Bitch

I'm going to come at this topic a little differently, cos although I agree that there are a shit ton of secondary character bitches in Romancelandia, there's something else that bothers me more. I can kind of accept that there are a lot of ex-girlfriend bitches and frenemies and jealous rivals, because, well...that can happen. Lots of girls I know have frenemies. There are as many bitches in life as there are good girls. I'm okay with that, to some extent.

But what I'm not okay with is how often every woman in literature and on TV and in film gets called a bitch. And not just by men, either. By women, too.

Take the TV show Everybody Loves Raymond. I always take this example, because it's the one that makes me the most furious. Go to the IMDB board for that show, and you'll see thread after thread after thread about what a total evol bitch queen from hell the wife, Debra, is. Seriously - you'd think this woman had killed someone's puppy onscreen. You'd think she kept her husband, Ray, chained to a water pipe in the basement.

Whereas Ray...ah, Ray. Ray is a saint, for putting up with her. Ray is a wonderful human being, who just wants to relax and have a good time. And he could, if only it wasn't for that shrew!

I swear to God, I read this stuff and just want to kill myself. Basically, Ray is the biggest asshole on the planet. He'd rather golf than hang out with his kids. He has to be harangued into doing the most basic, simple things. But of course, we as a society see that as poor Ray being nagged - even in this day and age.

Husbands should be left alone. Wives should just put up with it and do everything little thing the husband wants. Otherwise? Bitch.

And it's so insiduous, too. I call it "pulling a dunderhead". You see it all the time in washing up liquid commercials - in fact any commercials about "women's work". Some poor man can't get the hang of something - he just doesn't know what he's doing wrong! He's hopeless and forlorn! Laugh at his attempts, in the face of the "superior" woman that knows how.

But of course, all this does is absolve men of any of that responsibility, while silmultaneously pulling a really neat trick. Now we feel sorry for the poor put upon guy, and hate the woman for being a superior bitch. And goddamn, if it doesn't work every single time.

It's worked in King of Queens, Rules of Engagement, Friends, Married With Children, Last Man Standing, Home Improvement, Two and a Half Men...you name a sitcom that has some kind of family life in it, it's been there.

And it's not just there, either. You see it in movies, in books, in all kinds of television. You see it about women who aren't wives and mothers - any kind of woman at all will get the bitch label far faster than the male characters. Look at romance novels. Men can sleep around, cheat, steal, lie, murder, be total bastards, be assholes...

But God forbid a woman does any or all of those things. She won't just get "bitch". She'll get unlikeable, hard to warm to, annoying - oh, annoying is a BIG one. The amount of times I've loved a book, come to the reviews and seen annoying annoying annoying over and over. And for such minor things, too!

She couldn't decide what to do. She decided too quickly what to do. She decided just the right amount, but made the wrong decision. All of these things will encourage the scorn of a million readers and viewers, even though the same thing from a man wouldn't blink a single eye. And it just leaves me wondering...

Why do we find the actions of a woman so hard to forgive? Because seriously, until we get over that...we're never going to get a female Iron Man, or a female James Bond. Women aren't allowed to be promiscuous, we're not allowed to be too tough, we're not allowed to be flawed. We have to be perfect, and unfortunately - perfection is just not as compelling as what some of our male counterparts get to do.

Hence the Catwoman debacle. Hence the idea that women can't carry films the way men do. Seriously, I almost cried to see Melissa McCarthy in the upcoming movie Identity Thief, because it occurred to me midway through who she was reminding me of. Not some other chick who did what she's doing. No other chick has done what she's doing. No.

She reminded me of John Candy. And my soul was filled with such triumph that I've lived long enough to see a woman who's allowed to be John Candy. I so don't want that to be taken away from me, but I know what will happen when the movie comes out. I'll go to the IMDB and see that one word over and over:

Bitch.


ETA:

Totally forgot to say! I have a new book out! It's called Deep Desires, and it's got all kinds of goodies in it. Voyeurism, dark romance, angst, emotional fings... A few people have said it's a bit like Rear Window, only with sex. I like that! And it's only a quid/a dollar fifty on Amazon, at the moment. Hooray! Here are some links:

http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Desires-Mischief-Books-ebook/dp/B009GJLY4C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1348609482&sr=1-1&keywords=charlotte+stein

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deep-Desires-Mischief-Books-ebook/dp/B009GJLY4C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1348766731&sr=1-1


http://www.mischiefbooks.com/books/deep-desires/

Revenge of the X Chromosome

“Women are going to take over the world. You know, men, no matter how bad they were to women over the years, over the centuries, needed women for the race to continue. But all women needed were about a hundred semen slaves that they could milk every day, you see, and they could keep the race going. So they don’t need us. And – there’s a real possibility in my mind, about one in ten, that a hundred years from now there will be about a hundred men on earth and the women will have it all to themselves.. . . "
                                                 Norman Mailer.

We’ve been sitting in the dark waiting for the last credits to roll by on the movie remake of “Total Recall”, and I’m marveling at how well the movies have trained us to sit through the credits. While I’m sitting in the dark I’m thinking about a short story by Ray Bradbury called “the Anthem Sprinters” about Irish movie goers and how they hate the Irish National Anthem so much, at the end of every movie they make an Olympic sprint for the door to see who can hit the lobby first before the anthem cranks up. The immense credit list for Total Recall sails by and then Rick the manager turns on the house lights, a friendly signal to get the hell out so they can sweep.

Rick is my kid's new boss. My kid’s gotten his first job in the movie industry - making popcorn, sweeping up trash under the seats and tearing tickets. Everybody starts somewhere. Tarantino famously worked in a video store, Tom Hanks carried scenery backdrops across town.

Colin Farrell plays the part once played by Arnold Swarzennegger in the 1990 film as Douglas Quaid, a down at the heels factory worker whose job is to tighten two screws on a robot’s chest plate. Quaid is longing for a little romance and mortal danger in his life. To be Somebody. Total Recall has two female leads. One is the nice bitch, one is the cruel bitch.

Kate Beckinsale is his loving and faithful wife Lori, at least until she isn't. He’s having these awful dreams of being a secret agent on the run and goes to “ReKal”, a kind of vacation travel agency that can artificially implant memories of derring-do in your skull that are indistinguishable from reality, without the inconvenience of actually being tortured, burned, shot or mutilated or destroying your marriage with adulterous affairs.

His attempt to have memories of being a secret agent backfire when it is revealed that in fact he really is a secret agent whose memories have been suppressed to keep his cover air tight which creates an interesting premise – is he really a secret agent disguised as a dull factory worker? Or is this the memory he paid good money for? His loving, sexy wife turns out not be that at all – no – she’s a violent, vicious, snarling bitch whose mission was to keep a lid on him in case he breaks through the memory suppression and becomes Hauser the secret agent again. All this cheerful mayhem is based on a short story published in the old sci fi pulps by Phillip K Dick gorgeously titled “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale”. Dick, who had mental health issues, was fascinated by the fluidity of consciousness and identity and made it one of the central themes of his work. The mystery which is never revealed is whether the memories are real or a “paranoid episode”.

