Made You Blush: Confessions of A Vermont Erotica Writer

By Catalina Thomas

Original Artwork: Carolyn Weltman (www.artforengineers.com)

I am the soccer mom who lives down the street in your small Vermont town. You don’t notice me, but oh, I notice you. Yes, you. The curve of a stockinged calf as you slide into the driver’s seat of your Camry. The slice of pink lace as your bra strap slips out from beneath the shoulder of your tank top and down over sandalwood-scented skin as you stand in line ahead of me at the Co-op. The long, strong strides of swinging thighs under tan coveralls as you walk away from me to check for another bushel of Macouns in the back store room of your apple packing house, plaid flannel shirt tails rising and falling over the bouncing sway of your narrow, boyish hips. Yes, I see you, all of you, and I know what you want.

And if I don’t really know…well, then, I make it up. That’s the nature of erotic fiction. I hear that murder mystery writers see serial killers in the faces on the bus or at the dentist’s office, and detect clues in every stray stroke of graffiti or odd classified ad. For those of us who write literary and romantic erotica, the world is a sensual place. While sometimes a cigar is indeed just a cigar, erotica writers know that we are never wholly separate from the sexual elements of our beings any more than we are separate from the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of ourselves.

What is Erotica?

Erotica is the literary expression of a worldview that places sexuality at the core of human experience. When sexuality is acknowledged as the center of being – it is, after all, how we all got here – all the other elements of a creative work of fiction shift into a paradigm celebrating the sexual self. Instead of the chance encounters with murderers, victims, detectives, and forensic experts that constitute the primordial ooze of mysteries and police procedurals, the erotic protagonist goes through his or her days engaging in potentially arousing experiences and meeting potential sexual partners. This is not all the erotic protagonist does in the course of a day, obviously, but just as the girl-reporter-who-cracks-the-murder-case is always open to the idea that anyone she talks to is related to her mystery, the erotic hero or heroine is receptive to the sensual and sexual nature of the surrounding world. She washes the breakfast dishes knowing that today, somewhere out there, lies the opportunity for not just new living room furniture or a job promotion but complete sexual fulfillment.

Author Trebbe Johnson poignantly expounds on this sensual worldview in The World is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved (2005). She encourages everyone to embrace the powerful archetype of the Beloved, the sacred object of our desire, without fear or shame. In such a state of mind, a woman looks upon the world as upon the face of her lover, seeing its beauty, encouraging its potential, and drawing on its strength. Autumn leaves caught on a breeze invite you to raise your arms, twirl about, and smile. Spring rains soak your skin, caress your face with gentle fingertips, run down your throat and between your breasts and over your stomach with the feathery touch of intimacy. The summer sun calls you to lie down beneath a spreading pine, held in the burning embrace of the broad blue sky. Reflected back in the eyes of such a world, the same woman cannot help but see herself as beautiful, potent, and strong.

In the eyes of the sensual eroticist, a drive through the Vermont landscape becomes a sexual experience. The fields of summer are full of fertile corn, golden showers of pollen drifting from swaying tassels and gilding the erect cobs straining in their husks below. Barns burst with the fresh green scent of new mown hay, their androgynous silos thrusting upwards in phallic boldness yet rounded and full like maternal mounds, while warm milk flows from the swollen teats of broad-hipped Jerseys. Pigeons flutter like a lover’s eyelashes. The hills of winter blanket us in dreamlike stillness, tendrils of smoke whispering of intimate secrets shared in firelight, steaming loaves of fresh bread and cool glasses of red ale, cold hands on warm flushed skin.

The protagonist of my erotic novella Seasons, for example (being published in serial form at www.theeroticwoman.com beginning February 1st), has spent the long decades of her life awaiting the annual visits of her lover to her remote mountain home, yet she passes every day in a fulfilled state of sensual experience which binds their desire into a profound and lasting love:

She sought the scent of him in the blooming grasses of the spring and the ripe berries of her summer garden, felt his hands on her in the cold water of the swimming hole pressing against her goose-bumped bare flesh on a hot August afternoon, saw the lean sinew of his muscled thighs under the silvery skin of young beech trees. Not a day went by that she did not want him; yet she could hardly say she missed him, for she found him there in everything she touched and turned and tasted.

People love to ask erotic writers where they get their ideas, expecting a wildly lascivious response. That answer may be partly true; many erotic writers I know seem to have a lot more – and a lot more varied – sex than other people I know who work as, say, accountants or dentists. On the other hand, erotic writers may just talk about it more.

I was highly promiscuous in my youth, a product of the usual teen angst and self-loathing. Yet somehow all those wild backrooms at drinking parties and ménages-a-trois at the beach have never made it into my writing. Stories like these belong in the cheap-thrills category: they were fun, not to mention dangerous, but with the passage of time I can barely recall a face or name or particular sensation.

