A Place To Draw Blood Laughing › Eroticism

12. Later

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Late that same night I held May’s wrists down and wrapped my legs around his waist. I hovered over his face and watched him. He rippled his body in an S-shape between my thighs.

“When are you going to fuck me?” he said in a tiny, tiny voice.

Now, I thought. I didn’t say it out loud. Instead I hooked a finger behind the steel ring around his neck and dragged him to his feet and through the bedroom door. I stripped his clothes off and left them in a trail of little satin puddles. I pulled tan leather straps and silicone from our new teak toy chest. When I bought the chest it came with a little card, detailing the history of the ships the teak was salvaged from.

I pressed him into the bed with one hand on the dip of his spine. He arched his back in the air with his ass pointing straight up, and I laughed and had to push him back down to get him in a position I could actually penetrate from.

He made the most amazing noises. He started by moaning vowels out low in his throat, like music. When I thrust faster he gave low boar-grunts that ended in little mouse-squeaks, and when I finally stopped and lay across his back he sighed so deep I could feel it curl his toes.

9. What I Like

Saturday, June 14, 2008

On them: Button down, collared, white shirt. Linen or cotton, slightly textured, slightly translucent. Brilliant white or natural white or ivory. Slim cut to cling to the waist and frame the shoulders. No tie. A few buttons undone, maybe showing off a bit of jewelry or a thin metal collar.

Tight blue jeans, preferably on the dark side of blue, tight through the thighs and stretched round and swelling over the ass. A button fly, a belt with maybe a little punk edge. Quirky, comfortable shoes. On boys, sneakers, on girls, cute low heels.

Gah.

On me: Black a-line tank top. Tight denim jeans, my heavy studded belt, my Converse rip-off sneakers. Hair cut short and in my face. Wallet in one pocket, knife in the other. Whip in my hand. It doesn’t matter what I look like, in the end.

There’s a place for the classics of fetish, and I do like leather sometimes. I do like those chest harnesses with o-rings in the center, and I do love a girl in a garter belt. But I would really, really love to go to a fetish party someday and be surrounded by beautiful bottoms dressed in casual white, and all the tops in Cons.

5. Grime And White Tile

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

A lesbian, a tranny chick and a kinky girl walk into a bar…

I’m sorry, did my life start to resemble a comedy routine for a moment there?

When I’m out in public, usually in bars or restaurants, I have a habit of lingering in bathrooms. I don’t have any particular yearning for bathrooms themselves, and I’m not usually into the kind of play one would associate with such places. And yet I linger, because it seems to me that most bathroom stalls are the perfect size for dungeon rooms. Interrogation rooms. Prison cells. Most public bathrooms have the right feel as well; that artless blend of grime and gleaming tile, metal pipes and sharp corners. I especially love it when bathrooms aren’t full of stalls, but instead are created via a network of tiny, closed rooms. I like how the doors lock. I stand in the middle of the little stretch of wet floor, feel the space between my shoulders and the walls, and imagine bodies huddled in the corners. I imagine creaking boots and leather gloves and the color red on white. I think about fists, and nightsticks.

And then I go back into the bar, curl back into my seat, sip my wine, and smile.

How To Write Porn For Me

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

For one reason or another, more text-based porn than usual has made it across my radar in the last few weeks. (Thank you for the links, gentlemen, you are very sweet.) And it’s gotten me thinking. (And other things as well.)

Most pornographic stories are bad; a vast and sweeping generalization, I know, but I’ll let it slide for the moment. However, more often they are not so much bad as they are off target. They make me feel like ringing the author to say “Great effort, but the judges just couldn’t relate to your performance.”

And it occurs to me that while many, many, many resources exist to enable better writing, not many resources exist that are specifically designed to teach a writer how to target their audience. In fact, I would venture that most of us can’t really manage to write for audiences unlike ourselves, even when we actually try to (and, let’s face it, most of us don’t even try.) Especially regarding this particular subject matter.

And look, I’m not talking about great literature here. I’m talking wank material. Brown paper wrappings. Not safe for work. Porn. Which can still be great literature; the two are not mutually exclusive, although they do entail different perspectives and skills. It’s a bit of an alien experiment for most of us, the writing of porn. I don’t often write it, and you readers never see it when I do.

So, in my half helpful, half rantish mood, I thought I’d give a little Cliff Notes version of how to target porn for an audience I might relate to. Namely, dominant women. (Solipsism? On a blog? Impossible.)

