What I Know About Negotiation ( #BDSM #HardWonKnowledge )

by Annabeth Leong

My first experiences with BDSM, I think I’ve said before, happened in a context with no negotiation. I was so young and naive that I didn’t know negotiation was possible. And I was really turned on by what happened, but I was also harmed by it, and I had no tools to make the key distinctions this reality required.

Later, older and wiser, I learned about safewords and negotiation and playing responsibly and all that sort of thing. But I also learned how hard it is to live out the ideals people express about that stuff in BDSM communities.

I’m not as good at negotiation as I would like to be. I don’t always know how I’m going to feel about something in advance and I don’t always know how to account for that ahead of time or how to react to it when it comes up. Sometimes, I feel really ashamed about this. It feels like a really bad thing to have to admit something like I should have used my safeword and I didn’t. In my experience it’s hard to find honest conversations about those sorts of problems.

Here are some things I’ve figured out, for what they’re worth:

If someone dismisses the idea of negotiating or wants to gloss over it, watch out.

I’ve been burned by this enough times that I feel embarrassed to say so. The last time I let someone get away with it, it turned out that the person in question was angling for a threesome that was definitely not on the table for me, and huge drama resulted. It can feel like I’m the uncool bore insisting on negotiation, but I’ve been so sorry the times I let people rush me through it or talk me out of it.

Writing stuff down beforehand can help

It really helped me to make a list of my own thoughts about what I did and didn’t want to do. Not even necessarily to give the other person, just to know what I actually think and feel. I’m pretty susceptible to the temptation to say what I think the other person wants to hear. The list helps me stay honest, and it gives me a foundation to work with when someone takes me by surprise.

Hard no is important, but so is hard yes

Negotiations often focus on what a person doesn’t want. I think it’s fun, exciting, and important to also talk about what they do want. It’s a radical act for me to say, yes, this is what I want sexually. It also keeps the negotiation from feeling like a boring chore.

Negotiations should recognize flexibility

A huge innovation in my own negotiations came when I made a distinction between hard and soft limits. There are hard lines for me like, I don’t even want to talk about this, I am definitely not comfortable doing it. But there are other things that are more dependent on the situation, the people involved, the mood I’m in, etc--but I don’t want to do them generally. I started playing around with stuff like, these activities are not first date activities for me, but I’m not saying they’re totally off the table. I felt like recognizing flexibility helped me express myself more clearly.

Things are going to get fucked up and confused sometimes

I wish this wasn’t true, but it just is. Man, it sucks. But being able to deal with it is a key part of relationships, I think. I don’t think it’s possible to have an airtight negotiation that foresees every single thing that could come up. And it’s important to accept that, roll with things as best you can when things do go sideways, and try to be kind to yourself and everyone else involved about it.

***

So those are a few things I’ve learned about sexual negotiations. And I’ll also say that this is a place where I feel chemistry, too. I have good “negotiation chemistry” with some people, where I feel like we get each other and it’s easy for us to communicate about this sort of thing. That’s good to watch for, I think.

I want to get to “the fun stuff” as much as the next person, but I also know it’s super worth it to spend the time on the negotiation, too. BDSM can involve playing with some pretty volatile stuff. It’s foolish not to recognize that, I think.

And I do try to write about the fun stuff in my stories, too… ;)

A Defence of Fifty Shades of Gray

I spend a lot of time talking about romance and erotica. I have two podcasts of my own and appear regularly on a third podcast — and people in my daily life who know I write smut often ask questions about the industry.

And more often than not during these conversations, I’m put in the place of defending Fifty Shades of Gray.

Full disclosure: I have not actually read the books, but I’ve seen the first two movies. I’m aware of the books’ criticisms, particularly the lack of writing skill, the problematic portrayal of BDSM, and the fact that it started as Twilight fan fiction.

I see Fifty Shades of Gray as being the scapegoat for everything that outsiders perceive to be wrong about erotic fiction. And insiders to the genre view it as an outside imposter that’s doing a bad job of trying to fit in.

With specific regard to the three most common criticisms I see — the writing skill, portrayal of BDSM, and its fan fiction origins — I find the first and third criticisms to be annoying more than anything else.

Every author starts somewhere and every author develops their skills at their own pace. The fact that EL James’s writing is amateurish is a reflection of where she was at in her stage of writing skill at the time. It’s only because the book blew up that people even paid attention to it. If Fifty Shades of Gray had launched like most first time authors’ books do, it would have seen some minor success before quickly falling off the radar.

