A Glimpse of Stocking

Sacchi Green


“In Olden Days, a Glimpse of Stocking…” You know the rest of the song. The idea was how perceptions of what’s shocking change over time, and, while “shocking” isn’t exactly the same as “dirty,” it’s close enough. Or maybe those terms are closer than I thought. I’ve never reached any conclusion about what’s dirty and what isn’t, but I can see that a shock effect may be a major component. Is something dirty if you think it would shock, well, for instance, your grandmother? (Although I’m a grandmother, and I’m pretty hard to shock when it comes to sexual matters. I mean, duh, I came of age in the 60s. Ever here of them?) Is something not dirty enough to be fun if it wouldn’t shock most people? I can see that.

In terms of what I write, though, I only occasionally think about whether I could be shocking anyone likely to read my work. I did once, when I wrote about a stag beetle (a traditional pet for Japanese boys since they take up so little space) climbing over a girl’s naked torso as test of her submission, but the shock there wasn’t about the sex, it was about aversion to scary-looking insects. I admit that it was fun to write.

Getting back to dirty matters, I tend to think of dirty, sexy, and erotic as terms that are not totally interchangeable. My kneejerk impression of dirty sex (and this whole topic is entirely subjective) is that it’s unsanitary in some way—not that there’s anything wrong with that! I do know perfectly well that most folks don’t think of it that way. Dirty has more connotations of the forbidden (or shocking, which comes pretty close) than of germs. Sexy, on the other hand, doesn’t have to infer the forbidden, or shocking, it just has to inspire lust. So how are erotic stories any different from dirty or sexy ones? They’re not, of course, but in my subjective, irrational mind, erotic encompasses dirty, sexy, shocking, and various other grades of sensuality, but with—I hardly dare say it—a hint of the literary as well.

Of course I’d think that, wouldn’t I, since I call what I write and edit erotica. It’s a pitiful self-deception, I know, and I also know that some of the most lust-inspiring, sexy fiction is far from what I’d call the best-written in literary terms. I see some submissions to the anthologies I edit that are bountifully, shall we say, lubricious, but not particularly good as actual stories. I also have to admit that after years of editing I’ve become jaded. I look for settings, story arcs, concepts I haven’t seen before, and I’ll take well-written, evocative, even lyrical work with only a moderate amount of explicit sexual activity over stories overflowing with bodily fluids and Tab-A into Slot-B action. In fact I find often find that subtler depictions of sex, especially protracted sexual tension, can be more erotic than the whose-wet-body-parts-are-where-doing-what climactic scenes. (Those scenes get pretty hard to edit, in fact, when it’s not at all clear that said body parts could actually get into those positions.) Don't get me wrong; if a story is well-written and the sex fits in, I haven't yet found any level of of dirtiness that would rule it out.

Once in a great while, though,  I’ll even pick a story that doesn’t get to that sort of climactic scene at all. Sometimes I’m surprised that I get away with it. Maybe I won’t next time.

As an example, a story I chose for my next anthology (which hasn’t yet been approved by the publisher, so I may yet not get away with it—I’ll be getting the copyedits next week) stops just before the actual sex the whole thing has been leading up to. The distinctive voices of the characters are outstanding, the concept—shaving delicate areas with an heirloom straight razor—is startling and effective, but quite possibly I should have asked the writer to go farther. I know this writer, though, and I know she’d dig her heels in, thinking, rightly, that in story terms, in the flow and tension and rhythm of the story, where she stops is just right.

Getting back to the glimpse of stockings part from “Anything Goes,” I’m reminded of a scene from James Joyce’s Ulysses. The main protagonist, Leopold Bloom, strolling around Dublin, pauses to watch a young woman on a beach who teases him by gradually revealing more and more of her legs while he surreptitiously masturbates, climaxing when he finally glimpses her knickers (underpants.) It didn’t take stripping or pole dancing or revealing cleavage to get him off, because in the atmosphere of those times, a glimpse of knickers was shocking enough to ignite the imagination. In some other eras or places, stockings would have been enough to do the trick. That scene was certainly qualifies as erotic, if in a rather creepy way. But it can’t compete with a later scene when his wife Molly, alone, reminisces about a scene from her past:
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“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
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That’s a scene that we remnants of “olden times” don’t need to be dirtier.

