Thursday, June 5, 2014

Bad Erotica, that is, Erotica Other People Like

Somebody mentioned erotica for folks over 60, which reminded me of this post. Pretend like you haven't met before.  

As part of my affiliate deal with Good Vibrations, I get to pick from an assortment of free stuff each month which I can offer to you as a prize or keep for myself*. (My motto: if you're going to sell out to a corporate overlord, do it for a sex-positive, girl-power one that showers you and your loved ones with free sex toys.)

Usually I pass the free sex toy love on to one of y'all, but a couple months ago, Good Vibes was offering a book called Lust: Erotic Fantasies for Women. Oh yes, I decided selfishly--giving not a whit of thought to you and your needs--this one's for mama.

When it arrived in its discreet brown wrapper, I snuck away to be alone with my new smut and started reading. There was a story about an anonymous encounter on a subway which was kinda good. Something about a lady working at a fruit stand and a TV star who comes and whisks her away, eh... Next. I kept reading and reading, hoping to get to "the good part," as it were, but it started to become apparent that, for me at least, there wasn't gonna be a good part.

By the time I got to a story about retiree sex, I stopped looking to be aroused by the book and started reading as sort of a sociological study. (Yes, I am this nerdy. Reading porn as an intellectual exercise. I would appreciate it if you'd not bring it up again.)

I am not at all against retirees having sex. I'm all for it, I swear! But seriously, listen to this supposed "erotica" in "Moving" by Susan St. Aubin.
We trade medical notes: he sometimes takes Viagra in the afternoon. Mornings he can do without. I tell him about the hormone cream I've started using in my cunt to bring back its raw silk texture.
What. The. Fuck???

My point here is not that it is unsexy**, but that yes, though it is unsexy to me, it's completely fucking off-the-charts sexy to someone else. For all I know, writing it was so fucking hot to Susan St. Aubin that she had to slip away several times while writing it to push her hand between her legs to relieve the growing pressure in her hormone cream-covered raw silkiness.

I find it fascinating how different people are turned on by different things. Your particular biological predilection, plus snippets from your experiences--people you knew growing up, a sexy movie scene you saw in 2003, an early lover, an idea you saw in a book--all converge in your brain to form an idea of what is erotic to you.

A friend of mine lent me a book called The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica, Vol. 5. I turned to something called "I Want to Watch you Do It" because I liked the title. In it, the girl makes the guy jack off in front of her while she watches, then he takes charge and bosses her around. She, overcome with lust, can do nothing but obey his sexual commands. "Just do what I ask and don't say a word until you come at least twice. Nod your head if you agree," demands the guy, as her puts her through a series of moves. Oh, darling, I loved that #$##! But that's because it happens to fire up whatever particular erotica neurons I have set up in my brain. You, by contrast, might be left completely cold. Perhaps you need a vampire involved, or a fetching Scotsman, or a fierce dominatrix wearing a specific brand of blue boots.

I can imagine that Mammoth contributor Joshua Hoobler would be among those unaroused by my beloved story of sexual instructions. His story, "Not at Risk," lavishly shares the details of some dude giving himself enemas (5 of them!) and having sex with a series of three dildos. (Each oh so very very special.)
On Sunday morning I wake up early, have my regular bowel movement, wipe thoroughly, take the enema bag out from the bathroom cabinet, fill it with warm water, hang it on the towel rack, grab the Astroglide, slip on some latex gloves, lube up my asshole and commence upon a series of two quart enemas...It takes me at least three and sometimes up to five to get to where the toilet water is as clear when I'm done as it is when I sat down. 
Again, the point is not that this is unsexy***, but that this guy and I have a vast chasm--oh so very, very vast--between what we each consider sexy. When he was describing the particular quality of his friggin' poo, I not only wasn't turned on, I was whatever the complete opposite of turned on is. In truth, I really kind of wanted to retch.

However, if me retching turns you on, I would direct you to Puke Planet, a site for those with a vomiting fetish.

Which, I think, kind of makes my point...

xoxox
jill

*I also get a 20% commission on anything you order from Good Vibes through In Bed With Married Women. Might I suggest the We-Vibe couples vibrator thing? The woman wears it during penetration, while it hums along outside and inside at the same time. Haven't tried it but, damn, sure sounds good.
**Though, c'mon it totally is!
***But, holy fuck, it is so so so unsexy!!!

18 comments:

Betty Fokker said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Gia said...

Yeah, your story sounds sexy, and the others sound gross. So, to each his own. Or maybe we're right and everything else is wrong. :P

Anonymous said...

Well, those sound like some pretty awful books! Obviously different things turn us on and stimulate us mentally, but bad writing is bad writing.

Leah said...

I'm not particularly turned on by some aspects of erotic stories. I've read lots of it over the years, and what actually appeals to me is in a minority.

Having learned about what I like to read I now write my own from time to time. Great fun!

With regard to retiree sex, of course there's nothing wrong with that. In fact (confession time) I could have retired from work two years ago but chose not to. I still have wonderful sex (not regularly enough though!) and don't need creams to get me through. The lover will testify!

Cagey-C said...

I'm just glad that the dude wiped thoroughly after his normal Sunday morning bowel movement. Because nothing takes the eroticism out of a good enema story like half-assed wiping.

mike said...

haha completely reminds me of when I read "the story of o" ...

Vesta Vayne said...

Wow, I kind of wished I stopped reading when I got to the enema snippet. I agree with Liza, some of it just reads poorly.

To each their own!

Anonymous said...

I think you'd enjoy "Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us" by Jesse Bering. (P.S. it's nonfiction)

in bed with married women said...