Yes, Fifty Shade of Gray dominated the sales charts despite the lack of writing skill. Why? Because EL James knows how to tell a story. If you strip away the awkwardness of the prose and look at just the structure of the story, it’s clear she knows how to hook readers by giving them what they want. Sure, she might’ve made some choices that a more seasoned writer might not have made, but that’s again a reflection of writing maturity. When I saw the first two movies, I was sucked into the plot and taken along for the ride, even though I could see some of the problems during that ride.

Its fan fiction origins are not problematic for me in the slightest. Dreamspinner Press, easily the biggest and most successful publisher of MM erotic romance, has fan fiction origins too. They used to, and perhaps still do, peruse fan fiction sites to look for authors and books to take on. (Weirdly enough, given the community I’m part of on Twitter, I’ve seen Dreamspinner authors complain about the fan fiction aspect, like it automatically makes Fifty Shades of Gray utter trash.) I’ve read more than one Dreamspinner book that was thinly-veiled fan fiction, including one that was very clearly about One Direction. I’ve never even heard a One Direction song, nor did I know the names of the singers, but I could clearly identify the origins of the novel. A quick text to a friend of mine confirmed all my suspicions.

Fan fiction origins aren’t even exclusive to romance. Any established genre has elements of it. I can think of a few Star Trek novels that I would consider to be fan fiction or to have fan fiction elements. I clearly remember one book having a rather pointless scene that had characters named Koothrapali, Cooper, and Wolowitz (three of the guys from Big Bang Theory) — while the book itself was not fan fiction, this scene clearly was. Some Star Trek books I consider to be fan fiction of Star Trek itself, as they do “fan service” rather than tell a unique story.

But the portrayal of BDSM is where everyone gets hung up the most. No, it’s not realistic. Yes, it’s problematic.

There are two rebuttals I commonly voice to this criticism:
- Fifty Shades of Gray is fantasy, not reality.
- The target audience of Fifty Shades of Gray is not those who are participants in the BDSM community.

Romance and erotica are genres of fiction. Further, the stories are fantasy. While, yes, there is an ethical appeal to a fully consensual and fully negotiated sexual encounter, the fact is that readers by and large want pure fantasy. They want to see Christian push the lines of what’s acceptable, they want to see Anastasia get punished, they want to see that dominating and domineering side of Christian come out, they want to see Anastasia submit to it and have sex with him. They don’t want reality. In reality, that would be a very problematic relationship, but in this fantasy, the characters don’t get caught up in the problems.

The target audience, though, is perhaps the most tricky thing for both authors and readers. Every book has a target audience. There is no book I can think of whose target audience is “everyone”.

Quite often I see this pop up in regard to MM erotic romance. Gay men will now and then criticize women for writing MM with complaints (primarily) about it not being a realistic portrayal of gay relationships. Sound familiar?

The reason it’s like this is because gay men are not the target readership of MM erotic romance.

Women are the target readership and, because of this, they get to dictate the rules of how MM relationships are portrayed. These authors clearly have their target audience in mind and are writing to that audience. Their target audience loves it and can’t get enough of it. The style between women and gay men writing MM erotic romance is so stark that I can nine times out of ten determine the gender of the author simply from how the story unfolds and the sex is portrayed.

Similarly with Fifty Shades of Gray, authors of more “ethical” erotic romance are not the target audience. No, the target audience is women who are looking for the type of story that EL James wants to tell. I believe its wrong to shame people for what they want to read. Romance and erotica suffers from that often enough from those outside the genre — so why do we do this within the genre itself?

There’s a negotiation between author and reader. The author offers something and the reader either accepts it or rejects it. In that negotiation, the author finds their target audience and the negotiation is a success. EL James has done that. And for that, I applaud EL James and hope for her continued success.




Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Schoolboy Secrets. He is publisher at and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, member of the Indie Erotica Collective, and hosts two podcasts, Deep Desires Podcast and Sex For Money. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Breaking Our Own Rules #lesbian #erotica

The Girl on Your Skin

Lesbian Erotica by Giselle Renarde

How could I complain? I was breaking my own rule.

Nesta and I made lots of rules when we opened up. She wrote them down in the back of her daybook, and we kept those pages pinned to the corkboard by her computer:

-Don’t bring dates home
-Don’t fall in love
-Don’t rave about how great the sex was
-Don’t come to bed smelling like another girl

The list went on, but I was hung up on that last point. All night, I’d been tossing and turning in my sweat-soaked sheets. TV was boring. I went to bed with a book, but the book was boring too. Brought out my vibe. Didn’t do a damn thing. The room felt different when I was alone in it, when I knew Nesta was fucking someone else.

