Tag: erotica

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 7: ‘The Story of the Eye’ by Georges Bataille

~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

I read this little book on the advice of Björk, and my scandalous older boyfriend who had a serious crush on Björk. To judge from modern reviews, it is still extremely divisive, with many considering it irredeemable trash, and others suggesting it’s wholly allegorical, though that may be a wildly optimistic reading of what is at its heart a very filthy book.

What’s interesting (read: strange and a little frightening) to me now was that on first reading, not a bit of it seemed deviant. Of course the main character lifted her skirt and sat in a saucer of milk within five minutes of meeting the narrator. Of course they abducted a beauty, then drove her out of her mind. Of course they went to Spain and… For those who know what happens by the end, you may wonder how I read the whole thing and barely flinched. I have theories, some of which I’ve illuminated in prior posts.

France wanted to hang Bataille for a while. I blew my college teacher’s mind by even owning a copy of the book, which she borrowed from me. I think I might have made her a mixed tape, but socially, not romantically. Oh, the ’90s.

If memory serves, I bought the book at The Mystic Bookshop, the source of many outrageous ideas and my philosophical oasis growing up in a very staid city in a fairly conservative part of the world.  Thanks, Mystic Mike (as we called the snackable indie boy who worked there) and the whole Mystic crew for letting me spend hours thumbing through Re/Search books I could never afford to purchase.

The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. YMMV.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 5: A copy of Fetish Times

closeup of a woman's back, tied with hemp shibari ropes
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

There was that time I was coming down after a semi-licit rave at a downtown ballet studio.  I’d only just met the woman whose apartment we were in, though she knew some of my friends. It must have been spring, for the room was full of sunlight.

The woman was a dominatrix. Messily beautiful, twice my age. I am quite sure that if she tried to fuck me I would have said yes. Instead I read the magazine Fetish Times.

It was 1994. The internet was barely a word. No smartphones, no cameras, no 3.5 million search results and nothing to Google it from (sorry Netscape, you did your best.) We still called it cyberpunk, for fuck’s sake.  Then adolescent me picked up one of western culture’s strangest artefacts and the bottom dropped out of the world. Thanks to the imprinting effects of psychedelics, there was no coming back.

I was appalled. I read it cover to cover. No one noticed. They talked about San Francisco in the 1980s, about tweakers on roller-skates and failed revolutions. I read about…stuff.

Why do we want it so weird? Who told me to ask my first lover to pour hot wax on me, the third time I ever had sex?  That was before I’d seen the magazine. He asked what I wanted and that’s what I wanted.  We were barely dating. I just went to his house to fuck. To smoke hash. To read his mind-bendingly seditious books and fantasise about changing the world.

Am I ready?

Are you?

“Is This Seat Taken?”

a woman's beautiful bare legs as she sits in an easy chair by the window
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

So: your boyfriend who has family connections to your MBA supervisor invites you to an anonymous orgy. You want to go, because you like to fuck, so much that you agree, despite the fact that you will know probably half of the people there. But you try on the expensive mask he had made which really does cover your face well, a tight fitting cap of blood-red leather that extends to the base of your nose and conceals your hair. You look, in the mask and nothing else, totally gorgeous, a fact he tells you continually as he fucks you from behind, watching himself in the mirror over your shoulder. He is not wrong, and thinking of all the other men who will fuck this gorgeous masked woman, you come, shaking so hard he pulls out, thinking he’s hurt you somehow.

Idiot, you think again.

Yet you go to the party. The orgy. You wear the mask and a garter belt and stockings and heels and a long coat and nothing else. He has waxed not just his pubes but his chest, striding about in leather pants with a tear-away crotch. You spend very little time together, because the pants make you laugh, and as a designated sub that’s the kind of disrespect that earns you a shift in the stocks.

You like getting spanked. You do not like humiliation, being hung out for anyone to torment. Too many of the older men who dominate this scene fall back on that trope, one more reason why you are sitting alone in the back corner of the mansion’s front parlor, wondering if it’s possible to ghost on an orgy.

“Is this seat taken?” Before you answer the man sits down anyway on the other end of the little couch. “I just gotta relax for a bit.” He flops back, breathing hard, his half-hard cock laying against his thigh.

You check him out, because it’s that kind of party. A black beaked mask, Dread Pirate Roberts with a hint of Plague Doctor. The fit body of a dedicated college athlete keeping his shit together. No gray hair in the pubes. Who is he?

“Is the master enjoying his evening?”

“Don’t do that master stuff. You can just talk to me. And I don’t know. Yes and no. I’m thinking about going home.”

Ask me. You blush, because no matter how many dicks your boyfriend lets you have here and now, he will not lend his subs. He has told you so himself, because so many in his clique have asked to fuck you. Asked him, not you.

“Me too,” you say. The plague pirate turns to look directly at you, and you shiver, because the mask is only half of his menace, the rest in his dark eyes that seem to swallow you.

“I want your number,” he says.

“Okay. How—”

“I’ll remember it. And if I don’t, it’s my fault, right?”

“Okay.” You tell him your number.  He says it back to you. “You got it.”

“Does your boyfriend, sorry, master, read your messages?”

“God, no.”

“Good.” He stands up and stretches.  Like the slut you are, you stare at his erection.

“Are you leaving?” you ask.

“Yep.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to—”

He turns to you, and you shiver again under his dark gaze. “Not here. I want you paying attention.”

“Oh.”

He winks and walks away. His ass is amazing.

“Who was that?” your boyfriend asks as he approaches.

“I don’t know.”