It’s the women in the movie that fascinate me. Lori is a kind of ideal working class wife, with a job as a paramedic on an emergency trauma unit; sympathetic, longsuffering and sweet tempered and runway model hot in slinky underwear. She’s way too good for him, but doesn’t seem to notice. When the memories are implanted, or reawakened, take your pick, she transforms instantly into Totally Hot Kung Fu Bitch Mama (THKFBM), trying her goddamnedest to kill Quaid with a hot slug between the eyes or a stiletto heel in the temple.  When Quaid wails “But those last seven years, I thought you loved me!” Lori grins maliciously, “What can I say? I give ‘good wife’.” and pops a few more rounds at his head.


On the run, Quaid/Hauser meets Melina, another THKFBM, who while equally totally hot (are there ever any ugly women in these movies besides Judy Dench?) is a rebel and former lover and devoted to saving his ass.
Why?

One of the challenges in story craft is creating a deep character, a character with presence, contradictions, soul and personality. One of the images in the writer’s tool box for making the hero/heroine stand out in clear focus is making him/her a part of a larger character web. You see the character defined by the people who are close to him, especially when the people close to him are opposites. Batman is defined by the Joker when they share the same scenes, because they are so similar but inhabit opposite ends of a moral spectrum. Lori and Melina are similar, have similar roles, similar relationships with the hero, but inhabit different ends of the moral spectrum.
There is a trend in popular entertainment these days which I think has ramifications for human evolution. The revenge of the x chromosome. For millennia, men have pursued the demands of that Y chromosome to spread their sperm as far and wide as possible. There is a theory, which I think has some truth in it, that one of the reasons men have fought wars since ancient times is for free pussy. Burn a village, carry off the women and you’ve got loads of new pussy. You can even skip the carrying off part. In an instant of bliss a man ejaculates enough sperm cells to impregnate every woman of breeding age in the continent of Europe. Genghis Khan, the emperor of emperors, spread his DNA diversely enough to be currently tracked in millions of men today. Historically emperors have had fantastic harems, the Old Testament attributes 700 official wives to King Solomon, and that’s not counting concubines and slave women. It’s good to be king, although even in my most lurid fantasies that seems a little extreme, especially if you have the additional duties of royal office to attend to. But great women leaders have rarely had harems of men. Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, Elizabeth I (who often sent lovers with a wandering dick off to the Tower of London. It’s good to be queen.) tend towards capricious serial monogamy, taking lovers one at a time and disposing of them when they become boring or annoying.

When I lived in the Caribbean I observed the macho image men have constructed for themselves there, which has little to do with what women want, and more to do with alpha apes competing among themselves for dominance through display, often to the detriment of their families. Macho is what men created for other men. In America, up until the ‘60s, there was a definitive image of the manly man as a quietly strong guy with a steady hand on the rudder, who keeps his existential angst out of sight. He goes to work on the assembly line with his blue collar and lunch box, has a beer with the guys and comes home to his family. His wife is there, Buddy the son, Spot the dog, and his pipe and slippers served up just before the hot dinner by a slender, sweet tempered woman in a dress, heels and pearls. He is the benevolent lord of his tiny fiefdom and his great calling in life is to bring his paycheck home to his family. This is a definition of manliness which I believed was defined by women for men.

Times have changed, life is unreliable, men even more so in the Age of Crazy Pussy and women feel they have to be more self reliant. Reliant to the point of not needing a man for anything other than the transient pleasure of his company. Like the great empresses, if he gets annoying or dull he’s disposable.

The ’50s TV mom has always been a quietly erotic image created by men for men. She is wise and capable, but emotionally pliant. She defines herself by her house work and her family. She needs them and will never abandon them to “find herself”. She has the ability to gaze raptly at his conversation even when bored. She worries about things that can be managed with a little gumption. She does the housework made up to the best of her beauty, usually in a knee high dress, clothes referred to sometimes by rape detectives as “providing accessibility”. When the lord of the realm comes home from a stressful day it’s easy to brush aside the pipe and slippers, tiptoe mom upstairs to his room, a friendly shove backwards on the bed, up with the skirt and faster than the Beev can gasp “Gee, Wally!” he’ll be feeling so much more relaxed.

Images are the personification of an idea. They are the distillation of complex ideas, going far back to a time before man became literary when complex ideas were expressed in stories and richly deep images from cave paintings to the Sistine Chapel. Dream images are the personalization of complex ideas under the surface within ourselves. Movies and television, novels and stories, these are the way a given culture dreams and packages itself in popular mythos. The THKFBM is a kind of aggressive caricature personifying the modern woman’s dilemma. A woman more and more has the feeling of having to go it alone in this world, plus still managing her traditional duties. What is most core to the character of the THKFBM is that she doesn’t need or even expect a man to save her or help her. She needs them to stay the eff out of her way.

Which begs the question – whose fantasy is this? Is this a man’s fantasy? I don’t think so. I think this is the fantasy and the personification of the exhilaration and frustration of the modern woman. Modern religion is very much the product and consequence of fascination with linear thinking and linear consciousness. Ancient religion, before the wide spread of literacy was all about encapsulating complex and unthinkable ideas into pictures and stories. Icons. This is the origin of myth. In ancient times no one believed there was such a thing as the Garden of Eden. It was the symbol, the myth, of something much bigger.

Which begs the question – if the THKFBM is a woman’s fantasy, is she also a myth? What is the myth that she embodies? Maybe Norman Mailer is on to something.

Sisterhood

By Amber Skyze (Guest Blogger)

First I want to thank the Grip folks for allowing me to be here today.

Now on to the subject. I wish I could understand this, but I don’t. When I portray “other” women in my books they’re usually the heroine’s good friends. They are there for the heroine; to support her in a time of need. If the heroine needs advice about a guy or what to wear, her best friend is there. They talk about anything and everything.

You’d think after the experiences I had in high school I’d go in the direction of making the “other” women out to be bitches.

Growing up I was a painfully shy person. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to myself. I had one best friend and our boyfriends were best friends. One of my traits – loyalty. When you have my friendship I’ll be as loyal as a Labrador retriever. Other girls called me a bitch, snob and other mean things. I ignored them and tried to let their words hurt me. It was my best friend who ended up causing me the most hurt.

One day when I was at her house and she was at the hospital, I picked up the phone to use it. Her boyfriend was on the phone talking to her. She was saying, “I want her out of the house now. I don’t trust her. I don’t want her there alone with you.”

To say I was devastated would be an understatement. I’d never do anything with her boyfriend, even if I didn’t have my own. It wasn’t in my blood to hurt someone in such a way. That day ended our friendship for almost twenty years and I was the one who reached out to repair it.

