On Love and Sex

By an Apprentice of the Erotic Arts

Well, our sexuality is such an important part of our being that discussion of it is bound to be complex: there are as many sexualities as there human beings. We are by turns tender, controlling, lascivious, manipulative, insecure and surprisingly fragile.

Do I believe in love? Yes definitely, whatever love may be, as Prince Charles once famously and rather clumsily said. That's just the point, love is so difficult to define, as with the case of our sexual response, any tendency towards romantic inclination may be completely different in one person to another. Let's take a different starting point: 'you know when you've met the one'. I think there is definitely some truth in that. If I had to try and rationalize things, I would define love as a cocktail of intellectual and emotional compatibility, a strong sense of mutually shared fun and exploration of life together, humour, emotional empathy and compassion, and of course a strong dose of enduring sexual attraction. Take any of those elements away and of course things immediately become more difficult.

For me, the emotional and sexual elements of a relationship are quite inseparable. I personally don't really get why people do casual sexual encounters, without any emotional feeling at all. Well I do, out of loneliness, disappointment, or dare I say it, desperation sometimes. This is why for me, Samantha's character in Sex and the City cuts such a sad figure: wordly and utterly sexual, and completely capable in indulging in sex for her own personal gratification, but at the same time utterly incapable of emotional attachment. It's such a shame, but I suppose there are many like her. This is why any truly gratifying romantic relationship requires a strong dose of emotional courage.

If you have been hurt, and most of us have, it becomes increasingly difficult to let yourself go and to open yourself up to someone. This is also why a strong moral and social aim underpins the way I try and express myself. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I want to write for people who will appreciate it, and hopefully be uplifted by it. I'd like to think that I can write uplifting romantic fiction and erotica for ... the disappointed, the lonely, the abandoned, those who think they will never love again, those who think they've blown their best chance of romantic fulfilment, those who are obliged to lead romantically or sexually empty lives, for whatever reason. You never know what encounter or chance meeting may be just around the corner, for we human beings are both worse and better than we think we are. My characters suffer the pangs of loss, guilt, envy, and romantic, emotional and sexual deprivation, but they also become stronger for it. It is, I believe, all part of life's rich tapestry from which we can all learn.

The human sexual response is so fascinating because it is so varied, and because it identifies the very way that we exist and define ourselves as loving, creative beings. What may be completely normal to one person may be very much out of bounds to another. Our sexuality is a fluid, living thing that some degree defies definition, because our perception of it and relationship to it is in a constant state of flux. We do all have sexual fantasies, but some of us are far more comfortable with how we explore them, and how far we explore them, and in principle there is nothing wrong with that. I think the really crucial thing is not to force or coerce your partner into places where you want them to go. Complete trust and consensus in sex is I feel absolutely essential. Having seen a fair range of erotic writing, non-consensual sex or even the use of physical force appears to be a turn-on for some people. I have serious misgivings about that. Where we are going into rape fantasies, or the old male willingness to misunderstand and maintain that 'she wanted it really' I believe we are straying into extremely dangerous territory. As the at least physically stronger gender, men have a particular responsibility here. Where non-consensual reality and erotic fantasy start to mingle the consequences are potentially disastrous, even fatal. I challenge any male readers in particular to really think about the full consequences of their actions here, or at least let fantasy remain firmly in the realm of fantasy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no enemy of censorship, but for me there are limits, and they need to be carefully defined. That being said, provided there is total trust and consent in a loving relationship, issues of sexual power, or at least the fluctuating dynamics of seduction, become far more interesting to me. I believe it's all part of a fun, loving relationship to endeavour to do the things that turn your partner on, whether it be bondage, dressing up in latex, whatever. Such things don't really do it for me personally, but it is also a very basic truth that the more you creatively put into a sexual relationship, then the more you are likely to get out of it. We all have sexual boundaries which can be pushed, it's all about whether and how those boundaries should be pushed that sexual experimentation and the fulfilment of fantasies becomes so much more interesting. The evolution of a relationship can be quite fascinating, and if the chemistry is right it can develop from something relatively mundane into something far more edgy.