Back briefly to my own writing. There are stories of mine that do need to be dirtier to qualify as erotica, and they weren’t originally written to qualify as erotica, but I’d kind of like to include them if I ever manage to get a second collection of my work published. One is a quite complex ghost story with characters who are clearly a committed couple having plenty of sex, but none if it is more than touched on gently. Mmm, gentle touches…ahem. The other is also a ghost story, in part, but with many other things going on, and some of it is pretty grim. I’ve had it rejected as pornography just because the characters are lesbian (and trans, in a science-fictional sort of way) but that a whole different issue. Here’s the closest it gets to erotica:
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In the Flesh
Sacchi Green

   The fuchsia-topped cupcake was still there in the morning. Worse, so was I. No homicidal tendencies driving her as far as I could sense, but I could hope I'd been wrong. Last night some darkness all too close to my own had roiled beneath the surface of her mind, some pain as sharp-spiked as her day-glo hair; now she was all matted bed-head and muted mood. I didn't care enough to probe.
Waking up was all I could handle. Waking from dreams of Allison, vibrant, sensuous, teasing, her body warm against mine... But Allie was gone.
The message light on the phone pulsed in counterpoint to the throb in my head. Last night I'd ignored it; now I resigned myself to the inevitable.
"Lexie? You're still in New York?" I had a sudden, gut-wrenching hunger to hear Allie’s husky-sweet voice, but it was only Janet calling, trying for casual and not quite making it.
"You weren’t on the train last night. Let me know when to meet it again, okay?" She drew a long, shuddering breath. I dropped the receiver and burrowed under the pillow.
When I came up for air, last night's little distraction held the phone. I had a hazy memory of nudging her out of bed, expecting her to take a stab at my wallet once I'd zonked out. Maybe, if I were lucky enough, a stab at me. She hadn't even picked up the bills left deliberately on the dresser.
"Don't you wanna know what else she said?"
Great. An emotional voyeur. My head pounded without mercy. When Allie and I were young there was no such thing as too much wine. Or too much anything. I curled into a ball of black misery.
"If you don't get back today she's gonna come find you. And then she said, 'Lexie, you promised!'’
"I didn't promise her!" The musk of sex hung heavy in the air, my scent mingling with—oh God, not Allie's, but this stranger's. I lurched into the bathroom, hoping she'd get the hell out.
No such luck. When I stumbled out of the shower she eyed me in obvious hope of earning an honest bonus.
"I didn't think you'd be so...well, I've never been with a silver butch before."
"Yeah? You want a few references?" A year ago my hair had still been mostly dark. Six weeks ago, for Allie's memorial service, I'd let Janet crop it down to the new gray. The only touch I would accept from her.
"You must work out or something," the kid said.
"Or something," I said. "You don't get calluses like this at a health club. I split a lot of firewood."
A flush tinged her neck as she glanced at my roughened hands, reminding me briefly of Janet. Inconsequentially I wondered whether I'd left enough wood to keep the house warm through a Vermont winter. Janet is strong enough, and willing, but a klutz with an ax.
"The good life," I went on. "Right. You bet. Fresh air, organic veggies, exercise..." I'd spaded gardens, shoveled snow, hauled bales and rousted boxes; and all I had to show for it was the strength to carry Allison in my arms, when it came at last to that, and never stumble.
I had a right to stumble now.
"Get dressed...Nyx, is it?" Her body didn't particularly appeal to me. Fashionably bony, marginally perky. Perky leaves me cold. In Allison's bountiful joys I could lose myself... But Allie was gone.
Diversion had been my goal last night, not pleasure. I couldn't remember what impulse had driven me toward Nyx, but the kid had done well enough. In reward I'd impelled her to a mewling extremity that seemed to astonish her. By her look at my callused hands, she wanted more.
Then she astonished me. "You get into people's heads, don't you," she said with certainty.
"What, because I knew how to push your buttons?" Kids never believe in the value of experience.
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That’s just the beginning of a long story, and there’s almost no reference to actual sex in the rest of it. While I do want erotica to have more than sex going for it, preferably to be about more than sex but with sex integral to the whole, this piece, with all the sex offstage, doesn’t qualify. I don’t think there’s any way that it can.