This is how to write porn for me. Not that I expect you to, and not that I’m anticipating that any of you actually will. But many people try, and the success rate is just too low to ignore. So if you’ve ever been curious how to write pornography that a dominant woman would enjoy, here’s my side of the story. (I highly encourage each of you to write your own list for your orientation as well. I’m tempted to meme that suggestion, but I don’t think the world really needs more memes.)

Onward, and leaving aside the obvious things like “write about kinky sex” and “yes, women read porn too” and “yes, male bottoms are sexy” and “yes, as a matter of fact I am queer,” here is the not-so-secret list of hints and tricks.

1. Get out of my head.
Many of the stories I read are entirely made up of long, complicated inner monologues about arousal and angst and the contemplation of dominance. I give this tactic a great big failing mark in bright red pen. Remember the purpose of the piece. If you’re writing academic prose or fiction, go ahead and explore the psyche of your dominant character. Interesting? Definitely interesting. Sexy? Not sexy. Pornography is not contemplation. Pornography is action.

One of the questions we keep asking about pornography is how the reader relates to the characters, i.e. what character will I choose to inhabit? As I have mentioned before, I usually resist “inhabiting” dominant characters, because they annoy me. Instead I will eroticise a third-person perspective of a story, or inhabit the character of the submissive in order to better translate their reactions into wankable material. I would rather not have to do this, but inevitably I find dominant women in pornography alienating and annoying, not because they’re behaving stupidly or doing something I don’t relate to, but because they just won’t shut up.

1a, related: Skip my orgasm.
Unless it advances the plot or is necessary to complete the story, you can leave out all of the bits about the shock waves and juiciness the me-character is feeling. Usually when I get to this part I skim over the lines, usually while thinking, “Been there. Done that. Trying to get there again. Don’t need a guidebook.”

2. Focus on the bottom.
Following very obviously from the above points is this; I don’t want the focus of my pornography to be on the character I’m supposed to be inhabiting, but on the character I find attractive. Or, as other women have said before me, omigod hot slaves! Get the view off the dominant and onto the submissive. I want the bottom’s monologue, the bottom’s reactions, the bottom’s screams, the bottom’s emotions. I want to read the side of the story that I find sexy. Shocker: that’s not me.

3. Write my kinks.
Obviously I would love it if every pornographic story I read was about the things I love. Wouldn’t we all? Give me harem slaves, give me cages and heavy metal, whips and chains, tenderness and flinching, slapping and strengths and service. Give me fantasy and living artwork and quirky details. Give me rituals, love, slavery, fear. Give me characters who are joyful, who are confident, genderqueer, beautiful, funny, sexy, smart, skilled. And especially, give me great long strings of language and all of those searing, desperate words I love.

4. Write your kinks.
My kinks aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and as far as I’m concerned that’s fine. If none of the things I like get you off, then write about something that does get you off. Showcase your specific enthusiasm and passion, and the arousal will translate.

5. Write well.
I know that as you’ve been reading this you’ve been mentally gearing up for my (hopefully witty, you cross your fingers) contribution to the titanic outpouring of hatred against improper grammar, spelling, and punctuation that already floats about online. You can stop bracing yourself; you won’t get it. Two points on this:

Point the first: It’s porn, for fuckssake.
When it’s porn I really don’t care. I will not be brought back from the brink of orgasm by a misplaced apostrophe. (Honestly, if you’re brought back from the brink of orgasm by something so minor, I would suggest that you examine your grammatical hang-ups with a more critical eye.) In literature these things are important. In porn, frankly, not so much. I spoke out strongly against the Kushiel series recently not because they aren’t good pornography (they contain, in fact, some scattered moments of very good pornography) but because they aren’t good literature.

And point the second: Of course I would prefer proper grammar, proper spelling, proper punctuation, but good writing is not the same as these things. I suspect that many potentially good writers (pornographic and otherwise) don’t write because they fear being vilified over these aspects of their craft. And, of course, because on the internet there are no full time copy editors.

When I say “write well,” I mean to present developed characters, engaging scenarios, powerful interactions, and emotional growth. That sounds more complex than I could rightly ask for in pornography, but it’s actually a deceptive set of very simple ideas. A character can grow emotionally by simply moving from pain to acceptance. Our erotic imaginations have scenarios and interactions galore. As I said, pornography is about action. And as for character, which seems to stump so many people, hell, there are characters everywhere. Write slash if you don’t want to make your own. Appropriate your friends. Appropriate people you see on the street or meet in shopping centers. Appropriate your blogroll. I’ve been appropriated in pornography a few times in the past, and it always seems to turn out remarkably well.