Even that experience didn’t jade me from portraying women in a positive light.

That’s not to say that I haven’t created women for the heroine to be jealous of, but most of them are mistaken identity – sister, sister-in-law, cousin or wife of best friend.

In the end the heroine learns it’s nothing to be worried about and they move on.

The bottom line for me is to create a sisterhood with my heroine and her friends. I don’t want to show women in a negative light.

Bio

 

From a very young age, Amber Skyze began making up stories–the only child syndrome. Telling tall tales to all her friends she never dreamed of putting words on paper. In fact if anyone asked her if she would write when she grew up, she’d have laughed.

It wasn’t until raising children and reading all those romances that she decided–hey, I can write these. HA! Easier said than done.  When not crafting hot, steamy tales, this New York transplant now resides in Rhode Island with her husband, four children (who force her to work a day job), and three dogs.

She currently writes for Ellora’s Cave, Loose Id and is self-published.

www.amberskyze.com

http://amberskyze.blogspot.com
http://www.amazon.com/Amber-Skyze/e/B004G35HT6/

I Don't Get It

By Lisabet Sarai

Kathleen is responsible for our current topic, a discussion of how secondary female characters are stereotyped as conniving bitches in erotica and erotic romance. All I can say is, “Duh?”

I don't watch television, so I've never seen more than snippets of “True Blood”. However, I can't recall seeing this sort of trend in the erotica and erotic romance that I personally read. For instance, I just finished K.D. Grace's novel Surrogates. The heroine Francie is close friends with her employer Bel, even though Francie and Bel's husband are having a secret affair (with rather odd limits). Bel perhaps seems less appealing than Francie – she's a bit materialistic, and not completely honest with her husband – but I'd hardly call her a bitch. In fact, in the mistaken belief that Francie's suffering from loneliness and sexual frustration, Bel tries to set her friend up with a charming and handsome escort.

Meanwhile, in my own fiction, the other women who enter my heroine's life are more likely to end up as her lovers than her rivals or enemies. In Raw Silk, Kate finds herself in a steamy ménage a quartre with Thai maid Orapin. Miranda's roommate Lucy, in Incognito, role-plays a submissive student to Miranda's stern teacher as well as sharing her fiance with her studious friend. Even Francesca in my thriller Exposure, who is duplicitous and power hungry, and might, indeed, be a murderer, has a soft spot for my heroine Stella. The closest character to a bitch in any of my work might be Ruby Maxwell Chen in Ruby's Rules. However, she's the main character, not a secondary female.

In short, I just don't get it.

Given that I haven't really observed this pattern, there's not much I can say about it. However, to make your time worthwhile, I'll end with a quick excerpt from Exposure, highlighting the interactions between Stella and Francesca.

"Tell me more, Stella. I want to know everything." She leans forward, her tears gone.

Her eagerness makes me suspicious. Why in the world should I trust her? She has every reason to hate me, the floozy who was with her husband when he was murdered.

"That's it. After that – there was just two dead bodies and a lot of blood." I remember how Tony looked, empty, all his life and power gone. At the time I was too shocked to know I was afraid, but now the horror hits me, full force. I am confused and dizzy, and suddenly I am shaking again, my breath coming in gasps, close to hysteria.

I feel her arms around me. She's comforting me now; my head is on her chest. "Hush, Stella, it's okay. Don't worry. It's over. You're safe. It's terrible, but now you're safe."

I'm sobbing, gulping in air, trying to get control of myself. Still I notice that her breast is pleasantly round and firm beneath my cheek. Her scent envelops me in a sensuous cloud. She runs her fingers through my hair, working out the tangles, while she croons in my ear. I begin to feel a bit better, and then suddenly, she slips her hand inside my robe and begins to stroke my breast with cool, delicate fingers.

I raise my head and look into her eyes. Her lips curve into a half-smile. She leans down and kisses me, open-mouthed. I kiss her back.

It is as if I am watching myself from a distance. I feel the sensations, her smooth skin, her minty taste, the tickle of her hair as she bends to suck on my nipples. I can't understand why her touch arouses me so much. I'm still afraid, still suspicious, but the sensation of her tongue prodding my swollen flesh pushes everything else into the background. She nips at me. My cunt contracts into a tight knot, aching to be undone. She laps more gently, circling my nipples with her tongue. My sex relaxes, opens, trembles waiting for her next assault.

I am eager, wet and ready when her fingers find my cleft. I clutch desperately at her dress, arching my back and humping myself against her hand while she plays with my tits. She finds my rigid clit and works it with her thumb while her fingers play in my pussy. I squeeze my eyes shut, grinding against her, reaching for the climax that seems only a breath away. Pleasure washes over me, each wave more powerful than the last. Her fingers strum and stroke. My whole body vibrates with sensation, ready to shake itself apart, as I teeter on the edge for what feels like forever.

I feel all this and yet I am far away, wondering who this woman is, wondering why she wants to give me pleasure and why I am allowing her to. My orgasm is shattering and yet it seems to occur behind a wall of glass. I am divided from myself in a way that is totally foreign to me. It's a little frightening.

None of it seems real again until I find myself slumped in the chair, still panting, my robe hanging open, my thighs sticky. The kitchen reeks of sex. Francesca seems cool and collected. She smiles enigmatically and finishes her scotch.

Francesca is an opportunist, perhaps. A sensualist, definitely. But not, I think, the sort of bitch Kathleen is talking about.

Channelling Dick

by Jean Roberta


Ever since I first began telling stories to myself in childhood, I’ve been attracted to the role-playing which seemed at the time to be part of the essential glamour (i.e. spell-casting) of writing fiction, poetry or drama.

The tendency of other people to treat me in certain ways (patronizing when I was young) in what passed for Real Life gave me an urge to escape from all that by writing from other viewpoints. This seemed like a harmless adventure before any of my fiction was published.

Then came the feminist roar of disapproval for “appropriation” in various forms: cultural appropriation, “appropriation of voice.” How dare I? If I persisted in this folly, I could be ostracized by the Politically Correct, tarred-and-feathered in the social media, and possibly sued. (If this looks like an expression of paranoia, look up the history of The Women’s Press of Toronto, Canada.)

By the time I was thoroughly shaken by the righteous boundary-fixing of some literary critics (to use the term loosely), I was writing erotica. Did I have to limit myself to describing sex I had actually had? Egad. That would expose my current and past lovers/playmates to the same scorn I was exposing myself to. True Confessions can also lead to lawsuits. Not to mention that I hadn’t done everything that is sexually possible, or even everything I would like to try. What to do?

I realized that to avoid giving offense at all, to anyone, I would probably have to stop writing anything. I wasn’t willing to do that.

