Best Sex Writing 2009

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  Your policies have stripped the sexiness out of being inescapably imprisoned for no reason and with no due process. In fact, the only subgroup of my clientele that has increased over the past seven years has been adult babies. You’ve reduced the world to a place where people just want to cuddle and hear a bedtime story. This is hardly an apt use of my skills or equipment, and certainly not a broad enough clientele for me to make my house payment.

  And if your out-domming me and driving away my clients isn’t enough of a complaint, I’d like to point out that the professional dominatrix bases her sessions on the doctrine of preemptive strike. This whole policy of “I’m going to punish you before you’ve been bad” is so my shtick. I was employing preemptive strike before Mr. Bush’s daddy was in office the first time around; I have a published precedent. If shticks were copyright protected, I’d sue and retire to the Bahamas on my settlement.

  I’m not asking for a lot, but as a taxpayer and an American, I have a couple of requests. You could stop advertising, for one thing. Previous administrations did a much better job of keeping their agenda for world domination on the down low. Besides, tops that tout themselves as ruthlessly as you do, especially in the face of bad reviews, always strike me as distastefully insecure. And since it’s doubtful in this era of self-imposed antitrust policy, how about a subsidy, or federal grant to compensate me for profits lost due to the unfair expenditure of $255 million dollars a day in Iraq? That comes out to about $10.6 million dollars per hours, or $177,000 per minute. For the cost of about five minutes of your time in Iraq I could pay off my mortgage and have a nice little nest egg for myself. I’ll get out of the business and leave your number on my voice mail as a referral for my clients.

  Respectfully Yours,

  Mistress Morgana Maye

  The Pleasure of Unpleasure

  Kristina Lloyd

  All writers get bad reviews; if you write erotica, your sexuality gets reviewed as well.Trust me, you sometimes need a thick skin to deal with this. We are all, as individuals, never more vulnerable than when we reveal our desiring selves to others, and smut writers do this on a grand scale. Sure, it’s framed within a fiction and no one can see us blush. But with that distance comes a space which allows strangers to pass judgment.

  Here are a few things that have been said about me. I mean, about my books:

  Most of the sex scenes are degrading—not arousing.

  Great if you like the idea of being humiliated and called slut etc., not so great if you don’t.

  Ilya is a man who truly doesn’t respect Beth in the least, doesn’t even like her.

  You would think that an erotic fiction book would be at least a little bit sensual.

  I pitied Beth more than I wanted to be in her place.

  One of the worst Black Lace books I have ever read.

  I found some of the BDSM disgusting.

  Nothing against a kinky read but I don’t like mental abuse in erotic books.

  Ouch!

  My grumble isn’t really with negative comments; I think it’s par for the course when you’re a writer. And, I’m pleased to report, they’re vastly outnumbered by the very many positive, insightful, considered reviews my work has received over the years.

  No, my problem is with the way erotic humiliation is so frequently misunderstood, reviled, and marginalized. I write a lot about women who get off on being used, degraded, and verbally dominated; about rape fantasy; about discomfort, conflict, fear. Pain isn’t my kink. Spanking is off my radar. Rough stuff and psychological humiliation is more my theme although, of course, the physical and the mental don’t form neat parcels for anyone. When I write about this and someone says “Ew! Gross!,” they’re saying that what turns me on is wrong.

  An editor once reminded me that erotic fiction needs to focus on pleasure rather than be a vehicle for dysfunction. I was so stunned by this I didn’t eat worms for the rest of the week and almost quit my basket-weaving. I am not dysfunctional. I am not damaged. And what on earth is “pleasure” anyway? It sounds suspiciously like scented candles to me. The notion that female erotica should be softer and more romantic is wildly offensive. Ditto the implication that a woman who wants to be dominated by a man must be lacking her own mind. She doesn’t want it. She’s merely a victim and it’s her damaged, self-loathing psyche talking. Oh, puhlease.

  I get a lot of pleasure from unpleasure, from being made to squirm, from hating it and loving it all at once. All those who are with me, say “Ay!” One of the most moving erotic scenes I’ve ever read is in Stephen Elliott’s My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. The narrator, a male submissive new to the BDSM scene, after hours of being tied, gagged, hurt, and demeaned is fucked with a strap-on. Elliott writes:I had never been entered before. She leaned across my back, wrapping one arm around my chest and gripping my neck with her other hand, occasionally squeezing my windpipe so I couldn’t breathe for a second. I cried again, but it was a different crying. I was very comfortable. I don’t think I had ever been comfortable before.

  “Comfortable” might seem an odd word to use in this context but I think it’s perfect. For me, it’s that sense of dreamy, egoless relief that arises in the tension between pleasure and unpleasure. Subspace, to use the jargon.A lot of my characters (jeez, I can’t think who they’re based on) get off on being treated badly, on being distressed, reduced, shamed, and scared. They’re not screwballs, nihilists, emotional masochists, or lacking in self-worth. It’s a sex thang.They can still function.