Waiting was killer. Lying alone in our bed, I waited to hear her key in the door, waited for the hinges to creak, for her to unzip those big boots and kick them off in the hallway. Even the sound of her breath, the shallow guilt as she tiptoed to the bathroom, flicked on the light, closed the door—it was all there, right in my ear. The squeal of the shower. I heard every step in the process like an echo as I waited for her Nesta to come home.

I felt feverish, searching for a cool spot on my hot pillow. My head was burning up, and buzzing like a bee hive. I bucked against Nesta’s side of the bed, smelling her hair, her perfume, her body. It was all there in the sheets.

Where the hell was she? Fuck, it was… nine-forty-five? How was it only nine-forty-five? Felt like three in the morning. I covered my eyes and rolled onto my stomach, growling. My breath saturated the pillow, and I rolled again—onto Nesta’s side of the bed this time. I wasn’t going to preserve it anymore. When she got home, she was just going to have to deal with messy covers.

“Do you know what time it is?” I asked, in my mind. But that was a stupid question, because it wasn’t really late. “I’ve been worried sick.” Or maybe, “Who was she?” Or, “How was she?”

No, I couldn’t ask that question. It was in the rulebook. We weren’t supposed to ask about sexual performance.

I rolled back onto my side of the bed. More and more, I was starting to think it took a special type of person to survive an open relationship, and maybe I wasn’t that special. Did everybody feel this jealous?

When I finally heard Nesta’s key in the door, it came as a surprise. Maybe I’d given up hope or something, because I sat straight up in bed, on high alert, like the figure coming through the front door might not be Nesta at all.

She unzipped her boots, kicked them off in the hall. I couldn’t see her until she tiptoed past the bedroom door, and even then she was only a shadow. The shower would come next…

No.

Something inside me was adamant about this. I whipped off the covers and stomped across the room in basketball shorts and a T-shirt. Nesta shrieked when I grabbed her wrist and pulled her out of the bathroom. She shrieked like she didn’t know it was me, like I was some faceless attacker in the night.

I pulled her tight to my body and held her there, like we were dancing. Her breath hit my chin in hot little bursts as I pinned her to the bed.

“I haven’t showered yet,” she said in a whisper.

That day, for the first time, I didn’t care. My lust for Nesta superseded any jealousy. I was so hot for her I didn’t even know where to start.

Pressing my body tight to hers, I kissed her hard. She was too shocked to react, and I had to pry her teeth apart with my tongue, dig inside her perfect mouth.

Her perfect mouth tasted like pussy.

The sweet tang, the aftertaste that stuck at the back of my throat—it was pussy, unmistakeable. And I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I knew what she’d been up to, but knowing and tasting are different things entirely. That girl, that other girl, whoever she was, had found her way inside my mouth. She was a stranger to me, but her pussy was on my tongue. I could taste it.

“She fucked your face,” I said, holding Nesta’s head in my hands. My palms looked huge against the fine line of her jaw. “You ate her. You ate her good. Her pussy’s all over your skin.”

“Is it?” Nesta asked, like she wasn’t sure if I was angry or what.

“Shh, shh, shh!” I didn’t want her being scared. “Baby, it’s all good. It’s all good.”

I licked her cheek and she shuddered. “Oh god.”

“I can taste her pussy,” I said, and kissed Nesta’s chin with an open mouth. “I can taste her cunt. It’s everywhere. That chick must have been riding your face hard.”

“Yeah,” Nesta admitted. “She was.”

“Tell me what she looked like, girl.”

Nesta inhaled sharply as I tore open her top. “Are you sure you want to know?” she asked. “I thought we said…”

“Forget the rulebook.” I leaned her down on the bed and kissed a sharp path from her neck to her nipples. They stood up hard against the cool night air, and I asked, “Did she do this too?”

Petting my hair, Nesta said, “Yeah, babe. She did, but not like this. We were standing by the window, all the lights on. She stripped me bare so everyone could see down on the street.”

My pussy clamped tight when I pictured my Nesta naked, all eyes on her, getting her tits licked by some girl I didn’t know.

“Was she wearing lip gloss?” I asked, because Nesta’s nips had a tacky texture that didn’t come from me. And they tasted like strawberries.

“Yeah,” Nesta said. “Gloss over dark lipstick. Fake lashes. Golden eye shadow and thick black liner.”

“A real femme, huh?”

