The Erotica Fallacy

            So…I have a book coming out in two days.

            And I’m terrified.

            I have been working on Twenty-One on and off for six years. I don’t think it’s perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but at some point, I went as far as I possibly could with it. Rather than have the only novel I’ve completed in my adult life gather dust on my private shelf, I decided to self-publish it on Amazon and Createspace. It seemed the best send-off to my little Frankenstein’s Creature of a cross-genre work, rough around the edges but well-stitched together with just enough life in it to be called a decent book.

I don’t expect Twenty-One to reach far past my friend and family circle, but my mind still runs rampant with possible reactions of faceless readers or, dare I utter the phrase, critics. Will they find the typos and grammatical mistakes that I and my editor inevitably missed and dismiss the book altogether, as I admit to having done before with self-published books? Will they misinterpret the erotic tones filtered through the main character’s brainwashed mind as romanticizing rape? Will I be crucified for daring to discuss Haitian Vodou or, nightmare of nightmares, get in trouble for having POC characters? Not enough POC characters? The closer I get to the release date, the more my mind races with possible controversies and criticisms that are 99% sure not to happen.

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break.

One of my worries, however, is bound to happen. It’s bound to happen because, well, it’s already happened. Twenty-One is a dark novel rife with brutal violence, multiple felonies, death, and psychological torture. So far, not a single one of my first readers has batted an eye at any of that. What ruffles their feathers? What makes my family members uncomfortable about this book? Not the kidnapping, starving, and brainwashing of multiple characters. Not the blood and violence. No, the element that makes my readers who know me squirm is the sex.

The sex, guys.

I’ll be up front with you; there’s a lot of it. It’s detailed. It’s unflinching. And little, if any, of it is actually consensual, but oddly enough, that last part hasn’t bothered my early readers and potential readers as much as I’d thought. It’s the fact that there’s sex in this novel about human trafficking at all.

I’ll use an example. Around the time I released the cover image on social media, a friend of mine messaged me to express his excitement, despite his “not a typical fan of vampire romance stories.”

I had a good long laugh and assured him that this novel was neither romantic nor featured vampires in any way, shape, or form.

“It's a psychological thriller about the kidnapping and brainwashing of a college student. There are sex scenes in it and they are eroticized because she is psychologically broken down, but it certainly isn't safe, sane, or consensual.” I explained.

My inbox grew quiet for a moment.

“This tells me all about your personal life that I didn't need to know....” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“That you’re into consensual non-consent.”

And there it was.

A writer can write about anything. We can write about aliens, fantasy realms, serial killers, war crimes, ghosts, unicorns and genocide. Writers can describe people getting ripped apart in excruciating detail in a thousand terrible ways. Writers can author books like The Silence of the Lambs and Misery without the vast majority of readers batting an eye. Yet somehow, in America, writers of erotica can’t possibly have come up with their stories without personal experience or desire. No one thinks Thomas Harris has a deep longing to eat people. But writing about sex? Wow, TMI, man. I didn’t need to know what you like in the bedroom!

I’ve never been a big fan of the creator-centric way we currently analyze art. Unless you’re reading something like confessional poetry, I feel that lining up a book and the author’s biography and reading them side-by-side too often weakens the art. I’m much more of a proponent of Death of the Author—not in the full-blown Roland Barthes way, where you dip into the philosophy of “is anything really original?” but in the authorial intent is not a vital factor in interpreting a piece of art way.

Another aesthetic paragraph break. Hold your applause.

I understand the impulse to dig into the life of an author. It is inevitable that pieces of the author’s life and experiences will leak onto the page. Write what you know, after all, is the golden rule of writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously based the Daisy/Gatsby dynamic off of his own tumultuous marriage, for example. Kurt Vonnegut’s time as a POW was blatantly described in Slaughter House 5. However, no one thinks Fitzgerald had to be a bootlegger to write about one, nor does anyone think Vonnegut was abducted by aliens. The point I’m valiantly struggling to make is that even fiction with chunks of the author’s life and experiences in it has fictional elements that were not actually part of the author’s life and experiences. Going too far into authorial intent breeds idiots like anti-Stratfordians who believe Hamlet was somehow auto-biographical. No, morons. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet despite not being born into nobility. Just ignore the facts that Shakespeare thought Bohemia had a harbor and that Rome had clocks and pretend you have to have participated in tennis and falconry to write about them. You fucking morons.

Sorry…anti-Stratfordians are a point of contention with me. Re-focusing.

Writers can write about something they have never experienced. Trust me. It’s kind of our thing. And believe it or not, that ability does extend to sex.

Americans have always had a complicated relationship to sex. We refuse to have homogeneous sexual education in our schools, yet our burger commercials feature naked, oiled women. Our films can have people hanging from meat hooks and hemorrhaging blood from multiple orifices, but more than three thrusts in a sex scene, and I’m sorry, but it’s going to have to be rated NC-17. Seriously. Think of the children.

With this cultural backdrop, it’s no wonder that no one these days blinks at Stephen King, but countless people consider Laurell K. Hamilton to be a full-blown pervert. As a writer, I really just can’t fully grasp the cognitive dissonance at work here. Why is it perfectly believable that I can make up a character that snatches young women from their homes and tortures them, but the minute he starts having sex with them, I harbor deep desires to be used in the way his victims are? Why can I write about someone being beaten into unconsciousness without my readers wondering if I’ve ever beaten anyone into unconsciousness myself, or wondering if I want to?

Guys, I’m going to level with you. Writing about sex is exactly like writing about anything else. I don’t long for the sexual content in my novel any more than I long to slowly starve someone in my basement, brainwash someone, kill someone, or anything else that happens in the story. The same might not be true of all erotica writers, but, hey, the same might not be true of all horror writers, either. Maybe Thomas Harris has cooked up a human liver with fava beans. But if he has, he’s in the vast minority.

So, as you read my book, feel free to death of the author me into the ground. Understand that sex is just as easy to write about sans personal experience as wizards and gore. Free yourself from the uncomfortable thoughts of, “Dear God, is Dee really into all of this sex stuff?” I assure you, I’m not.

Not all of it.

Pre-order the e-book now, buy the
paperback in two days!

Why, yes, that last bit was, in fact, a joke.