But many smaller instances in my real life have inspired erotic works of poetry and fiction. The moments that spring unbidden to my mind are small but intensely powerful: the smooth voice of a lean, silver-haired man in a bar wearing a crisply creased shirt smelling of starch, and the unbearable desire to touch the pulsing blue vein on the inside of his wrist when he reached his arm out and then bent it back to check his watch. The way my lover’s eyes darted swiftly and furtively around the crowded room before the very first time that he said something invitingly suggestive to me, and the way his hands trembled moments later, wondering whether he’d overstepped the bounds of propriety. The way a leather belt slides from its buckle, the sound of a descending zipper, the smell of jasmine in the crowded passenger compartment of a midnight train. My inspirations are less a matter of life experiences and more a matter of experiencing life, fully and passionately, and seeing the sensual, the sensuous, the intimate, and indeed the sacred, in every thing and every person.

Since the Dawn of Time

Gilgamesh. The Song of Solomon. Don’t be embarrassed, but people have been having sex since the dawn of time, and they’ve been talking and writing about it since right after that first cup of coffee and morning cigarette. And apparently sex has remained immensely popular ever since then. There are, after all, about six billion of us on the planet, so your intelligent design math homework for the evening is to figure out how many sex acts it has taken since Adam and Eve to get us there, remembering to factor into your equation a variable for non-conceptive sexual events. (Please feel free to design alternative models accounting for the Clinton Administration principle holding that acts of oral gratification do not constitute sex.)

Erotic literature has been written and published since writing and publishing have existed and don’t think that the writers of prior generations, or even of prior centuries and millennia, spared their readers the explicit, the bawdy, or the obscene. Dionysian and Bacchanalian literature recount excessively ribald feasts and rituals that include orgies not only of food and drink, but of the flesh as well. Ovid’s Amores gives frankly explicit advice to a man seeking a mistress, as well as to the mistress on how to physically please her lover. In 1660, Nicolas Chorier published The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea in France, the functional equivalent of a modern sex manual presented in the form of a novel comprising dialogues between various women.

In 1684 the Earl of Rochester became, according to Michael Perkins (whose 1976 book The Secret Record  is the best scholarly work on the history of erotica) the first erotic writer in English whom legal minds would declare to be pornographic. The good Earl’s satirical novel Sodom comprised a long volume of ribald erotic verse featuring the adventures of characters with names that would look right at home in National Lampoon, like Fuckadilla and Cuntigratia. The work was boldly anti-Puritan and of bizarre genius, managing to be simultaneously bawdy bedroom farce in the best British Benny Hill tradition, and yet dramatically political. The social and sexual impact of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying  pales considerably in comparison.

When it comes to sex, there is nothing new under the sun. Yet sex manages to be new and different every time, with every new lover, in every new day. Like a virgin, indeed. It is precisely our extraordinary, inherent, perpetual ability to desire that ensures that erotic works of literature, in both prose and verse, will always be read – and written.

The Good, the Bad,  and the Ugly:
Quality . . . and Morality

Although erotica is one of the oldest and broadest-read genres of literature, academics and scholars tend to look down their collective nose at it. Without a body of review and criticism, and few mentions in the Sunday New York Times,  there exists little to no discussion of erotica as art.

Nevertheless, we all know what the question comes down to: Were Mapplethorpe’s photographs debasing works of pornography, or did they boldly push the envelope of dramatic art by creating a visceral, emotional reaction in the viewer? Or both? Are Stephen King’s novels literature, or commercial brain candy? What about Normal Rockwell’s paintings – artistic depictions of the essence of Americana, or commercial illustration not worthy of framing?

There are hundreds of websites and dozens of journals and magazines out there that will print (without payment to the author) any ungrammatical, poorly-spelled recitation of a sexual encounter, real or imagined. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people read such material – alone, with their sexual partners, or in groups in dorm rooms on Saturday night – because it gives them a fleeting sexual rush. I wouldn’t call it literature, but then again, neither are the articles in magazines like Cat Fancy or Hot Rod. They serve an audience, but to me these works are merely part of the prevailing American culture that turns sex, like everything else, into a cheap commodity. The object of the sale is accomplished, and most people consume it greedily. However, are they enriched – or simply sated – after doing so? I tend to think not, and so I avoid the cheap thrills of any consumptive variety – sexual, gastronomical, or otherwise – and am inclined to rank them low on the aesthetic scale.

Moving out of the ranks of cheap thrills brings us to the vast, swelling middle ground of erotic publications. This would be the diner, the luncheonette, the truck-stop-with-great-omelets realm of erotic writing. Amidst this fertile mound you will find the full spectrum of sexually-based publications, from Penthouse’s Forum to the bodice-ripping scenes tumbling out over ever more pages of the dime-store romance novel to cutesy, commercialized short stories full of phallus-and-breast-shaped-cookie-cutter characters on their merry way back into the world as the Armani-suited businessman with dark-and-vaguely-foreign eyes, or the whip-cracking, leather-corset-wearing dominatrix flower shop owner.

