Theme Essay by Lorraine Berry
With Erotica, It’s All in Your Head
It’s ironic. I’m awed by the visual splendor of nature. I love walking in the woods, and when I see the latest spring wildflower or spot a rare pileated woodpecker, my world stops. But when it comes to sex, the visual doesn’t do it for me.
A calendar of beefcake boys? Forget it. Words are what spark my imagination. Give me a book of well-crafted erotic prose, and I can lose track of time—lots of time.
I should define well-crafted. I like erotica to push my boundaries but not gross me out. I don’t like hard-core pornography. You’re not ever going to see me watching a porno film. It’s not that Debbie Does Dallas or other movies with such clunky word- and sex-play offend me; it’s that I find many of them boring. There’s only so much one can do with “insert tab A into slot B” (or “slot C” or “slot D,” for that matter).
But if I find an erotic book I like, I can read it repeatedly, or at least the juicy parts. For me, well-crafted erotica involves attractive characters—not beautiful; I mean people I’d want to sleep with—and a playful plot featuring steamy sex that lingers sensually, capturing my imagination. As Isabel Allende writes in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, “Erotica is using a feather; pornography is using the whole chicken.”
I suppose it started for me the same way it does for many of us. I discovered my parents’ collection of books—including Her by Anonymous and The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander—underneath their bed one day when I was babysitting my brothers. Why were they there and not on the bookshelves? I began to read. (This may have been the same day my brothers put a hole in the living room wall.)
And I was lost. I was twelve or thirteen, and reading these books did something to me. My blood rushed through me like a freight train. What I remember about Her (it’s now out of print) is that a man described a weekend spent with his female lover during which they had sex seven times. I had no idea why that was so astounding.
I knew the books were naughty. One of Hollander’s chapter titles is, swear to God, “Nothing Could be Finer than to be in Your Vagina in the Morning.” I understood that they were about sex, but I didn’t really get why the books made me feel good. I couldn’t make the connection yet between my own response and reading about what men and women do together—and in the 1970s, only male and female coupling was on the table (so to speak).
Even after an afternoon’s worth of reading The Happy Hooker, I wasn’t clear on the mechanics. (I’m serious about this. Ask my first boyfriend. He’ll confirm that I was clueless.) But regardless of what I understood about my own motivations, I realized my parents would be aghast if they knew what I was up to. After that babysitting discovery, I only read from their collection when I was in the house alone.
As an adult, the first time I bought an “erotic” book—the 1986 anthology Erotic Interludes—I did it through the book club I belonged to. Each month, at least one collection of erotica would be featured, such as a rediscovered classic of Victorian literature like Three More Naughty French Novels (even with quaint euphemisms for certain parts of the body like “quim,” which I frequently use as a Scrabble word, and “to spend,” one soon gets the gist) or The Mammoth Book of Erotica.
Since I didn’t have to place the book on a counter for some salesperson to ring up, I felt free to dabble in all sorts of titles. The book club was literary; it seemed more highbrow than reading some skeevy thing bought at an adult bookstore.
Over the years, I learned what I do and don’t like. I’m not a fan of Henry Miller or The Story of O. Yet, I like stories about adult women discovering their erotic power and the submissive young woman who discovers that she likes being dominated. I love the 1980s trilogy that Anne Rice wrote called The Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty. What’s always struck me (damn, another pun) about such stories is that while they often describe activities I find arousing, I’m not in a hurry to try the more exotic stuff in real life.
I have friends who love nothing more than to disappear into worlds of elves and amazons and utopian forms of government. The “fantasy” label is slapped on a particular genre of writing, but all forms of creative fiction and nonfiction involve fantasies—erotica perhaps most of all.
My own fantasies take me to smoky French bistros late at night. They help me imagine what really happened to Sleeping Beauty when the prince awakened her—or what it’s like to venture into a foreign city where you meet a handsome stranger you’ll never see again—or will you? (One of my favorites of the latter genre is “The Story of No” by Lisa Tuttle in the 1992 anthology Slow Hand.)
My lesbian friends have remarked that I’m “hopelessly heterosexual,” but in my reading pleasures, I’m willing to go just about anywhere for a good story. When I read about two lesbians playing games in “The Scavenger Hunt” by Nisa Donnelly, for instance, it makes me ache for my male partner.
Just as my writer’s imagination has put me in places and situations where I’m never likely to be, the erotica I love best suggests the endless possibilities of flesh intertwining with flesh. And sweat. And scent—and sound.
Some folks find books dry, dusty things. But books stroke my imagination and invite me to play. And that’s just plain sexy.
Publishing Information
- Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende (HarperCollins, 1998).
- Her by Anonymous (Lyle Stuart, 1970).
- The Happy Hooker: My Own Story by Xaviera Hollander with Robin Moore, originally published by Dell in 1972 (30th Anniversary Edition: HarperCollins, 2002).
- Erotic Interludes: Tales Told by Women edited by Lonnie Barbach, originally published by Doubleday in 1986 (Plume/Penguin, 1995; includes “The Scavenger Hunt” by Nisa Donnelly).
- Three More Naughty French Novels: Les Libertines/Diary of a Chambermaid/Irene by Adolphe Belot, Octave Mirbeau, and Louis Aragon (Quality Paperback Book Club, 2002).
- The Mammoth Book of Erotica edited by Maxim Jakubowski, originally published in the U.K. by Robinson Publishing in 1994 (Carroll & Graf, 1994, 2000).
- The Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty (I. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, II. Beauty's Punishment, III. Beauty's Release) by Anne Rice (as A.N. Roquelaure), originally published by Plume/Penguin in 1983, 1984, and 1985.
- Slow Hand: Women Writing Erotica edited by Michele Slung (HarperCollins, 1992; includes “The Story of No” by Lisa Tuttle).
Art Information
- "Striped Trillium" and "Columbine" © Lorraine Berry; used by permission
Lorraine Berry is a contributing editor at Talking Writing.
She teaches creative nonfiction at SUNY Cortland and is a columnist at Does This Make Sense? Her essays have been published in Salon, Common Dreams, At the Bottom of the World, The Raven Chronicles, and Fictionique.
Lorraine recently finished a memoir manuscript. She lives in the Finger Lakes region with her partner and her two children.
Of her summertime plans, she says, "I will spend the summer working on a manuscript for a Hollywood producer who has bought the rights to a story I wrote. When I'm not writing, I will be found either in the woods or sitting on the edge of the creek, hoping to avoid losing my toes to a snapping turtle."
