Romance tells women that ‘happily ever after’ means getting together with a man. It seldom looks at what it takes to maintain a happy and meaningful relationship. No, the man is the great goal, the aspiration of your life and the measure of your worth as a person. What century are we in again? In terms of its impact, I think romance does exactly the same thing for women that porn does for men: It gives us bloody stupid and counterproductive beliefs about relationships and the opposite sex. Put the porn guy and the romance girl together and you are not going to get a happily ever after, you are going to get mutual incomprehension and abject misery.

Romance gives us fantasy men who think and act in ways that women want them to. Emotionally speaking, this can set us up to expect actual men to behave this way. They don’t, because fiction style alpha males are dysfunctional bastards, and the heroes who are effectively women with willies are not like actual men either. Real men are complex human beings. Just as complex as women. Many are not confident and self assured enough to say and do the rubbish romance heroes come out with.

Fantasy men are of course rippling with muscles and totally gorgeous. Real men are a bit more average, on the whole. The romance fantasy skips over how much time you have to spend in a gym and in front of a mirror to look like a god. And how much money it costs. And of course we get the effortlessly beautiful heroines too who, despite taking no exercise, eating crap and staying up late getting laid, all look lovely. This is never never land. Might as well throw in a unicorn and be done with it.

Men in romance are, by definition going to settle down. The other sort are only going to be background stories, or sub plots. So the vast majority of real life encounters, the flings that go nowhere, the heart breaking affairs, the doomed attachments, the guys who turn out to be married, only passing through, only wanting a distraction from some major life issue – they barley exist. In a romance story you cannot tell the tale of a woman who finds the love of her life and has to deal with the guy being scum.

Even in the erotica end of romance, bodily fluids are kept to a minimum. Some places won’t even take books that mention them. Now, sex is messy. Sweat is a likely consequence of having a good time. Orgasms are messy. Anal sex is… let’s not even go there, I’ve written a blog on that already. Bodies produce fluids, and those fluids all result in smells and tastes. The morning after, sweat encrusted, cum stained, is not what you tend to find in the pristine world of romance fiction. And men… they don’t inherently smell like roses. Mostly they smell of man, and if you get them hot and sweaty, they smell even more distinctly of man, and the morning after, that can be a tad more like skunk. Not romantic. Sex, is not actually consistent with the pleasing surfaces of romance. Sex however, is entirely real, and romance is mostly fictional. Love has very little to do with the habits of romance and a great deal to do with two people being able to engage with reality.

Here’s a curious thing though. Once you get away from the straight fiction, things change. Gay erotic romance is a lot more earthy. The celebration of manliness, in all its forms, including the sweat and the man smells, is very much present. Women readers are buying this, enthusiastically, so it’s clearly not a gender thing. Actual women are entirely capable of enjoying the maleness of a bloke, not obsessing over impossible fantasies.

I like real men. I also like real women. By this, I mean the sort of men and women who exist, who sweat, fart, masturbate, lick each other… that sort. Not the strong jawed steely muscle men who got that way by magic, without the aid of a gym. Not the ones who exist only to fulfil an emotionally fragile fantasy. Real people, with real lives. Stories about love, that do not set us up to expect the impossible of each other.

I’m pleased to announce that Regan and Maisie’s holiday adventures in The Red Satin Collection have been reviewed in the March/April 2012 issue of “Frock: Your Bi-Monthly Transgender Lifestyle Magazine.” (Thank you, Sally. You’re the best!)

Arousal is a very individual business. There are people who are aroused by things that others find disgusting. There are also people whose fetishes are so far from ‘normal’ that no one would necessarily notice them. Speaking personally, I get a somewhat erotic thrill from scenarios in which horrible things happen to rapists. It’s not a purely sexual kick, but it sparks something very intense in me, and a book most certainly does not need to be erotic to achieve that. Equally, things as presented as exciting sexual content can make me squirm. I have a lot of trouble with anal scenarios. Anyone who has read my work will know that I write gay guys, and anal sex, so make of that what you will!

I hate forced consent stories way more than rape narratives. The current ‘romance’ convention is that if the victim can be brainwashed, conditioned or otherwise manipulated into feeling ok about having had sex against their will, that’s just fine. At least with rape scenario, the character knows what has happened to them and the reader knows it isn’t ok. Compromised consent is far more uncomfortable, to my mind, because it encourages the idea that it’s ok to be persuaded. Under law, having sex under duress still counts as rape, but a lot of writers don’t seem to be entirely conscious of that, and it’s pretty much a staple of the bodice ripper.