“Yeah, babe.” Nesta pushed down on her pants, and I helped her. God knows what happened to her panties. I’d never seen her go commando before. She must have lost them at this femme’s place. Her pussy was bare where it mattered, with just a tuft of hair like a landing strip.

“You’re still wet,” I said, tracing my fingers over the slick line of her pussy lips. She was drenched with juice, just dripping with it. “Did this girl eat your pussy before you ate hers?”

Nesta nodded. “How’d you know she went first?”

I didn’t know. I wasn’t even thinking anymore. My body was taking her because that’s what my body wanted. There were days when I wished to hell I could grow a cock and fuck her with it, fuck her hard. My system was in overload mode. Too much heat.

“Get me off,” I said, begging for it. I didn’t even know what I wanted her to do, exactly. “Get up on the bed. Spread your legs.”

My cunt was throbbing for real, actually pounding like my clit had its own heartbeat. I pulled off my clothes as Nesta climbed fully onto the bed. Her top was open, hanging off her shoulders. Her bra was pulled down under her tits, but her bottom was bare. Even in the dark I could see her pink glistening. How much of that was pussy juice and how much was a stranger’s saliva?

I’d never wanted to know before. I’d never wanted to think about who Nesta fucked outside our bedroom. But that’s because I was scared. Scared these women were bigger than me, stronger than me, butcher than me, better.

That was it. That’s what I’d been afraid of—that Nesta was looking to replace me, when all that time she’d been looking in the other direction.

I don’t do feline and feminine. I like the look, but it isn’t me. The girl who’d planted her face between my Nesta’s legs had all that going for her. I could practically see her pouty purple lips parting to lap my Nesta’s nectar. Pretty girls playing in front of open windows, for all the world to see.

My pussy pounced. Turning Nesta on her side, I spread her legs so I was straddling one, the other launched over my shoulder. Yeah, I split her right in half and pushed my cunt right up close to hers. She shrieked and grabbed her tits, like that would protect her from me.

“You’re crazy,” she said, and I wasn’t totally sure whether she was amused or afraid. “What’s going on here?”

“I’m getting off on you,” I said, pressing my fuzzy cunt right up against her. “Fuck, your pussy’s wet, girl. You’re all slippery.”

I licked her smooth calf, and she moaned, thumbing both nipples. “God…”

She looked good like that, damn good, and I asked her, “Is that what you were doing while that other girl sucked your fat little clit? You twisted your tits just like that while she ate you?”

Nesta’s eyes were closed, but she nodded. “Mmm-hmm.”

“You keep tugging on those tits, baby.” I rammed my cunt right up against hers, banging our bones together, searching for the sweet spot. It wasn’t easy to find. Usually I’d have the patience for all sorts of bumping and grinding, writhing and adjusting, but not this time. “Squeeze your tits, girl, just like that.”

Nesta pushed her big breasts together as I pulled her ass off the bedspread, holding her up until my muscles trembled. She wasn’t heavy, but the effort got to me. I needed to come, and fast. I had to find that perfect place where I could rub my fat clit against her pink. I wasn’t getting there quick enough, and it made me want to scream.

I pictured this girl, this stranger, between Nesta’s thighs, lapping at her soft flesh. Would I be beat by some chick I didn’t know? Never. Never. I traced my clit up and across the plump folds of Nesta’s pussy until I found what I’d been looking for.

An imagined tongue licked our clits as we grinded together—hot, wet, slick and powerful. Every woman had a tongue, but not every woman knew how to use it. Whoever Nesta spent the evening with knew just what to do. I could feel it like an echo in Nesta’s pulsing body. I could feel it in the way she bucked against my pussy while we tribbed. There was something between us, something we could both feel even though it wasn’t physically there.

“What’s her name?” I grunted. I could barely speak.

Nesta pinched her tits and squealed. “We said we wouldn’t tell. It’s in the rules.”

“Fuck the rules.” I pounded her pussy with my clit, making it a cock, fucking her like she wanted. “Tell me her name.”

“Won’t you be mad?”

Holding her hips aloft, I traced my clit over hers, feeling her shudder. I trembled so hard I couldn’t speak. I didn’t care about that girl’s name anymore. I didn’t care about anything. My orgasm was coming on strong, riding up my thighs and swelling in my belly before shooting straight to my clit.

It was fireworks, the way we exploded together. Her hips rattled in my hands. My cunt blazed against the soft, wet pink of her pussy. There was another element in the mix, too—a lingering scent, or feeling, or taste. Something foreign, not of us.

