I’ve been writing for a long while now.

I wrote silly runaway adventure stories when I was six or seven, and started writing “poetry” around that age, too, and kept it up all through school, and on until I was in my early twenties.

Four years ago I started my first novel, and now three have been published.

But recently, I began writing screenplays, and I’ve just produced a short thriller based on one of them.

And as I sit at my computer, endeavoring to edit the thing, I’m still in shock–the same shock I experienced at the auditions, the rehearsals, during shooting, and the first time I looked at the footage.

It’s the shock of seeing characters do the things, hearing them say the things I wrote. Experiencing my words brought to life by actual people.

I’ve always had a visceral response to my own writing, from fear-induced heart palpitations to being driven to the edge by the need provoked by the lustier passages of my stories, but those reactions pale by comparison to my cringing, flinching response to what I’m looking at on my screen. And the film is TAME compared to my novels.

So, I’m curious, have any of you found yourself startled, shocked by your own reaction to what you’ve created.

I have this mantra: boys are pretty, too.

Everywhere I turn, hour by hour, I see images of gorgeous women. Billboards hawking beer, perfume and engagement rings; fliers pasted on telephone poles and bulletin boards advertising local club nights, live bands, and burlesque shows; web site after web site, from Seattle’s queer-friendly, somewhat avant-garde free weekly, The Stranger, to Wired Magazine and Nerve.com; even T.V. shows that are impressively egalitarian in other ways, like Battlestar Galactica.

But images of hawt guys, stripped down to next to nothing, posing invitingly, gazing out at me from the screen, the page, the billboard as if promising they’ll do me on the spot if I only favor them with a smile—these are still depressingly scarce, despite Abercrombie & Fitch’s efforts to the contrary.

Why, damn it? Why?!

There’s a widespread—nearly universal, in fact—perception that women are inherently more beautiful than men. That feminine beauty adheres to some innate, fundamental aesthetic law, while masculine beauty undeniably falls short.

Bullshit.

The sole strike against masculine beauty is our inheritance of a culture perpetually dominated by men who have painted, sculpted, poeticised, photographed, filmed, commissioned, curated, displayed and celebrated the images that conformed to their notion of what is beautiful, what is alluring, arousing.

One aspect of being a writer (as well as a nascent filmmaker), is the opportunity to balance the scales a bit. In my short stories and novels, I pay every bit as much attention to the beauty of the men—the contours of an angular jaw, the shape of a lip, the gleaming pewter flecks in an iris, the swell of a tricep, the irresistibly erotic V where the torso joins the trunk, the faint down on a lean belly, a taut, tawny nipple, the provoking swell of a stiffening cock under a confining pair of shorts—as I do the charms of the women. In fact, the appearance of my female characters usually remains nebulous to me, while I always have a concrete image of the men populating my stories.

And as a reader, and a consumer of film and other media, it’s always a pleasure to discover works that pay homage to masculine beauty.

I don’t usually write incest.

It’s not that I have any big qualms about the genre, it’s just that incest isn’t one of the kinks I’m wired for—maybe because I’m a straight girl with no close male family members, so I’ve never experienced the fear or thrill at the thought of crossing that line.

But I know it’s a very popular area of erotica, and I understand why: it’s one of the most dangerous kinds of sex imaginable. It’s horribly transgressive. A violation of the laws of nature and society.

And that I can appreciate.

So, I challenged myself to write an incest story. And, as soon as I put my characters into a situation where I genuinely believed they would do the things they do, I discovered, to my surprise, how much this story is like the stories I’m most often compelled to write.

Lost is more than hot brother-on-sister action, or hot dad-on-daughter action, or hot dad-on-son action (I’m not saying which happens in the story—I have to keep you guessing, right?). It’s also a story of desperate, hungry love coming to fruition against all odds, of people giving in to love, even when they think they’re unworthy of it, of love saving people who thought they were forever lost to that joy.

The Illusionist. The Heartbreak Kid. The Band’s Visit. Sideways. You, Me and Dupree. No Country for Old Men. What do they all have in common?