  Beth, my central character in Asking for Trouble, is a woman exploring her taste for sleaze, danger, submission, and humiliation. Ilya is the enigmatic stranger she’s newly involved with. She confesses her fantasies to him: “I just like picturing things where I’m being used, objectified, degraded, that kind of stuff. It’s liberating. I’m in someone else’s hands. I’m not being me.”

  Once upon a time, academics wrote about Black Lace books and the new phenomenon of women writing porn. One academic, analyzing Asking for Trouble, quoted the above dialogue and said,“So once again then, we see in the woman who liberates her sexuality and embraces eroticism the simultaneous flight from selfhood.”

  Huh? Flight from selfhood? Isn’t half the point of sex the way in which we can transcend ourselves? (What’s the other half? Someone remind me? Oh, yes: cock.) In Split, my spooky puppets-and-bondage novel, I explore what submission and degradation mean a little bit more. Kate is falling in love with Jake, the strange and beautiful curator of an isolated puppet museum in the Yorkshire Moors. She’s gradually coming to understand how the power imbalance of their sexual relationship fulfills her:He breaks me down, strips me of inhibitions, and when I’ve sobbed and climaxed until I don’t know who I am, he wraps me in his arms, so soft and tender.

  Do I sound like a masochist? I don’t feel like one. The point isn’t the pain and I don’t suffer. Or rather, I go beyond suffering and into a new space. If I could get there without it hurting, I would. I think that’s why I like it when Jake calls me ‘slut’ and makes me feel bad. It takes me there, helps me lose myself […] and it’s as if I’m in a nothing space, floating. I am so free there.

  It’s such a feeling to be free of yourself. I didn’t understand it at first. I think it scared me but I’m getting to know and understand it. I’m coming to realize that I want this not because I’m worthless and I must suffer. It’s because I’m human and life’s tough. Letting go is so powerful. Surrender transforms me. I adore oblivion.

  Kate, like Beth, is a woman conflicted about her sexuality. I think this is true of a lot of people whose kinks are on the dark side, and I think this is okay. We hear a lot about “sex positivity” and having a “healthy” attitude; and while I applaud the sentiment it leaves me feeling a tad uncomfortable. It seems so neat, clean, and tidy, and leaves little space for angst or doubt. Where we want to go and what we want to do or be done to us can be disturbing, terrifying, upsetting, and exciting. It’s pleasure but not as the
y know it. Accepting conflict and contradiction is a significant part of accepting our messy sexual selves. I’m sure “sex positive” was originally meant to encompass this but it’s easily miscast to imply unproblematic happy-jolly-fucky sex. It can make me feel dirty, and not in a good way.

  I like brutes and bullies with a nice line in contempt. I like back alleys, seediness, and squalor. I like scary scenarios that make my heart beat faster. All these things break down the ego and strip away the veneer of the civilized self. And when you’re without that constructed identity, when your dignity and self-respect have been put on hold, then boundaries shift, inhibitions are lost. If anything, those who like to indulge in being broken down need to have a very secure sense of self. They must be continually piecing themselves back together again afterward.

  I imagine a scene. To some eyes, it may look like a woman on her knees in a crack den, sobbing in shame with her hair full of piss, being mocked by a couple of thugs. But for plenty of people, suffering and degradation is intensely erotic. It’s the pleasure of unpleasure, of being split between yes and no. I like it there. I’m comfortable.The scented candles can go hang!

  What’s “Normal” Sex?

  Brian Alexander

  This month the American Psychiatric Association announced the names of “working group” members who will guide the development of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, the codex of American psychiatry.

  Not surprisingly, given the DSM’s colorful history, particularly when it comes to sex, controversy erupted within days of the announcement, especially over membership of the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders working group, which will wrestle with questions such as: Are sadomasochism or pedophilia mental disorders? Are dysfunctions like female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (low sex drive) psychiatric issues, or hormonal issues? Perhaps the most important question is whether, when it comes to many sexual interests and issues, it’s even possible or desirable to create diagnostic criteria.

  At least one petition, spearheaded by transgender activists, is being circulated to oppose the appointment of some members to the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders work group and its chair, Kenneth Zucker, head of the Gender Identity Service at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada. The petition accuses Zucker of having engaged in “junk science” and promoting “hurtful theories” during his career, especially advocating the idea that children who are unambiguously male or female anatomically, but seem confused about their gender identity, can be treated by encouraging gender expression in line with their anatomy.

  Zucker rejects the junk-science charge, saying that there “has to be an empirical basis to modify anything” in the DSM. As for hurting people, “in my own career, my primary motivation in working with children, adolescents, and families is to help them with the distress and suffering they are experiencing, whatever the reasons they are having these struggles. I want to help people feel better about themselves, not hurt them.”

  That sex is controversial comes as no surprise to Dr. Darrel Regier, the vice-chair of the APA’s DSM-V Task Force, based in Arlington, Virginia.

  Sex, he says, in an understatement,“is an area that obviously has lots of emotion attached to it.” But the APA, he says, is doing its best to put science and evidence first, both in who it appoints to working groups and in the process it will use to create the DSM-V (so called because it is the fifth complete version). Each working group will accept input from many experts with varying views, reach a consensus on DSM content, and then put that work group’s product before the board of trustees of the APA and the APA assembly.

