Celebrating

By Lisabet Sarai

It's hard for me to believe, but in January 2013, I will turn sixty. Am I looking forward to beginning my seventh decade? Well, as they say, getting old is better than the alternative!

My mother died at fifty-two. One of my dearest friends succumbed to ovarian cancer at fifty-four. Life is always uncertain. My reaction to that hard fact? Celebrate whatever and whenever you can. Thus, even though we really can't afford it, we're throwing a massive party to celebrate my hitting the big Six-Oh. It only happens once!

Since I live in the tropics, the party will be outdoors, on the terrace of an oceanfront hotel. We'll have a buffet dinner, wine and beer, plus an open bar. I'm hoping to hire a band, though I haven't located one yet. In my view, it's not a party if there's no dancing.

The hotel wanted me to commit to a minimum head count. That's pretty tough, since the majority of people I'm inviting live in the U.S. I know from personal experience how difficult and expensive it is to travel halfway around the world. I've tried to balance realism with wishful thinking in my estimate of forty people. I was amused to find that the hotel thinks this is a small party.

In fact, several of my prospective guests have already told me they're coming. I'm thrilled, although some close friends have regretfully declined as well. The RSVP deadline is still several months away, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Of course, if everyone invited actually showed up, we'd be way over budget. Not that I'd begrudge the money – it would be worth it.

Meanwhile, the event has given me the opportunity to reestablish contact with people I haven't heard from in a long time. I sent invitations to friends I figured wouldn't be able to make it, just to open the lines of communication and let them know that I thinking about them, that I'd love them to be here if it were at all possible.

The whole process has been great fun so far – finding a venue, deciding on the menu, creating invitations and the guest list, handling responses – and I'm looking forward not just to the party itself but to all the interactions leading up to the event. I haven't entertained at this scale since my siblings and I organized my dad's eightieth birthday party a decade ago. I'm trying hard not to think about the possible disasters that could derail our plans. Worrying won't prevent these negative happenings, but it certainly will tarnish the pleasure of anticipation.

My only regret is that I haven't been able to invite people from the world of Lisabet Sarai, even though I count some of you among my closest friends. I'd love to celebrate with you. However, for serious practical reasons, I need to keep my writing life strictly separate from my so-called real life. With one or two exceptions, most of my invited guests know nothing about my erotic self. If my writing colleagues were to mingle with these innocent friends from my non-erotic existence, the risk of inadvertent exposure would skyrocket – despite the best intentions.

I think I need to plan another gathering, in either the U.S. or the U.K. (or maybe both!), strictly for my writing friends. What a fantasy – to meet you all in the flesh, swap gossip, share readings, drink and dance and revel in the company of fellow outlaws. I love living in Asia, but I'm pretty isolated from the erotica community. I'm definitely going to try putting a party together next time I'm headed for western climes.

For one thing, that will give me something to look forward to, after this birthday bash is history.

Focus Group

By Lisabet Sarai

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for taking the time to join me and share your opinions. I'm Lisabet Sarai...”

“You're Lisabet Sarai? Cool!”

“I thought you'd be taller.”

“Hey, from your pic, I thought you'd be younger. But you've still got great tits....”

“Please, Mr. Worminghauser, restrain yourself. Remember that this is a mixed group.”

“What do you mean? You write sex stories. Everybody here likes sex, the men and the women, too.”

“When I said mixed, I didn't mean gender. Some members of this focus group read romance rather than erotica. They tend to like things a little less raw than the erotica readers”

“Oh. Well, you said that you wanted us to share our opinions.”

“I do. But let's set some ground rules. We'll go around the room and give each person a turn to ask me a question or offer an opinion. Let's start over here, with Ms. Larchmont. Lily, do you have a question for me?”

“Well, yes. I just finished reading 'Exposure'...”

“Did you like it?”

“Oh yes, I really loved Stella. She's so strong and yet still vulnerable. And smart, too. Everybody's after her, but she manages to keep one step ahead of them. But I want to know why the book doesn't have a happy ending.”

“It's sort of happy. Stella's back where she belongs, dancing at the Peacock....”

“Yes, but she and Jimmy didn't get together.”

“I don't say that they didn't...”

“But you don't say that they did, either. He's such a nice guy, and obviously in love with her. They belong together. He should take her to Greece, like she wants.”

“You think so? But what about Francesca?”

“Her? She's no good for Stella. Stella needs a good man. Maybe if she got married, she'd be able to quit working as a stripper.”

“She likes working as a stripper. Anyway, I deliberately left the ending ambiguous. 'Exposure' is not a romance, it's an erotic thriller. I didn't want to tie up all the loose ends.”

“Well – I think I would have liked the book better if they'd at least gotten engaged...”

“Okay... I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for your feedback, Lily. Let's move on. Bob Brakethrust, do you have anything to say?”

“You should write more femdom.”

“Oh?”

“Your story 'Be Careful What You Wish For' is the hottest femdom piece I've ever read. And 'Quiet Evening at Home', where the two women spank their two-timing boyfriend, is nearly as good. They tan that guy's butt until he's in tears, then make him watch while they play with each other. My kind of story!”

“Thanks very much. Have you read 'Ruby's Rules'? It includes a chapter-long scene in which Ruby dominates Rick.”

“Yeah, I read it, but it's got too much other stuff in it. For one thing, by the end, it seems as though the tables are turned and he's topping her.”

“Yes, well, I was trying to show that nobody is purely dominant or purely submissive – that the roles in a D/s power exchange are fluid. A dominant can't really be effective unless he or she understands, in a deep way, the sub's perspective, and vice versa. That's the whole point with Margaret, too – after being a submissive in her relationship with Liu, she reacts as a domme when she meets Luna.”

“Well, it's all too complicated for me. Just give me femdom, plain and simple. A gorgeous, domineering woman who kicks her guy around, humiliates him, cuckolds him, forces him to do disgusting things like drinking her lover's cum... Mmm. Can't get enough of that sort of thing. And you do it so well. If you would just concentrate on that and not throw in so much variety – woman-woman, male-male, ménages, it's like going to some Thai restaurant where you don't have clue what you'll get when you order. I'm a meat and potatoes man, myself.”

“I see. I appreciate your point of view, and I'll take your suggestions under consideration.”

“Great!”

“Ms. Rizzotto, what about you? What do you like about my writing? What do you want more of?”

“That's easy. Vampires. There's nothing that I love as much as a tall, pale, muscular undead stud, with razor-sharp fangs and a cock like stone.”

“But Reba, everyone is doing vampires.”

“That's because they're so delicious.”

“But don't you get bored?”

“Not a chance. I could read about vampires forever.”

“Well, in my career I've written three vampire stories, including a new one called 'Fourth World' coming out in D.L.King's anthology 'The Sweetest Kiss'. It's about a vampire who lives in Bangkok. But to be honest, I find it hard to find anything new to say about vampires.”

“You asked me what I wanted. I'm just telling you. If you want to make this reader happy, write a sizzling, sexy vampire novel. Better still, a series! Why not turn your Fourth World story into a series?”

“There's already a series called The Vampire of Siam.”

“Oh really? Who wrote it?”

“Thank you for your input, Reba. Ms. Krinklekotter, I'd love to hear your thoughts.”

“My absolute favorite is M/M romance. I loved 'Tomorrow's Gifts', though I have to say that I skipped over the heavy BDSM scenes.”

