasons, people find horny. I’m not criticising. After all, I’m fine with fantasy tropes, and for deeply troubling reasons love nothing better than an undemocratic, feudal and rigidly classist society – as long as there are a few dragons about the place. But those sexual tropes aren’t story to me.

I develop ideas for my erotica stories as I develop all my stories – with a jumble of images, a resonant line, a sense of an issue at the core of the heroine’s life, a scrap of personal philosophy, a need, an academic idea, or a mood, or any mixture of the above, scribbling and staring and walking and daydreaming as the elements of story jostle into position, then writing it all down and figuring out how to sew it together, finding reasons why she won’t know this yet or how to keep him off the scene or where that information comes from or how it all started. What I never do is start with a trope: “I want to write an m/f/m scene” or “How about bondage?” I rarely even consider the sex, then I stare at my first rough outline, puzzled, and mutter to myself “Uh – where’s the sex?”

Where’s the sex? Everywhere. Give me a hero and a heroine who remain on separate desert islands for the duration of the novel and somehow, by the time I’ve finished writing it, it’s teeming with sex. As most characters aren’t marooned and isolated, it’s even easier. If anything, the difficulty is excluding sex from my mainstream novels, reluctantly fading to black, cheating my characters of their perfect moment and my readers of the romantic climax – just as I berate other authors for doing.

Sex is everywhere, like dust, and here’s the odd thing. Every novelist, at some point in their career, and often at some point in every book, will describe the dust – the golden motes dancing in a shaft of sunshine, glittering in the late afternoon stillness, spiralling like a stream of cosmic particles, twirling their infinitesmal and tiny brilliances, or what you will. Personally, I think this is due to how much time we spend in empty houses staring into space. But dust changes nothing. Sex can change everything – the shape of your home, the books on your shelves, what country you live in, whether you take that job, the coming-together or utter ruination of your life, whether you cry in the shower or sing in the street. You could lose everything. You could gain the world. So why describe dust and not sex? That’s why I write stories with the sex left in.

“Left in” is the crux. In a novel covering a year, ten sex scenes – some maybe not including the protagonist – isn’t an orgy by anyone’s standards. If there’s a relationship going on, you’re probably leaving out more sex than you’re including – you won’t describe every long lazy Saturday morning, unless something changes between them, that time. If the characters aren’t together, or were, and now want to be, their heads are probably teeming with sex. If you have more than two characters, there’s more sex than anyone can include in just one book. Sex is as ubiquitous as food, pervasive as air, and universal as love, and the latter is probably why sex will always creep into all my stories, because they’re all concerned with love – the epic kind, with armies, ghosts, castles, spaceships (still trying to get this one past the Powers That Be), dragons – destiny – a world gone mad! Widespread destruction! Betrayal! True love! A cast of thousands!

This picture from www.furiae.com

When my characters are chasing destiny, coming to terms with their true selves, and fighting for their lives, there’s just no room to crow-bar in some m/f/m – though it might happen. It depends on the story. Everything depends on the story. I do use tropes, in my own way – what else is a cold stone castle or a dragon, after all? Ancient fertility rites: guilty. Erotically charged magic: guilty. Inexplicable sexual desire based in powers what man is not meant to wot of: guilty as charged. I don’t see them as sexual tropes so much as metaphors, though, for a level of passion that’s as real as a Saturday morning and as mythical as a pre-destined king. I would write these things regardless, because to me the epic matters, and I leave the sex in, because I believe sex matters. More than dust.

Write Sex Week: Day One

by Kristina Lloyd

About ten years ago when I was an apprentice pornographer, I kept hearing that erotic fiction was perfectly in tune with female sexuality. Men, they said, were happy with a jazz mag and a quick hand shandy. Women preferred narrative. We wanted escapism, sensuality, emotional complexity and actual characters.

Either I’m hanging out with a better class of smutter or times have changed. (Actually, I think those two things are inseparable.) Today, mainstream culture is more sexually aware; women are producing and consuming porn and erotica as never before; many sweeping generalisations have been swept up and flung in a cell along with Mel Gibson DVDs and remaindered piles of Men are from Mars, Women are Heinous.

