Why Do We Do This?

Hello. Pleased to meet you; please call me Fran. I'm about to commit a flagrant indulgence, for which I hope you'll forgive me; I'm of the opinion that a lot of Literotica writers would appreciate both the sentiments and the encouragement.

I've been a semi-professional writer, fiction and non-fiction both, for thirty years. That is, I get paid for my stuff...well, most of the time, anyway...but it's not my main source of income, and if I weren't paid at all, I'd probably still write. More, I'd probably still write exactly the stories, and more pertinent, the kinds of stories, that I've been writing for three decades.

I write for two reasons above all others. The first and less important one is to illustrate something about the way people think, feel, and behave. The second, and by far the more important, is to make myself and others feel good.

The odds are high that those of you who are bothering to read this -- the Reviews & Essays section doesn't get nearly the traffic the other sections do -- are occasional submitters of stories to Literotica, as I am. I'd like you to ask yourself: Why do I do this?

While you're pondering that, allow me a few observations about so-called erotica, with specific application to what appears here.

Most of what's styled "erotica" is really just pornography. Pornography is the depiction of raw sexual behavior, independent of what reaction it elicits from the reader. Erotica is about the evocation of desire; it's written to elicit the urge to union with a beloved, including sexual union. It's not "whacking material," as quite a lot of the stuff submitted here so obviously is. It celebrates eros, the desire to bond with one's beloved, of which sex is the fleshly expression.

You want proof? Ask any woman. We men tend to suppress such notions; they strike us as somehow unmanly. All the same, ponder why men desire sexual intercourse as fervently as we do. As Lord Chesterfield once observed, "The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable." But a man whose wife or Significant Other "cuts him off" will feel he's lost far more than just an outlet for the pressure in his testicles. Some will seek relief elsewhere, but believe it or not, the overwhelming majority of us won't and don't -- and not because we don't think we'd get away with it.

If I'm to go by what I've read at Literotica, most of the submitters here don't agree with that formulation. What they write appears directed at "working it:" stiffening Irving or lubricating Wendy in preparation for a bit of self-exercise.

A mature adult, however much he might need to do so, doesn't feel all that good after masturbating. It relieves the biological pressure, but it does little for the emotional yearning indissolubly connected to the sex drive in any healthy human being.

I'm here to encourage you to think about making your readers feel good in more ways than just "the tickle in the pickle."

I don't much like some of my own stories that appear here. I wrote the disliked ones at an early stage in my approach to erotica, before I reached the conclusions and the attitude I bear today. They're as rough and crude as any you might find. What a reader might get out of them, he could get from ten thousand other bits of porn here and millions he could find elsewhere. In particular, they have no lasting impact.

I'd like to think I've learned better. Today, when I write erotica, it's aimed at evoking not just sexual desire, but the sense that genuine, love-suffused bonding with another person is possible to anyone, whether or not one already enjoys that blessing. The main thrust of such a story cannot be the sex act itself; it must be the emotional intertwining of the main characters.

That takes a lot more thought, work, and care than "Roughly he thrust his throbbing tool into her quivering quim." It's worth it. It gives a story lasting impact on its reader, and it encourages him to raise his ambitions a millimeter or two above his groin. He might even be moved to get his beloved some flowers...and jump her afterward, of course.

Just in case it's not perfectly obvious, it doesn't matter whether your orientation is heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual. Man's emotional dynamics are independent of the specifics of his sexual desires. I'm as heterosexual as they come, but I've written erotica about bisexuals, homosexuals, and transsexuals as well. Indeed, one of those pieces, "Cruelties," is one of my favorites among my own stories, and apparently one of my readers' favorites as well.

In fact, it occurred to me as I wrote the above that one of my award winners is monosexual: the only sex act in it is a young woman masturbating. But it displays in full the convictions and attitude I'm trying to express here. It's never been posted at Literotica before this.

She had felt herself to be the center of attention in the store. Other shoppers' eyes had pressed upon her, analyzing, weighing, passing judgment. As busy as the place had been, it had seemed that all talk ceased as she arrived, and did not resume until she departed. It was hard to believe she had done it.