“You skipped them? Why?”

“They made me uncomfortable – especially the ones between Michael and Thorne. Because it's clear that they don't love each other the way Michael and Neil do...”

“That's the whole point of the story, Kelly.”

“I understand that. But I just couldn't get into the sex without them being in love. It just felt wrong to me.”

“Hmm.”

“Anyway, I hope that you'll write some more M/M. These days that's almost all I read.”

“Actually, I am working on a new M/M novel called 'Necessary Madness'. It's paranormal. Do you like paranormal?”

“I love it. Though honestly I'll read anything that has two horny hunks in love with each other.”

“Well, I'm only a few chapters into this new book. But I'll keep your opinions in mind. And what about you, Mr. Worminghauser.”

“Call me Wayne.”

“All right, Wayne. What do you think of my writing?”

“I love your sex scenes, Lisabet. They make me hard every time. Especially the kinky ones.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“You must have had lots of interesting experiences”

“You shouldn't assume that I've actually done everything that I write about, Wayne.”

“Most of it, though, right? Right? I can tell the difference between imagination and reality. You couldn't write the way you do if you weren't a real slut. That orgy in 'The Antidote'. The public flogging in 'Incognito'. And the billiards scene... you couldn't have made that up! There's nothing you wouldn't try – probably very little that you haven't tried.”

“Mr. Worminghauser, I'm not sure...”

“Personally, I'd rather she didn't put so much sex in her romances. It's embarrassing.”

“Lily, please wait for your turn...”

“Why should I, when he's being so rude? I just want you to know that not all of your readers are perverts like him.”

“Who are you calling a pervert, missy?”

“You, you disgusting sex fiend. You should be locked up.”

“Well you're an ugly, dried-up old maid who I wouldn't fuck in a million years.”

“Hey, hey! Let's be sex positive here. Sex is good – healthy, emotionally fulfilling, a path to enlightenment.”

“I'd like to enlighten your pussy...”

“That's enough from you, Wayne! Stop screaming, Lily. He's a bit of a boor, but he won't hurt you....”

“Why don't you kick his ass, Lisabet? I'd love to see you do that.”

“Bob, I'm a writer, not a wrestler. Wayne, you apologize to Lily. Lily, you do the same. Come on, you're both my readers. I'd really like you to get along.

“I'm sorry things got so out of hand here. I wasn't expecting such a – lively – discussion. Seriously, I appreciate hearing your opinions. I'll do what I can to satisfy them. It's just a bit tough trying to keep everyone happy. But I always do enjoy a challenge...”

---

Actually, these are just the voices in my head. My real readers are far more
polite! I gather their opinions with my monthly contests. I ask a question; they respond and get entered into a random drawing for some nice prize. For more details about this month's contest, see my newsletter.

Dying to Please

by Lisabet Sarai



Is thin sexy? Sexual attractiveness is in the eye of the beholder, but I know from personal experience that our cultural obsession with thinness can be deadly.

In high school, I was what might be called pleasingly plump. Zaftig, as my Jewish grandmother would say, with more than ample curves for a teenager. Like many teens, I thought that I was fat. I always wanted to be thinner, but somehow, I could never manage it. I enjoyed my mom’s cooking too much.

Then, in my senior year, faced with all the stress of applying to colleges and the uncertainties of moving into the adult world, I began to lose weight. First I stopped eating bread and potatoes. Then I stopped adding milk to my coffee, drinking it black with artificial sweeteners. I ate all the salad I could put away, leaving the meat on my plate – cut into small pieces and spread around so that my mother wouldn’t notice. I’d check the scales every day, feeling pride whenever the numbers dropped, guilt and self-disgust when they didn’t. I still recall my intense flush of pleasure when I went for my annual checkup and weighed in at ninety-nine pounds. I’m just a bit over five feet tall, so my doctor was not alarmed. I was thrilled.

During my senior summer, I worked as a clerk in a grocery store, ate raw cucumbers and drank diet soda for lunch, and dropped more weight. By the time September rolled around, I was in the mid-eighties. My parents refused to let me enter university unless I gained weight. I got back up to ninety-two pounds, started school, but dropped out in a month, unable to muster the physical and emotional energy required.

My life for the next year and a half was spent in a limbo of medical and psychiatric institutions. At one point, I dropped below eighty pounds. I stopped menstruating. My limbs were grotesque sticks. My face was gaunt. My hair started to fall out. I was weak, constipated, subject to palpitations and anxiety attacks. I read voraciously during that period – that was about all that I could do. I don’t recall anything now. Zilch. My brain didn’t have enough nutrients to register new memories. In retrospect, the whole period is shrouded in a fog.

Anorexia had not yet become fashionable. I spent three months on the crisis ward of a state psychiatric hospital with suicidal housewives and drug addicts. I had to learn to trust my therapist when he told me that it was okay to eat. I had to suppress my feelings of disgust when I saw my weight climb back into a healthy range, and to deny the supposed evidence of my distorted self-image when I viewed my “fat” body in the mirror.

I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t die. I didn’t suffer any permanent damage, other than my loss of memory. I have personally known anorexics who were not so fortunate. Without treatment, anorexia is fatal 20% of the time. Even with treatment, the mortality rate is 3%. With treatment, only about 60% of anorexics fully recover. (http://www.mirror-mirror.org). It took more than a decade for my body image and my eating habits to return to “normal”.

Can I blame my anorexia on the pervasive myth that “a woman can’t be too thin”? Not directly, of course. Research has shown that anorexia is as much about control and fear as it is about food. Still, if I hadn’t felt fat, I wouldn’t have started to diet, giving the obsession a chance to take hold. And I don’t think that I would have thought I was fat if I had not been continually bombarded by images of skinny women who were hailed as the ideal of beauty.

As the average weight of super models and movie stars has dropped, the prevalence of anorexia has risen dramatically. Is there a relationship? I think so. I was seventeen when I was diagnosed. Now ten year old anorexics are becoming increasingly common. One study found that 81% percent of ten year old girls and 46% of nine year olds dieted. The fear of being fat is so overwhelming that young girls have indicated in surveys that they are more afraid of becoming fat than they are of cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents. (National Eating Disorder Information Center, Canada)

So what, if anything, does this have to do with sex? I personally find skinny women far less sexy than ones who are more well-endowed. It occurs to me that the glorification of being thin in our culture could be an unconscious repudiation of sex. Today’s models and movie stars, with their narrow hips, flat stomachs, and A-cup breasts, look more like children or young boys than adult women. They are cool, graceful, elegant – but asexual.

They are safe. They offer no ample flesh to tempt the mind and raise the temperature, no perilous curves that lead you down the road to sin and perdition.

You may laugh, finding my thesis absurd. I have to tell you, as I watched the pounds drop off, I felt pure and clean. Virtuous. My adolescent sexual fantasies disappeared at the same time, melting away with my fat and muscle. Eating became the cardinal sin, because it nurtured the flesh, the evil blubber that threatened to consume me. Whenever the attendants in the hospital made me eat, I felt dirty, disgusting, smothered by my own body.

I’m intensely grateful that that I escaped from that madness. Even now, it’s all too vivid when I bring back the memories.