  All that may be true, but Regier does not expect such reassurances to quell the forces already swirling around the DSM-V as it moves toward a 2012 publication date. Currently, the DSM-IV includes sex-related activities as varied as paraphilias like voyeurism, klismaphilia (erotic use of enemas), and sadism, and functional disorders like dyspareunia (pain with intercourse), erectile disorders, and premature ejaculation.

  “A Set of Scientific Hypotheses”

  The first DSM was issued in 1952. The idea was to create a more standardized way of talking about psychiatric disorders. As psychiatrist Dr. Gail Saltz, a “Today Show” contributor who also practices in New York, explains, the DSM is best viewed as “a language we have chosen to speak, a talking point we mental health professionals have created to communicate as well as we can with each other and with other professions.”

  It is not a final arbiter of who’s crazy and who’s not. Saltz, who says she thinks the DSM can be limiting in clinical practice, prefers to take a holistic approach and look at each patient’s collection of symptoms and concerns without being restricted by the DSM’s various criteria.

  Regier agrees that’s how doctors should use it, arguing that the DSM “really needs to be seen as a set of scientific hypotheses.” It is, he believes, “a living document” changeable with new research.

  But if the DSM is a book of “hypotheses,” why the fuss? Does the DSM matter?

  Yes. A lot.

  The first reason why is prosaic. If you want your insurance to reimburse your visit to a mental health professional, you are probably going to need a DSM code signifying a diagnosis.

  But the more profound reason is that it shapes how doctors, and even the rest of society, view sexuality.

  “A psychiatric diagnosis is more than shorthand to facilitate communication among professionals or to standardize research parameters,” wrote Dr. Charles Moser and Peggy Kleinplatz in a 2005 paper published in the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality. “Psychiatric diagnoses affect child custody decisions, self-esteem, whether individuals are hired or fired, receive security clearances, or have other rights and privileges curtailed. Criminals may find that their sentences are either mitigated or enhanced as a direct result of their diagnoses. The equating of unusual sexual interests with psychiatric diagnoses has been used to justify the oppression of sexual minorities and to serve political agendas. A review of this area is not only a scientific issue, but also a human rights issue.”

  A Problem for Whom?

  There is no shortage of opinion on what ought to be changed, deleted, or included in the new DSM-V. Sandra Leiblum, formerly a professor at New Jersey’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and an expert in female sexual health who is now in private practice in Bridgewater, New Jersey, says she wants to see a revision of diagnoses of female hypoactive sexual desire disorder, other female arousal disorders, and sexual pain like dyspareunia. For example, she wants language that would separate arousal disorders into genital (more biological in origin) and subjective subtypes.

  Carol Queen, a sexologist, sexual rights activist, and cofounder of San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, believes the new DSM should stress that sexual variances are only a problem “if they are problems in the life of the person showing up” in a psychiatrist’s office “so that when somebody is eroticizing something, or doing something in a consensual way, that’s not a problem” even if it may seem odd to most of us.

  She also proposes an addition, a diagnosis of “absexual” (“ab” meaning “away from”). This would include those who appear to be “turned on by fulminating against it.” Examples could include state governors who crusade against prostitution even while paying hookers for sex, and religious leaders who wind up trying to explain engaging in the sex acts they preach against.

  Moser, who is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, and Kleinplatz, from the University of Ottawa, argue that all paraphilias, like sexual sadism, sexual masochism, and transvestism, should be removed from the DSM, insisting that “the DSM criteria for diagnosis of unusual sexual interests as pathological rests on a series of unproven and more importantly, untested assumptions.”

  This does not mean, as opponents of this idea have suggested, that they somehow approve of sex between adults and children. “We would argue that the rem
oval of pedophilia from the DSM would focus attention on the criminal aspect of these acts, and not allow the perpetrators to claim mental illness as a defense or use it to mitigate responsibility for their crimes,” they wrote.“Individuals convicted of these crimes should be punished as provided by the laws in the jurisdiction in which the crime occurred.”

  Most of these suggestions are inherently political, as much as the APA and most psychiatrists would wish to avoid politics. Sex exists as part of the culture, and it cannot be separated from it.

  The DSM has reflected cultural shifts through its revisions and new editions. The most famous example is homosexuality. When the first DSM was created in 1952, homosexuality was declared a mental illness. By 1973, and after much heated debate and over objections from religious conservatives, the DSM-II excluded homosexuality as a disorder with the exception of one variant, and that was soon dropped in an interim revision.

  Once Deviant, Now Desirable

  “Definitely a change in culture affects diagnoses,” Leiblum says. “We used to think oral-genital sex was deviant and we have embraced that. Masturbation was evidence of out-of-control behavior; now we see it as not only normative but to be encouraged.”

  So if enough people start to do it, or are more public about doing it, does that mean it is no longer a disorder? “I think it probably affects the degree to which people are willing to look at scientific evidence,” Regier says.