Like oh so many works of fiction, they feature a romantic pairing between a man, and a much younger (and arguably much hotter) woman. In The Heartbreak Kid, we get forty-three year-old Ben Stiller paired, first with thirty-year old Malin Akerman, then with thirty-two year-old Michelle Monaghan. In The Band’s Visit, the lovely Ronit Elkabetz, forty-two, pursues a romantic encounter with the much older Sasson Gabai. Sideways sort of makes up for its pairing of Thomas Haden Church, forty-eight, and Sandra Oh, thirty-seven, with its love match between Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen who is (gasp!) six years his senior, though let’s face it, those six years haven’t done much to level the playing field between the two in the looks department, have they?

The Illusionist is in a category all by itself, because it gives us a story about childhood sweethearts who are the same age, yet when they grow up, the man is played by thirty-nine year-old Edward Norton, while the woman is played by Jessica Biel, who’s thirteen years younger. One effect of such casting is to give the illusion that, while it’s quite all right for a thirty-nine year-old man to look his age, his thirty-nine year-old lover should of course look like she’s twenty-six.

The other films, with their pairings of older men and younger women, simply feed the already rampant assumption that every average schmuck can reasonably expect to shag, marry, and be eagerly sought by women far younger and hotter than he, while implying to all us women that, however svelte our bodies, however glossy our hair and toned our skin may be, we should be content to snuggle up to, spread our legs for, kneel down and give blowjobs to craggy, flabby, droopy guys ten or twenty years older than us.

Thanks.

Now, before you start throwing rocks and castigating the superficiality rampant in my critique (Age and beauty don’t matter! It’s what’s inside that counts!), I’ll head you off and agree.

I’d be perfectly content if there were any kind of balance, if for every film where an aging, thickening beauty like Matt Dillon was paired up with a fresh and willowy Kate Hudson, we got a romance between Emma Thomson and Justin Timberlake, a fuckfest featuring Carrie Ann Moss and Gael Garcia Bernal, a film where Cillian Murphy desperately pursues a romance with, say, Meryl Streep. And of course, such films exist (Young Adam and Shadowboxer are two examples), but they’re comparatively rare.

And I’ll readily concede that the trope of the older man and the younger woman reflects history and reality, to a degree. All over the world, in all periods of history, including our own, young girls have been married off to men two, three, four times their age, and in many socioeconomic environments, it’s been typical for men who’ve been out in the world long enough to establish economic stability to take to wife a young woman just as she’s ready to leave the nest.

But that’s not the world being portrayed in any of these films. And it’s certainly not my world. Films that portray couples where the man does all the financial heavy lifting while his partner coifs her hair and arranges their social engagements, thereby cultivating an expectation in women that a man should take care of them, are as irritating as those that encourage every pasty cubicle slave in slacks and a button-up to comb the earth for his very own Keira Knightley.

I hope that now that women have joined not only the ranks of authors and artists, but of filmmakers, as well, portrayals of love and sex will more often be egalitarian, or, failing that, cater to the fantasies of women as well as men.

In my novels, I work out problems. Usually via a lot of torrid sex, but still, the novels are investigations of problems, explorations of moral dilemmas, the ugly and twisted turns of human psychology and social behaviors, a poking a prodding of the links between the things that scare me, and the things that excite me. They also look at how love unfolds and endures through drama and trauma.

On the other hand, Lord Melchior, like most of my short stories, is no more than a flagrant exploration of my raunchiest pet fantasies.

Don’t ask me when I first started getting myself off to daydreams of taken by multiple men—it was well before I was old enough to feature as a character in an erotic novel on this site, let’s leave it at that. But my earliest erotic fantasies centered on being an innocent virgin (not so accurate, these days, but the fantasy endures!), helpless to refuse the two (three, five) men bent on tearing off my clothes and bending me to their will.

It’s no secret that I’m not alone. Women—a lot of women—have rape fantasies. It’s also well-known that this is no indication of an actual desire to suffer sexual violence. But in fantasy, in fiction, there’s something overwhelming, thrilling, compelling, about heart-grabbing fear twined with arousing action and imagery.

ia

Authors are all too aware that their fate rests with their readers: readers have the power to buoy us up to the best-seller lists or relegate us to the cold depths of obscurity. We want readers to want us, and when they’ve got us, we want them to love us, to be as swept up in reading our stories as we were in writing them.