Now when I see a woman walking down the street or on the subway with the tell-tale bony knees, wasted arms and protruding cheekbones, a chill runs through me. I want to shake her, show her a mirror, strip away the hallucinations that make her believe she is still obese. When my eleven year old niece complains about how fat she is, I choke back my scream of frustration. You’re beautiful, Allie, I tell her, absolutely perfect, not fat at all.

With a sinking heart, I know that she doesn’t believe me.

Dancing

by Lisabet Sarai



I love to dance. I always have. At four years old I spun round and round, drunk on movement, till I slipped and split my chin open on the unyielding linoleum. Six stitches left a scar I still carry proudly. For my fifth birthday, my parents took me to see the ballet “Giselle”. I remember afterwards, the thrill of being awake at midnight. I watched the snow drift down as we waited for the bus, still entranced by the unearthly grace of the dancers. At eight I had a solo in a community performance, improvising to Gershwin’s “Summertime”, and in high school I danced the role of Bonnie to my best friend’s Clyde.

My parents danced. When my dad led my mother onto the floor for a jitterbug, they’d immediately attract a circle of admirers. He would swing and twirl her, their steps in perfect synchrony, while the crowd applauded. At weddings and bar mitzvahs, I’d be overwhelmed with pride and with the desire to emulate my talented, sexy mother and my ultra-cool dad. It’s a pity they didn’t move to the same rhythms off the dance floor.

In graduate school, I enjoyed an extracurricular career as a belly dancer in a local Middle Eastern restaurant. People actually paid me to dance. I was astonished. The experience was magic. No thought, no fear, no plans – just the music flowing through me, shaping my arms, swirling my hips, guiding my feet. I was beautiful, beloved, free.

Flamenco, tango, rock and roll. The fluid control of Balinese dance, the frenzy of Rajastani steps, the smooth synchronization of a Broadway musical, the hectic kineticism of hip hop. I love it all. Watching a dancer may bring tears to my eyes. Or it may make my own limbs twitch and ache to join in the dance.

Dance for me is both a reality and a metaphor for the union of body and spirit. I use dancing in many of my stories. Incognito opens with a scene in a disco, in which a seductive stranger sweeps Miranda across the floor and awakens her latent passion. In Exposure, Stella exists in a trance-like state of heightened awareness as she performs her strip routine, half-convinced that she sees reads the minds of the men in her audience. Here’s a passage from a novel fragment that is sitting on my hard drive, waiting for new inspiration, tentatively titled Unveiled.

---

On my ninth birthday, my parents took me to see the great Nehir perform, and my destiny was sealed.

I sat bolt upright in my velvet seat, there in Symphony Hall, hardly daring to breathe, as the lights dimmed and the musicians strolled onto the stage. They settled themselves in a row of chairs toward the back. The drummer and the clarinetist whispered together for a moment, then nodded to the man with the oud. Then, an intricate sequence of notes dripped from his strings, rising up in the hall and falling again like plaintive rain.

The house went black. The oud solo still shimmered in the darkness, shivered down my spine, a lament centuries old. A bolt of light shot from the back of the theater, defining a perfect circle of brightness on the stage. There, motionless in the spotlight as though frozen by a flashbulb, stood a diminutive figure swathed in layers of turquoise and gold gauze.

The oud faded to silence. My chest hurt from anticipation. The dumbeq player coaxed two musical beats from his goatskin drum. Nehir raised her arm simultaneously, as though her movement had precipitated the drumbeats rather than the other way around. Two more beats, another gesture. She shifted her hips, making her jeweled belt sparkle, as the drummer matched her rhythm. She pivoted and bent backward, her veils brushing the floor behind her, to the next beats.

The clarinet joined the drum. Nehir’s bare arms snaked through the air. Her hips made slow circles, rising as the melody rose, dipping down when it sank to a lower register. The musicians were in taksim mode, improvising to a free form rhythm, and Nehir perfectly matched their every musical gesture, remaining immobile between notes.

The oud player picked up the melody, and abruptly, the drummer swung into a fast, regular beat. All at once, the dancer was all motion. Her shoulders shimmied, her hips shook, her fingers feathered the air. I could see her rise on her toes as she twirled, translucent fabric trailing behind her.

My heart beat in time with the drum as I drank in Nehir’s fluid, voluptuous movements. Her bare feet were light and sure as she traced the intricate steps of the age-old, ageless dance. She removed her outer veil, swirling it in sinous patterns around her, so that for a moment it seemed that she had a partner. My chest ached with nameless longing.

Nehir did not listen to and interpret the music. The music filled her, bore her up, swept her away in frenzy of glorious energy. She surrendered to the music. She allowed the rhythm to have its way with her. Let the melody enter her, take her, bend her into impossibly graceful forms, travel up her spine until her whole body rippled like water.

Her name meant “the river”, my mother had told me. As I watched her the floodgates opened inside me. I wanted to dance as she danced, wanted that more than anything in the world. I wanted the music to take me and use me as it did her. I craved the knowledge of motion and stillness that, even as a child, I read in her perfect gestures. And I knew, even then, that this was not a mere childish whim.

---

These days, I don’t dance as much as I would like. As the result of over-enthusiastic Jazzercizing over two decades, I developed arthritis in one hip. My days of doing splits are long gone. Even a shimmy hurts.

Still, I dance when I can, in bars or clubs or at parties, and pay the price afterward. While the music holds me, I am weightless and beyond pain. Later, my gratitude soothes the pangs in my poor weak flesh.

Ten years ago, I was trying to understand (as we all do) who I was and where I was going. What is your vision? one book asked. How do you see your life in relation to the world?

My answer to that question was the poem below.

Vision

My life will be a dance.
I will try to tread lightly,
      bouyant
      joyful
      touching but not trampling.

I will trust my partners
      and be trustworthy in return,
Follow through, complete the steps.

I will dance abundance
      accepted and shared;
Faith, power,
      peace and wonder,
And always, love.

Remember that the dance
flows from the inside out,
      spirit to body
      and out to the world,
And that all, spirit, body and world,
      are sacred.
Even when solo, know
      that I dance a part
      in a larger pattern.
Leave behind
      some increase of joy,
      some greater beauty.

Lisabet Made a Funny

by Lisabet Sarai


I’ve been dreading Helen’s topic, “Laughter and Sex”, because, unlike most subjects, I don’t have much to say about it. I’ve never been the sort of person who could make others laugh – in the flesh or in my writing. When I was a kid, my brother and sister would tease me about my lame attempts at making jokes. “Lisabet made a funny!” they’d crow. Their ridicule should have made me reluctant to keep trying, but I really wanted to elicit chuckles rather than groans. Somehow, though, with all my degrees and my half-century of world experience, I have never quite mastered that skill.

Helen, on the other side, can be hilarious when she wants to. (She can also write heart-breaking, breath-stopping stories that are deadly serious.) Take for example, her recent tale “Over the Rainbow” in the Erotica Readers and Writers Association Gallery, in which a bored and weary immigration official encounters a highly irregular prospective immigrant. If you’re not familiar with her Cynical Woman cartoons, you’re missing some of the funniest commentary on a writer’s life that you’ll find on the web.