Are all those tales of heaving bosoms and 26-inch waists,  enormous penises under six-pack abdomens, and astonishingly talented sexual magicians who bring a woman to orgasm by merely letting her sit through a movie in their presence really works of literature? I’m reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon in which Calvin says that life should be more like television – men should all carry big guns and women wear impossibly tight clothing.

Silly as it all may seem, this is the heartland of commercial fiction publishing. The characters and plots of mainstream commercial erotica are no shallower and, unfortunately, no deeper, than those of any other drug-store romance or mystery novel. Fictional characters are always larger than life – in the case of erotica, particularly in the genital organs vicinity. But there’s no need to be snobbish about it. If you don’t worry about whether it’s literature or not, a good cheap read in any genre can be fun and mindless entertainment. It’s certainly no worse for your personal development than watching a Survivor  re-run.

What baffles me, however, is the brick wall of social disapproval and silence about reading mainstream erotica. A brick wall which, given the vast audience for these works, and the way sex scenes in primarily non-erotic movies and books have grown exponentially in quantity and volume over recent decades is nothing short of pure hypocrisy.

We all read fiction because it causes an emotional response in us. Fiction allows us to experience the “forbidden” vicariously. We read gothica and watch horror movies for that spine-tingling fear – but we don’t dash out to lie down in front of a train and get the same rush for real. I’m no more inclined to become a promiscuous, whip-snapping dominatrix for reading a piece of fantasy erotica, than I am inclined to become an astronaut for reading science fiction, or a shallow, irritating millionaire for reading The Great Gatsby. On the other hand, fiction does inspire us to stretch our bounds, to model attributes of a character we admire. If a horror story encourages us to be a little braver, or a mystery to be a little smarter or more questioning, or an erotic story to be slightly more sexually adventurous or experience the world in a slightly more sensuous way – I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.

The Cream of the Crop

In every other genre of literature, some works rise to the top. Erotic works that stand out as superb literature are those that have all the other elements of any literary tale: the story has a beginning, middle, and end; the protagonist faces obstacles and overcomes them; the protagonist has developed and is different in some way at the end than he or she was in the beginning; and along the way, confronts issues on universal themes, from aging or mediocrity to social justice, oppression, and mortality.

Superb works of literary erotica I’ve read recently have compelling main characters: a man with HIV/AIDS wrestling with whether he can continue to perceive himself as a sexual being; a doctor who loses – and then, in a wrangle of deep emotions, finds – her sexuality while working in the South American jungle identifying body parts from a mass murder related to a guerilla war; and a set of men who decide to engage in public acts of sex, wearing black ski masks, to protest the installation of the soon-to-be-ubiquitous security cameras on nearly every public street. In each of these tales, sex, and the main character’s sexuality, is the dominant theme, and the sexual encounters in each tale are described in explicit and highly erotic terms. Yet in each one, sex is anything but a cheap thrill; it is instead a deep, rich facet of a highly complex character facing the cutting-edge social justice and political issues of our time.

To this end, erotica is now pushing past every other field of literature as the crest of the wave fighting back against the tide of increasingly puritanical morals represented by the red-state ‘family values’ crowd. The most private intimacies of homosexual and lesbian relationships are revealed in the exploding realm of homoerotic literature, building bonds with heterosexual readers who often find to their surprise that they are just as enamored of same-gender erotic stories as opposite-gender ones. Desire, love, hurtfulness, passion, and lust are all, at heart, genderless.

The Patriot Act’s privacy invasions are exposed in political erotic literature. All that social outcry about whether federal law enforcement agents can access your library and bookstore records without your knowledge was not only about suburban moms and dads worrying that the CIA wouldn’t like their purchases of Berenstein Bears books. It was also about whether Homeland Security is monitoring your sex life. Would your bookstore receipts show your purchases of Anais Nin, the Yellow Silk  journal – or a homoerotic men’s magazine? And do you want to be sitting in a small room with four men in pinstriped suits and wingtips answering questions about your sex life while wondering who was looking at you through the one-way mirror?

Erotic writing celebrates the essence of our sexual selves – the very essence that is on the political chopping block, threatened with the gleaming stroke of the guillotine. Erotic writers, whether they are simply writing stories and poetry that make the reader feel a powerful urge to go meet her husband or lover for lunch, or whether they are directly addressing sexual politics through their characters and plot lines, are the social activists fighting the death knell of sexual freedom.

But this is one social protest you’ll find extremely pleasurable to join: buy your lover – or yourself – a book of erotic poetry or short stories for Valentine’s Day; chocolates and lingerie optional. You’ll feel very, very good about yourself in the morning. Oh, I know you will. You see, I know what you want.

Catalina Thomas is one pen name of a writer living in central Vermont, whose literary erotic works have been published in a number of venues including www.sensualvenus.com and  www.theeroticwoman.com. She is a member of the Erotic Authors Association. She has also published several hundred nonfiction articles and works of fiction and poetry outside the erotic genre.