As she approached her building, she felt again the heightened sense of scrutiny. Passers-by were only pretending not to stare at her; she knew better. Head down, shoulders hunched over her package, she scurried up the building's front steps and down the hall to her family's apartment.

Only she was home. Her mother and brother were undoubtedly hard at work. They would not have been surprised to find her at home, but they would have expected her to be at her studies, not whizzing through the house as if she'd committed an act of theft and couldn't hide the evidence quickly enough.

She locked the apartment door and ran down the hall to her bedroom. As tiny and Spartan as it was, it was all the privacy she had. She felt lucky to have that much; individual privacy was not highly regarded among her people.

She closed and locked her bedroom door and sat at her desk, package still clutched to her chest, and tried to catch her breath. It was unreasonable for her to be in such a state over so small a thing, but she knew what her mother would say if she found out. Yet her mother would not be the worst of it. Her brother, the self-appointed guardian of her virtue, would leap into action at once, raging, accusing, searching for evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors she would never have the courage to consider. Though he was two years her junior, he nevertheless considered himself the paterfamilias, and her under his tutelage. Once he had even struck her. She, to her shame, had done nothing.

Her heart rate slowed, and she forced down the panic that had followed hard upon her act of daring. There were practical problems to be solved, and she would not forget them. But for the moment, it was time to enjoy what her thrifty habits and her episode of abandon had gained her, and to revel in her act of self-assertion.

She pulled the box out of the plastic bag she clutched, set it on the desk, and looked at it awhile. Her timidity surged back. It almost regained control of her. Would she regret her purchase when she opened the box? Would she see the symbols of her fantasy, or an expensive folly that would mock her hopeless attempt to be something she was not?

She lifted the lid, removed the contents and set them delicately on the desk like matching sculptures. Baby dolls, the clerk had called them. The black patent leather gleamed just as seductively as it had in the store's window. She traced a fingertip up one four-inch heel, down the vamp and around the rounded toe, marveling at the smoothness of the finish.

She was certain her mother had never worn a pair of high heels. Her mother owned two pairs of shoes, both absolutely flat and as utilitarian as a dust pan. Probably no one in her community owned a pair of high heels. Bold as she had been to purchase them, she could not wear them here, or where anyone who knew her or her family could see. But she would wear them.

She pulled off the flat, scuffed shoes that were all she dared to wear in her own neighborhood, and the heavy black ankle socks under them. Her feet were delicate, even pretty. Her toes were well-formed, with undistorted nails. Her ankles were slender. Her insteps were smooth and her arches high. She knew she was pretty, in that special way called petite, and it pleased her that her feet were a match for the rest of her. She hoped that someone else would see her as pretty, some day soon. In her senior year at college, it had yet to happen.

She yanked open the top drawer of her minuscule dresser, groped under the piles of plain cotton underwear and extracted the single pair of pantyhose she had dared to buy. She pulled them on and yanked them up under her long denim skirt, then jammed her new shoes onto her feet and stood, thrilling to the still-exciting sensations and the new tension in her legs.

The only sizable mirror was in her mother's room. Though she had heard no sound from the front door, she peeked out the door of her bedroom, listening for the presence of others. When she was certain that she was still alone in the apartment, she walked carefully -- one does not run in high heels! -- to her mother's bedroom and admired herself in the full-length mirror that hung on the closet door.

They were beautiful. She was beautiful! She would never be tall, but her new shoes raised her nearly to average height. Her posture was affected as she had expected, bosom and rump more prominent, more inviting to the eye. When she pulled up her skirt enough to see, the effect on her legs was sensational; she actually had calves now.

She ran her hands along her contours, from her neck down to her thighs. She had always envied women who had the courage to dress to glorify themselves. Soon she would be one of them. How did they feel? How would she feel, when she had assembled a properly feminine wardrobe and had amassed the boldness to wear it? Excitement built in her again.

