by Lori Perkins
He had told her she needed to make the decision whether to become His Total, Complete, 24/7, Lifestyle, Gorean, Old Guarde, Euro, Submissive, Slavegirl. And then He started sending her all these presents.
“But I don’t understand what it all means!” she cried, chewing her lip and wiggling her toes and swallowing hanks of her tawny, wavy hair. “How on earth could I ever learn anything about this stuff in Seattle?”
Just then, the mail came, with an invitation to a Doms and Subs and Friends Together Munch, a flyer for the upcoming Living & Loving in Leather conference, and a catalog from the Pacific Northwest Dykes Who Make Whips. She tossed them all on top of her MacBook Pro from the Future, and shook her head sadly, bursting into tears, as she usually did when thinking of Momzer Macher. “There’s just no way I could ever understand Him!” she wailed.
“Then you shouldn’t see him again,” pronounced Plotitia, who, despite actually having done some journalism, also didn’t know how to research things.
“Okay,” said Tiffany, stumbling over her gifts. “I’ll just return all this stuff, now!”
Suddenly, her phone rang.
“Come on out with me, baby,” purred the deep, dark voice of Momzer Macher.
“I was just talking about you!” Tiffany squeaked.
“I know, I bugged your apartment. Come with me at once, let me take you flying and show you a world of wealth beyond your deepest, most submissive dreams! Then we can go for pancakes. I’ll get you the Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity, if you’re a good girl.”
Deep in her heart, Tiffany knew she should say no. After all, this guy was fifty shades of crazy, what with His super-secret dark past that He wouldn’t talk about and His kinky sex fantasies and how He wouldn’t let her touch Him except when He was fucking her or holding her or she was sucking His cock or they were kissing and the mysterious fact that He could make her orgasm by doing pretty much anything, even though she had never even jerked off before, and His muttering, frequently, that He wanted to beat the shit out of her and that creepy thing He said about her looking like His mom, like, oh, eww, and that annoying way He kept stalking and spying on her and scaring off all her friends and trying to keep her from visiting home and that fucking annoying way He said “laters” instead of “goodbye” like a normal person, but … but …
Pancakes.
“Okay!” she said cheerfully, and she dashed out the door and ran right into him, as He was right there, totally kneeling so He could look through the keyhole. And He swept her off in His black helicopter and they flew around and had pancakes and went back to His place where finally, like after 800 pages, He actually hit her in a way she was pretty sure she didn’t like AT ALL. After, she argued with Him and assured him, repeatedly, that it was totally okay with her and she knew her safeword, dammit, and then totally forgot to use it.
“I didn’t actually like any of this kinky shit, ever!” she screamed at Him, finally. And He was very upset and she was upset and they both cried and said dumb things and broke up forever, which is really not true, because if they did, there wouldn’t be a …
Book Three: Fifty Shades of Happily Ever After
“Let’s get married,” Momzer Macher said to Tiffany one day.
“Okay,” said Tiffany with all the unconditional love she had in her deep heart. Inside, her inner fairy princess was doing a pas de deux, with a little bit of tango and a smattering of an esoteric Brazilian martial art that sort of looked like dancing except that you could totally maim someone if they didn’t duck in time.
How she loved Momzer Macher, dressed for their tropical vacation in His usual black leather pants, hanging off His narrow, sexy hips (I have to remember to buy him a belt, Tiffany thought) and a black shirt and black tie and black boots and black bikini underwear. How sad that I didn’t understand His complicated past! she thought, gazing into His deep, dark eyes, harboring the saddest past anyone ever had.
If she hadn’t been threatened by her boss, who had a grudge against Momzer Macher, if she hadn’t been stalked by several of His seventeen former slaves, if she hadn’t learned the true secret why He liked to play His sick little disgusting S&M games, if He hadn’t had to rescue her, repeatedly, from everyone who wanted to hurt Him by hurting her, why, she could have been working for a living, without a computer from the future, a new car, a new house, and a contract of all sorts of weird rules she never had any intention of signing, but He always forgot to actually ever have her sign.