Luckily, I had experienced sex (even great, memorable, fabulous sex) with men and women before I ever wrote about it. So I could write het and lesbian erotica based on what I knew in a carnal sense. However, I couldn’t actually experience male/female sex or male/male sex in a male body, and the possibility of “channeling dick” in a story intrigued me. This phrase has been used to describe actual sex between women in which one of them seems to have a kind of psychic phallus (if not an actual strap-on or hand-held device), also known as “male” energy.

Whenever I’ve tried writing a first-person story from a man’s viewpoint, I think of it as “channeling Dick,” or seeing the world through the eyes of a kind of representative character who is more than his body. This has meant listening, as non-judgmentally as I can, to complaints from men which often sound to me like the whines of the over-privileged.

Recently, I was honoured by a gay-male friend who read an m/m story of mine, and told me, blushing, that he liked it. I couldn’t imagine higher praise. Here is the opening scene:

“We have a prop for you today, Johnny,” purred the avant-garde lesbian-feminist art instructor I thought of as Ms. Muff. I hated the way she used the royal “we,” and I hated her version of my French-Canadian name, Jean.

There’s something about being naked in a roomful of fully-dressed people that makes it hard for me to assert myself. In fact, trying not to get hard usually took up most of my energy. I stood quietly, forcing my arms to stay at my sides, while Ms. Muff strutted around me in her black jeans, tossing her sun-bleached hair and looking amused. She probably fantasized about cutting me up and serving choice bits as hors d’oeuvres at the next lesbian brunch or gallery opening.

“Face the ladder,” she ordered, “then hold onto the rung at your chin-level. Can you hold that pose without moving for thirty minutes?”

Even with the eyes of twenty-five students, mostly women over thirty, on my boyish derriere, I had my pride. I couldn’t refuse the challenge. “Sure,” I answered loudly enough for my audience to hear.

As I settled into my pose, I could almost hear the silent laughter of the mid-life dyke set as they studied my chestnut hair, the long muscles in my back, my firm ass and my hairy legs. I was a young male specimen to them. On their Amazon planet, I would be lucky to be kept alive for stud service (from “Focal Point”)

In real life, I now belong to “the mid-life dyke set,” although I’m not a student in an art class. (Years ago, I was a nude model, and this story is loosely based on my experience.) Seriously, I’ve never wanted to cut a man up and serve him as hors d’oeuvres at a lesbian brunch, but I have heard men fantasize aloud that some women (especially those who don’t date men) fantasize about this. Fears are real, even if they seem—well, I won’t go there now.

I can never be sure how well my experiments in fictional role-playing succeed, but evidence that I haven’t offended those whose consciousness I “appropriate” seems like a good sign.

Here is the opening of a story named “Moonbeam” which I felt had to be written from the viewpoint of someone who considers himself a “regular guy,” a man who meets a woman in a bar and invites her home for the night:

"Years ago, there was a character named Moonbeam in a comic strip in the newspaper. She was a hillbilly with tits and hips and pouty lips, dressed in rags that barely covered her essentials. She liked to hang out with the pigs, and she always had flies around her. Moonbeam somehow looked luscious and repulsive at the same time.

I think of a certain woman I know as Moonbeam, even though she grew up in a city and her real name doesn’t sound like a joke. I know her all over, inside and out, from her dyed-black hair to her breasts (one with an inverted nipple) to her deep, tight pussy to her thin legs and long-toed feet. I don’t really know if my carnal knowledge makes me responsible for her. I know that her lingering smell in my nose and the feel of her hand on my balls embarrass the hell out of me. (“Moonbeam”).

Stories like this are at least as interesting for me to write as for others to read. I have written from the viewpoints of characters who are different from me in various physical and cultural ways, and I always hope to use them as lenses on the world (as M. Christian explained in his post on this topic) rather than stereotypes.

“Channelling Dick” is a way to try broadening my perspective. In the above story, I can more-or-less understand why a character like Moonbeam would behave the way she does, but how would a decent-enough guy respond to her? To what extent would he feel responsible for her emotional well-being? I needed to find out.

Ultimately, writing the “other” seems to be one way to expand the self.
-------------

Not Really Other

By M. Christian (Guest Blogger)

Once again, before I start in on the subject at hand I want to give a well-deserved tip-of-the-hat to the fantastic folks here at The Grip for allowing me this little space to write about ... well, we'll get to that in a second.

A bit of background should probably be in order before I begin: I'm a writer. I write a lot of things, from science fiction to horror to mysteries to non-fiction to – let’s not dance around it – smut. Quite a bit of smut, actually.

But what's rather unique about my life in pornography ("erotica" if I'm talking to people of a 'delicate sensibility') is that I've written – and even sold – more a few stories, and even several novels, that are not in my own, sexual, 'familiar territory.'

Or, to put it another way, I've written (and still write) a lot of gay and lesbian fiction ... but I'm straight.

This (ahem) has naturally raised more than few eyebrows – straight ones as well as queer ones: how, they ask, can a heterosexual fellow write – somewhat successfully as well -- to such an orientation not his own?

I've given this a lot of thought myself, of course, a good amount of pondering. One thing, though; I want to be very clear about, is that I never, ever, tell the editors and publishers I work with that I'm gay: I'm very upfront about by own sexuality – and that they still accept me and my work is, honestly, something that keeps me somewhat toasty during those long, dark nights of the soul.

The why is much easier to answer: I'm a writer. In fact it’s way up there even above my sexuality, on my Things Important To Me list. So when an editor or publisher asks for, or a reader appreciates a story or book I've written, and for more ... let’s just say I’ll do just about anything, write just abut anything, to keep that praise coming.

After more than a bit soul-searching I have come to what I feel is a pretty close answer to how I can write gay stories, lesbian stories, bisexual stories, or kinky stories (when I say I mean I'm straight, I mean I'm straight ... to the point where I worry sometimes I'm a tad boring, sexually) – though it was an interesting conclusion, to say the least.

The thing is, you see: I don't write about gay men and lesbians.

But first, a bit more background: another odd thing about me is that I sit on another fence, but not a sexual one this time: I've edited some 25 anthologies (or more, I always lose count) and am now an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books – which means that I'm not just writing but I'm actually the guy on the other end buying what others are writing.

This means I quite often see other writers trying to write beyond their own sexualities – and when they succeed and, sadly, sometimes fail.

This is a large part of where my own revelation came from – that I write, more than anything, about people. It came from seeing quite a few stories and books where the author focuses – often from the get-go – on the sexuality of their character(s), especially if they are different from the author's own, which is where they too-often fail.

When I read those failures -- where the story clearly feels false, forced, staged -- where it’s painfully clear the writer has created a character that isn’t their native orientation it rings a very loud

bell in my mind: a ringing that caused me to reflect – and finally understand -- on my own work.

These less-than-successful writers, you see, were writing about differences. From the onset, they're looking at their queer characters ... and there is a big difference between looking at a character and looking through a character.