Okay, I’m cheating. It would be too easy to write about Helen, or all the other authors I know who do understand how to make sex humorous. I really don’t. In my entire ten years writing erotica and erotic romance, I’ve produced exactly two pieces with some claim to be funny. The first is “The Shadow over Des Moines”, an erotic H.P. Lovecraft parody which has never been published. The other is “Stiff”, a tongue-firmly-in-cheek story that originally appeared in Mitzi Szereto’s “sex and death” anthology, Dying for It. Neither of these stories is roll-on-the-floor-clutching-your-belly funny. In fact, they both depend on a certain level of specialized knowledge for their effects. They’re sort of “in-jokes”. If you’re not familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s overblown style, you won’t understand what’s going on in “Des Moines” at all. “Stiff” will probably only make sense to authors – those of us who have struggled to smother our purple prose.

I believe that it takes a certain kind of comic genius to consistently elicit laughter. I just don’t have it. When I try to be funny, I end up working too hard, and the results show that. It seems to me that humor must spring naturally from the artist’s imagination – whether a writer, an illustrator or a stand-up comedian. Of course, since I’m not funny, I might be completely wrong. I do hope readers’ comments will enlighten me.

It suddenly occurs to me that in proposing her topic, Helen may not have been talking about sex and laughter in art, but in the real world. Aha! This I understand, at least a little. Viewed dispassionately, sexual intercourse is more than a bit bizarre. There are also ample opportunities for awkwardness and embarrassment that ultimately generate laughter. But I’d rather focus on the delighted laughter that flows from deep satisfaction and comfort with one’s partner. When you’re in love, or when you’ve just had the best sex you can remember (or even better still, both!), you float. Joy bubbles in your veins; everything is bright, beautiful, shimmering with possibility. Laughter comes easily, wells up naturally in response to the least provocation.

I’ve written about sex and laughter, in this sort of context, lovers who know each other well enough to tease and mock each other, all in play. Actually, that’s a key word, play. I mean this in the sense of children playing, not mind games or masquerades, but the light-hearted abandon that allows us to be ourselves without fear of being judged, even if that means being silly.

People in the BDSM scene often speak of “playing a scene” or going to “play parties”. My meaning is a bit different. However, I have often experienced this sort of playful interaction, laughter just below the surface or even breaking out loud, in the context of a BDSM relationship. I think that some people have the mistaken notion that BDSM is terribly serious, that it has to feel dark and dangerous to be thrilling. Sometimes. Maybe. But I’ve laughed with my master in the middle of a scene at least as often as I’ve cried.

Sneaky, aren’t I? Here I started with sex and laughter, a topic that left me completely uninspired, and brought my post back once again to one of my favorite subjects. But that was last week...

I’d love to be able to generate humor, but I really don’t want my readers rolling eyes and groaning the way my siblings did. I can at least enjoy it when other people are funny. I’m looking forward to laughing a lot this week.

Photo by Fred Askew, http://www.fredaskew.com.

The Joys of Writing BDSM

by Lisabet Sarai



In my post two weeks ago I complained about the constraints of fitting into a genre. Now I have to admit that there is a genre where I’m comfortable -- the genre commonly known as BDSM.

I love writing BDSM. I find it far easier than writing so-called “vanilla” romance or erotica. I’ll be the first to admit the reason: it turns me on. BDSM pushes my personal buttons. My real world experience in the BDSM arena has been fairly limited but has had incredible personal impact. Nothing excites me like a well-written scene between a Master or Mistress and his or her willing slave. I know this is because the action and conversation contain echoes of my own ecstatic awakening to the joys of dominance and submission.

“BDSM” is short for Bondage, Discipline, Sadism and Masochism. It also subsumes “D/s”, Dominance and submission. What is included in BDSM fiction? Depending on who is doing the writing, bondage could be anything from naughty little games with silk scarves to ball gags, hog tying and suspension. Discipline can range from a playful spanking to flogging with a bull whip. Blindfolds, handcuffs, slave collars, dildos, riding crops, leather masks, stiletto heels – the paraphernalia of BDSM have in fact become familiar to the point that they’re almost clichés.

For me, though, the external tools and symbols of BDSM don’t matter, not really. The essence to BDSM, the key to understanding its appeal, lies in the relationship between the dominant and the submissive. Trust is the core concept. The submissive entrusts the dominant with her body, believing that he will administer no more pain than she can bear. She opens her mind to him, sharing her desire to be mastered. She gives him power over her, trusting him to use it wisely. Meanwhile, the dominant trusts the sub to use her safe word if he misjudges her limits, but otherwise, to let him lead her through the scene and not “top from below”.

(For convenience, I am using the terminology of a male dominant and female submissive here, but the dynamics do not change significantly regardless of gender.)

The two participants in this exchange of power are connected – emotionally, psychically, even spiritually. Successful BDSM scenes require a level of communication and honesty beyond what one usually finds in vanilla sexual encounters. A skillful Dom intuits the sub’s psychological and physical state from her breathing, her skin, her body language. To the sub, it can feel as though the dominant is reading her mind – and maybe he is. She cannot lie about her arousal or her agony. Both are plain to see. The experience of being seen and known so deeply is intoxicating, magnifying the sexual excitement.

I enjoy writing BDSM because I can participate vicariously in this intimate connection. I can write from the dominant’s or the submissive’s perspective, male or female. It doesn’t seem to matter. The buzz is the same.

This is just my view. Some readers, and writers, take a more fetishistic approach to BDSM. For these individuals, the paraphernalia are arousing in themselves. It doesn’t matter who is using them. And of course, there are people who find non-consensual scenarios of rape and torture sexually arousing.

It’s not my place to judge these people. After all, there are lots of fine upstanding citizens who would label my own interests and desires as evil or sick. However, neither of these perspectives on BDSM corresponds to my own. I write safe, consensual, responsible, emotionally satisfying BDSM scenes between adults who at very least care about each other’s welfare.

Sounds almost wholesome, doesn’t it?

It’s possible to write BDSM fiction with none of the traditional trappings. One of my all time favorite erotic stories, by Mike Kimera, is called “Other Bonds than Leather”. Better than anything I’ve written, it captures the essence of D/s, separate from the artifacts and the toys.

Meanwhile, here’s something of my own, an example that will perhaps make my point clearer than any more of this intellectualizing.

From “Wednesday Night at Rocky’s Ace Hardware Store” in Rough Caress (Eternal Press, 2008)

We pass a display of galvanized steel fittings. I stop, fascinated. Sturdy eye bolts and swivel bolts, hooks and pulleys, interlocking rings and brackets, all sensuously curved and shining a dull silver. I can't take my eyes away, imagining spread limbs and stretched muscles. Hardware stores always bring out my creative side.

He laughs at my intensity. "You know that we can't attach anything to the walls, Sarah. It's in the resident's agreement."

"Well... what about out on the deck?" Our top-floor condo has a lovely patio built out on the flat part of the roof. From there we have a fabulous view of the city, from Twin Peaks to the Golden Gate.

"You want me to bind you out in the open, where anyone uphill can see you?" He rolls his eyes heavenward, pretending annoyance. "And you say that I'm perverted!"

He steers me onward. Reluctantly, I leave the suggestive display of fittings, only to be transfixed by the rolls of self-service chain at the other end of the aisle.

"Chain is completely impractical," he reminds me with a grin.

"But it's so decorative, so evocative," I counter. "Whips and chains, you know."

"Whatever you want, dear," he says, bowing low. I make a choice and he cuts me a four foot length of the pretty, brass-finished stuff with half-inch links. He dumps it into our basket. It gives a satisfying clink whenever we move.