Oh, and she wouldn’t be pregnant.
But that wasn’t her fault at all! Because Momzer Macher had told her He didn’t like using birth control, so she had to, and then she had these shots all lined up, but forgot to go get them, what with the kidnappings and midnight helicopter flights and crazy former submissives and the way they kept fighting and making up and having great sex with simultaneous orgasms.
Simultaneous orgasms made a girl somewhat forgetful!
Maybe I should tell Him about the pregnancy, she thought. She consulted her inner fairy princess, but that twat was too busy spinning around in a dervish to Bhangra with some Watusi-inspired sidesteps. So, she looked into Momzer Macher’s deep, dark, pained eyes and said, “Could we get married soon? Because I am sort of knocked up.”
“What? Bad girl! Bad slave! What the fuck! I hate you!” Momzer Macher leapt up, shaking with fury. “How dare you!” And then He ran off, screaming, leaving her there to burst into tears.
“Oh, crap to the tenth power!” she wailed. “Holy, goddamn, motherfucking crap!” How stupid and clumsy and unattractive she was, to not have realized that the fear she constantly had about telling Him bad news was actually a sign that telling Him bad news meant He’d act like a complete dick and run off to seek comfort with one of His many ex-lovers or abusers. If only she had trusted friends to advise her and comfort her! But He had chased them all away with His jealous, controlling rages, which were all really just proof that He really loved her.
Meanwhile, Momzer Macher totally ran off and got drunk with one of His bad influences and acted like a dick. Then He sighed and came back and said to Tiffany, who had cried a whole lot, “Okay, let’s get married anyway.”
“And you won’t make me do any of that kinky shit?” Tiffany asked, having gotten a little wiser in the past 600 pages.
“No. I mean, yes, but only when you want it. Or, when I really need it, unless it upsets you. Or the baby. Whatever. It’s just that I have realized, Tiffany, you are the perfect woman for me. You look like my crack-whore mommy, and your submission is entirely fictional, yet you love me so much you collapse into complete hysterics at the mere thought of my leaving you. Somehow, that just says you are the most amazing natural subbie. Let me buy you more stuff. And then maybe a little spanking?”
“Hm,” said Tiffany, one hand cradling her pregnant belly. “Nah. But maybe some more action with the Ben Wa balls. After we get married. I bet our baby will like that a lot.” Her inner fairy princess made a ca-ching! sound and nodded in satisfaction while doing the hustle.
“I can’t wait to taste breast milk again!” enthused Momzer Macher, now more or less completely submissive to His formerly virginal, sexually ignorant bride. And that was not creepy at all.
LAURA ANTONIOU has been writing erotica for over twenty years. Best known for her Marketplace series of BDSM novels, she has also edited and appeared in many anthologies. Her most recent finished novel is The Killer Wore Leather, a comedy murder mystery set within the Leather/BDSM world. Her website is www.lantoniou.com.
Fifty
Shades of
Fanfiction
CECILIA TAN
Fifty Shades of Stories
THE SUCCESS OF FIFTY SHADES OF GREY may seem sudden, but like many “overnight sensations” the apparent suddenness is the result of two forces: one, the cultural blindness that makes books like this invisible until they reach a tipping point into mass consciousness, and two, the many sociological and commercial forces that have been continuously a
t work in the background in the years previous. I want to examine one of those forces, the still-burgeoning but long-established world of fanfiction, or “fanfic” for short.