One more thought about how dirty a story should be. The sex should belong. Stories with extra heavy sex shoe-horned in where it doesn’t need to be in terms of the work as a whole leaves me cold, whereas a glimpse of stocking, in the right context and with the right build-up of sexual tension, could definitely heat me up.

On the Edge

Sacchi Green

   An edge is both an end and a beginning, a dividing line between one space and another, but not a barrier between them. The edge of the forest is the beginning of the cleared land, and vice versa. The forest might spread if no one keeps the land cleared, or the clearing might expand if the trees are cut back. A cliff edge where the land gives way abruptly to a vast expanse of space will not reclaim that empty space, but will probably be eroded by wind and water and time so that the edge retreats farther and farther inland. In either of these cases the edge is not a constant, but a moving line.

When we use the edge as a metaphor, it’s just as fluid. Applied to sexual mores, what’s considered “edgy” is subject to change over time; “In olden days, a glimpse of stocking/was looked on as something shocking/now Heaven knows, Anything goes.” Even in 1934 when Cole Porter wrote that, there were certainly areas of our culture where Anything did not Go, and from time to time such general agreement as there may be swings back and forth on its pendulum. Not only that, but there never seems to be any societal agreement on just where the edges of permissibility fall. Of porn, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I know it when I see it,” and none of the Justices hearing the 1964 case claimed to be able to define exactly where the permissible or legal edge fell.

As erotica writers (and readers) we have some interest in where the edge of what can be published falls, and in how far we can push it. Drawing within the lines get boring and feels constricting. As an editor I like to think that nothing goes too far over the edge as long as it’s well-written, but when it comes down to it I admit to being hypocritical. A great deal depends on what the readership for a particular book will enjoy, and while I do want to stretch their perceptions, for a theme that’s assumed to be sex-positive I do find my edge when a character is severely punished for giving in to her desires, even when that ending is perfect in both the literary and aesthetic sense. It’s intriguing, though, to contemplate an anthology where that would be a perfect fit.

Some kinds of edges do have an almost hypnotic attraction. Standing close to the edge of a cliff…writing scenes that go beyond what even your genre is likely to find acceptable…acting out impulses both dangerous and culturally forbidden…

When it comes to literal cliff edges, I always think of the Grand Canyon, which brings me to the image that came to my mind as soon as I knew we were writing about edges now. Here it is, an excerpt from my story “Bright Angel,” just about the last third of the story. The setting is the Grand Canyon, and the characters are some I’ve written about in two other stories, so maybe someday I’ll give them a whole episodic novel of their own, if there is such a thing.

From “Bright Angel”
Sacchi Green

We were up at dawn the next morning, breakfasting on the Bright Angel Lodge terrace. "Why 'Bright Angel?'" Maura asked.    

I told her about Major John Wesley Powell's exploration of the Colorado river, and the story that after his men named one muddy incoming stream the Dirty Devil, the Major had compensated by dubbing the first clear creek they came to Bright Angel, flowing down from the north to join the river across from what later became Bright Angel Trail. I thought, watching Maura's beautiful face, as luminescent in its own way as the morning light suffusing the mist rising from far below, that he must also have been thinking of Lucifer before the Fall, Milton's "angel bright" of Paradise Lost. Or, just possibly, he had known someone like Maura.    

Three hours later we were far below the rim, three miles along the Hermit and Dripping Springs trails. Maura's cheeks and forehead were smudged with rock dust, and sweat trickled down between her breasts. Her hair was tangled and tied back with a bandanna. Her eyes had never been brighter.

      "Just a little farther," I said, urging her past the spring, its fringe of greenery lively with small birds. "We'll fill our water bottles on the way back." A hundred feet off the trail, through a crevice between boulders, we were on a narrow shelf out of sight of passing climbers at our own level. Our view of sky and rock seemed as wide as infinity, and hikers and rafters deep in the Canyon could see us easily if they looked up; see us, but not clearly enough even with binoculars to recognize Maura's features from past magazine spreads or future appearances on the big screen.    