My nipples go taut at the sound. He notices, of course, and leans down to tweak one, hard. Another wave of lubrication gushes from my cunt. His nostrils flare as my scent fills the aisle.

"My turn," he says. "Let's go check out the dowels." His thumb and forefinger are still grasping my swollen tit. He leads me toward the back of the store.

I look around nervously, but there are few customers at eight PM on a Wednesday evening. Despite my comments about the deck, I'm actually terrified of public exposure. To be more accurate, public restraint or punishment is still beyond my limits, something I'm not ready to admit that I want. He knows that perfectly well.

He halts in front of a rack holding wooden rods of varying diameters and lengths. I have small hands; I could not get my thumb and forefinger around one of the thickest. The thinnest are perhaps a quarter-inch in diameter, like the sticks used to mount children's balloons.

When he releases his hold on my nipple, I still feel the echo of his fingers on my throbbing flesh. "Bend over," he orders. Trembling with fearful excitement, I bend at the waist. I rest my hands on my thighs for support, but he can see that I am not comfortable. He flips my skirt up, baring my buttocks. "Don't move," he cautions, and then disappears, leaving me alone in this awkward and obscene position.

He is gone for what feels like forever. Slight currents of air brush my exposed ass like ghostly fingers. My engorged pudenda ache for his touch, and the scent of my lust is stronger than ever. Sweat trickles down my neck, dampening my hair. My heart sounds so loudly in my ears, I do not even hear him when he returns. He has a folding stepladder, which he assembles and places in front of me. "Hold on to this."

The position is more stable and places far less strain on my back. "Thank you, Master," I whisper, once again marveling at how finely tuned he is to my needs.

He slips a casual finger into my soaking cunt and wriggles it around. "You certainly are wet, Sarah." My pelvis churns at his touch. Without thought, I grind myself against his hand. I am rewarded by a sharp slap on my butt cheek.

"Be still!" he says softly. "I did not give you permission to move."

He continues to explore my well-lubricated folds. Meanwhile I press my lips together and tighten all my muscles, struggling to obey his directive of immobility.

"What are you thinking, little slut?" he whispers in my ear. "Tell me."

I can hardly speak, aroused and taut as I am. "That I'm yours," I gasp, finally. "That I would do anything for you."

That’s it, in the last sentence. I get wet every time I read that sentence. That’s why I write BDSM.

The Golden Age

I was born in the nineteen-fifties, into the world of McCarthy and Eisenhower, conformist and conservative. I reached sexual maturity, though, in a golden age – that fifteen or twenty year period after the invention of the Pill and before the onslaught of AIDS.

Women a generation before me indulged their sexual desires at the risk of becoming pregnant. (Perhaps they risked their reputation as well, but that was a far less tangible concern.) When contraception was unreliable or even illegal, surrendering to the moment could have dire consequences. Unwed mothers were ostracized and back street abortions claimed many lives. Premature marriage was safer, but often shattered a woman’s dreams of a higher education or a career.

Women of my daughter’s generation (actually, I don’t have a daughter, and I’m rather glad) bear an even heavier burden. These days, sex can literally kill you. What a horrible thought! Now sexual relations must be approached warily. They must be negotiated, predicated on the results of blood tests or the availability of “protection”. I bow to the indisputable need for safe sex, but I weep at the damage done to the joy and spontaneity of the sex that I knew.

The golden age. I don’t think that I’m romanticizing. In college, in graduate school and after I began working, I was free to explore who I was sexually, to discover what – and who – I really wanted. The so-called sexual revolution in the late sixties and the seventies was real and wonderful. I don’t want to turn this blog post into a sexual memoir, but I will admit that I had quite a few lovers during that period, including several serious relationships going on concurrently. True, this was a bit confusing emotionally, as well as creating some logistical problems. But it felt right at the time.

I had deep loves as well as my share of short-term flings. Looking back, I am intensely grateful for these experiences. Though I do wonder now where I got the energy!

How does all this reminiscing relate to “the new explicitness”? The opening of society to things sexual began during this golden age. Perhaps this was a reaction to the constraints of the drab fifties. Maybe it was just the natural cycling of society – after all, the nineteen-twenties was also a period of sexual freedom and explicitness.

Now, though, I believe that things have gone too far. A strange opinion, you may think, for an author of erotica. Nevertheless, I stand by it. These days, there’s too much sex in the media and on the Internet. Actually, the real issue for me is not the quantity, it’s the quality. There’s sex everywhere, nudity and kink, on the porn sites and in the evening news. Unfortunately, most of this sex is not arousing or erotic in the least. We’ve become habituated to the surface expressions of sex, and the emotion has slipped away.

Back in my golden age, sex was still naughty, exciting and fun. It could feed your soul and break your heart. Now, in the age of AIDS, sex has no mystery. It is used to sell everything from blue jeans to baby food, and the thrill is largely gone.

Indeed, it has occurred to me that the explosion of explicitness in the public sphere is a reaction to the terrifying reality of AIDS in the private psyche. We’ve deliberately de-sensitized ourselves, killing desire through over-exposure, in order to purge ourselves from the fear of dying through loving.

Maybe this theory simply reflects my history. Perhaps someone who has grown up with AIDS does not see it as the tragedy that I do. It’s not just that it has stolen the lives of so many millions. It has robbed the living, stealing the peak experience of irresistible, irrational passion. My story “After the Plague”, in my collection Fire, captures my feelings about this.

You were born to the plague. So were your mother and father. For you, making love has always been tainted by the threat of death. What a tragedy – an abomination! Can you even begin to imagine a time when two people who were drawn to each other could have sex without fear, without consequences, other than the fact that the emotional connection might or might not strike true?

It's nearly inconceivable to you, I know, the notion of spontaneous sex. No vaccines, no tests, no questions asked. No barriers – at least no physical ones. You might enjoy yourself, you might not. That was the only risk.

I lived in that age. The golden age, it seems now. You could revel in your own body, in someone else's body. Anyone you fancied. Maybe a stranger. Maybe your best friend's husband – or even your best friend herself! If desire called, you answered, as long as that was what felt right.

Every day was ripe with erotic possibilities. We moved through our world (well, perhaps I should speak only for myself) in a continual state of borderline arousal, ready to recognize and enjoy the next sensual adventure.

You're trying to be polite, but I can see your nose wrinkle with disgust at my "promiscuity". To you it sounds unthinkable. Irresponsible. Try to understand. Sex was safe – without drugs or viral inhibitors or any other "precautions". Oh, you could be hurt. You could fall in love with someone who didn't care for you, or with a stranger you'd never see again. But you were always free to try.

So how can an author of erotica evoke this kind of emotion, in our pressurized, impersonal, hyper-sexual world? I’m not sure. Speaking for myself, I try to capture the emotional essence of my own experiences and transplant it into my characters. I write on the fringes of the acceptable, using taboos to recreate the delicious sensation of transgression that I knew when I was younger. And I focus on the feelings – not the sensations of sexual intercourse, but the characters’ emotions as they allow themselves to sink into passion.

It’s a challenge, and I take it very seriously. I’ll allow the unnamed narrator of “Before the Plague” to speak for me:

You're right, I'm a romantic, but don't you think the world today needs a romantic or two? Look, my conapt is just a few levels up. Wouldn't you like to come up and join me for a nightcap?