Keppie, it's going on my list. i just have to brave it up to face the library (see also: cheapness). maybe the library in the next town...

cegluna said...

Your posts never fail to amuse and entertain me. And I would totally attend a lecture on the intellectual analysis of porn. So I'm right there with ya ;)

in bed with married women said...

cegluna--awwww. and i like that you wrote that you would "totally" attend instead of just attending. like you'd be attending EXTRA.

Anonymous said...

Some erotica can do wondrous things to me. Other erotica? Meh. I agree wholeheartedly with you on the "to each their own". Thanks for the chuckle!

Oh, also, as the recipient of one of your wonderful treats from Good Vibes, you and they rock! (Although I did have to pass the toy along to a friend as it proved a bit too small. :( Ah well, c'est la vie, eh? ) Thank you again! -Fitzlurker

in bed with married women said...

Fitz--hope the toy fit its eventual owner. the toy re-gift: a social situation that's not so talked about. "hey is your orifice/protruding genitalia bigger/smaller than my own? i may have something for you."

in bed with married women said...

And I'm passing this email along from "b" because it makes me realize how damn happy I am that we can all talk about this stuff openly now, instead of it just being our weird little secret. You young ones, you don't even know!

howdy jill

i so agree w u. i'm 65 and have been readin' 'dirty books/stories' for at least 47yrs. when i used to buy the books at times sq i'd always want to share 'em w my current lady friend. my tastes r i think fairly 'normal'; my only kink is i like incest stories (and no i've never tried nor been attracted to ANY of my family yeeuuuck!!)

my favorite story site is literotica. (i also like mr doubles but generally i ain't gonna pay.) very nicely categorized w active authors and generally higher quality writing. occasionally a story is miscategorized and as i'm readin' i like u am wonderin', r u serious, people actually get off on this!?! i'm not talkin' gay or mild bdsm either.

a quick aside i thought 50 shades was a joke and degrading to women as well.

i enjoy ur thoughts

thx

Anonymous said...

Hello Jeel (there, that should tip you as to who this is; too late at night to do any better than that, but let me know if I'm wrong and you have no idea who is babbling away at you . . . ):

Another great article--you have really blossomed into a fine, bad ass writer. Congrats! You are so right that erotica is very much a "to each their own" world. It's interesting to think back to the earliest days of the web when, thanks to the amount of data dial up could handle and the low speed with which it could handle said data, it became a quest akin to locating the Holy Grail just to view ONE pornographic picture. It might be in 17 pieces, which, if you could find all of them, could be automatically stitched together into a finished photo IF you had the right piece of photo software, IF you really did have every part of the image, and IF you knew how to use the often extremely complicated software.

Man, I'll never forget the first time I successfully downloaded a photo--what was once just a stream of digits on the screen if you opened it with a text program suddenly, magically appeared in all it's technicolor glory once I located all the parts, downloaded them to the right directory, and correctly ran them through the photo software. Yes, at roughly a half-hour per photo in the beginning, you made DAMN sure you were downloading something that was in your erotic wheelhouse because otherwise you had just wasted a huge amount of time only to be completely grossed out by any number of German fetish photos or, worst of all, suddenly worried that the FBI was going to be knocking down your door because HOLY SHIT THAT GIRL LOOKED FAR TOO YOUNG AND THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT TO DOWNLOAD I SWEAR YOUR HONOR! (No, I never downloaded anything illegal that I know of, but my point is that some things that were definitely mislabeled had my wondering and rather scared that I *might* have, ya know?)

Internet porn was just the Wild West back then, and there was nothing worse than downloading something you thought was in your "Like, maybe LOVE" category only to learn that instead it was actually in your "Oh god, I'm going to be sick" category. All you could do is curse out the anonymous person who had uploaded it in the first place, someone who probably thought they were serving the greater good of the pervo community by generously taking the time to upload photos instead of just scanning for stuff to download.

My point here being, of course, that in the early days, you had to really WANT to see some porn to go through the terrible hassles it took to actually locate any, and then once you did locate it, it was important to make damn sure it was something that you really wanted to see or you were just going to end up angry, not horny, and definitely not satisfied. Of course, anyone who waited for the digital modem/cable revolution before they went porn hunting on the net have NO idea what I'm talking about. After all, once high speed became the law of the land, downloading the wrong photo was a two-second mistake that was instantly correctible and hey, things were so fast, it was possible to do a little surfing and suddenly discover you had some erotic interests you NEVER even knew you had. Imagine that! High speed means never having to say you're sorry and never having to leave the computer unsatisfied. My, how things have changed.

That's it for tonight. That's what your article made me think of, but I'm not surprised. As I hit the age of 50, I find that many things trigger strolls down memory lane, why should porn be any different?

Muchas gracias for the article, chica. Keep up the good work!

B.

ValdVin said...

Fiction is supposed to be "real life with the dull bits edited out".

Sounds like some editing was needed.

My first experience with a woman who had woman's erotica on her bookshelf was very good, and it only reinforced my good feelings for her.

The stories were longer and more emotionally detailed than the proverbial "Dear (you know which mag) I can't believe this happened to me..." stuff made by men for men.

PS Are you down with the SBTB?

in bed with married women said...

B--Of COURSE i know it's you! your old-school porn gettin' story was completely new news to me. I somehow missed the years between unearthing hidden magazine stashes and 24/7 free video on demand. love the idea of the anticipation.

valdvin--sbtb, no--don't even know what it is! do tell.

Jill Hamilton said...

Valdvin--first sbtb hit on google: 'saved by the bell'.