Maura stood with her arms outstretched like wings and her back to the cliff. Just above her head a twisted juniper grew out from a cleft in the rock, casting a tracery of shadows across her face.  

"This is the place," she said with certainty. "Right here. Right now."  

I drew a wet trail with my tongue along her dusty cheek and kissed her, for once, gently. For once, she allowed the tenderness, kissing back with more sensuality than challenge. Maybe wearing her out was the secret. Or did the vastness of the world spread out before us make petty conflict seem too insignificant?    

More likely, it was just that she had grander things on her mind than private games.    

"Roby...do you think anyone is watching?" Her fingers scrabbled in haste at the buttons of her shirt, and when she'd cast it aside and yanked off the tank top beneath, she went to work on the silver Navajo belt buckle purchased just yesterday. Sunlight glinted from its highly polished surface like spears of fire.    

"I'd bet there are at least a dozen pairs of binoculars and as many cameras aimed right up there," I told her, pointing out the peregrine falcon riding the breeze above us, undoubtedly watching for one of the small birds by the spring to stray from the sheltering shrubbery. "And now that you've been wriggling hard enough to flash signals from that silver mirror sliding down along with your pants, most of them must be checking you out, and calling their buddies to look, too."    

Maura kicked aside her jeans and raised her arms. Her fingers could just grasp the gnarled trunk of the juniper. "Tie me," she said.    

I pulled the bandanna loose from her hair. A twist around slender wrists and up over the juniper, and she was bound just far enough out from the cliff for me to slide behind her and press my thigh hard up against her butt, bending my knee slightly, taking some of her weight. That juniper must have been clinging to life here for a hundred years or more; I hoped to spare its roots for another hard-won century, in spite of her thrashing. And she would thrash.    

"So show them what you've got, girl," I muttered in her ear as I pulled on a latex glove. I'm not sure she even heard me. Her focus was far out over the bright canyon, past labyrinthine ravines and spurs and phallic turrets carved by water, wind, and time. The sharp pinch of my fingers on her breasts grabbed her attention, though, and over her shoulder I watched pink nipples swell and darken into nubbled peaks as wildly beautiful as any rock formation. To my tongue, they would feel tender as well as rigid, straining, begging to be sucked, hard...    

No. In this tableau, this ritual of exposure, I belonged behind the scenes, only my hands coming between Maura's offering of her body and the sun-struck gulf of space and stone.    

So I reached around her and my hands went to work, one alternately flicking and squeezing her breasts, one stroking between dampening thighs. When she tried to press toward my touch, I moved the top hand down to knead her belly and hold her steady while the fingers of the lower one approached the growing slickness of her cunt. Approached, but refused quite to enter, slipping forward and back in the wet folds just short of where she needed me most.    

Maura began to twist and strain. I was nudging her clit erratically, lightly, too lightly; she rocked and bucked, muttering curses interspersed with gasps, making the juniper's trunk creak. Bruised bark added its scent to dried sweat and the intense musk of sex rising from both of us. The friction of her firm ass against my crotch was driving me toward the edge along with her.      

"Now!" I thrust up inside her, fingers twisting, pressing forward, my upper hand sliding down to give her seeking clit the hard, fierce strokes it demanded. Short, sharp gasps punctuated my movements, intensified, accelerated... Until, abruptly, she tensed, the arc of her slim body between tethered wrists and denim-bound boots so beautiful that I ached to capture the vision on film, but could only try to fix it in my mind. "Now! Let it out!"    

And out it came, her long, triumphant cry, echoing from rocky outcroppings, vibrating through her body and into mine as I crushed my mouth against the nape of her neck to muffle my own cries. Through the soft dark tangle of her hair,. out of the sun-dazzled corner of my eye, I thought I saw, for the briefest moment, bright angel wings soaring off into the golden distance.    

Then Maura slumped back against me. I cut her down from the juniper and crouched with her in my arms. Another beat of wings caught my eye, but it was only the falcon veering off toward her hidden aerie. Maura would fly again, to far-off places where I couldn't or wouldn't follow; but for this rare moment of surrender I knew exactly who she was.