Writing about and confronting sexual taboos
This is a subject which has been on my mind for a few weeks but every time I tried to start writing about it I found myself wandering somewhere along the perimeter of sounding like a cross between a clinical psychiatrist and Xavier Hollander, so ultimately I decided to just try and let my feelings flow out of me and hopefully my own voice will convey what I’m thinking and feeling adequately without getting bogged down with too many of my semi infamous non-sequiturs or even some of that haughty goodness I like to toss in there every once in a while.
What started me thinking about this subject, and yes I’ll tell you exactly what I’m referring to in just a moment, but what served as the genesis for these thoughts was this post by Remittance Girl where she raised the idea of writing outside of one’s comfort zone. I’ve taken that initial question or idea and have gone in my own direction with it, which is what I actually want to discuss, but let me back up a moment and lay some foundations first. I have enormous respect for Remittance Girl’s work. It takes a certain panache and level of personal drive for women to write erotica because it constantly forces us to draw from deep within our own erotic core for inspiration, and sometimes the things we write about may be our own personal fantasies, or experiences, or some other kind of intangible shadow from that place we keep locked inside our own mind, and out of the many women who do use this medium to share their own erotic musings, be them fact or fiction, it does exact a kind of toll on our psyche after a while. You start to feel, or at least I started to feel, just a bit too naked out there, which probably explains why I started to pull back from sharing so much of my own sexuality and personal experiences. It became too real if such a thing exists, and I began feeling as tho the things I was sharing with the world were the kinds of things that I felt should be kept “safe”.
There was a point in time when my journal was strictly dedicated to my own erotic mirror. Almost everything I wrote was based on my own experience because that’s what I knew and that’s what I was able to share at that moment in time. Writing fiction was a bit harder for me, but thru the process of writing about my own experiences I was able to develop my voice and tradecraft to where I felt that I was making progress, and that’s what mattered to me, that I could measure my own progress. I know that there are many out there in Cyberia who like to fancy themselves as the auteur du jour, and that’s fine. I was never terribly interested in competing with anyone for much of anything really, so I left the net’s own grammar nannies to their own amusement and I just did my own thing. I think it really comes down to what one is looking for from the medium, because as I wrote here, there is a huge difference between writing and blogging, but that’s a subject for another day.
As my voice developed and as I grew more comfortable with sharing so much of myself, I found that I was able to use my voice and my space as a sort of confessional where I could write about my bisexuality, my need for sexual submission, my first threesome with my husband and my girlfriend, my own particular kinks, or even the kinds of things I fantasized about when I masturbated. Then I looked back on all of it and it scared me! I truly did feel naked, but then I realized just how powerful a naked woman can be, and in that instant I knew that I had been placed on a path of the universe’s choosing and that this was something I had to pursue, somehow, someway.
Last week when I took a little break and when I briefly touched on the idea that blogging and writing were two different and distinct things, I spent some of my time off meditating on that whole notion. I took a critical look at my own work and I tried to decide where I wanted to go next. Where would my path lead me? I wondered. And even tho I didn’t have any great epiphany or even any real concrete answers, I was able to identify some of what I perceive as my own strengths and weaknesses. In my own evaluation I decided that I felt my biggest strength as a writer was in being able to convey my voice thru my words, and I also felt as tho I was very good with visual imagery thru words. I also decided that my work would benefit greatly with the help of a good editor to help me with structure and flow, but again, blogging and writing aren’t the same thing, but if I truly wanted to pursue writing on the next level, I would need some help. I can live with that.
Over the past year and a half or so since I started lazy geisha, much of my work (my erotic writing) has been somewhat rough, some things better than others, but still, they’ve all been consistent with my voice, which I think is a good thing. So, I have decided that I’m going to pick up where I left off and I’m going to start writing erotica again, as well as my reviews and other musings that I like to share. I’m thinking that I may want to write some erotic fiction as well as sharing parts of my own intimacy because I have to admit, I really did enjoy writing about things I did with my husband and with Lisa, and even things from my past. These things are part of me and no matter how much I’ve tried to distance myself from that, I can’t escape it, so I might as well embrace it and see where it leads me. So that’s that.
Going back to what Remittance Girl had to say about writing outside of one’s comfort zone, I also have a comfort zone which I find myself being pushed up against, and as I said previously, all we as writers have to draw on is our own experience, and if you’re writing erotica, all you have is your own erotic core. But that doesn’t suffice because I happen to be a woman who needs to live my life on that edge. I need that stimulus; I need those experiences in order to write about them. Yes, I can imagine these things, but unless I’ve experienced them for myself, I find that I cannot put the words together in such a way that it’s real to me, and if it isn’t real to me, how can it possibly be real to anyone who might read it? This led me to start thinking about my own sexuality and my personal journey of experience and exploration. Things like that gnawing need to be bound and gagged, blindfolded and taken. Things like rough sex and role playing and all sorts of wicked things I’ve done that I’ve never had the courage to write about. Perhaps this also helps to explain why I have such deep beliefs about monogamy and fidelity because I have often found it impossible to really let go and immerse myself in my own sexuality unless I had a high level of trust and emotional commitment with my partners.
Something we never tell you; the most raw and intimate way to be fucked is from behind. We can’t see your face, we can’t see your eyes, yet you’re all around us, over us, overpowering us. It’s such a helpless and powerless feeling, yet it’s also the most feminine feeling. It is the essence of womanhood to be taken this way, and for me it was always a position which I reserved for very few because I was so unwilling to show such vulnerability without that trust.
There was something else in Remittance Girl’s post which started much of this in-depth analysis, and that was a reference to what she called “the daddy thing”, and what gave me such pause was that I completely understood what she was talking about. I’ve always danced around my own experiences with role playing and age play, but I have done some of those things, and yes, I do like it. It’s very hot, but writing about it is incredibly intimidating, and it’s also something that I’m forced to admit is part of my own erotic core and is part of my sexual identity. I don’t know if this is a universal thing among us, that whole idea of daddy, even tho psychologists tell us that our father is our first love, and even now I’m reluctant to open these doors because I’m nowhere near prepared to explore this subject other than to say that I’ve recently ordered a Japanese Schoolgirl Uniform and to tell you that I like doing the things I do but writing about them scares the shit out of me. Hopefully I’ll be able to cross that barrier and live outside of my own comfort zone, if even just a little bit.
Some other things that I want to bring current that I started some time ago and didn’t quite get to finish because of one distraction or another are A Night in Manhattan which I’ve decided to rename and completely revise, and my own ménage a trois experience which I hope to make available by the fall of 2007, and a few other things that I want to go back and revise and present in a new way, so as far as working as a writer those are my plans.
In the meantime I hope to entertain you with my random musings, sex toy reviews, some articles about sex and sexuality, and whatever cool things may happen to wander into my mind. This is still geishaland after all! And if I haven’t said it before, thank you for reading me. It truly means the world to me.
Aishiteru wa!
You know, I think I should be the first woman president! Screw Hillary! :biggrin:
Can’t wait to read.