There are a lot of things that separate us – ethnicity, race, age, sexuality, gender, orientation ... the list is long – but despite all these things that separate us, we all have much more in common.

This is what I mean when I say I actually I don't write about gay men and lesbians.

I write about people.

When I sit down to work on a book or story with a queer character I try very hard to make them human beings first – with their orientation as part of their lives ... and not the only defining thing about them: I try to look through their eyes -- using my own emotional life as reference.

Sure, I may not know the nitty-gritty sexual details – I've never had a gay or bisexual experience and aren't equipped for a lesbian one – but I do know the emotional landscape of sex and desire: the fluttering heartbeat, the flashes of fantasy, the elevation of hope, the nervousness ... these are things that everyone, of every orientation or gender, feels at one time or another. These are the things that people feel.

When a writer only looks at a character they're stepping back – losing that connective humanity. When I write I always work to connect with the reader: to tell a tale that pulls them in and that hopefully allows them to see the story through the eyes of the character – and you simply can't do that by focusing on their differences.

Gay, straight, bi, kinky, straight, whatever ... it really doesn't matter if a writer remembers that behind it all is what unites us all.

Gay, straight, bi, kinky, straight, whatever ... we are people, human beings. I work very hard in my writing to never forget that -- to see their story through my own eyes as well as through theirs.

And, even more importantly, I try to see the world the same way. Down deep, where it really matters, we have an unshakable, inescapable, and – best of all – glorious humanity.

***

Bio: M. Christian is - among many things - an acknowledged master of erotica with more than 400 stories in such anthologies as Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and many, many other anthologies, magazines, and web sites.

He is the editor of 25 anthologies including the Best S/M Erotica series, Pirate Booty, My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica, The Burning Pen, Guilty Pleasures, The Mammoth Book of Future Cops and The Mammoth Book of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi) and Confessions, Garden of Perverse, and Amazons (with Sage Vivant).

He is the author of the collections Dirty Words, Speaking Parts, The Bachelor Machine, Licks & Promises, Filthy, Love Without Gun Control, Rude Mechanicals, Pornotopia, How To Write And Sell Erotica; and the novels Running Dry, The Very Bloody Marys, Me2, Brushes, Finger's Breadth, and Painted Doll. His site is at www.mchristian.com

For a taste of the other – check out the re-release of the controversial Me2!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0092B8VOA/

The Object of Desire

By Kathleen Bradean

The reason we read and write stories is so we can skinwalk in the lives of others. Last time I checked, J R R Tolkien wasn't a hobbit, Agatha Christie never murdered anyone, and Steig Larsson wasn't a petite female computer hacker with eidetic memory and intense trust issues.  So writing a story from the point of view of "the other" isn't the difficult part, I think. It's the object of desire -- the girl he wants or the guy he's oogling-- that gives us pause.

OMG! I'm a straight guy and if I write a gay sex scene, people are going to think I'm secretly into men! Or, I'm not turned on by women, so how can I write that convincingly? A writer could stick to their personal preferences, but where's the challenge in that? Women with bobbed haircuts and men with dark curly hair are my sexual obsessions. I don't expect anyone else to feel the same way. So I don't focus on stuff like that. I write about desire, longing, how it feels to want that person. There's no "other" when it comes down to that. Those feelings are universal.    

Writing sex is daunting. It's uncomfortable. You'd think erotica writers lose inhibitions as they write sex scenes. We do to some degree because we have to get over the fear of exposure if we're going to let people read our work, but that doesn't mean it's ever easy. Writing in that space remains deeply personal. It's not as if one day you wake up and everything and everyone on earth stokes your libido and you're up for any sexual scenario that people propose. You'd be surprised how many times we have to tell our stalkers that no, really, thank you but I don't want to be kidnapped and become your sex slave even though I've written twenty stories about that scenario. Here, have a restraining order. Oh yes, I insist.

While searching the internet for good quotes about objects of desire I found this poem. It doesn't fit since he's talking about restlessness of spirit and objectless desire, but I can understand that sentiment too. I think there's a bit of writer's envy going on as well. So relatable. 

 

After Reading Antony and Cleopatra

By Robert Louis Stevenson

As when the hunt by holt and field

   Drives on with horn and strife,

Hunger of hopeless things pursues

   Our spirits throughout life.

The sea's roar fills us aching full

   Of objectless desire—

The sea's roar, and the white moon-shine,

   And the reddening of the fire.

Who talks to me of reason now?

   It would be more delight

To have died in Cleopatra's arms

   Than be alive to-night.

Three Disgruntled Pigeons

(A story of three ways I'm not)

“I’m locking the door now,” said Ron. “This is me locking the door.”

Mako sat on Ron's bed feeling far away, as though day dreaming, watching a fly buzzing against the window glass, bumping at it.

Then Mako was looking out the apartment window past the fly at a pigeon sitting on the red brick ledge looking back at him. The pigeon flapped its wings and bobbed its head, holding its wings out for some kind of emphasis. Or maybe disapproval. But it was watching him with that glassy blue doll’s eye.

“You okay?” said Ron. He came over to him and sat next to him on the bed. He put his hand on Mako’s knee and waited.

Mako turned away from the pigeon and seemed to notice him there. “Are we doing right?”

“What we do in here,” said Ron, “ain’t nobody’s business. You want to get under the covers?”

Mako looked at the covers.

“I’m not asking you to do anything you don’t want to do,” said Ron. “But this is what I want to do.” He moved close to Ron and touched his lips to his and held him tight for a moment.

Mako allowed himself to be held and felt a kind of peaceful terror, a willful stepping over the abyss of everything he had been taught was right and true into strangeness. But what was right and true seemed so far away. At this moment it had nothing to do with him. He had liked girls, had felt completely at ease around girls compared to the other boys. Almost like one of them. But it was the boy next to him that disturbed his peace. His strength. His physical compactness. His aggressive bravado. There was a sense of reinvention somehow – over there.

“Where you at?” said Ron, as though reading his mind. “You don't like it? Want me to stop now?”

Mako didn’t love him. It wasn’t that. It always seemed like the girls wanted to hear you say it. But this was something new and alien, and undiscovered within himself. The men wanted what was being offered right now, right next to him. The immedia cy of it was over powering as well as the knowledge that this door being opened had been there all along.

“I’m right here,” said Mako. He lifted off his shirt and threw it on the floor. His heart was pounding with a delirium of transgression and anticipation. A declaration to the God of all that was proper – this is who I am. I didn’t ask for this. It’s how it is, that’s all. He looked at the shirt on the floor and had the feeling a snake might have when shedding its old skin. He heard movement and Ron was quickly shedding his shirt. And then his jeans. And then his shorts. And then nothing left to shed, but that flat belly and black short hair spinning halfway up his belly and the thick swinging sex below, half risen now, revealing its shape and form but still hesitating as if waiting to be blessed. Mako was looking at Arthur’s shy phallus, half risen, as though asking a question. And the quickness of it all. The directness. Women were never so direct. He felt himself responding, rising to that masculine directness of desire. Not so much in attraction as the anticipation of desire, or transgression, of a new stage. A new snake skin. He stood up.