And that’s it. It’s not a very long list, being the Cliff Notes version. But as May said last night when I was ranting the baby beginnings of this post at him, “Sex just isn’t that complicated.” And in the end, he’s right.

Now that I’ve written all of this down, I think I might just go write some pornography of my own. Who am I writing for? What’s on your how-to list?

Friday Night And Sweet White Wine

Friday, May 16, 2008

I wouldn’t usually allow myself the indulgence of posting in this blog while completely knackered on wine and Friday night promises. But I am just drunk enough that I’ll let it slide. Just this once.

Here’s what I wanted to say, the thing I probably wouldn’t say without that sweet white wine:

I also have an oral fixation.

May is siting across from me right now in a leather armchair, with his leg stretched out along the beige carpet, and when I look at him I think, “Fuck dominance, fuck dignity, all I want to do is lick my way up the skin of his legs, his hips, his stomach and neck, and sate myself in the texture of his hair. All I want to do is lay him down on our bed and let my mouth go roaming.” My mouth tingles with the thought, his soft, butter-smooth skin catching on my lips, opening to me, offering to me.

His skin is like vanilla ice cream. I look at him and want to eat him up with relish, like a delicacy. Earlier he brought me my wine in a tall water glass, and I pulled him up against the rough fabric of the couch, scraped my teeth over the fleshy head of his cock and tried like hell to ignore how much I wanted to just bite down.

There is a weird fucked up paradox that places want and need in submissive spaces. The part of me that is a drunken, dominant, desperate connoisseur is here to tell you: that is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I want May so badly it hurts to look at him. My mouth aches for him. My fingers tingle when I think of touching his velvety, amazing skin.

I want him. Fuck all the shit that says I shouldn’t want, that says I have distance and control. I have no distance. I barely have control. My lips pulse at him, the urgent need to just push him to the floor and devour, to pick him up and curl him in my arms and eat him whole.

The Pen Is The Tongue Of The Mind

Monday, May 12, 2008

I’ve joined FetLife, a curious experience simultaneously stimulating my interest in social dynamics and making me want to stab unwitting stuffed animals with forks. I should begin by saying that despite my intermittent screeching noises, it really is a good site and a sound premise, and hopefully it grows into something of a real community.

The stabbing, you ask? Ah yes. The site is simply a little microcosm of kink, and as such occasionally prompts me to sharpen forks.

The well shot, well proportioned, laughably stereotypical picture on the home page of an older, greying man holding the throat of a young, beautiful, bound woman is thankfully no longer getting under my skin, because Maymay is a computer genius. I asked him to make sure that picture never shows when I load the home page, he fiddled a bit, wrote some code doohicky, and voila. Customized log in, Eileen-annoyance free.

And since changing my orientation from “Dominant” to “Top,” I am no longer identified under a gendered abbreviation. Unless some shockingly clever person manages to push “toppe” through as the new label-du-jour, I suppose.

And I admit, I refused to friend the three young men from New South Wales who each requested foot worship sessions with me.

But these things? They are just my little nitpicks. They are not really problems, per say. Just a friendly confirmation that the quirks of our subculture are alive and kicking. And yet, I am beginning to reconsider my membership. This may be part of a massive shift in my life which has pushed my kink awareness under in favor of work and domesticity.

The thing about a microcosm of kink is that no matter how hard I try, it’s only a matter of time before something crosses my radar that just inflames me. And no, I’m not talking about the big issues here. Oh no, I’m perfectly capable of becoming inflamed over tiny things that people less prone to passionate annoyance will shrug off, or simply fail to notice.

I joined The Kinky Intellectual’s Book Club FetLife group. And as I did so, I made a tiny internal bet with myself. “What do you bet, Eileen, that this group will go three days without mentioning Kushiel’s Dart?”

“I bet nothing. I refuse to throw perfectly good money away.”

Good thing I didn’t bet. But oh, the annoyance.

As I have previously mentioned, I have read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series. At the time, I was ambivalent toward them. They are not staggering works of literary genius. They are passable fantasy that occasionally wanders into “decent” territory. (Yes, you may dispute this. I have high standards. We know this by now.) I am no longer ambivalent. I feel now, toward these books, an annoyance that momentarily lingers on inflamed irrational rage.

