Beyond Erotica: Two Stories of Sex

Introduction

The two stories appearing in this issue of The Big Stupid Review are slated for our anthology. Those who have visited the special call under submissions know this is intended to be an anthology of short stories by women about loveless sex outside the accepted bounds of social behavior. We continue to leave the submission open.

The call for submission has been open for a year and the rejection rate has been absurdly high. The reason we are publishing these two stories is because they are languishing, awaiting critical mass for bringing out the anthology as an e-book. We may publish more later. These are both what I consider excellent stories.

Perhaps the problem has been in the misunderstanding of some writers who think we seek erotica. We don't. We do not care to publish genre of any sort. There is enough dishonest writing published already. Genre writing by its nature forces one inside a box with rigid values and rules, an orthodoxy outside which one dare not venture.

This is a serious problem within the dying publishing industry in the US. The idea that readers only want genre stems from fear of information, in the sense of information theory in communications and statistics. Information means surprise, and it is assumed readers don't want surprise. This goes with a current cultural orthodoxy that stifles creativity in a wide cross section of the US. It is why we in the US import people to do our creative work, our intellectual heavy lifting.

It seems that the insistence on genre is part of the bubble of mythology within which the US increasingly chooses to live. The bubble has been growing rapidly denser for decades, and it becomes more opaque to external reality with every shock the nation experiences as a result of its refusal to see the real world. This is a classical feedback.

Evidence at the political level has beset us at least since the shock of Vietnam. The reaction was more mythology, more retreat from reality. The hippy generation and flower power. Later replaced by mythology such as the Brokaw bestseller, The Greatest Generation. Was it about Stalin's army? In the light of history, it was Stalin's Red Army that defeated Hitler's army; however, we in the US prefer our mythos. We pay handsomely to perpetuate it. Nor are we unique in this, but we have been able to disengage more effectively than any other people outside isolated rainforests, it seems, while propagating our myths via our propagandist media.

So we elected a series of presidents to coincide with our fear of facing reality. We elected a president to two terms who campaigned on grandfatherly tales of heroics of Americans in World War II, tales of the greatest generation, tales that turned out to be episodes from films this particular president could not distinguish from reality. It got worse over time, but perhaps his loss of contact with reality was an apt metaphor for the nation. Certainly he was not the first in the last century to lose contact with reality while in office. In fact, it is likely far more common than we think.

Now we have a President of the US whose loss of contact with reality mimics that of Caligula sending his legions to defeat Poseidon by stopping the waves. He garnered support for this war by touting again the myth of a heroic greatest generation as role model, but this time without cost. The current generation can also save the world, he said, and it will not only cost nothing financially, but will in fact be paid for by the grateful liberated. Business school theory of modern warfare? There would be almost no casualties as the thankful Iraqis worship us and thank us for bringing them democracy, whatever that word may mean. He was elected for a second term, campaigning for reelection as a war hero who had defeated Poseidon.

It is amusing to hear talking heads going on about our democracy, a democracy in which a President lied to people who knew he lied in order to get them to sign on to a war. A President who has decided he will not accept any constitutional limits, will not share power with a Congress which changed hands due to disillusionment of citizens beginning to glimpse a hint of reality through the fog of illusion. The national hypocrisy has not yet shown through for many, and likely never will.

But this is spiel coming off track and in fact is stealing from work to be displayed later with the Second Annual Howard Littlefield Award for Economics.

We don't care that the stories have erotic content. We are not interested in titillating readers. That is an absurd goal for a story. We do care about honesty. Honesty means the story cannot be simply some event without connection to the human experience. It cannot be a one-dimensional cartoon caricature.

I suggest reading City of Night by John Rechy. It is an old book from 1963, but displaying an honesty not often found in writing about sexual experience. This is about a street hustler told by someone who had experience. His tale verifies my discussions with street hustlers in the New Orleans French Quarter, where I lived on Bourbon Street in the 1970s. The hustlers had to be macho young men, appear straight, and it was good if they had a woman. (I found it amusing to watch a couple going to work: he on the corner across from my apartment, catty corner from Lafitte's in Exile, she at Lucky Pierre's; both to find male clients.) Hustlers had to remain passive, allowing the score to fellate them without breaking their demeanor. And then only if paid.

These two stories are also about sex for money. But they tell us a truth that is apparent in Rechy's tale as well: sex for money is never only for money. There is more involved. For Rechy's street hustler, to prove his masculinity and his desirability, and what better way than to be paid. The women I got to know who worked as prostitutes also had this motivation, the proof of their desirability. Some of them were exotic dancers or models for men's magazines, more proof of their desirability. Sometimes with older ones it became a desperate search for a client, even if it meant taking only a token payment. And there were other aspects as well, including knocking on a hotel room door to have sex with a man or men or a couple without knowing what to expect. This has been explored in Luis Buñel's masterwork Belle du Jour, a film now mistakenly relegated to the limbo of erotica by a standard industry taxonomy devoid of meaning.

The women in these stories also wear demeanors and masks akin to the hustlers in Rechy's novel, though perhaps with more variability. Among the professional women I knew, the idea of client as disgusting loser was a typical theme. As was the faked orgasm, the trick on the trick. Not to ever give in to an actual orgasm. I would bet that with major stars of pornographic films there is also far more to it than money. The problem is that the US seems to have added to the veil of their national delusion the standard lie of bidness admin that the only reason humans engage in any activity (other than religion and maybe romantic sex?) is for money.

Most of the stories we have received have been about sex for money. Not many are convincing. Those that are seem to have to come from people who lived the experience, but then to be a writer with an edge of truth requires living large and paying attention, particularly to the people. Motivation, that seemingly elusive quality, comes from this.

We are not particularly interested in stories of sex for money. We do want stories of sex without the illusion of romance. We want a different illusion, a different mask.

Next in line for popular topics to write about seems to be bondage and discipline. What is missing is the swinger, and I know they existed at one time because I met some and they were not interested in romance except as a couple engaging others. They had their own masks. There are women who engage in less organized forms of sex with strangers or group sex than swinging. I have known some of them.

Perhaps the problem is that these people don't want to write their stories. Maybe they are too difficult to explain, the motivation which is the core of character. Or it may be it is enough to have lived the stories. The compulsion to tell seems too often to fall on people who have little to tell about, and what they imagine is so molded by mainstream entertainment and media it is predictable; that is to say, devoid of information.

These two stories are neither predictable nor something from the mainstream media, at least not the current mainstream.

Jim Chaffee

© Jim Chaffee 2007

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