“Watch,” he said. Ron watched, and Mako could see his prick rising and stiffening the final inch. “Here.” He stood up suddenly by the bed and dropped his shorts and his cock was almost the same as Ron’s. He began to imagine things. Rubbing bodies. Rubbing cocks like boy scouts rubbing sticks to make a fire. What would come next? What did men do?

But before he could think, Ron was already leaving the bed, throwing a pillow on the floor at Mako’s feet and kneeling on the pillow as though in prayer. His hands reached behind and palmed Mako’s ass and pulled him forward. His lips were on Mako’s cock and Mako wanted to shout “Stop!” but already Ron’s warm tongue was moving, doing something no girl had done for him, stunning him not with pleasure, yes that too, but more truly a deep emotional undertow of fear and exhilaration.

He felt the tension rising in his prick and wondered if he would be able to ejaculate in Ron’s mouth, if he would be up to it when the moment came over him. He wanted so much for Ron to feel validated, praised by Mako’s physical response. He hated being naked in front of anyone in locker rooms, wondered if guys were looking at him and sensed his queerness, his otherness. If Ron needed him to, wanted him to, would he come good in Ron’s mouth? For Ron’s sake? That seemed a terrifying level of intimacy to have with any man, with any person. To come in their mouth. He looked down his belly and Ron was looking up. Ron wanted this so much. He needed to come for Ron’s sake. To please him.

He looked past Ron’s bobbing head and the pigeon at the window was bobbing its head as it paced on the ledge. Seeing Mako’s eyes on his, he raised his wings and dropped over into the abyss beyond and below.

****

She was playing in the garden in her Sunday dress when it happened. She didn’t think of it as playing, playing was what children did and she was all of twelve. She played formal games but not with dolls or toys. She played with boys, with her brother, but she sensed her budding womanhood through them and their change towards her.

There was a pigeon waddling on the pavement of the garden bobbing its head as it walked with its toes turned in. She threw popcorn to the bird and watched it dive its head, grab a corn and fly a few feet away. It was on a constant swivel, watching the bushes for cats, watching her, watching all around as though the world were filled with threats. She felt sorry for it. To be able to fly, like a fairy queen and yet this descendent of the Tyrannosaur was so fearful and clumsy on the ground. She could feel it every emotion so vividly it hurt. She wanted to hold it and pet it.

She took a step towards it and felt a wetness bloom at the top of her thighs. The wetness swelled and increased. She felt a sharp pain in her belly. A drop of blood fell on the pavement.

She stood still looking at the blood. The pigeon seemed to see it too and dropped it’s popcorn and stood still watching her.

She understood vaguely about the blood, was pretty sure she knew what it meant. Had seen her mother’s tampons. Had seen her mother’s blood. Was it supposed to hurt? And still this single drop of blood had hit the ground like a bomb. She stood with the wetness between her legs and suddenly it seemed like a sewer down there, where everything gross and nasty happened, where she peed, where she bled, where somewhere babies would burst out covered in her blood. She had never given a thought to it. It seemed like her body was falling to pieces under her.

She offered popcorn to the bird, but her belly spasmed again and she leaned over in pain. The pigeon spread its wings at her sudden move and flew over her head high into the wide, safe and unchanging blue sky.

****

In the Korean grocery on 34th Ave and E Street she walked down the aisle hoping to find her favorite soda, Manhattan Espresso Coffee soda. Years before Starbucks or any of them this had been her favorite summer drink. On muggy urban evenings when the city sank into sullen torpor, sitting on the steps with a Manhattan Soda was a kind of Brooklyn ritual, like soda fountains and Egg Creams. She found the last bottle in the beer cooler and picked up some plantain chips in a green bag with palm trees on the cover. She cruised the produce aisle and thought about tommorrow’s dinner for her husband Joe and herself, but tomorrow would be movie night and they would eat out.

At the register she picked up a pack of gum and added it to the little pile.

“Four thirty five.” said the Korean grocery, an old man with a heavy accent. She gave him her credit card, but he rasied his hand. “No, sorry, no. Credee. Must have five dollar for credee. Credee cost me charge too.”

She checked around and picked up a bag of Mallomar cookies which were in season in the late summer and added it to the pile.

“Nine dollar, fifty seven, thank you.” He smiled now and cheerfully stuffed it all in a plastic bag and rang it up.

She had been away from the house for about an hour. She had promised Joe she would stay away for two. She wouldn’t come home for two hours. That was the deal.

“Thanks,” she said. “Take care, Mr. Kim.”

She went outside and the steam hit her like a wall. With the steam the smells of the city, the bus exhaust, cigarette smoke, and the dumpster smells from the ally. She checked her watch. Fifty minutes to go. The soda would be warm when she got home and it tasted better outside. She wrapped her blouse hem around the cap and twisted it off and drank from the bottle. It was already turning warm but the sweet thick bitterness was better than beer, better than coffee, burning as it went down. She walked down the sidewalk drinking the coffee soda and listening to the traffic on the next street. E street was dark and quiet this time of night.

As she went she thought of the Mallomars, ripping the bag open while the chocolate marshmallow cookies were still cold and washing down one or two with the soda, but if she opened the bag the chocolate would melt.

As she crossed the street, she heard footsteps pacing behind. She wanted to look over her shoulder, but wouldn’t that be inviting danger? Attention?

As she passed the iron piked fence of an old church a pigeon on the steps in front of the great oak double doors was watching her. As she walked past the gate the pigeon kept its eyes on her. There had been this TV show that had scared her when she was a little kid. Some old show, and there were these pigeons outside a haunted house very much like this church who were supposed to imprison the souls of the evil dead. Pigeons from hell somehow. But Whip Poor Wills, in South Carolina, when she was that little kid, the old folks said it was Whip Poor Wills that housed the dead.

The steps were closer.

She stopped at the corner and turned facing the street the street that crossed here. It was a ruse, to cross over, to test the owner of the foot steps and see if they were meant for her. The street was empty so she crossed against the light, trying extra hard to move slowly and steadily, not taking notice as the steps seemed louder. She crossed the street and the red and green neon lights of the pool hall and grill reflected off the filthy water gathered in the cobblestones and asphalt. She stepped up on the curb and glanced sideways across the street. There was a young man walking slowly, staying on his side. She would keep an eye on him, like the pigeon.

As she reached her street she heard the steps again. He had crossed the street. But her brownstone was in sight. She glanced at her watch. She was forty minutes early. But she had promised.

She turned at the top of the steps and looked down with her hand on the knob wondering what to do as the man passed.

It was a young man in a T shirt and jeans. There were white wires dangling from his ears and he was nodding his head, not looking at her, not interested, away in his own world.