That swelling in your britches is answer enough. No, that's OK, let me get the tab. Come on now, don't be such a prude. You know that you want to.

Of course I have a supply of condoms, viricide, gloves and dental dams. I'm a woman of my times. But I hope that I can make you forget all that. I want you to relax, to trust me, to let me give you a glimpse, a taste, of what pleasure was like before the plague.

Because, so help me, if someone doesn't know, and remember, we're doomed. Or might as well be.

Genres? We don't need no stinking genres!

by Lisabet Sarai



Jamie’s topic for this week at Oh Get A Grip asks the question, what’s your favorite genre to write? My reaction is perhaps not so extreme as my title would suggest, but to be honest, I’m rather fed up with the whole concept. The way I see it, genres are primarily a marketing issue. The market slaps a genre label onto your work and puts you in a box.

I don’t like to be cooped up in a box. (Well, not unless my Master put me there!) My writing tends to cross genres. I write M/M, F/F, M/F/M, M/M/F, and pretty much every other combination of genders that you could imagine – in the same book. I have BDSM elements, paranormal elements, cross-cultural elements and historical settings – all bound up together.

My recently released novel Exposure is labeled as “erotic suspense”, and I suppose that is as accurate as any single label would be, but then I worry: will my readers be upset by the F/F scenes? And what about the readers who love lesbian fiction? How will they know they can find it in my book?

Incognito is tagged as “contemporary erotic romance”, yet nearly a third of the book takes place in Victorian Boston. Raw Silk was contracted to its original publisher as “erotica”. Now it’s selling as “erotic romance”. I probably changed no more than 1% of the text. Was that enough to change the genre? Of course not!

I recently pitched a story to one of my publishers, a contribution to a menage anthology. The editor rejected it because it had some male/male interaction, and this anthology was supposed to be restricted to M/F/M only.

Grr! I mean, it’s up to her what she wants to publish, but I can’t help thinking that she has a rather narrow definition of menage.

I understand why publishers want to assign genre labels. It’s a short cut for readers looking for a particular sort of subject matter. You liked the last two werewolf novels you bought? Here, try another one. Or twelve. But perhaps readers might be happier experimenting. As much as I love well-written BDSM, I can’t take a steady diet of it. Am I weird, wanting to have some variety? Wanting to mix it up? (My husband will energetically assert that I am indeed weird, but not for that reason!)

From what I’ve observed in my two and a half years in the ePublishing world, genre labels seem to encourage a distressing level of uniformity. We see piles of shapeshifter books, hundreds of vampire romances. Every week a dozen new volumes set in mystical realms inhabited by beings with magical powers hit the cyber-shelves.

Maybe most readers really are looking for predictability. Not me. When I read, I want to be surprised. Astonished by the author’s original premise. Sucked into places I didn’t expect to go.

Weird, right?

One genre label that drives me crazy is “inter-racial romance”. To me, categorizing a romance based on the race of the protagonists smacks of bigotry and prejudice. Sure, a black woman and a white man (or vice versa) may be more of a turn on for some people than a same-race couple, but to me, using the “inter-racial” label seems to be validating and perpetuating the old myths associated with segregation and slavery.

I’ve been assured by authors who explicitly identify their work as “inter-racial” that this sub-genre sells well. Ah well, I suppose the market rules. As for me, I’ve written stories featuring mixed race lovers, but I’ll never use the word “inter-racial” to try and sell them. Just my feelings.

It suddenly strikes me that my argument against the inter-racial label sounds similar to the complaints some people make about BDSM. It encourages violence against women, they say. It makes cruelty and abuse acceptable and sexy.

Now personally, I know that this is hogwash – at least for the type of BDSM that I write. The BDSM relationships in which my characters are involved are intimate, enjoyable, fulfilling, even healing. I suppose, though, that someone who had never read my work or experienced the potential joy to be found in a D/s relationship might well find BDSM fiction alien and threatening, sick and dangerous.

This, in turn, makes me realize that another purpose of genre labels is to warn readers away from fiction that would make them uncomfortable. I suppose I can understand this, but it still makes me wonder. If they’ve never read BDSM, or FF, or MM, how do they know they won’t like it. Do readers really want the same stories, the same experience, over and over?

Maybe they do. Maybe I’m just weird. Maybe that’s why my writing doesn’t sell better!

What do you think?

A Valentine's Origin Myth

By Lisabet Sarai


To kick off the topic for this week (which is, of course, Valentine’s Day), I thought that I’d discuss the history of this beloved holiday. When I did some research, however, I discovered a great deal of confusion. In fact, the history of Valentine’s Day is one big muddle.

First, there was not one, but three Saint Valentines, all martyrs during the first few centuries after Christ, when Rome was working to suppress the subversive new religion. Second, there appears to be no relationship whatsoever between any of these saintly figures (who were celibate priests) and the topics of romantic love or sex. Yet by Chaucer’s time, such an association existed, at least tentatively, and the notion was well-established by Shakespeare’s period, as indicated by an extended passage from Hamlet:

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

The holiday was commercialized in the mid-nineteenth century, when the sending of cards, flowers and gifts became popular. I’m more curious, though, about the original inspiration. How did Saint Valentine become the patron of lovers? There must be something missing from the historical record. Given the lack of any clues, I decided to offer my own Valentine’s origin myth based (extremely loosely) on what we do know about the mysterious martyr.

The Origin of Valentine’s Day (according to Lisabet Sarai!)

The priest Valentinus lay on the straw pallet in his cell. Final rays from the setting sun pierced the slits in the stone walls and made gold streaks on the floor. Valentinus sighed at the thought that this would be the last he would see of the glorious orb. Soon, though, I’ll will be with Christ, in the heart of glory, he reminded himself. Still, his heart was as heavy as the granite enclosing him.

Claudius had just left in a fit of pique, after failing again to make him recant. Despite the emperor’s epithet, “The Cruel”, Valentinus understood that the august ruler respected him, and did not want him to lose his head. It was all political for Claudius; he hadn’t a spiritual bone in his body. The new religion offered too much of a challenge to the state to be tolerated. If the priest would renounce his faith and publicly bow to Jupiter, Claudius would free him in an instant, an example to the self-righteous ramble who followed the new prophet.

Valentinus was a different sort of man. He believed in divine love and ultimate resurrection. His faith had kept him strong and pure for more than fifteen years, since the trip to Ephesus when he had first encountered the True Church. For his faith, he would lose his life. But he would save his soul.

Dusk deepened to full night. The pitch torch smoked and sputtered. Valentinus prayed, there on his back. He knew that his Lord did not require the discomfort of bony knees on a hard floor.

The iron door squealed. Valentine sat up. It was too early for his last supper. A slight feminine figure swathed in white linen slipped into the cell and pushed the recalcitrant door shut behind her. She approached the pallet and removed her outer wrap.

Golden curls tumbled down over her shoulders, brilliant as the vanished sun. A chaplet of myrtle bound her brow. Youth shone in her eyes, but the body he glimpsed under her finely-woven robe was the ripe form of a woman. Ancient desire stirred in him. He suppressed it with the ease of long practice.

“Who are you, lady? Why have you come to disturb my final meditations?”