I do feel relatively comfortable talking about this area, because I think that most well-balanced human beings have a healthy interest in sex, we are naturally curious about what other people are getting up to. We have an inclination to hear about it in the case of gossip, to read about it, in the case of erotica, and in some cases to view it, either on film, or even in extreme cases in person. I think that women are every bit as interested in sex as men, but our society prevents them from expressing it or indulging it in public. I absolutely reject the idea that porn or erotica are just for men, women can get a lot of satisfaction from it too, and the adult industry as a whole caters for their needs quite poorly.

The main problem I have with male heterosexuality is that it can veer off to extremes far too easily, it can take on a compulsive nature.It's commonly accepted that men are subject to more powerful and extreme sexual urges than women, and to some degree that needs to be controlled. It's also interesting to note that when a woman is subject to those strong urges it is far more of a rarity, but exactly because of that it becomes an area of great interest in the erotic domain - ' she really let go of herself and started behaving like a real slut.' It's a line we've all heard before, and it's significance is largely overestimated, as it takes place far more in male fantasies than anywhere else!

Women are interested in sex, and it has been revealing – and arousing to me – in recent months, when reading various erotic texts, just how sensually and erotically they can write. In fact I would go so far to say that women are far more erotic and sensual beings, and understand far better how to express genuinely moving and stimulating eroticism. This is why female sexuality is so fascinating to me, it is so much more complex, subtle and multi-faceted. Men are losing out in comparison because our society in many ways inhibits emotional expression in men alongside the sexual.

Men also have a tendency to objectify sex and to compartmentalize it from other areas of self-expression too easily. We only need to take the briefest glimpse of the softcore and hardcore pornography available to appreciate that, beautiful and arousing though the images of naked people posing suggestively or indulging in intercourse may be, it is all too often geared towards the male perspective, almost if not always exclusively so. I maintain that a hardcore sexual encounter can be a very beautiful thing to view, but it can also be very ugly. First and foremost, do not impose your standard of what is acceptable in terms of explicitness on others, good eroticists want to titillate and arouse, not offend. The point I am coming to here is that the removal of the surrounding context – often by male producers – does everyone a disservice, especially the female models or actresses who are in danger of being objectified. It is so much more interesting when there is a background story to think about, for me the emotional and the sexual are quite inseparable. The counter argument runs that in a good erotic production you need to cut to the chase pretty quickly, the viewer isn't paying to watch lots of tedious build-up. All that took place in the seventies and eighties when erotica was far more underground than it is today, and where the quality of production was much lower than today.

All men are bastards – actually, no

I'll give an example. Let's say that I wanted to turn people on by depicting an anal sex scene. If I take that out of the air, and merely write about the mechanics of this encounter, and probably the mix of pleasure and pain that is likely to be caused, I'm immediately taking my fantasy beyond the realm of what is normal or acceptable to most sexually active adults. Not impossible, but the majority of us probably haven't been there, we either feel uneasy about it or we may well have had an at best mixed experience. (I haven't been anywhere near anal sex in my private life, for the record, nor is it in itself a particular turn-on for me). For most of us, an anal sex encounter remains firmly in the domain of fantasy, practised only by well practised porn starlets who do it for a living. Further, Western European and North American society has encouraged men to think that way, there is an objectification of women that can lead to men having a really derogatory view of them. On this point, to a certain degree, I'm with the sisterhood. Not wanting to over-generalize here, but if a typical male college student were to sit down and write that anal sex piece I daresay some of that excessive objectification, that reduction of the fairer sex to nothing more than a nice pair of breasts and a shapely backside would probably be present. Indeed, would he have the knowledge and insight to write a piece that would arouse his whole membership, not just the men (and I've already established here that women like erotica too)?

This leads us to a real contradiction – men by and large like sex and appreciate depictions of it. However, our society encourages men to be emotionally impotent, and not to express the valuable and significant emotions that they feel, and which require an outlet before, during and after sex. No woman likes a sissy or a man who is over-emotional, that is quite clear. At the same time I do take issue with the macho stereotype that so many men feel obliged to conform to in relation to their sexual persona. In fact I hate it, it's smug, shallow, at times infantile, (think of those horrible American Pie films) and has no place in a genuinely loving sexual relationship. Men do have far more sensibility and awareness of what creates a solid, emotionally and sexually attuned relationship than they are sometimes given credit for, the problem is to some degree the way in which modern society is structured, and which inhibits that communication and emotional expression. So many young men in particular do experience emotional difficulties because they do not have the same outlets for their frustrations, disappointments and loneliness in the same way that a woman has. Perceived wisdom indicates that men are far less inhibited by society than women in terms of what is normal, socially acceptable behaviour, but is this really true?