A pigeon fluttered and landed on the pavement in front of the brownstone. It paced up and down, bobbing its head as if accusing her. “I’m not breaking any promise”, she whispered. “I only promised I’d stay away for two hours. I’m not going in, not yet. What is there to see that I don’t have a right to see?”

She tiptoed down the stairs and went along the side of the house. The window blinds were all down. But the window blinds for the parlor had the blades open enough to see through. She put down the bag and looked in the window.

A woman was sitting on the sofa, she was watching the TV. She was wearing black stilettos and dark nylons, under a familiar red pleated satin tube dress. The choice of dark velvet lipstick linked the dress and shoes perfectly, tastefully. Even in the low light of the television she recognized the profile. The nose and chin were unmistakable. A wave of jealousy passed through her like sickness. She tore the Mallomar bag with her teeth and crammed one roughly into her mouth smearing wet chocolate on her fingers.

“He looks more beautiful than me,” she thought.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

Stretching

By Nobilis Reed (Guest Blogger)

 

I write science fiction and fantasy erotica. As shocking as it may sound, I’ve never owned a sex robot, I’ve never magically transformed into a woman, and I’ve never had sex in zero gravity. I have not had the pleasure of fucking a space alien, or an elf, or a tentacled horror.

I can hear your collective gasps. Shocking, isn’t it?

As far as I’m concerned, straight women writing gay erotic romance, vanilla folks writing kink, men writing from the point of view of randy college girls―those folks have it easy. There are a thousand blogs out there written by people who are living those lives. It’s easy to empathize with someone who’s living on Earth in the twenty-first century, because we have so many things in common.

Try imagining you’re a woman who has just discovered that you’re descended from a hermaphrodite that came to Earth from another dimension. Imagine that you now understand why you have a penis-sized clit and magical powers, unlike anyone else but your mother. Imagine you travel to your ancestor’s home dimension, where you’re not a freak, but rather a member of the aristocracy.

Or imagine you’re a young man in the distant future, who has just been recruited by an interstellar courier service whose ships are powered by sex. Imagine you’re a Roman procurator who is exploring the Great Lakes in a steam-turbine ship. Imagine you’re an engineer who has fallen in love with the woman who wrote the software for your nano-tech garment that can turn into any item of clothing.

Try researching that.

It's a real stretch for the imagination. Not only am I working out the minds and hearts of individual people, I'm working out cultural norms for entire societies. I'm not just breaking taboos, I'm setting them up in the first place and giving them reasons for being there to boot. Science. Technology. Government. Religion. All of these things need consideration, because all of them bear on the character’s experience.

Sure, there’s research that can help with that effort, studying real culture and history of places that might be something like what I’m dreaming up. For the ‘magical hermaphrodites’ setting I’ve found ‘third gender’ traditions in various cultures around the world that can help shed some light, and even though we don’t have wizards blasting fireballs at their enemies, we certainly have legends and magical traditions where fantasy writers have found their building blocks.

And certainly there are many who have gone before in creating alien cultures. There’s probably no better resource for creating good speculative fiction than to read a wide variety of good speculative fiction. I’m certainly not copying other folks’ work, but the imagination is nourished by the imagination of others.

In the end, though, when I create a new universe to set stories in, I’m the first person to write about it. You can’t get much more “other” than that!

Now I admit that there are advantages to writing speculative fiction. For one thing, I am the ultimate authority of reality in my constructed universes. I get to say how things work. There are no outside authorities to tell me I got some historical details wrong, or that my geography is out of whack. There’s a certain amount of freedom there.

Ultimately, though, stories are about people and if the people don’t come across as essentially and consistently human, then the reader is not going to connect well with them, and the story will fail. This kind of failure is sometimes overt; the reader shouts, “People don’t act like that!” and puts the book down, but this can also manifest as simply a mild distaste. “I just couldn’t get into it,” she might say. “I couldn’t get into the characters.”

That’s the challenge every author faces. Like anyone else, I use research, empathy and imagination to make that happen. I’m just stretching a little farther when I do it.

* * * * *

A few years ago Nobilis Reed decided to start sharing the naughty little stories he scribbled out in hidden notebooks. To his surprise, people actually liked them! Now, he can’t stop. The poor man is addicted. His wife, teenage children, and even the cats just look on this wretch of a man, hunched over his computer and shake their heads. Clearly, there is no hope for him. The best thing to do is simply make him as comfortable as his condition will allow. Symptoms of his condition include two novels, several novellas, numerous short stories, and the longest-running erotica podcast in the history of the world. Find his site at www.nobiliserotica.com, and his audio podcast at nobilis.libsyn.com.

Check out Coming Together: Arm in Arm in Arm - tentacle erotica for charity, coming this month!

Creature of Pure Sensation

By Lisabet Sarai

I'm a polymorphously-perverse humanist who believes that almost anything can be arousing, under the right circumstances. So in general, I don't have too much difficulty writing sex from the perspective of the “other”. I've written lesbian stories (but that's easy because I'm attracted to women myself) and gay male stories (more surprising since I have little or no experience with M/M sex, or even gay porn). A significant fraction of my stories are told from a man's point of view. I find I can inhabit the mind and body of my male characters and female characters with nearly equal facility.

Although I've created a number of secondary characters who were male-to-female transsexuals, thus far I haven't written any tales where the POV protagonist is transgendered. However, I've had one simmering on the back burner for a while, a story that looks at the world through the eyes of a pre-op transsexual Thai go-go dancer. Over the years, on my visits to Bangkok, I've met a few. I can imagine the thrill my heroine would feel seeing her new, feminine body – not to mention the kick of being admired by the men in the audience. At the same time, there'd be fear and shame, worries about being rejected, a sense of inadequacy compared to the biological women she worked with. I'd really like to explore those emotions and see how they play out when I manage to get her into a hotel room alone with the guy who buys her out of the bar. Actually, this fledgling story is almost a rewrite of my tale “Butterfly”, with the point of view flipped. I wonder, though, whether it might end more happily.

I'm less confident that I could write a main character who was female-to-male – it's tough for me to think about chopping off my tits – but I'd be willing to give it a shot. I like an erotic challenge. In my smut-on-commission work for Custom Erotica Source, I've managed to crank up the heat writing scenarios that would never arouse me personally.

There's one sort of “other”, though, I doubt I could successfully portray. I don't think I could convincingly write a creature of pure sensation – a woman (or man) for whom physical stimulation is the primary focus of sexual experience. All my characters share one trait with one another – and with me. For all of them, arousal begins in the mind and flows out to the body.

My sex scenes concentrate on what's going on in my characters' heads. The circumstances and meaning of the sexual encounter, the emotional connection between the participants, the fantasies shared or held in secret, these are the elements that fuel my erotic writing. The physical actions involved are definitely secondary. The brush of a single fingertip along the sensitive side of a breast can evoke a reaction more intense than full penetration. Vibrating dildoes inserted front and rear won't do a thing to one of my heroines if her mind isn't engaged in the scene.