“Lord Valentinus, I am Lydia, priestess of Juno. The Holy Mother is affronted by your stubborn refusal to pay her homage. Tonight is the festival of Lupercalia. Tonight, maids and youths throughout Rome will be celebrating the marriage of Juno and Jupiter, the rulers of heaven. Yet you languish here, refusing to accept the gift of love, scorning the generosity of the gods.”

“Your gods are not mine, lady. I neither honor nor scorn them. They are irrelevant to me.”

“Relevant enough to take your head,” Lydia commented.

“My body is unimportant. Soon enough, my soul will be with God.” Despite his brave words, though, her beauty was working her spell on him. The rod of flesh between his legs grew stiffer by the minute.

Lydia untied the sash that fastened her robe. The diaphanous garment floated to the floor, revealing her lush, perfect body. “I’ve come to offer you Juno’s gifts, nevertheless.” She approached the pallet and took his face in her hands. “I know I cannot change your mind, Valentinus, or make you renounce your faith. But allow me to provide one last taste of the pleasures of earth, before you leave it.”

“No, wait. I am sworn to celibacy...” Valentinus began. Yet he did not resist when she gathered him to her sweet breasts, when she parted the ragged cotton robe that covered him and laved his aching nipples with her tongue. He cried out, but did not push her away, when she swallowed the stubborn pillar jutting from his groin. He grabbed her hips and arched into her when she straddled him and settled his shaft in the liquid depths between her thighs.

They moved together, not speaking aloud, but joined in spirit. She is not like the other Romans, realized Valentinus, even as pleasure surged through him in ecstatic waves. She does not care about material things. She is a creature of faith, a true daughter of her gods. I can touch her soul as well as her body.

Moonlight crept through the window-slits, painting their skin silver. Their passion rose and fell, smooth and silent as the Tiber rolling toward the sea. Their pleasure crested and ebbed and then climbed again. They never broke the connection. Through the night he remained within her, their limbs entwined, their minds and hearts united.

At last they slept. At dawn came the squeal of the rusty hinges and the guards, unexpectedly gentle when they saw Valentinus and Lydia together. Without shame, ignoring the lustful gaze of the centurions, Lydia rose and donned her robe. “Remember me,” she told the priest, with a last kiss. “It will ease the last pain.”

“And remember me,” said Valentinus, unfazed by his apparent fall from grace. “Here, take this.” He handed her a scroll, his copy of the Scriptures. “I know I will not woo you from your gods to my God, but let this be my keepsake.”

“Sign it,” she said, and he did, before the guards led him to the execution ground.

Lydia returned to the temple, rejoicing in the trickle of Valentinus’ seed down the insides of her thighs. She did not wish to see his final moments. She knew that she would be in his thoughts as the sword came down. She made her obeisance to the majestic gilded image of the Mother before returning to her modest room. There, she unfurled the scroll and read her lover’s dedication.

“To my beloved Lydia whom I look forward to meeting in heaven,
For I know that no God or gods would be cruel enough to separate us.
From your devoted Valentine.”

Tears fell on the parchment, smearing the charcoal-based ink.

They were tears of joy.

---

Happy Valentine’s Day to all of our readers!

Grand Re-Opening Contest Winner

Thanks to all who contributed to our grand re-opening week by reading and commenting. We received 133 distinct, non-anonymous comments (not including comments by Grip authors). All I can say is WOW.

Our randomly chosen winner is blessedheart. Please email me at the email address you will find on my website (http://www.lisabetsarai.com/links.html) and tell me your preferred email address, so that we can send you your gift certificate.

Once again, thanks to everyone who visited. We do hope that you'll continue to drop by the Grip and offer your thoughts.

And so it begins...

by Lisabet Sarai

Initiation by Eric Maslowski

Initiation. The word evokes images of secret rituals, trials designed to test the mettle of novices who seek knowledge or power or membership in some elite association. Rites of passage. Transitions from innocence to experience. Of course “initiation” also simply means “beginning”, but its deeper meaning has more emotional resonance, especially for a writer.

We’ve all lived through initiations. The first nasty rejection. The first scathing review. The first public reading of our work. The first tattoo or piercing. For some of us, the first time we were bound or sodomized, or the first time we made love to someone of our own gender.

Initiations are challenging and often uncomfortable. Looking back, we might forget the discomfort, but the reality is that it’s never easy. However, these experiences usually make us wiser or stronger -- more skilled, more sensitive or more loving. That’s the whole point.

So, what does this have to do with “Oh Get A Grip”? For the last two years, I’ve been resisting the universal recommendation that every author should blog regularly. I wasn’t willing to make the commitment. I don’t have anything to say, I rationalized – though whenever I was invited to guest blog, I always managed to fill the page. I don’t have the time, I complained to anyone who would listen. (Not too many people did, of course. They were too busy blogging!) I knew in my heart that I should bite the bullet and join the blogosphere, but I was reluctant. I resisted making the next transition in my developing career as an author.

Then, out of the blue, one of the former members of “Oh Get A Grip” contacted me, asking if I’d like to take over her slot, as she was planning to move on. I figured this was a sign. I swallowed hard and agreed. The next thing I knew, the whole original Grip crew wanted to retire. I thought long and hard. Did I want to find another group and take over responsibility for the whole shebang? I loved the topic-based organization and the lively discussions – could my group and I do as well, keep the energy flowing?

I – we – have decided to try. This week you’ll meet a whole new collection of authors, most of them friends and colleagues whom I’ve known (on the ‘Net, at least) for years. We all write erotic romance, erotica, or some combination. We’re all rather opinionated. (That’s meant to be a compliment, guys...!) I’m hoping that, in collaboration with our readers, we can create an enlightening, exciting and entertaining space here in the cyberworld.

We can’t do this without you. We want you to participate! Don’t just read, comment! In fact, to get you into the habit, all this week we’re running a “Grand Re-Opening” contest. Every time you leave a comment, you’re entered to win. The prize is a $30 Amazon gift certificate – bound to be useful in today’s lean times. I’ll announce the winner next Sunday right here. Stay tuned!

I’m about to hit the “Post” button, sending this inaugural message into public view. I am definitely nervous. Once you cross the threshold, there’s no going back. Once you’ve survived the trial by fire, you can only look ahead to the next challenge.

I’m looking forward to new tests and new opportunities to grow.

Welcome to the next generation of the Grip!

Image used with permission. Visit Eric's website for more compelling digital art.

Guest Blogger: Author Lisabet Sarai

The crew at Oh Get a Grip welcomes guest blogger, author Lisabet Sarai!

Candlelight, Wine and a Whip: Why BDSM is Romantic

Let me begin by saying that every individual has different preferences, desires and limits. That is, in fact, one of the first tenets of BDSM. The picture of the pierced self-corset posted a few days squicked me, too. However, I do believe that many people get hung up on the externals, the paraphernalia and the physical acts popularly associated with dominance and submission, and miss the main point. At the fundamental level, BDSM is about the relationship between the dominant and the submissive – a relationship that at its best is as intimate, intense and fulfilling as anything portrayed in vanilla romance.

BDSM not about one person controlling another. It’s not about cruelty or ego or weakness or low self-esteem or inequality. Serious practitioners (and I guess I must count myself in that number, though my current relationship is vanilla) will tell you that the essence of dominance and submission is an exchange of power. The submissive freely offers the dominant power over her body. (For now I'll assume a female submissive. I've written both male- and female-dominant tales, as well as some lesbian D/s, but it gets awkward to keep using multiple pronouns!) The dominant accepts responsibility for the submissive’s well-being, which includes her pleasure.

