Apparently I write erotic fiction. You can find some on the other page. It’s surprisingly fun to write. There are a couple more chapters backed up, along with some vague ideas for more stuff. If you’re curious or just want to whack off, go nuts.
I hesitated to publish them for quite some time, then decided I’m at that point. It’s not a bad place, but it’s a very strange place, mainly because the topic is a particularly difficult one for polite society to deal with and as such it is largely socially unacceptable.
However.
Sexuality is a central part of each and every one of us, whether we realize it or not. Yes, you with the black ring. I hear you, and I’ll counter that asexuality is also a form of sexuality, in much the same way that atheism is, in a sense, a form of religious faith. Believing that no god exists is a belief, and it is religious in nature. Not wanting to have sex is still a sexual thought. You defined the concept, conjured it up in your imagination, kicked it around for a little while, and then said to yourself “you know what? That just isn’t me. I don’t want to.” That’s fine, and perfectly valid. Maybe you don’t have sexual thoughts or desires often, maybe it has no particular draw for you, but you can’t escape it entirely. Our society, our culture, our religion (mostly without consciously realizing it), everything revolves around sex. It permeates everything, from art to advertising.
None of us would be here without it. And yet, for whatever reason, it is largely taboo. You can do it, but you can’t talk about it. No one can see you do it, no one can see you watching other people do it, but if you don’t do it you’re weird, pathetic, a pervert. So, ironically, is the person – both genders but especially the man – who does it too much. You have to at least pretend to try to hide it, and yet somehow everyone knows. It’s okay to be gay, but I don’t want to have to see that, ew, stop rubbing it in my face (which is, intentionally or not, something of a vaguely homoerotic double entendre which I find hilarious). Trans people are okay but I wouldn’t let my daughter date one. Porn is ubiquitous, everyone has been accessing all of it for free online since they were about 10 or 12 (I’m not claiming that’s healthy, I’m stating reality. Of course I never got into anything like that as a kid, but other people do. Probably. I didn’t inhale. Ahem. 😳) but it has to be hidden away, shipped in an opaque wrapper, to protect the children. Gays are ruining marriage for me, my wife, my three ex-wives, my secretary, her husband, and that guy I’m always out fishing with. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam. If it weren’t for mixed messages about sex, we wouldn’t have any at all.
If there is any solution it is probably to attempt to have a factual, mature, open, honest, low-emotion conversation about such things, but when does that ever happen except maybe occasionally within the confines of a therapy session? Who can you have that conversation with? If I try, will it make the other person uncomfortable? Will it engender connotations and send out subtextual signals I don’t intend? What if it scares them away? What if it doesn’t? What if we want each other? What if we don’t? What if we want each other, and sleep together, and get caught, and it’s socially unacceptable and super embarrassing and we have to leave town in disgrace? All of the reasons it is very, very difficult for men and women just to be friends begin to surface in a big, big way, and so we say nothing and the problem festers.
One of the things that the semi-anonymous (please don’t try to doxx me, I’m sure you could do it if you want but I promise you I’m not that interesting or influential. I’d like to think I’m that handsome, but I’m probably not that either) nature of the internet allows, is a bit of physical detachment from the situation. I’m not looking at you, you’re not looking at me, the emotions aren’t running quite as strongly as a result, we will most likely never run across each other in real life, and we can think about things a little more clearly and a little more analytically.
And so, here we are. I have only recently, as I approach middle age, after years of expensive therapy, begun to come to terms with my own personal sexuality. I only ever got to have one partner in my lifetime. That relationship lasted a little bit less than a year, caused a bit of a scandal, the ending of it traumatized me, and that was it. I never got to experiment. It wasn’t until quite a while after that relationship ended that I started to figure out what I might like to experiment with. Besides that, back in my day (which was nowhere near as repressed as my parents’ day) you had to be very careful about what you experimented with anyway, because you’d risk getting labeled and even if it turned out that you weren’t that the label would invariably stick. Also I’m pretty sure that my family would neither understand nor accept it, but they would pretend to and be patronizing about it, which is far worse than outright rejection. They aren’t really in the picture anymore, but in my head they never quite go away. That’s just the way it is. What’s amazing is that, as I think back, there have been several people who have correctly guessed, or who have been really, really close to guessing, and they figured it out long before I did. Maybe I’ll write about that sometime, but that’s really another post.
Point being, most of my life since hitting puberty has been some level or another of sexual frustration. I don’t know how to ask, and I am afraid to ask, if I were honest I might scare them away. The only thing worse than not being in a relationship, is being abandoned after having been in one. It’s happened to me before. Sex raises the stakes immensely. I have a few friends I could probably practice on, and if I were smarter and had a little bit more courage I would, but that prospect is quite a disincentive and the RSD (rejection sensitivity dysphoria, it’s actually a thing) is strong.
Add onto this the fact that I have learned that my day job is a lot of things, but probably not my true calling. Art beckons, but it’s a very difficult transition – especially since I need a certain amount of income in order to pay my bills. One of the easiest things for me to do is to write, I can do it from anywhere, I can do it in my spare time, I’m doing it now, if I play my cards right maybe I can start to make a little money from it, and once I can start making a little money on the side I can build on that until I reach a point where I can declare independence from the corporate machine and go back to art school and make lots of money and ben my own boss and meet lots of beautiful women and…
Sexual frustration plus writing equals erotic fiction. It’s basically math, at this point. Fear is the only reason for me not to publish it, and that isn’t a good reason. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. And don’t label me.
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