This mirrors my own sexual experience. I've been to swing parties and sex clubs, been fondled and fucked by strangers, and felt almost nothing, because my partner(s) just weren't pushing my psychological buttons. I can masturbate forever without coming, unless I envision a transgressive tableau to accompany my actions. When I replay my most cherished sexual memories, I can't really recall the details of what we did. But how I felt – that's still sweet, raw and precious.

I gather that many women experience sex in a similar manner. (That's probably one reason why I'm doing pretty well writing erotic romance.) I'm sure that at least some guys do, also. However, not everyone is wired that way. We've had discussions on the ERWA Writers list which made it clear that some women achieve orgasm from specific kinds of stimulation, without regard to context. Some people screw for the pure physical pleasure of the act. They don't care about taboos, or power exchange, or whether their companion has a great sense of humor. A good hard cock, a hot wet cunt, is all they need to have fulfilling sex.

It's tough for me to wrap my mind around that concept. I mean, I can understand it intellectually, but it's so distant from my own sexuality, I'm not sure I could write about it. Furthermore, I have to admit the notion of reading stories about such people doesn't interest me much, either. I realize that sounds judgmental. It's not meant to be. Sometimes, in fact, I regret that I'm not more present in my body during sex. I suspect I'm missing a lot.

At this point in my life, though, I'm not likely to change. I guess I have to accept that there are limits to my perversity - though that very notion makes me want to try and push the envelope. Still, is it possible to write a character who's driven entirely by physical sensation, and still have the story be erotic? My definition of erotic fiction is fiction that explores the experience and nature of desire. Can desire be totally physical? I'd love to hear others' opinions.

Thirteenth Night

by Jean Roberta.

Backstory: In Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night, Viola has landed in Illyria as a result of a shipwreck. It’s not safe for her to appear in a strange place as a young woman, so she disguises herself as a young man named Cesario and enters the service of Count Orsino, ruler of Illyria. Orsino is in love with Countess Olivia, who is in mourning for her dead brother and refuses to see her suitor.

Orsino is so impressed by his new “manservant,” Cesario, that he sends him (her) to Olivia with messages of love. Olivia is so impressed with Cesario that she asks to see him (her) again.

The courtship scenes between Cesario (Viola) and Olivia are popular with lesbian Shakespeare fans. In Shakespeare’s version, Olivia conveniently marries “Cesario’s” (Viola’s) twin brother Sebastian, who looks just like her (mighty strange, that), and Viola finally gets to take off her disguise and reveal her love for her boss, Count Orsino, who finally gives up Olivia as a lost cause, and marries his adoring servant, Viola.

But what if …?

****************************

Olivia: Oh fair youth, please tell thy master that I prefer his messenger.

Viola (blushing): You musn’t, madam.

Olivia: Why musn’t I?

Viola: Because I am not what I appear to be.

Olivia: Then I wish to see what is hidden behind thy rich doublet and cunning codpiece. How can I trust the sincerity of thy protestations of thy master’s love unless thou art fully revealed as nature intended?

Viola (panicking): For the love of God, your Grace! You would be sorely disappointed.

Olivia: How so?

Viola: I am a poor impostor who lacks all the equipment of a man.

Olivia (laughing): That equipment is available in yon Sex Market, my fair angel. “Tis said that angels have no organs of generation, but I shall believe that when I see it for myself. If you were born without a boyish cock, Cesario, you must have the hairy clam of a woman, and that would please me more.

Viola: Oh, madam! I will disrobe down to my bare skin right here in your garden if you swear not to laugh.

Olivia: What self-injury is this? Cesario, do you think I find my own parts to be a matter for jest? If your breasts and hips and the fruit between your thighs are as ripe and eager as my own, we shall have ourselves a banquet. No one may dare laugh at you in my presence.

(Olivia sweeps Viola into her arms and they kiss passionately. Olivia manages to help Viola out of her doublet with one hand while unlacing various other parts of her livery with the other.)

Viola: Oh, madam! I never thought to feel such pleasure!

Olivia: You have barely had a taste, little rosebud. How innocent you must be! How I shall enjoy claiming your maidenhood and keeping you safe from drunken asses like my stupid kinsman Sir Toby and his buddy Sir Andrew. And even your pretentious master the Count, if you only knew. Call me Olivia.

Viola: Olivia, you seem to have a wealth of knowledge and experience, and I am so young and so starved for touch. I deserve to be spanked soundly for appearing to you in disguise.

Olivia: Then I will see to your correction forthwith. (Olivia dexterously finishes unlacing, unbuttoning and removing Viola’s livery. Viola boldly tries to help Olivia out of her gown.)

Olivia: Alas, my dear, these clothes are my suit of armor. (Calling her maid) Ho there, Maria! Come help me to prepare myself for sport. Young Cesario is our guest.

Maria (entering briskly): Shall I bring the birch and the dildo, madam?

Olivia: Of course! You never fail me, Maria. You may help me to leave my imprint on our guest’s impudent pink bottom, and then you shall receive your reward.

(Viola vainly tries to cover her small, perky breasts and curly brown public hair with her two delicate hands. Maria marches up to her and pulls them away.)

Maria: She’s a fine one, madam. Has she a maidenhead still?

Olivia: I believe so, dear, but not for long. (Maria helps Olivia out of layers of clothing until the countess steps out of a pool of satin, revealing lush curves and a smooth golden complexion. She shakes out her long, glossy black hair which matches her bush.)

Olivia (after seating herself on a garden bench) Maria, please position our guest over my lap.

Maria: Gladly. (She lifts Viola by the waist and lays her across Olivia’s lap, face-down. Viola squeals, more as an invitation than a protest.)

Olivia: Spread your legs. I must sample this honeypot first. (Viola’s squealing increases as Olivia slides two fingers down the crack of Viola’s bottom and finds her slit.) This may hurt a bit, little angel, but you must endure it if you wish to become a woman. (Olivia tickles Viola’s clit and angles one finger into her cunt.)

Viola: Oh!

Olivia: Be brave for me, little messenger. You may carry this message back to the Count.
(Olivia skilfully pushes past Viola’s hymen and gently strokes the walls of her cunt.)

Viola: Oh!

Maria (grinning): Save your breath for when I get to you with the dildo.

Viola (spasming): Oh! I think I shall die!

Olivia: Not by a long shot. (Olivia withdraws her finger, smeared with fluid.) You haven’t felt the birch yet.

(Maria, now naked, hands the birch to Olivia.)

Olivia: Are you ready, little one?

Viola: Olivia, I am at your mercy. Do to me what you will. (Olivia and Maria chuckle together like conspirators who know each other’s intentions.)

*******************************

To be continued.