The sub surrenders herself to the dom, in devotion and trust. The dom can do whatever he wants with the sub; she has, after all, given her consent (although in the real world, there are always limits, agreed or intuited). He has the intoxicating knowledge that by taking what he desires, he will also give his sub what she most craves: the satisfaction of pleasing her master and the freedom to experience her secret, forbidden fantasies of ravishment and abuse.
Some threads in BDSM literature portray non-consensual dominance, where the submissive is coerced, humiliated and literally abused. I exclude these from consideration. Some people are turned on by such stories, and that’s okay, but I can’t see anything romantic in these scenarios.

My BDSM work focuses on individuals, often in a committed relationship, who share mutually complementary desires and explore them together. Whether the tale involves bondage, or spanking, or electrical stimulation, or some other challenge posed by the dominant for the submissive to experience, the real point is the psychic bond that develops between the participants in a BDSM scene. I know that it probably sounds absurd if you haven’t experienced it, but the dom beats the submissive out of love for her.

I had intended to share an excerpt from Raw Silk. This novel traces the journey of an intelligent, independent woman coming to accept her submissive desires and to love the man who intuits and fulfills them. At the same time, he recognizes his need for her. However, I decided instead to give you something a bit more light-hearted, a selection from Rough Caress, my collection of BDSM short stories. “Wednesday Night at Rocky’s Ace Hardware” is not a true story – but it might well have been. It captures the spirit of my own experiences with D/s, and demonstrates, much better than my halting efforts above, how BDSM can be wonderfully romantic.

Thanks Lisabet! And now a little about one of her fabulous romances. Click on the cover for more information:

X-rated Excerpt from “Wednesday Night at Rocky’s Ace Hardware” From Rough Caress :

We pass a display of galvanized steel fittings. I stop, fascinated. Sturdy eyebolts and swivel bolts, hooks and pulleys, interlocking rings and brackets, all sensuously curved and shining a dull silver. I can't take my eyes away, imagining spread limbs and stretched muscles. Hardware stores always bring out my creative side.

He laughs at my intensity. "You know that we can't attach anything to the walls, Sarah. It's in the resident's agreement."

"Well... what about out on the deck?" Our top-floor condo has a lovely patio built out on the flat part of the roof. From there we have a fabulous view of the city, from Twin Peaks to the Golden Gate.

"You want me to bind you out in the open, where anyone uphill can see you?" He rolls his eyes heavenward, pretending annoyance. "And you say that I'm perverted!"

He steers me onward. Reluctantly, I leave the suggestive display of fittings, only to be transfixed by the rolls of self-service chain at the other end of the aisle.

"Chain is completely impractical," he reminds me with a grin.

"But it's so decorative, so evocative," I counter. "Whips and chains, you know."

"Whatever you want, dear," he says, bowing low. I make a choice and he cuts me a four-foot length of the pretty, brass-finished stuff with half-inch links. He dumps it into our basket. It gives a satisfying clink whenever we move.

My nipples go taut at the sound. He notices, of course, and leans down to tweak one, hard. Another wave of lubrication gushes from my cunt. His nostrils flare as my scent fills the aisle.

"My turn," he says. "Let's go check out the dowels." His thumb and forefinger are still grasping my swollen tit. He leads me toward the back of the store.

I look around nervously, but there are few customers at eight PM on a Wednesday evening. Despite my comments about the deck, I'm actually terrified of public exposure. To be more accurate, public restraint or punishment is still beyond my limits, something I'm not ready to admit that I want. He knows that perfectly well.

He halts in front of a rack holding wooden rods of varying diameters and lengths. I have small hands; I could not get my thumb and forefinger around one of the thickest. The thinnest are perhaps a quarter-inch in diameter, like the sticks used to mount children's balloons.

When he releases his hold on my nipple, I still feel the echo of his fingers on my throbbing flesh. "Bend over," he orders. Trembling with fearful excitement, I bend at the waist. I rest my hands on my thighs for support, but he can see that I am not comfortable. He flips my skirt up, baring my buttocks. "Don't move," he cautions, and then disappears, leaving me alone in this awkward and obscene position.

He is gone for what feels like forever. Slight currents of air brush my exposed ass like ghostly fingers. My engorged pudenda ache for his touch, and the scent of my lust is stronger than ever. Sweat trickles down my neck, dampening my hair. My heart sounds so loudly in my ears, I do not even hear him when he returns. He has a folding stepladder, which he assembles and places in front of me. "Hold on to this."

The position is more stable and places far less strain on my back. "Thank you, Master," I whisper, once again marveling at how finely tuned he is to my needs.

He slips a casual finger into my soaking cunt and wriggles it around. "You certainly are wet, Sarah." My pelvis churns at his touch. Without thought, I grind myself against his hand. I am rewarded by a sharp slap on my butt cheek.

"Be still!" he says softly. "I did not give you permission to move."

He continues to explore my well-lubricated folds. Meanwhile I press my lips together and tighten all my muscles, struggling to obey his directive of immobility.

"What are you thinking, little slut?" he whispers in my ear. "Tell me."

I can hardly speak, aroused and taut as I am. "That I'm yours," I gasp, finally. "That I would do anything for you."

"Really? Well, we'll see about that, won't we?" His voice holds that familiar hint of mockery, but I can tell he is pleased. He pulls his hand abruptly from my sex, and I almost cry out in disappointment. "Now, let me think about this..."

I can hear him rummaging among the dowels. My mind paints pictures of what he will do, what he will choose. I see him easing the fattest rod into my cunt. My sex spasms at the thought, and an electric thrill seizes my clit. But then, why would I think he'd prefer my cunt to my rear hole? He's told me, often, that taking me anally is the purest form of domination. What if he forces a dowel into my ass, presented so conveniently to him here in the aisle of this hardware store, where anyone could watch and observe my total degradation?

I almost come with that thought. But as usual, he surprises me. Just as I am getting control of myself, I hear a swooshing sound, and something burns a fiery track across my left buttock. Before I can recover, my right cheek is symmetrically assaulted. Tears rise and spill down my face at the sudden, spectacular pain.

I tense, expecting more blows, but instead there is the blessed relief of his palm, delicately stroking my inflamed skin. "Yes," he says, "this should do quite nicely, seeing as birch switches are fairly hard to come by in the city..." He circles me, raises me up, and deposits a gentle kiss on my grateful lips. "Don't you think that this will work well, Sarah?"

I nod, still dazed by the pleasure and pain surging in my lower parts. He smoothes my dress over the rosy streaks that I know mark my skin.

I am barely decent when a bespectacled clerk in a blue-striped vest rounds the corner and almost bumps into us. "Oh, excuse me," he says, flustered. "Can I help you with anything?"

My Master looks down at me, pondering a moment. "Let's see, we have plenty of rope... which way to the plumbing supplies?"

BDSM work by Lisabet Sarai

Rough Caress (short stories) ISBN 978-0-980-4739-7-1
from Eternal Press

Ruby’s Rules (erotic romance novel) ISBN 978-1-897559-24-6
from Eternal Press

Raw Silk (erotic romance novel)
Incognito (erotic romance novel)
Rendezvous (romantic novella)
from Total-E-Bound