I have had these books recommended to me on a rate of about four times a year for the past six years. I am sick of being told I should read these fucking books, so sick, in fact, that I will now sometimes, in very snippy moods, head off sentences that begin with “Have you ever read…” by interrupting, “Carey? Yes, I have.” They do not deserve this overflow of effusive praise. They are simply not that good.

The Kushiel series, along with a very few other titles that compose the core (and only) BDSM fiction reading list for those of us not inclined to get our wanks from online erotica, operate within a starvation economy that skyrockets their value far beyond anything my tastes will allow. We are so desperate for kinky material that’s been proofread and couched in narrative that we will devour, praise and pimp the passable. And since I’ve written here before about my utterly devastating erotic obsession with artistic skill, one can imagine how this makes me feel.

From here I veer off in two directions, both writerly in nature. Starvation economy of words? Duh. Create more words.

There is the little tickle in the back of my brain, the one that moans of how unfair it is that to find kink content I like I’m best off creating it myself. But that little tickle is the remenant of an indignation that has long since fizzled down; it is, after all, not unfair for me to produce content if I genuinely love producing content.

On the one hand, there is that distinct temptation: “Eileen, how about you write a nice juicy kink/fantasy crossover novel? You’d be rich! Rich, I say!” I’ve gone far enough down this road to have sketched a setting, a plot, some subplots. I’ve done character profiles, even toyed with the first few pages. I have, essentially, a half-decent, passable working novel idea. But I’m still feeling my way through fantasy genre writing, and I don’t know how I feel about writing passable novels.

And then, there is the hand that wants to write the real story down. The story that’s on this blog and all the natty details in between, all blended up in a realist half-fiction that’s more worth the time it would take to write and the time it would take to read. I want to write kink and love the way Stephen Elliot writes kink and love. I want to squash Mistress Nan off the market and completely redefine the “real experiences of a dominant woman” in all their intricate, clumsy, laughable, joyful ache and glory.

A telling insight on my ego: I desire to possess skill and desire to possess the skilled. I keep falling flat on my face for artists and writers, the body as a metaphor for the intellect, the intellect as a metaphor for the body. Or, to put it bluntly: the better I craft, the hotter I get. The better you craft, the hotter you get.

Protected: On The Rotation

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Walls

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

I’ve spent the past two entries and a lot of my energy on rhetoric and objective thinking. But at the same time, there’s the nitty gritty, the bits of my psyche that are feeling minutely unbalanced.

Having my sexuality censored didn’t throw me into an enormous depressive spiral of self-doubt. It didn’t cause me to take any dramatic steps back or change any of my beliefs. It has not been so climactic.

But I’d lie if I said it wasn’t affecting my relationship with kink, with sex, and with other people.

Two weeks ago, that Saturday night, I fell asleep with sex banished from my mind. The yawning gap where my sex drive had gone missing was hidden, all mixed up with the rest of my misery.

I keep using the word “shredded.” What it means is I walked around for days with my nerve endings dead, my brain feeling sluggish, my nose stuffed and my spirit exhausted. I still feel it; the numbed feeling, the exhaustion. I am still so, so tired. I can’t remember the last time I was this tired.

One by one, parts of me are beginning to heal. I emailed my family member back. What started as a fight has become a halting, slowly paced discussion; still painful, much more rational. A few days ago they emailed me a stupid joke:

Q: What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?
A: Make me one with everything.

I laughed and cried at the same time.

In an example of incredibly ironic timing, the weekend of the fight was directly followed by the weekend of Black Rose, a kink event in Washington DC. Months ago, May and I had planned to go. We had tickets, a hotel room, people expecting us.

That week, as each day dragged by, I kept thinking Oh god oh god, I do not want to go to Black Rose. I cannot deal with scene space. I cannot handle playing.

I feel incomplete. I feel as though parts of me have died and fallen off.

But I had laid my money down, and as it became clear that sometimes the solution to pain is not to wall oneself off to the world, I sucked it up and went.

And it was lovely. Lovely, and hard, and complicated. It was what I needed it to be.

The entire weekend I felt strangely as though I’d been granted a brief reprieve from my pain. Like the world was on hold, and my sexuality was working, albeit quietly and with far more reservations than usual.

It was as though the range of interests I’m used to enjoying had been culled ruthlessly, walling off sadomasochism, walling off D/s, building big heavy brick walls around anything I would consider heavy play. At the time I hardly noticed; I was so fried, so happy to be playing again, to be reconfirmed.