It bugs me that we’re not supposed to talk about ‘under-aged sex’ when the allowed age in the UK is different from that in the USA. I was, quite legally sexually active aged 17. If I wrote about that in any detail, we’d all be in trouble. I was biologically an adult female by 17, I was emotionally mature enough, looking back. But what about the earlier stuff? Historically the age of consent has often been a lot lower. Mary, mother of Jesus was, I gather about fourteen, a detail that often gets missed out. At fourteen, my body had pretty much stopped growing. I had an adult shape, an adult menstrual cycle, and raging hormones. Like most of the people I knew growing up, I started exploring other people before that was legal for me. In practice, so long as you play with consenting people of your own age, no one usually minds. At fourteen, I had a nineteen year old boyfriend, but I can’t tell you too much about that.

There is a world of difference between someone who is physically an adult, and someone who isn’t. That often has less to do with age and more to do with individual development. Some people are biologically and emotionally still children long after they are fair game sexually. The lines between adult and child as defined by age in numbers, are no reflection of reality as we live it. But we aren’t allowed to tell you those coming of age stories, those first explorations. We have to pretend that people under the age of eighteen are not sexual and have no sexual experiences. I like to push the boundaries where I can with this. For example, have a look at ‘Naked Canvas’ in which the main character, who is about thirty, has a teenage daughter. We don’t do the back story, but anyone can do the math.

Sex is a part of life. Sex is often complicated, messy, and individual. We each respond to different things. We read erotica for all kinds of reasons – to learn, explore and experiment in a safe space. For catharsis, for voyeuristic kicks, to fill in gaps in our own lives, to be other people. We read erotica for all the same kinds of reasons that we read murder mysteries, horror stories, books about serial killers and misery memoires. We read them to be affected. Don’t tell me no one ever gets a sexual thrill out of that kind of book. They do.

As I teen, I did, in fact. Horror fiction was easier to get hands on than erotica. It was so intense, so visceral, sometimes there was sex in it. But I got a thrill out of the horror that wasn’t entirely healthy. I have no doubt that if I’d had some good, honest filth to read I would have been happier, more emotionally balanced, more comfortable with my own skin and inclinations. But we aren’t allowed to sell erotica to teenagers either, because that might be bad for them. No, far better that they watch violence and read vague, unrealistic romances in which forced women decide they ought to marry him after all. We make sex a shameful, hidden thing, with porn images sneaked online, dubious magazines passed round. Young people grow up in a world laden with sexual imagery and sexualising influences, whilst being told that they are not yet sexual themselves. We keep young people in the dark, we feed them myths and bullshit at the time when they most need truth, and good quality information about relationships and options. Erotica is a good and healthy thing. Silence, fear and misinformation are not. The laws allegedly there to protect young people, are instead, I think, making them more vulnerable. Knowledge is power.

For real, anything with ‘Boy’ ‘Girl’ or ‘Daddy’ in the title is being banned as suggesting incest and/or underage characters. Despite the fact that people into their twenties, and maybe beyond, will gleefully self identify as boys and girls, because its playful. Apparently for some people boys and girls can only be children. God only knows what they’re going to make of bois and grrls.

My  first demand then is that we ban all books about miners, in case dyslexics and people who cannot spell, are unable to distinguish between miners and minors, and assume that big men working up a sweat underground are really under age, and then get a kick out of their mistake.

We should then ban all books featuring bears. Not everyone understands that bears can be big, hairy gay guys (a bit like Daddies really) and might assume they are reading bestiality. So, to be in the safe side, no bear fiction. And while we’re at it, I’ve heard a rumour that there might be otters, and even if there aren’t, let’s ban them too just in case.

Pony Boys and Pony Girls have to go, because that’s clearly encouraging people to have sex with under age animals. Or something. Anyway, just from the title you can tell it’s bad and wrong and shouldn’t be allowed. And of course judging a book by its title is wholly reasonable.

We should ban books in which people are murdered, because murder is a crime. I would therefore like to see the entire murder mystery genre outlawed. We should ban horror too, because that involves dead people and nasty things and someone might be enjoying that. We must then ban all of the autobiographies and biographies that feature childhoods that are not all fluffy and inoffensive in case anyone is reading those for deviant means. We must ban books that include any depictions of crimes at all, so the thriller genre is pretty much gone under my scheme, all detective fiction too. Goodbye Sherlock! As we’ve already taken out incest,  under age sex and rape, literary fiction will barely exist. And of course that means we can’t sell the Bible to anyone or any of the stories from ancient Greece, which are rife with rape incidents. Ban Ovid, I say!

