“I masturbated to you too,” I said. “After that first party when we played together, and I was so envious of the boy you were playing with. I went home and thought about you.” He became small and gleeful when I said this.

Then, he said something that surprised me.

“It is safe to assume that every man who asks to play with you either has masturbated to you in the past, or will maturbate to you in the future, regardless of whether or not you play with him.”

And when I turned to him and raised my eyebrows, he added, “It’s not just you, by the way.”

I thought that was strange for about three seconds, and then I began to run my masturbatory fantasies over in my head.

“Oh yea,” I said. “I do that too.”

One of the things I’ve learned from sex blogging is that eventually you will find a way to get free sex toys, usually in exchange for reviews but sometimes just because they appear, in little puffs of lube and smoke. For example, our wooden prostate massager. I know what you’re thinking – wood? For a sex toy? The case to the thing says that it’s been treated with a sealant, but I don’t trust such statements. It works well, with condoms. May tells me it’s actually quite lovely. And when it’s not in his bum, it amuses me to set it on my night stand like a little abstract sculpture.

We do have a glass dildo (how could we not, when it was free?) but I have yet to try it out. It is quite pretty, in a frosted chandelier sort of way. And through the tricks and turns of kinky friends, we also own a Vergenza Mk. 1, which, well…it works. It is trying a bit too hard to be a high-end product, I think. Unfortunately it’s made from aircraft spun aluminum, lovely but a bit lightweight for the price tag (which we did not pay).

And finally, my joy, my favorite: the Omega. Not even for me, and so ridiculously over the top that it makes me giggle, when I’m not drooling. But when May wears it, it’s as though he’s been thrown back several centuries, across a few fantastical borders, and landed smack in the middle of my imaginary harem. I love it there. Oh yes.

Money is tight at the moment (quel supris), but once it loosens up a bit I may come back to my collection. Like many of you, I’m sure, I am still hankering over the Eleven. In the meantime, I have a little shelf of pretty thing, art objects that just happen to be for sex, or perhaps the other way around.

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I haven’t read it.

Really. Whatever it is, I probably haven’t read more than three pages. Unless it is the Kushiel series or something written by Stephen Elliot. Or a scattered handful of Jay Wiseman books. So if you have been getting the impression that I know something about kinky erotica, consider this the unveiling.
I don’t read kinky books.

There are several reasons for this.

The first is that I didn’t learn about kink by reading instructional books; I learned about kink by going to Conversio Virium, seeing educational presentations, and learning through experience. I’m not knocking this learning style one way or the other. My exposure was simply a twist of advantage and geography.

And I still tend to not learn by reading; I always prefer to learn by watching, doing, fucking up, and trying again.

The second reason is that I am chronically resistant to instructional, self-help, or disseminated psychology books. I suspect this is a hold-over from my upbringing in a do-it-yourself, anti-therapy attitude. So I didn’t read the books that “explain” kink. I have a copy of Bound To Be Free…somewhere. I never got around to reading it. While it might have helped me at some point in my life, right now it simply doesn’t seem relevant.

As you may have noticed, I am perpetually self-analyzing. I usually see reading as a break from self-analysis. Books are my vacation.

The third reason is that I don’t read erotic fiction as literary fiction. So I have not read The Story of O. I have not read Tipping the Velvet. I have not read the Marketplace series. I have not read Venus in Furs. I don’t like to pay for it, I would never carry it around with me, and I’ve seen no compelling evidence, from the few pages of each of these texts that I’ve skimmed through, that I cannot find material just as good or better, for free, online.

I spend my money on kinky photography books. They are prettier to look at and deliver much more long-term satisfaction.

I used to think I owed it to the kinky community and myself to read these books, because they were so obviously an integral part of kink culture. Eventually I decided that this was a bad reason to read books, unless a day came that I was genuinely interested in their historical impact. That interest has not yet surfaced. Perhaps someday it will.

In the end, I prefer literary fiction. I don’t put my energy into long erotic fiction, because it is never, ever as fulfilling as reading good standard fiction. I prefer dense, classic epics; I read a lot of Hugo, Dumas, Austen, Rushdie, Marquez, Allende, Clavell. I went and bought a few new books recently: Eco, Borges, Kundera. And when I want a popcorn book, I reach for the sci-fi: Bradbury, Stephenson, Heinlein, Asimov.

The erotic fiction just doesn’t do it for me. The day someone writes a kinky erotic epic with the scale and scope of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I will die happy. I simply don’t see that day coming.

So I’ve been asked many, many times for my advice on kinky books. I will keep recommending
Elliot, because I respect his writing and appreciate the balance of erotic/non-erotic narrative in his work. But other than that, I’m at a loss. I’m not the right person to ask.

If you want to talk non-kinky books, I’d love to. Literature is one of the very few fields in which I genuinely identify as a geek.

But lest you think I know the specific reference behind the Story-of-O ring, let me set that record straight. I have absorbed the reference through cultural exposure. I have never read the book.

In other news, I love having a colorful sex life. Although I am running short on blue-haired boys and red-haired girls, sadly.

 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?

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.

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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.