One hand pulled her skirt up high, bunching it in her fingers. Her other hand moved to her mound, where a trickle of wetness had begun to leak through her white cotton panties, endangering her precious pantyhose. It seemed unimportant now. Her fingers stroked her mound, sending exquisite spasms through all her muscles. Waves of tension and surrender surged through her. At last she pressed down against her most sensitive spot, middle finger digging in hard. Her head tipped back and a curious low growl escaped her lips, as the spasms changed from small transient currents of pleasure to something infinitely more.

She descended from her climax to find herself still posed before the mirror, face flushed and chest heaving. She let her skirt fall and breathed deeply, trying to regain her composure. Who could know how soon her family might return on any given day? They always closed the restaurant for an hour between the luncheon and dinner periods. But before she left her mother's bedroom for her own, she could not resist one more appraisal of the image in the mirror.

Everything had to go. She could no longer bear the thought of such frumpishness. She would work even harder, and she would save, and soon she would have clothes suitable to wear with her beautiful new shoes. A silk or satin blouse, cut to accentuate her figure. A skirt that revealed her legs, perhaps in suede or leather. More pairs of pantyhose in several shades. Maybe even some jewelry. If she had to leave the house dressed like a drudge, she would stop at a public ladies' room to change, and of course to change back again before returning home.

She could not resist putting her fingers to the corners of her eyes and trying once more to pull them into a Caucasian configuration. The epicanthic folds resisted her stubbornly. She squinted a bit and willed the mirror to show her the image of what she wished to be: a confident, indomitable, thoroughly feminine Western woman.

The folds remained, as did the long black hair plaited into a single thick braid, and the golden-brown skin on which all her experiments with cosmetics had looked so wrong. She ceased to tug at her eyes and let her hands fall to her sides.

Some would see it as a great irony. There were limits upon her attempts to remake herself that all the money and privacy in the world could not overcome. They had been imposed not by her actions, but by the actions of others. Even in America, the land of infinite choice, still one could not choose one's parents.

The ghost of a sound from the hallway outside startled her out of her reverie. She scurried back to her room, there to become again the plain, dutiful young woman she was expected to be, the only kind of girl tolerated in that part of Chinatown.

Have you been thinking about why you do this -- that is, what you hope to achieve, for yourself or for others, by writing erotica? I hope so. The world has much sorrow in it; whatever a writer can do to lift that burden of sorrow off a few souls is a mighty act of charity and a sign of God's grace. Well conceived, well written erotica has that power.

And now, a few disclosures, so you'll have a better sense "where I'm coming from."

First, I'm a devout Catholic, though I differ with my Church on several of its pronouncements about sex. I believe that God gave us our sexual natures and desires as a tool by which we can propagate our species, bond with one another, and make one another happy. Though sex can be misused and abused, it's no more inherently evil than anything else people might do with their bodies. All the same, I hold that sex must not be used to assert power over another, nor to wound, betray, nor punish. If there is joy, the desire to give as well as receive pleasure, and the willingness to accept the consequences in their entirety, sex is no more sinful than watching television...and a lot more fun, especially considering some of the crap that pours out of the idiot box these days. (Sitcoms! Sheesh!)

Second: I'll allow that I write rather formally, sometimes even archaically. Partly that's because I'm an older man (58), educated at a time of greater formality about the English language and its use, but mostly it's because I prefer that kind of diction to the looser and more colloquial form that's prevalent today. "You pays your money and you takes your choice." And no, I do not have a broom handle up my ass.

Third, I write on many subjects, including software engineering, management, politics, philosophy, religion and matters of faith. My fiction spans fantasy, science fiction, contemporary suspense, political intrigue, romance, and even a little humor. If you like the stuff I've posted at Literotica, you're likely to enjoy some of the other stuff too, nearly all of which is available on line, and for free. As Literotica frowns on promoting one's wares through this site, write to me if you want to explore my other work -- an E-mail comment to this essay, including a return E-address, would do just fine -- and I'll happily send you some links.

And as I'm given to saying at the close of an essay, may God bless and keep you all, whatever your particular kink!

All my best,
Fran Porretto
April 10, 2010