You will henceforth be allowed to write stories including mild peril and chaste romance. Anything else is too racey, too dangerous and too likely to offend. Also, we’re going to take your pens off you in case you accidentally stab yourself in the eye.

Now, doesn’t that feel better?

So here we are, people, with a crack-down on online obscenity. By obscenity, we mean anything assumed to be for sexual titillation that somebody official finds objectionable. Both the ‘sexual titillation’ aspect and the ‘objectionable’ are totally subjective. You can bet they won’t be cracking down on literature, drama, crime or horror fiction.

Now, no matter how extreme the content, fiction, by definition, is not real. No one really does any of the things in the book. No one bleeds, or dies. So assuming an offence exists, we’d be talking about a victimless crime, and a thought crime at that. If you are offended by the construction of victimless crimes and thought crimes, about freedom of speech, and about who has the right to determine who can find what sexual, you need to start paying attention to what’s happening. This is also a situation in which hypocrisy is fine, and a suggestion of honesty isn’t. If you can pretend that the book is instructional, or memoire, or literature or crime… then you can write all the graphic rape scenes you want. No one is gunning for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, despite the graphic violence and anal rape. But it’s a crime novel, so we all know that no one reading it would get off on that kind of content, don’t we? Right.

There are real people out there being raped, really raped. Those in authority would rather use their time chasing people who write about it.

There are children being abused. Apparently it’s a better use of money to chase book distributors whose content might be a bit dark.

Victims of domestic abuse are beaten every day, but for some people, the things you imagine are in far more urgent need of policing.

While real victims are suffering the consequences of real crimes, it is not just ridiculous to spend time and money chasing authors and publishers, it’s obscene. It’s criminal.

Being raped is a horrendous experience, and the prosecution rates are very low. Being abused is life destroying. Reading about abuse and rape, can be cathartic and healing. It’s a big part of why we do it. The erotica industry is dominated by female authors, female readers and female publishers. It has a lot of gay, lesbian, transgender and otherwise not-straight people taking refuge in it, finding community and expression. Erotica is a voice for real experience. We don’t just tell pretty, inoffensive little love stories, we talk about life as it really is, for good and ill, what it does to you. Erotica empowers people to speak up, to understand what is good, to know the difference between consenting to something kinky and being conditioned into slavery. These are thought forms that could help thousands of abuse victims to recognise their condition, and thus be able to escape it.

The kind of people who would rather spend money policing the things that offend them, will harp on about the good old days, the upholding of family values. Ah yes, those good old days when a man could beat his wife and children, and no one would deign to notice. The good old days when there was no such thing as rape in marriage and your wife was your property. The good old days when your legally owned slaves could be killed on your say so, and your bastard children fathered on raped slave women could be left to grow up as slaves too and that was just fine. Hurrah for those old fashioned family values. Don’t we long for the days when it was fine to jail people for being queer, fine to lock people up for their underclothes, back when the poor knew their place and kept to it.

First they came for the pornographers, but I did not speak up, because I was not into porn.

Porn should not be inherently offensive. Abusing people to force them into the porn industry should be offensive. Letting human beings live in such poverty and hopelessness that they feel forced to sell their bodies, should be offensive. The priorities of those in power are very, very wrong.

We know how this goes, people, we know how this works. You start with the ones who are furthest from the mainstream, and work your way back in. Porn first, dark fiction writers, then what? Who next? This is not about real crime, real offence, or real harm, this is about curtailing the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. This is about making it harder to talk about the dark side of sex, rather than tackling the kind of people who actually abuse. Right now, I don’t know what any of us can do about it, but we can know and witness, and try to resist. Once it is established that you can lock people up for thought crimes, we are on a very slippery slope. If the state has the right to dictate what we can think about, write about, talk about, it’s power to quash dissent is absolute. Do not imagine that, just because you aren’t needing to express anything dark, or hardcore, it won’t affect you. Ask what comes next. Ask what we won’t be allowed to talk about tomorrow. What we won’t be allowed to do tomorrow.

And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.

Okay, so my sweetheart and I were getting it on the other day and I tend to be pretty noisy in bed, but this time I was SUPER loud. Not just “Oh yeah baby,” but actually screaming. It was awesome. Good times.

I guess I closed my eyes for a while, because suddenly I wasn’t the only one screaming. There were two sets of screams, and I knew the others didn’t belong to Sweet, because she’s not much of a screamer.