It’s a little easier to forget, or to fail to be aware in the first place, how vital a good editor is to the success of a writer. But editors do a lot more than catch all the “theirs” that should be “there’s” and turn our fragments and run-ons into more elegant, cohesive sentences.

A good editor helps an author to become more aware of her own writing, her strengths and—painful though it can be at times—her weaknesses. Under the best of circumstances, when a good rapport and trust develop between a writer and editor, the outcome is not just a better novel, but a better writer.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with two wonderful editors—both authors in their own right—on my second two novels: After and Hurt. I’ll refrain from naming them—both are probably already besieged with requests from writers in need. But I did want to offer up a public thanks for what must often be a relatively thankless task. I’m probably not the only writer who clings desperately to nearly every phrase, however flawed, to each image, each turn in my sometimes twisted story structure. I blame the fact that I’m an only child. Like a favorite toy, I want the story to be mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! It’s not easy to accept even the wisest advice, and alter what I’ve wrought.

But I’ll say wholeheartedly that Hurt and After are better novels than they could have been, without the patient and, I fear, laborious help I received.

Thanks, guys!

John Cameron Mitchell, director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has said in response to criticism of his more recent and sexually explicit film, Short Bus:

“In the old days, when you couldn’t show sex on film, directors like Hitchcock had metaphors for sex (trains going into tunnels, etc). When you can show more realistic sex, the sex itself can be a metaphor for other parts of the character’s lives. The way people express themselves sexually can tell you a lot about who they are. Some people ask me, ‘Couldn’t you have told the same story without the explicitness?’. They don’t ask whether I could’ve done Hedwig without the songs. Why not be allowed to use every paint in the paintbox?”

No doubt I’m preaching to the choir, here. But now and then I still find myself wondering why I write erotica, or porn, or whatever genre my stuff belongs in, as opposed to some other kind of fiction. And I confess, I sometimes feel a defensive twinge, as if explicitly erotic fiction were something to be excused, apologized for.

Probably, I could spend a month’s worth of blog posts dissecting the myriad reasons for that, from our culture’s often puritanical attitude toward sexuality and sexual enjoyment, to my own half-submerged guilt feelings (Why am I always thinking about sex? Why am I always thinking about that kind of sex?).

In my moments of clarity, though, I remember that sex is one of the most important, delicious, frightening, wonderful things that can be written about. Sex, as much as any other aspect of human experience and interaction, deserves a place in fiction, even in literature.

Sex is at the core of every person’s existence. Our lives began with sex, our sexual choices and fates determine whether we’ll be parents. Sex shapes and enriches our relationships to our friends, our lovers, our partners, and ourselves. And—even if we forget about dichotomies like gay and straight—sex is at the core of our identities.

And on a cultural level, sex shapes our societies. At the foundation of mores and laws dictating marriage practices, even who is entitled to an education and a vote, is sex.

That most of the world’s most gifted authors have shied away from depictions of sexuality, or have written such scenes only from behind pen names to shield their reputation as ‘legitimate’ authors, is a pity. What if literature were stripped of all works devoted to other crucial aspects of human existence? War. Death. Love. Motherhood and fatherhood.

When I write, I often write to arouse. Lots of readers have put a smile on my face telling me something I’ve written has gotten them off.

Beyond titillation, though, I’m always exploring other aspects of the erotic life, the sexual encounter, sometimes in a quest to understand human nature better, sometimes just in an attempt to understand myself better. And if the author and her readers get turned on in the process, no harm, right?

As those who know me are all too aware, when I write, I tend to write a lot. I have yet to wrangle a novel in at under a hundred thousand words, and two out of three are twice that. But once upon a time I proved to myself I could write something small, and thought I’d share this modest handful of a story with the gang, here. -VARAN

HITCHER

“Can you smell it?”

That wasn’t her. That was him imagining. Sometimes he wasn’t sure which it was, something real his senses told him about, or something that got made up in his brain.

She hadn’t asked him, “Can you smell it?” But the smell was real. Her cunt. Her want. The car was filled with it. That’s why he didn’t roll down his window, even though he was too warm.