The Way Forward

I am therefore seeking a new, balanced erotica, for couples, singles, whoever, but which takes into account the needs of both sexes in equal measure. We are all absolutely equal, regardless of gender, and have the right to equality of treatment. For me, the measure of a good erotic story is that it should be equally arousing to both men and women, though in slightly different ways. It shouldn't shock, offend, or bore, or worse, turn the reader off. Much also depends on the reader's sensibilities. I have come increasingly to feel that good erotica is there to be shared as part of an open, loving relationship. It's quite a nice thought to imagine a committed couple enjoying erotic stories together, reading them to each other even, rather than viewing them as a source of shame and embarrassment to be hidden from their partner. I therefore come back to the point that good erotica for me should be a potent mix of the sexual and the emotional. I just don't get how you can have a truly arousing erotic scene without an emotional build-up, a true empathy for the characters being depicted. To resume with my anal sex scene scenario again, what if we were to take the example of an otherwise happily married wife who, after many years of conjugal contentment, realizes that actually, there are still many things she would like to try, and that anal sex is increasingly arousing her curiosity. To examine a well-rounded, flawed, human character grappling with those uncertainties, doubts and fears, before perhaps indulging in that experimentation, makes that scene – when it does finally come – all the more interesting and rewarding to the reader. I personally don't see anything sordid or dirty about it, it is simply human beings exploring their sexuality in a way which they have been doing for thousands of years. To me, the emotional complexities of the episode and the empathy we as readers start to feel for the protagonists make it far more engaging for the reader.

For me the focus I want to place on a much more female-oriented erotica is my way of redressing the balance, my way of redressing the uncontrolled and harmful sexual aggression I have described above. It's about giving female readers in particular the space to breathe, to imagine themselves in a particular scenario without needing to spell everything out, and allowing them to be the beautiful, sensuous, all too often misunderstood and misrepresented sexual beings that they are. To my mind, the best erotica is not exactly mundane, but it does take place in the kind of scenario, possibly in the workplace, or a chance encounter, in which the reader can imagine oneself without too much difficulty. The reader must not feel intimidated or overawed by the scenario, finding oneself at the centre of a group sex encounter probably won't do it for the silent majority! At the same time, there should be an element of mystery or surprise to the truly stimulating erotic scenario, we want to be tantalized by what may, or may not, happen. Will this be ' the one that got away' or a 'truly earth-shattering' encounter?

Love, like life itself, can be so bittersweet, that sometimes we need to reflect the pain of loss, disappointment or separation in order for those moving erotic episodes to be all the more powerful when they do arrive. A sugar-coated, soft focus view of the erotic is for me personally less effective. This also comes back to my strong view that effective, moving erotica needs a strong romantic, human element. Everything means so much more when we really feel for the characters, we feel close to them, and want them to succeed in their romantic or sexual designs. This is also where 'the surprise element' can be most effective, and explains why scenarios such as a younger man being sexually initiated by an older (and not necessarily sexually more experienced) woman, or an otherwise staid acquaintance or work colleague suddenly showing their true colours and making sexual advances, or a character suffering from profoundly conflicting loyalties, hold such an interest for me.

We are all sexual beings, it is part of our very nature. The very strong thesis that I want to put across is that the sexual and the emotional are very closely intertwined. It is difficult for us to control our feelings when they can impel us towards a particular course of action so strongly. We are subject to our own free will, but when our sexual instincts drive us in a particular direction it can be very difficult to maintain the required focus and objectivity. Very often we find someone attractive not just physically, but because of who they are in terms of character, and that in itself also becomes part of their sexual attractiveness. There are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, do compartmentalize sexual fulfilment and a deep emotional engagement to that relationship for all kinds of often very good reasons, and I can completely understand that. I have always maintained very strongly that we each and every one of us have the right to sexual and emotional fulfilment, although that of course is a somewhat fluid concept, after all, fulfilment means something slightly different to each one of us. For me, truly rewarding sexual expression only comes within a relationship where you really connect with your partner on a profound emotional level, and that shows through very clearly in my creative work. I believe this is something we should always be striving for. The enemies of healthy, rewarding sex are fatigue, stress, guilt and anxiety. If we can aim to banish these – and this is not easy, our sex lives will be so much more rewarding for it.