It was the cat. You know I have cats, right? So, it was Mr. Majestic cat, the regal cat, the cat who owns this apartment and everyone in it. He was SCREAMING at us. I’ve never heard him make a noise like this before. It wasn’t exactly a scream, I guess, and it wasn’t a growl or a hiss. It was actually more of a moaning meow-bark. It was kind of a cat-fight noise, come to think of it. He kept running down the bed and yelling at Sweet, then running up the bed and screaming at me.

Now, I don’t claim to speak cat, but my rough interpretation was something along the lines of:

To Sweet: “What are you doing to my mom?!?!?!”
To Me: “Why are you screaming like that?!?!?!”
To Sweet: “You’re hurting her! Unless… oh, don’t tell me she loves you! Impossible!”
To Me: “I thought you loved ME! How dare you toy with my tender feline emotions?”

Something like that. Cats are pretty egocentric, so I think that’s what he was saying.

Of course, I started laughing because… well, it was just hilarious. But regal kitty cats don’t appreciate being laughed at, so he started head-butting my girlfriend at that point, just hurling himself at her, making that weird moaning cat scream the whole time, like “Get off her! She’s mine. She’s MINE!!!”

Nobody, cat or human, has ever expressed that kind of jealousy or possessiveness of me. Nobody’s ever tried to beat up my girlfriend, and certainly not while we were in bed together. If it had been a human doing all this, it would have been frightening I suppose, but because it was a cat, it was funny.

I totally lost it. I couldn’t stay in the moment while my cat was cursing and crying and throwing himself at my girlfriend. I collapsed on the bed, laughing hysterically, so I guess ultimately the cat got what he wanted… because I stopped screaming.

I’m trying to think up a moral to this story, otherwise it’s just me telling you about my bizarre sex life. I guess the moral is that cats always get their way. Wouldn’t you agree?

Hugs,
Giselle
–
Giselle Renarde
Canada just got hotter!

Visit me online

http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com

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Giselle Renarde is author of numerous lyd books, including (aptly):

Waxing is for Pussies: Claire is strong, proud, and covered in tattoos, but can she handle the pain of a bikini wax?

Blurb:

Claire is a butch dyke who doesn’t go in for all the “girly” stuff. Her girlfriend Billie works at a salon, joyfully painting nails all day.  When Billie takes up hot waxing, she asks Claire to be her test subject. She also asks her salon buddy Soo Jin to give her hand. How will Claire and Billie react when Soo Jin takes the request for help as an invitation to play?

Read an excerpt here: http://www.loveyoudivine.com/index.php?main_page=document_product_info&cPath=37&products_id=834

For the last however many years it’s been, I’ve produced a lot of troubled, gothic tales. That had a lot to do with not being a very happy sort of person. Life is way better now, which makes me inclined to write upbeat, playful sex. I did used to write lighter stuff, occasionally, but it’s been good rediscovering it.

On with the inside story and those real het-fet diaries. Some years ago, I used to write for Custom Erotic Source, producing unique stories to customer specifications, usually in very short time frames. The job was full of challenges, and I used to really enjoy doing it. However, custom fic is expensive and it’s not something people buy if they’re belt tightening. I miss doing it though. There were a whole team of us over at CES, and we used to get other jobs come in aside from the usual requests.

One job had a bunch of us writing stories to accompany a series of images – we got to pick which set we wanted. Doing that fed into the ideas for Elliot’s Hero (available from loveyoudivine) – although nothing I saw seemed that extreme. Another one had a team of us doing a blog just like the one Siren Kay gets involved with. It was supposed to be like Sex in the City, (which I’ve never seen, but apparently didn’t need to) four women talking about their sex lives. In the fic we were friends, but in reality none of us knew each other and one of us was a bloke! (Not me). I did it for a while, and I struggled. The remit called for content that was a hairsbreadth from porn. That means not too much story, character, emotion or introspection. Anyone who has read my fiction will be able to guess how much of a struggle that would be! I like story, character, emotion and introspection. There’s only so much sex I can write before I get bored with it. I don’t find sex on its own all that sexy. I need to care about the characters just a little bit, and it helps if they do more than shag.

The Het Fet Diaries have four fictional friends doing a blog about their sex lives, and getting paid for it. I think there used to be more places online that would pay for this kind of content (I wrote for Ruthie’s Club, as well, years ago). But it’s a nice premise at any rate, and I like to fantasise about getting paid to blog! We’re only following the one blogger in detail, and mostly it’s about what she gets up to and the crazy people she meets along the way. This is also me on a personal mission to prove that heterosexual, pain free sex is not necessarily dull.

Anything can be a fetish. Anything can become part of kinky sex. What creates the fetish angle often has a lot to do with the insides of people’s heads. That gives me room for a dash of introspection. I’m going to try and avoid the more clichéd fetishes, or at least find strange angles to come at them from. If there’s anything you’d like Siren Kay to explore, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m ALWAYS open to suggestions.

