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:
____________

“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."
____________

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:
____________

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.
____________

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.

Reading in the Borderlands

by Annabeth Leong

I always like to list the last several things I’ve read because I like to read all over the place genre-wise.

Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim

You know a book is good when you have lunch with someone and spend the entire time just telling them about the book, story after story. This is a memoir about Suki Kim’s experience teaching at a school in North Korea (it’s a really big deal that she was there, because outsiders are rarely allowed in).

It captivated me utterly. Her love for her students is obvious, even as she fears them, knowing that at any time one of them could report her for saying something that breaks the many spoken and unspoken rules of the place. Her depiction of North Korea is fascinating and disturbing. I am a fan of dystopian fiction, and I’ve never read about a real place that seems like it would fit so well in a dystopian novel. At the same time, my fascination feels voyeuristic and weird since this isn’t fiction. I was compelled by her portrayal of the psychological effects of watching her words and action as carefully as she has to while she is there. Finally, her discussion of the history of the split between North and South Korea, both informative and personal, moved me deeply. I didn’t know much of anything about that before reading this book, but exile, diaspora, and separation are themes that always speak to me.

Her writing style is of the spare and poetic variety that I love the most.

I can’t recommend this one enough.

French Kissing by Harper Bliss

I downloaded the pilot episode of this for free so long ago that I don’t even remember doing it, and just never got around to reading it. Then I found myself waiting around somewhere with only my Kindle to entertain me and rediscovered it. I would describe this book as “lesbian drama in Paris,” and it’s set up as if it were a television series. It was just the sort of light, absorbing read I needed at the time. I started reading casually, but then my pace and obsession picked up, and before I knew it, I had devoured both seasons (and am now eagerly awaiting the third!).

There are not incidental resemblances to The L-word series. I picture Bliss’s Steph as played by Kate Moennig, absolutely (in other words, like The L-word’s Shane). Bliss’s Nadia and Juliette feel like the Bette and Tina of French Kissing.

However, Bliss makes all that her own, and doesn’t fall into the sorts of missteps common to long, dramatic stories. Steph is a womanizer, but her arc is really about true love. The L-word never used Shane so well.

I often find that drama gets either too tense or too repetitive for me. French Kissing, however, is excellently paced, and its conflicts feel fresh and distinct.

I’d recommend it for anyone to whom the idea of lesbian drama in Paris appeals. And you’d better believe I’ll be downloading season three later this month!

Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older

This is a solid urban fantasy with some twists that make it better than usual. Older’s voice is refreshing and musical. He’s going for a stylish noir, and he makes that his own, both checking the classic boxes and creating something different and satisfying in its own way.

A big part of that for me had to do with race. I was pleasantly surprised to see quotations from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands introducing the book. As a mixed-race person who never feels like I belong anywhere, this book’s themes spoke to me deeply, and the Anzaldua quotes told me right off the bat to expect that.

The main character, Carlos, is halfway between living and dead, and Older uses that to explore all sorts of halfways. Being brown. Being open to emotion, but also sort of broken. Being weak and strong at the same time. This is the world I live in and know, and it meant a lot to me to read it. I loved his racial descriptions and observations because the US can be so literally black and white about race that I rarely encounter work that recognizes more complexity.

Though I was sold on the voice immediately, it took me a bit to get into the story. Once part three hit, however, I was in that state where you’re trying to wave people away so you can get back to reading. I’ve ordered the next Bone Street Rumba novel, and am looking forward to it.

Carol by Patricia Highsmith

I saw the movie, and (heresy time) did not love it as much as my favorite queer websites seemed to think I would. To me, there was a sterility between Cate Blanchett’s Carol and Rooney Mara’s Therese that made the love story difficult to accept. I also felt uneasy with their age difference—that’s a thing that tends to bother me.

In the book, however, it’s not sterility. It’s a sort of spareness and restraint filled with longing and questioning. It takes me back to when I loved a woman but didn’t really understand that it was possible to love a woman, when I had desires that made no sense to me because I had no context for them.

There is a strong literary sensibility to this book. There are scenes that feel significant but you’re not sure why. There’s a sense of mystery to everything that happens.