Most folks know the story by now. Fifty Shades began life as a piece of Twilight fanfic, but an “alternate universe” version in which Edward isn’t a vampire, but merely a mysterious rich man, and Bella isn’t a high school student, but in college. What most people may not know is just how incredibly common it is for preexisting characters and/or universes to be used as a vehicle for intense erotic fantasizing onto the page (or screen) by women all over the world. Fanfiction.net, an online archive, has 25,000 Twilight-based stories alone, and if the site allowed explicitly sexual stories, there would be even more. The Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fanfic archive begun in 2008, has over 400,000 fics archived, with more being added every day. In December 2010 the site drew almost 250,000 unique visitors. As of June 2012, that monthly number had grown to 1.5 million. That is, simply put, a lot of stories and a lot of readers. And that’s only at one of hundreds of websites where fanfic can be found.
• • • • •
While not all fanfic is romantic or erotic, a huge portion of it is: about 20 percent of what’s on AO3 is marked “explicit” and another 20 percent or so is marked “mature.” Three of the tags most frequently applied to stories at AO3 are “romance,” “relationship(s),” and “sexual content.” Which means thousands of writers and millions of readers are participating in an online culture that produces huge volumes of sexy stories. And the vast majority of both those writers and readers are women.
This hotbed of female-driven expressions of lust and love is not new. It predates the internet. Fanfic’s modern roots are in the 1960s and the growth of Star Trek fandom, whose write-in campaigns famously kept the TV series on the air. Camille Bacon-Smith published one of the defining works on the subject of Star Trek fan writers and the fanfiction community twenty years ago: Enterprising Women, a 1992 University of Pennsylvania Press book. In it, she calls the world of fanfiction “a conceptual space where women can come together and create … outside the restrictive boundaries that men have placed on women’s public behavior.” She also names the writing of fanfic “a subversive act, undertaken by housewives and librarians … under the very noses of husbands and bosses who would not approve and children who should not be exposed to such blatant acts of civil disobedience.” And women banding together to read and write love stories about pop culture icons was a highly subversive act. Which was more subversive in its time: the fact that fan writers used copyrighted characters as the vehicles for their fantasies, or that they wrote and shared such vivid fantasies about sex and romance in the first place?
Today, a new generation has grown up from that same community and has proliferated wildly in the hothouse of anonymity that is the internet. Is reading and writing sexual stories and romance still seen as civil disobedience? Is it still something to hide from the genteel sensibilities of the menfolk? I would say yes, at least in some quarters, judging by the number of fans who feel the need to use pseudonyms. But many others are much more empowered. And the breakthrough of Fifty Shades of Grey presents an opportunity not only for fanfic writers and readers to come out of the closet, but also for female readers of erotica and erotic romance to, as well.
Romance has long been the biggest selling segment of all published fiction, and yet for all the decades that it has topped the moneymaking genres list, it is still thought of by some readers to be a “guilty pleasure” and a source of shame instead of a source of pride. Shouldn’t something “everyone” is doing be a cultural norm? Perhaps one of the best things about the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey and its pervasiveness is that it blows open the closet door, at least in terms of itself. I saw no fewer than three women reading the book while waiting to board an airplane recently, and none of them were making any attempt to hide it. And who knows how many others, in that same airport terminal, were reading it on their Kindle or smartphone invisibly? And how many beyond them read it in its original fanfic form?
There is no longer a compelling reason to hide writing or reading fanfiction, and there are fewer and fewer compelling reasons to hide enjoyment of erotic books. Fear of being judged by others for what we read remains the main one, but fewer women suffer that fear now than in the past. And some readers are empowered enough and uninhibited enough to feel entitled to their fantasies. They want their erotica and they want it now. They will be the tastemakers who define what flourishes in the “post–Fifty Shades” marketplace.
Since fanfic is not bound by the strictures of commerce, creativity flourishes in infinite diversity. No fan writer is being steered by an editor toward what stories “sell” best to bookstores. Instead, the fan writer answers only to the audience itself. Erotic fanfic topics encompass not only BDSM, but “kinks” as varied as bubble baths, healing sex, male pregnancy, frenemies, comfort sex, bromance, and much more. Which will be the next hot trend? Fan writers will know before book publishers do. Fan writers receive instantaneous feedback on whether their stories succeed in moving the audience or not. Since feedback from readers, in the form of comments, is the only “payment” or validation a fanfic author receives, comments are highly prized. A fan writer knows immediately whether a story accomplished what was intended. Did the readers cry, sigh with ecstasy, or reach for their vibrators?