Travel is both faster and a lot more affordable, and the internet makes it easy to stay in touch. So at least in theory, long distance relationships ought to be easier. Certainly more people seem to be going in for them. I know a fair few people who have had international affairs, sometimes meeting in person, sometimes never moving out of the virtual realms. These days, meeting people online is a daily event. Can you fall in love in cyberspace? Can you have a meaningful relationship with someone you’ve never met in person?

Sometimes, yes.

I say this with the absolute confidence of someone who has done it. I met my other half, appropriately enough, through a publishing company a lot of years ago, and we were emotionally involved before we met in person. It was strange though. It took me a few hours to mentally reconcile the virtual person with the actual one, to map my perceptions and emotions onto someone who was finally in the same room as me. I had also spent a lot of years not being entirely sure if this virtual thing could be really… well… real, but it was, and is. We’ve been married nearly a year now.

But I’ve watched friends form relationships and not be able to sustain them. The distance and the not being able to touch can be lethal, even if you do feel strongly about someone. People online often lie as well, talking themselves up to attract a mate, or saying whatever it takes to get the ego boost and sex play they require for private kicks. It’s easier to lie through a screen than it is in person.

Long distance love affairs are challenging in every way. They hurt. If you do get time together in the same place, they hurt even more. I used to wake on my own in the mornings and roll into the empty bit of bed where Tom wasn’t, and cry, on pretty much a daily basis. You’ve got to be very serious about someone to keep putting yourself through that, and you’ve got to feel that they’re worth it. That kind of emotional pressure puts extra demands on a relationship. It’s got to be more than the average hook up. It’s got to be epic to survive, but it also means the smallest of setbacks can look huge and insurmountable. The slightest misjudged remark can seem like the end of the world.

I could have piled a lot more angst and misery on my guys in The Price of Love. If I’d tried to realistically show what a long term, long distance love affair does to your heart, and your head, I’m not sure anyone would have believed me. It took a year from first getting together in person to being able to live together. Plenty of regular relationships don’t last that long. But I didn’t want to tell a story in which two sexy men spent most of their time being anxious, struggling with paperwork and trying to keep hopeful. I let them off lightly, all things considered.

So how far is it ok to go? How much of a fictional life is it ok to invent to go with your fictional work? If you’re yet another stay at home mum whose real life revolves around childcare and housework, how on earth are you going to talk yourself up to sell books? We all know it’s easier to sell books if readers find you interesting as a person, so what do you do, if you aren’t? At what point, if any, does is stop being fiction and become lies?

Part of the reason for bringing this up, is having heard that a couple of apparently gay authors have turned out to be women. They were using the J.K Rowling technique – ambiguous names, but they both blogged about their supposedly real lives as gay men. I’m curious to know how readers feel about this. Most of the time we can’t know much about the real lives of authors. The famous ones get stalked by the press, but most don’t. Most of the time, all you have to go on is what the author tells you. And authors…. Make stuff up. It’s such a ‘given’ that I’ve found that in legal situations my ability to tell the truth has been called into question in the past, simply on the grounds of my being an author. Not that the judge seemed to take that seriously, but even so, it was pretty scary.

Bryn is a Welsh name, and traditionally male. There are plenty of female Bryns, Brynnes and other variations out there, it’s not just me. And I’ve always been open about being a girl, and that I’m writing all kinds of things because it interests me to do so. I’m moderately open about my real life. Enough that I don’t feel I’ve misled anyone deliberately, but at the same time I hold my privacy where I need to and I don’t compromise anyone else. Even the one or two who really deserve to be publically named and shamed.

I think that what we claim about our real lives does affect how people perceive us. Are we authentic? Are we offering an insight that someone who’s not done it for real wouldn’t have? Are you then going to take what we say as valid how-to information and act on it? People do take real life inspiration from fiction, which makes me feel an obligation to try and get things right. There is also the issue of who we have the right to speak for. That can be about gender preference, but also race, religion, life experience. To claim authority on anything that isn’t ours, is just unethical. You can write about anything, but there’s a difference between that, and claiming ownership of it.

I know most of the lyd authors. Some of them I’ve met in person, or I’ve talked to via skype. Others have met each other too. We’re all real, and confident in each other’s realness. I know Cain is a big, black, gay guy, not a woman who’s playing at it, because I’ve heard his voice. The authority that comes from being real, matters to me. So, do you want your authors to be real people, or is it ok for an author to be a work of fiction too?

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