But as I’ve come out of that space and back to the world over the past week and a half, those walls have remained. It took me days to find a way to recognize arousal again. My fantasies feel scattered. The first orgasm I had after the weekend was hard. I had to wait for it, because I couldn’t fight for it.

It would be easy to say this is frustrating me, but that’s not quite right. It’s making me less confident, it’s pushing me into issues with my body and my personality that I had under control three weeks ago.

It makes me want to wear baggy clothes and put my hair in my eyes. I watch myself flirting and have to consciously tell the part of my character that worries about social faux pas to shut the hell up.

We think about being attacked and group our possible responses into fight or flight categories. I know it looks, on that side of the computer screen, like I’m fighting. On this side, nothing is simple. I’m consciously trying to figure out ways to defend myself and cataloging ways to fight, and at the same time I catch myself stumbling over words, pulling gestures back in half-fulfilled motions, hiding my face and shutting my doors.

It’d be easy to pass this off as a minor depressive spiral. Maybe that’s all it is; I don’t really have a pinpoint on the nuances of my mind.

I know I’m second guessing my desires. I can feel myself doing it, like there are decisions being made in my body that my mind is continually one step behind. I don’t like it; it’s unconscious. This little thread of pain and uncertainty isn’t based in rational thought. Rather, it’s an earmark of my self confidence, reduced to tatters and shreds.

I feel as though there’s a plate glass window between myself and my sexuality. As though I have neural gaps and lack the ability to bridge them.

I know I will bridge these gaps and tear down all the temporary walls I threw up in my hasty defense of my psyche. I realize that this is largely a matter of time.

I can be patient. I will wait for my kinks and I to find our way back to each other.

Lustful

Monday, November 5, 2007

Once upon a time I had a tryst, a fling, a brief rest-stop of innuendo, oral sex and cheap Chinese food with a friend of mine. I have had a generous handful of these, friendships that stray into sex for a night or a month and then fade, quietly, back into friendship.

What I remember from that night, the strongest image beside all the others of blond hair and bruised skin, is that he came up for air from kissing my neck, he ran my hands down my stomach, and he ripped my underwear off. He shredded them like so much green lace paper, threw them to the floor and plunged his head between my legs with the motions of a desperate man. I remember that was the sexiest anyone had ever made me feel, the first time someone had wanted me with such searing completeness.

Last week May was lounging on our bed as only he can lounge, all sprawled out with awkward grace like an overgrown albino kitten. I itched for him in a way that was oddly unfamiliar, a sexual need not quite asking for sex, a dominant need not quite reaching to sadism. I turned this itch over in my head, thinking What is this want that I have, and where do I know it from? Then he turned over on his side and raised his hips in the air at me, playfully. Then I got it. Oh, right. That’s the strap-on itch.

I pulled our tan leather harness on, I fitted the dildo in the ring curve pointing downward, and I grabbed May by the ass to drag him to the corner of the bed. I had him kneel away from me, I spread the dildo with sticky jelly and wiped my fingers on his skin. Then I fucked him.

I fucked him long enough and hard enough that the bones in his legs wobbled and melted out from under him, sinking him first to his chest and then to his stomach, pinned down by my hand on the bed. He keened, screamed, pounded his fists into the pillows and his hips into the mattress. I fucked him until his ankles hung in the air behind me and he stayed on the bed only because of my weight supporting him, and then I fucked him right down to the floor.

I too the harness off and left him there, with his head pressed against the foot of the bed frame. He was moaning with every breath, softly. I climbed onto the bed, spread my legs apart on either side of his face, and began to masturbate, running my finger in hard circles around my clit, scooping up moisture from my lips and spreading it around my skin. From the floor, he watched. His eyes just peeped over the edge of the bed, achingly huge. When aroused so severely May’s eyes grow to anime-worthy proportions.

I watched him watch me, I saw him lick his lips, and just as I had time to wonder if he would stay there, on the floor, he jumped on me. He pounced, he practically clawed his way up across the bedspread in his rush to my cunt, his mouth suddenly everywhere, his moans muffled in my flesh. I gasped, I watched him bury himself in deeper, I threw back my head and laughed.

Eventually I drew him up into the air and pressed his head into my shoulder. I held him tightly, letting the tremors of his lust drive me farther into orgasm. Afterwards he still moaned quietly, his cock painfully hard against my thigh, and I folded his limbs into a tight ball and pressed him to me. My boy, I feel sexier every day that I’m with you.

Protected: You’ll Get A Name When You Earn One

Thursday, October 25, 2007