Sweat-sheened, her bare thighs were parted so a V of red vinyl seat showed between, up to the high hem of her thin black skirt. He looked away, back down to the first thing he’d noticed when he’d climbed out of the cloud of dust stirred up by her wheels and into her car—the panties on the floor by his feet. Orange-red like the car seats and twisted up like she’d just rolled them down her thighs and past her knees and calves and tossed them there. That cunt he smelled was bare under that thin black skirt, between those damp, parted thighs.

When he looked up her eyes were down on his crotch. When he looked down he could see the shape of his hard cock angling up under the denim plain as he could smell her sex. When he looked up again her eyes were on the road, and only one hand was on the steering wheel. The other hand was between those open thighs, disfiguring the orange-red triangle.

There was a sound, soft and wet, coming from where her hand was slowly, slightly moving.

“Can you smell it?”

Stronger now, the musk atmosphere of the car.

“Do what I’m doing.”

It was like the sole of a boot pressing down on his throat, the want and the fear he felt as he stretched his hand down between those spread thighs.

“No. Do it to yourself.”

He wanted to reach under that thin black skirt and find her soft warm flesh, the damp silk of her inner thighs, the sticky heat and wet hold of her cunt. But he undid his fly and wrapped his fist around his hard cock and watched her hand flexing between her thighs and watched her watching his hand slide up and down. Her eyes would flick ahead to the road, then back down to his hand, moving faster now.

Now his smell was in the warm, close air of the car, too, mingling with the smell of her cunt. Almost like the smell of fucking. When he’d fucked Alicia, it had smelled almost like that. And her soft, wet noises and the smack of his hand every downstroke and her moans and his exhales loud through his nose were almost like the sounds of him and Alicia, too. Him and Alicia, their bodies, their smells, their noises all pressed up and stirred together. Him and Alicia fucking. God. Oh Fuck. God.

He’d hitched half way but maybe Alicia wasn’t even there any more. She’d stopped coming on visiting days more than a year back, and for almost seven months he hadn’t had a letter. Maybe Alicia’d given up on him.

He tried to straighten up against the sudden swerve of the car, and then they were at the side of the road and she was crying and he thought then, with that jack boot on the throat feeling that he’d fucked it all up, that his brain had tricked him again. Soon there’d be a siren and angry voices and cold metal biting at his wrists.

“I miss him,” she whispered, staring out the windshield, her cheeks all wet. “I miss him.”

That was her. She’d said that. He touched the back of her neck and she leaned into him and let him hold her while she cried.

I spend as much time as possible thinking and writing about sex.

No, not dense, inscrutable critical theory texts on media representations of gender and the body–that was grad school.

I write stories–short stories, novels, and starting a few months ago, screenplays–most of which poke and prod and the dark little corners of human sexuality. In a sense, nothing’s taboo, anymore. There’s no act, no fetish that hasn’t been made utterly banal in the proliferation of porn. What intrigues and excites me is the exploration of the conflicting impulses, the twisted psychology and turbulent emotions of people who find themselves unable to resist desires that lie beyond their own moral boundaries, or in circumstances that compel them to cross those boundaries against their will.

Back in the halcyon days of grad school, when I was supposed to be reading things like Karl Marx’s Grundrisse, or Burke’s Philosophy of Literary Form, I found myself sneaking in these hours-long sessions of fiction-writing. Little did my fellow grad students or professors suspect that instead of taking copious notes on Foucault’s theory of power in human relationships, I was penning an elaborate pornographic tale of kidnapping and coercion! (It’s a love story, too, a rather poignant one, I think, but I’ll save my take on romance as a topic for another day.)

And now that I’ve long-since left the those hallowed halls of my education for a life of… well, let’s just say not academia, the fruits of all those warm hours of fantasy and invention have culminated in the publication of that first novel, Abduction.

All my life, my one and only calling has been writing. Still, much as I’ve always had an active erotic imagination, I never thought I’d be writing porn. But three novels, half a dozen short stories, and two screenplays later, porn is all I write, because the stories that have the strongest hold on my imagination have sex at their core. So, I’ve come to see myself as an accidental pornographer.

Or is that accidental erotician? Perhaps I’ll save that discussion for next time.

-Varian