Nothing else had ever felt this good, and I knew it was the unnamed femme, the ghost of a threesome. The tang of her pussy clung to my throat as I grunted Nesta’s name. Her tongue was there on my woman’s clit, lapping up hard while we climaxed together. The unnamed girl was there the whole time. No denying it.

My arms lost their strength. I dropped Nesta’s hips to the bed and our hot pussies came apart, making a wet kissing sound. Falling beside her, I spread my legs. My cunt felt so fat I couldn’t close them without sending aftershocks through my whole body.

Nesta was panting wildly when I found her hand with mine. For a long time, we didn’t say a word. We had way too much to talk about—a whole rulebook to re-evaluate. Hard to know where to start.

“I didn’t take my shower,” Nesta said, after a while.

“Yeah.” I slid my arm under her shoulder and rolled in to sniff her neck. The whole room smelled like pussy, but I could still distinguish the one that wasn’t ours. “You want to shower now?”

Nesta hesitated before saying, “Maybe in the morning. I’m too tired to stand.”

We pulled up the covers and buried ourselves underneath. Change was coming, but the conversation could wait. We could sleep together in the scent of that nameless femme who’d taken Nesta up against a window, for all the world to see.

*****

This story appears in my book Spicy Confessions, which is now available as an audiobook from such retailers as Nook Audiobooks and eStories.

If you're a patron of mine on Patreon, I've already read you The Girl On Your Skin. Remember that?

And if you're not yet my patron, get your fine ass over to http://Patreon.com/AudioErotica

Negotiation or Seduction? #BDSM #negotiation #nostalgia

By Lisabet Sarai

I wish now that I’d kept his letters—the ones in which he detailed his fantasies about spanking me, tying me to his bed, dripping hot wax over my breasts, then asked for my reactions. We hadn’t touched each other at that point, just flirted over a chess board (he almost always won). I’d never thought about the activities he described in his multi-page messages, at least not consciously, though I’d had kidnap fantasies since before puberty.

Somehow he sensed that I was susceptible, before I knew this myself. With old-fashioned, pen-on-paper epistles, then later through lengthy, expensive phone calls, he revealed his kinky nature and explored mine. When we finally met again in person, more than six months after he’d left grad school and moved to the West Coast, we were in essence already lovers, though we’d never even kissed. With his arrogance, eloquence, and calculated crudeness, he’d captured my erotic imagination and won my consent. We both knew we’d have sex, and not vanilla sex, either. (Hard to believe, but I didn’t even know the term “vanilla” at that point!) I was ready to yield, eager, despite the fact that I had no idea what to expect.

But actually, that’s not true—I had learned about his desires as he interrogated me about mine. Face to face, we didn’t need to negotiate anything. I trusted him, somehow, with my body and my spirit. I think he was surprised by how easy it was.

I was too overwhelmed by emotion and sensation to even consider the question.

That was almost exactly forty years ago. I’ve wondered, since then, whether he and I would have come together if he’d stayed on to get his PhD instead of putting 2500 miles between us. Geeky and awkward as he was, would he have had the courage to offer himself as my master? Struggling to deal with my own raging hormones, would I have paid enough attention to him that I would have seen who he really was?

Believe—believe in me, and in your own dreams.

For I will make them real.

I am the one, the Master.

Give me your nakedness, your naked heart.

As you open yourself to me, so I will satisfy your lust.

I don’t have those letters anymore. One day, years ago, I destroyed all the correspondence I’d saved. I decided it was unhealthy to hold onto them. Rereading them over and over them was too guilty a pleasure. I worried that my obsession with our past love might be damaging my marriage. But a few of his words and phrases live on, quoted verbatim in my novels—like the snippet above from RawSilk.

Lisabet Sarai probably would not exist if not for that long-ago, long-distance negotiation. I’d always written stories, but without my memories of that incandescent passion, would I have been so moved to write erotica, especially erotica featuring power exchange? I doubt it.

I really wish I had those letters. Would I still react the same way? Or would his words sound cheesy and silly? I am no longer the innocent I was. We were both so young. Still, even at twenty four, he had the true instincts of a dominant. In those letters, he both guided and tempted me. I fell for his lines. I answered his embarrassing questions. I gave myself wholeheartedly into his hands.

I’ve never for an instant regretted it.

For an earlier post about negotiation, go here:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2010/06/delicate-art-of-negotiation.html

For a fantasy about those letters:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2016/02/stash.html

The Delicate Art of Negotiation

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.