“What did he want?” He is fiddling with his detachable crotch again. You do not love him. Now you know that you do not like him either.

 “Nothing.”

“Really?”

 “I’m getting one of those headaches.  Do you have any idea where my coat is?”

(2020)

“The call is coming from inside the house…”

an erotic close-up of someone's bare throat under gold lights
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Writing erotica is not like writing romance. When sex is at the core of the writing, the rest of the plot serves mainly to create situations where people will want to have it. The sex becomes the plot, and the way it unfolds creates the narrative. Are the characters happy? Guilty? Excited? Fearful? Do they feel good about it at the start then realize as soon as fur hits fur that, oh shit, this is a very bad idea? Or the opposite, warming to the notion the further they pursue it?

While it is popular to add an erotic gloss to another genre (Erotic Thriller, Erotic Horror) this is sometimes like adding sprinkles to ice cream: delicious, but it could have been great without it. In pure erotica, in which sex is the main thrust (hur hur) of the plot, who is the villain?  More to the point, who is even a plausible antagonist in an erotica narrative? The protagonist’s parents? Their social circle? Ex-lovers? These are certainly options, and in a romance-first erotic story, one expects the hero to fight-for-the-right-to-love with another well-defined character.

Love, romance, sexual desire: do we need an external antagonist to narrate these facets of our lives, when the villain of our own sexual stories is so rarely external? The struggle is most often within your own mind, between your consciously constructed desire and your history, beliefs, triggers, and unstated, unconscious, icky longings that you ought not to share but can never deny. So few of us feel perfectly safe in our sexual selves. Always we doubt, whether our own ability to give and receive pleasure, or to withstand humiliation after the fact. When we struggle with our feelings about sex, more often than no, we fight ourselves.

This is the nature of erotica. External threats only matter if they change the protagonist’s understanding of themselves and their approach to sex. The villain doesn’t need to be embodied as a person.  It can be whatever it is that keeps the erotic hero from fulfilling their sexual destiny.  We don’t need to see the betrayal to feel the agony of the struggle.

Indeed, to put the villain in the story can rob it of its sexual pleasure. To frame an abuser, even an absent one, as the antagonist can rob an erotic story of its liberating influence, by making it more about the hurt than the recovery. At its heart, erotic literature is about freedom, about expressing parts of the self not ordinarily permitted. The process of denial is not always important to the plot. We all know that story. What we want from erotica is the getting free.

The Commuters

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Paris, 1903

When is the next train due?

Seven  minutes.

Will we have enough time?

Yes, only hurry. This way, behind here.

Is this safe?

Of course not. Do you care?

Have I ever cared?

I’ve missed you so.

A kiss first, quickly.

Mmm…you changed tobacco.

Actually I did. Your brand.

You’re even more delicious. Come, further from the light. Over here.

Kiss me more. I never get enough kisses from you.

We never have time. If I could only have you for a night. An hour even, alone.

To get undressed.

Yes. To kiss you everywhere. To touch you properly, feel your skin against mine.

Time for you to do everything to me you’ve ever wanted. 

This is madness.

It’s enough.

Hush, footsteps…alright, they’ve gone. Andre, we can’t keep doing this.

But how else can I see you?

I’ll rent a room. Somewhere that people won’t care who comes and goes. You know I have money. It’s not impossible.

It’s not safe.

This is worse. This is scandals and inquiries and your whole life and mine gone to ruin. For seven minutes of scrabbling in the dark, like a pair of blind—

Hush…they’ve gone.

Andre, please, let me find us somewhere. One night. Somewhere in the north end. Or right out of town. Rent a cottage, arrive separately. Take guns and dogs and say we’re hunting.

We’ll talk about it later.

There is no later. There’s this, and this again, and never anything else.

Don’t leave. Michel, I’m sorry. I’m frightened and I’m sorry that I’ve got nothing more to give you. I’m sorry that it will never be enough.

Stop. If that’s all you’ve got to say, let’s stop talking.

Kiss me again.

Mmm…come farther now. Hurry.

I can barely see you.

You don’t need to see. Just touch me.

Oh my…is that…all you?

Don’t you know how I ache for you every moment we’re not together?

I want you in my mouth.

We can’t. Not here.

I must. Just this once. 

Agree you’ll see me elsewhere. Tell me you’ll be with me, if only for a night. Or I don’t know that I can ever do this again.

Don’t lie.

I mean it. Promise me one night together. Or I’ll walk away right now—

Don’t. Don’t ever say that again.

Well then?

I promise. We will be together. Not just like this but truly together. Whatever you desire. Only say you’ll never refuse me.

How could I refuse my heart?

One more kiss. Then let me have you.

Yes. Only hurry…             

I’ve wanted to do this for so long. Every time we meet.

You’d better start or you’ll be waiting again…oh…Andre…oh, love…what is that you’re …how can it feel so…oh yes, touch me there. I’ll spread my legs for you to reach…yes…yes…yes, take me right down…oh, I’m going to…oh yes, suck it down. Yes, take it.

Well…I never knew you had such talk in you.

You wait. Wait till we’re alone. When there’s no one to hear us, judge us. I’ll tell you all the things I’ve ever wanted to do to you, love. And then we’ll do them.

Yes. Find us a room. I promise, I’ll be there.

Do you still love me?

More than ever. I’ll be tasting you all night.

I hear the train.

What about tomorrow?

What about it? You know I’ll be here. Quick, kiss me one last time…now go. Carry on with the crowd. I’ll leave after.

I miss you already, darling.

Tomorrow, love. I promise.