The binaries are blurring. ‘He wants/She wants’ is so passé. Or is it? Maybe what I’m trying to say is: I’m so glad I’m not the only woman who adores the psycho romance of Wuthering Heights and also gets off on pics of men in the buff and who will use any cheap excuse to post a photo of some half-naked brute on Lust Bites.*

Ahem. This week, we’re asking if gender matters. Are there differences in the way men and women write about sex? Do male and female readers want different things? If so, what? Why? Could a man write an erotic romance with a hero women will fall half in love with? Should Black Lace, an imprint publishing women only, open its doors to the hairier sex? Should Lust Bites let the lads in? Can men write convincing female orgasms? Can women write believable male/male fiction? Can straight men do lesbians (hey, quit sniggering at the back) or should erotica writers stick to what they know best?

Anyway, we’re kicking off with a guessing game. Below are seven sizzling snippets. Can you guess if the author is male or female? I’ll reveal the answers on Friday, and one correct guesser wins a copy of Alison Tyler’s Tiffany Twisted, a fabulously funny sexy book in which Tiffany and her boyfriend Kurt find themselves trapped in each other’s bodies. Also on Friday, we'll be unveiling the magnificent 'Lust Bites Monster Woman'! LBMW is a body parts collage brought to you by our barely-draped selves and the creative genius that is Nikki Magennis. You've been warned!

Kristina X

* Half-naked brute is Brandon Mills, pic by Joe Oppedisano. Brandon is 6’2”. Whimpers.

*QUIZ TIME: Male or female? Hold on tight: these extracts are HOT!*

ONE

She said, did I want her to show me what women like. I said yes. It was hard to get my hand inside of her. She had a meaty, fat pussy. You had to go all the way down to the bottom of her snatch to get your finger in. It was so strange once you got your finger in, it was like sticking your finger in the ocean. If she was sitting on me, I used to think she pissed on me. Hot liquid on my balls. I swear she used to piss on me. She told me to hold women when they come, to hold them in your arms. She taught me how to unhook a bra with one hand. She said it would come in handy someday. She asked me if I’d ever kissed a woman down there, and I said no. I may have lied.

TWO

Hot-skinned and sticky about our thighs, the poet plucked me from the rock. Casually, with two unlit cigarettes drooping from his mouth, he took me down to the cold lagoon. I could have fainted with happiness when the cold water rose between my buttocks and lapped over my stomach. When all of me was under the water, except for my head, I nuzzled under Walt’s jaw with appreciative lips.

THREE

"Please," she repeated in a whisper as the cold stream of lubricant drizzled into her crack. She moaned as I opened her up with my fingers, and by the time I slid my shaft into her I knew Michelle had a well-trained ass. She pushed up against me, her fingers still parting her cheeks wide for me, giving me unchecked access to her tight asshole. I reached under her and pushed the dildo more firmly into her cunt, using my hand to grind the harness against her clit. Michelle's mouth opened wide and she went to scream as she pulsed toward her orgasm, but no sound came out at first. Then a strangled moan of pleasure exploded from her as I felt her asshole clenching rhythmically in orgasmic spasms around my cock. I pumped into her faster, knowing I would come any second. Just as she finished her climax, I exploded into her, filling the realtor's asshole with my come.

FOUR

How delightfully cruel he could be. And how part of her responded to the darkness of his passion. The willing submission flooded her body as the desire seemed to centre within her, unfurling like a moist red flower whose petals pulsed and swelled.

FIVE

His cock slid between her lips effortlessly. She parted for him, taking him in, like his wife never had before. Like no one ever had before. She had been waiting for this and he could tell. The feel of him, the taste of him on her lips was something she had considered many times before. The truth of this set West free. He pushed beyond the barrier or her teeth, felt her soft tongue on his erection, fucked her mouth. He was free. Lulled by the feel of the hot suede of her mouth rushing to encompass him as he gently pushed the rocker back and forth, back and forth. A metronome of pleasure. The universe boiled down to one bright point in his mind – her mouth on him.

SIX

I was hungry to get my cunt stuffed with his dick again so I broke off and told him to doggy-fuck me. He got behind me as I kneeled on all fours and he drove his fat cock nuts-deep into my saturated cunt. He started powering away and I came with a yell and a creamy squirt.


SEVEN

He has the most tender mouth, large and pink and powerful. His kisses set off these detonations inside you and amazingly he can easily take your cock all the way down to its root and slap it back and forth with the inside of his mouth. He loves it when you lean against a tree and screw his face and sometimes as you’re getting there you can feel the mosquitoes biting your shoulders and your stomach and it makes it more intense when you finally come. When he’s about to come, his eyes actually film over. And then you both lie there, staring up at the strange-looking trees in the Asian forest. As the daylight bleeds away, you watch how he vanishes next to you, this lovely black man, he just disappears into the darkness.