The writing surprises me. I notice inconsistencies of plot and detail, but somehow I forgive it all. I wonder how some of these things made it through editing, but they don’t seem to take away from the way the story captivates me. There is something so private and internal about this book that I’m not surprised the movie didn’t work for me.

I’m still reading this one and am about halfway through. I’m curious how I will feel in the end. In the movie, the end felt empty to me. I didn’t really want Therese and Carol to be together. I suspect it may be different for me with the book.

Your writing: For Coming Together: Positively Sexy

And finally, there’s what I plan to be reading over the next six months: submissions for the new book I’m editing. It’s for Coming Together, it’s a collection of erotica about characters who have STIs, and it will benefit the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health. You can read more about it here. Definitely ask me if you have any questions!

Erotic Addiction

Sacchi Green

Why write erotica? Well, my best guess as to why I do it is that I’m a short-story writer by nature, and pretty much the only markets for short stories are in the genres of erotica or science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction (which is where I got my start, and where I still dabble from time to time.) Even my sf/f stories tended to have an erotic subtext, so when I discovered that there were markets for specifically erotic short stories I was off and running.

True as the above may be, I realize that we’ve been discussing erotica on more complex or abstract levels that have nothing to do with short stories versus novels, and raise many more questions than we can find answers for. Let’s skip over the question of  “Why write fiction at all?” and move on to “Why write stories with explicit sex scenes?” Which, of course, raises further questions of how much sex a story needs to qualify as erotica, whether a story with romance gives up any claim to being erotica no matter how much sex it includes, and, more important from a literary point of view (if one cares about such things), whether the sex is “gratuitous” if the story would be complete without it.

I’m of the opinion that explicit sex is a great revealer of character and mood and is often essential to the plot or story arc, but even when it's not, it adds color and intensity. Still, as an anthology editor, I prefer erotic fiction that’s about something besides sex, which usually means that the sex itself is about something besides sex.  (Outstanding writing, of course, trumps all other concerns.) I’ve edited a dozen anthologies marketed as erotica, and, while I’ll freely admit that not all of the stories would qualify as erotica rather than erotic romance to real sticklers when it comes to sexual content, I’ve never had any complaints on that score that I know of. Maybe working in the sub-niche of lesbian fiction helps—I’ve had reviewers rave about how kinky a book is when I didn’t think there was much that was all that edgy in that particular book. I guess just having LGBT themes is enough to qualify as kinky to some folks. In fact, way back when I was writing sf/f I had an editor turn down a story because it was “porn”, when there was almost no actual sex portrayed (except, apparently, in his own mind when he read it.) To be fair, these days the better sf/f publications are begging for “diversity”.

My editorial choices these days are greatly influenced by originality, maybe to the detriment of the sexual content. Okay, I’m getting jaded, and I have to remind myself to use at least a few stories (as long as they’re well-written) that will appeal to new readers who haven’t seen it all before. Fortunately I see more and more writers with originality and skill to offset the many beginners who think they should write things  just like what they’ve read for free online. For Best Lesbian Erotica 2016 I’ve chosen some work more because it interested me than because I expect it to turn readers on, and I may well get complaints. One story set in a London bomb shelter during WWII takes a necessarily long time to get to the necessarily somewhat muted sex. In another, the streets of Liverpool in 1961 spawn a rock band of rebels, with a whole lot more story than sex, but what there is, is choice. Then we have Miss Scarlet from Clue hustling a female cop in the New York subway system, also with a great deal of story before getting down to fucking. Outstanding stories, as are the rest, and sexy. But a few may be erotica mostly because I say they are. (Well, the Miss Scarlet one is reprint, so clearly others accept it as erotica, too, and it's had rave reviews.)

Looking at things from the “gratuitous” point of view, some of the pieces I chose would be excellent as stories without the sex being as explicit, but the sex makes them even better. I don’t have final approval yet from the new Cleis publisher, and I have no way yet to judge her taste, or that of the new owners, so the contents may change. That’s the way it goes. The ground, as the other bloggers here have pointed out, is shifting under our feet.