By all accounts, the fanfic originally known as “Master of the Universe” (MotU) had many English-speaking women the world over reaching for their vibrators and eagerly awaiting the next chapter. It is not alone in this regard, as there are many thousands of stories like it. (AO3 shows over 3,000 current stories tagged with “BDSM.”) Also not unique to MotU is the fact that it was eventually collected as original fiction with the “serial numbers filed off” and published by a small press specializing in such “filed off” fiction. Did you know there are numerous small presses doing exactly that? Writers Coffee House Press, the house that originally published Fifty Shades, is but one. Omnific is another. (And more are certain to spring up in the wake of success.) Even before the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey, these publishers recognized two key things. One, that the readers of fanfic have their erotica-loving analogs in the non-fandom world: women who may not be clued in to fandom but who share the same desire for sexy stories. And two, that there are many fanfic stories just waiting to be cherry-picked where, although an established story, character, or universe served as the initial inspiration, the fan writer ended up quite far from the original.
So it was with “Master of the Universe,” which used Edward and Bella as a kind of virtual Ken and Barbie, merely familiar vehicles for the writer’s fantasies. Some might complain that Fifty Shades of Grey is not the best-written piece of literature. Some might feel it isn’t deserving of the attention it receives when there are literally thousands and thousands of erotic fanfics out there that could be considered more original and better written. But the fact remains: this fanfic was incredibly popular among online readers. Whatever one might argue about E. L. James, the popularity of the original fanfic proved that her writing touched a nerve. It moved readers. That’s the ultimate test, and in the seething underground of female lust that is the fanfic world, where thousands of other choices are freely available for just a mouse click, MotU passed that test. In its “filed off,” professionally published form, it continues to do so.
CECILIA TAN is “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature,” according to Susie Bright. Tan is the author of many books, including the groundbreaking erotic short story collections Black Feathers (HarperCollins), White Flames (Running Press), and Edge Plays (Circlet Press), and the erotica romances Mind Games, The Prince’s Boy, The Hot Streak, and the Magic University series. She discovered how much fun it is to write fanfic in recent years and is a supporter of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW).
TISH BEATY
; Editing Fifty
IN 2009, a good friend I’d met through the Twilight fandom introduced me to the story “Master of the Universe.” According to her, the lead male character—Fifty—was everything I’d been looking for in a good fanfiction Dom. He was mysterious, calculating, demanding, jaded, and best of all, panty-dropping hot.
“Master of the Universe” or, as we now know it, Fifty Shades of Grey, held me captive from the first chapter. I was drawn to Ana’s unbelievable innocence, and I found Christian’s ability to take command of Ana in the bedroom and otherwise a huge turn-on. While I’d read several BDSM Twi-fanfictions by the time I came across Fifty Shades, something about the way E. L. James wrote her characters made their story unique compared to the others.
It didn’t take long for Fifty Shades of Grey to garner a following in the Twi-fandom. People could read it on FanFiction.Net as well as at the Twilighted community. I followed the story via FanFiction.Net. By the time I really got into the story, James must have had over 2,000 reviews from fans. I’d never read a fanfiction novel that had received so many comments in so little time. People were passionate about the direction the story took from update to update. Fans would get irritated at Christian for being too demanding of sweet little Ana or angry at Ana for not being more understanding of Christian’s needs as a Dom.
I visited the Twilighted threads a few times during the months I was reading the fanfic. Twilighted is where James built her original fan base—the Bunker Babes. The Bunker Babes are a group of Fifty Shades fans that supported and backed James no matter what direction she took the story. They promoted Fifty Shades all over Twitter and the fanfiction communities. They were her sounding board and cheer squad, and were a force to be reckoned with.
