Publish and Be Damned

I’m going to leave the relative merits of the different POVs up to someone else. Everyone has his or her favorite POV to write in, and often it will be the story that dictates what that is.

What I want to discuss is an almost chronic problem I see the work of people who are just starting out writing erotica. And sometimes – I’m sorry to have to say – I see it in the work of writers with a good deal of experience who should know better. I’m not sure there is a proper term for this problem, but I call it ‘meat puppeting’.

Let us be honest. Most of us write erotica because it is pleasurable to do it. It turns us on. And we write most often about the kind of kinks and fantasies that are of specific, personal interest to us. It’s rare to find a writer who, for instance, is an avid BDSM practitioner in real life, but never writes about it in their fiction.

But far too often, I’ve read characters who were solely created for the purpose of acting out the writer’s personal sexual fantasies. Now, this isn’t always a problem. If you’ve written a character who may believably share your fantasies, then it usually works very well in the story. The problem comes when, for instance, male writers put exceedingly male-centered fantasies into the heads of their female characters or vice-versa.

I recently angsted for days over feedback to a writer whose narrator and main female character kept having the most graphic fantasies about a man she fancied spurting his come all over her – not once, but five times in five pages.  Not once in any of these fantasies does she imagine being touched, penetrated or tasted. Not once does she imagine how it feels on her skin. These are NOT typical female fantasies. These are the male fantasies of the author being channeled through his female character as if she were a literary blow-up doll. He WISHES women had these fantasies and he’s manufactured a character out of his wishes.

If this were a story about an uber-submissive female character who was seriously into orgasm / pleasure denial, I could see it, I guess. But it wasn’t. The relationship was, by most people’s standards, a vanilla one. Only a woman who specifically got off on the complete absence of any sexual stimulation, other than the visualized pleasure of her lover, would fantasize like this. The writer has made his female character his whore – his meat puppet.

Similarly, I get very annoyed to read about sexually vanilla male characters who want nothing more than to spend four hours performing cunnilingus on their lover. Of course, if he was into femdom and got off on being denied, that would be one thing, but too often in erotica writing this is not the case. The female writer has used a male character to act out her fantasies for her, and allowed him no volition or natural reactions of his own, because they didn’t feed her personal fantasy.

Now, many people are going to say, “Who cares? I like the idea of a male character who wants no more than to please me. It’s fantasy. This is erotica!”

My response is: nope, that’s porn. Porn doesn’t need to be concerned with the creation of three-dimensional characters who have a certain amount of autonomous agency. Porn characters ARE meat puppets, manufactured specifically to bend in all the right places so we can get them to sexually perform our fantasies for us.

If erotica is ever to take its place as a respected literary genre, we have to start seeing the erotic in reality and write our characters accordingly, with enough realism to begin to do what all good literature does: reflect our world back at us and offer us a deeper insight into it. And god knows, we are sorely lacking in much in the way of deep insights into our own eroticisms and sexualities.

Now, there is a really simple way to avoid the meat-puppeting problem. Just write a character who can believably have the fantasies you want to see played out.  Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, no. It isn’t easy at all, because it means being incredibly honest about your own fantasies and really owning them.

Writers who are most likely to meat-puppet their characters are the ones who are least comfortable in themselves with the fantasies they want to portray. And, crafting a character who resembles the writer enough to believably channel the fantasies through, still feels uncomfortable, because it is too close to the bone.

So, here’s my advice. Sometimes you need to work on yourself first, and make peace with your own sexual fantasies before you can write in fiction. No one ever said that good erotic writing would be comfortable or easy to do. Moreover, there is no writer who doesn’t, to some extent, commit this sin. But it is a question of degrees.

The first time I stopped meat-puppeting when I wrote a male character in a non-con story, I produced Click. I spent most of the writing time feeling acutely sick to my stomach. That’s when I realized, if I wanted write something non-con that only fed my fantasies and still contained realistic characters, I was going to have to write it from the female perspective in first or third person limited.

March 16th, 2010 | Remittance Girl | Discussion Topics, Point of View | 4 Comments »