I’ll probably keep on writing and editing stories that pass as erotica, whether or not they sell much, but now I’m wondering how much of my own writing would be just as well off without the explicit sex. Here’s an experiment. My piece “The Outside Edge”, an Olympic figure skating story, was published in my first anthology for Cleis Press, Girl Crazy, and reprinted in Best Lesbian Romance 2010 after some debate about whether it might be too erotic for romance. It’s heavy on the story aspect, so I’m wondering if the actual sex scenes are essential, or gratuitous. I’ve posted some of them here before, and probably linked to the whole story, but I’ll repeat myself now, with just a taste and then a link to the whole story, free on my personal blog. It occurs to me now that I should have used a different example, but it’s too late, and I’m too tired.

Here’s the taste, by no means the only sex scene. Try skipping the parts in brackets. Does the story make just as much sense? Is it better with or without the sex?
__________

Medaling as a long shot had condemned me to a TV interview. The reporter kept her comments to the usual inanities, except for a somewhat suggestive, “That was quite some program!”
“If you liked that, don’t miss the exhibition tomorrow,” I said to her, and to whatever segment of the world watches these things. When I added that I was quitting competition to pursue my own “artistic goals,” she flashed her white teeth and wished me luck, and then, microphone set aside and camera off, leaned close for a moment to lay a hand on my arm. “Nice costume, but I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get it off.”

Suli was right on it, her own sharp teeth flashing and her long nails digging into my sleeve. The reporter snatched her hand back just in time. “Don’t worry,” Suli purred, “I’ve got all that covered.”

Don’t expose yourself like that! Don’t let me drag you down! But I couldn’t say it, and I knew Suli was in no mood to listen.

I was too tired, anyway, wanting nothing more than to strip off the unitard and never squirm into one again, but Suli wouldn’t let me change in the locker room. Once I saw the gleam of metal she flashed in her open shoulder bag—so much for security at the Games!—I followed her out and back to our room with no regret for the parties we were missing.

The instant the door clicked shut behind us she had the knife all the way out of its leather sheath. “Take off that medal,” she growled, doing a knockout job of sounding menacing. “The rest is mine.”

I set the bronze medal on the bedside table, flopped backward onto the bed, and spread my arms and legs wide. “Use it or lose it,” I said, then gasped at the touch of the hilt against my throat.

“Don’t move,” she ordered, crouching over me, her hair brushing my chest. I lay frozen, not a muscle twitching, although my flesh shrank reflexively from the cold blade when she sat back on her haunches and slit the stretchy unitard at the juncture of thigh and crotch.

[[[“Been sweating, haven’t we,” she crooned, slicing away until the fabric gaped like a hungry mouth, showing my skin pale beneath. “But it’s not all sweat, is it?” Her cool hand slid inside to fondle my slippery folds. It certainly wasn’t all sweat.

Her moves were a blend of ritual and raw sex. The steel flat against my inner thigh sent tongues of icy flame stabbing deep into my cunt.]]]

The keen edge drawn along my belly and breastbone seemed to split my old body and release a new one, though only a few light pricks drew blood. The rip of the fabric parting under Suli’s knife and hands and, eventually, teeth, was like the rending of bonds that had confined me all my life.

[[[Then Suli’s warm mouth captured my clit. The trancelike ritual vanished abruptly in a fierce, urgent wave of right here, right now, right NOW NOW NO-O-W-W-W-W! Followed, with hardly a pause to recharge, by further waves impelled by her teasing tongue and penetrating fingers until I was completely out of breath and wrung out.

“I thought I was supposed to be storing up energy,” I told her, when I could talk at all.

“Jude, you’re pumping out enough pheromones to melt ice,” Suli said, “and I’m not ice!”

It turned out that I wasn’t all that wrung out, after all, and if I couldn’t talk, it was only because Suli was straddling my face, and my mouth was most gloriously, and busily, full.]]]

The chill kiss of the blade lingered on my skin the next day, along with the heat of Suli’s touch.
__________

After trying the test myself, I have to finally admit why I write erotica. I'm addicted. I write it because I love to do it. Because that’s what I write, where my characters want me to take them, what makes the writing worthwhile, and maybe, just once in awhile, makes the prose sing, even if I’m the only one who can hear the music.

But I still haven’t learned what constitutes dirty erotica, much less filthy, and they say that’s what sells these days.

For the entire story “The Outside Edge”: http://sacchi-green.blogspot.com/2014/02/free-lesbian-ice-skating-erotica.html