Edgy Erotica
A lot of erotica could, if one were kind, be called edgy. There’s the earlier iterations of ‘good girls don’t’ meaning to get the good girl to do ‘it’ you had a fair bit of what could charitably be called dubcon, if not outright rape.
Romance has moved on from that, for the most part. Even the most ass of alphaholes isn’t pressuring the way they once were.
However, erotica never really changed. Afterall there is a lot of id, a lot of repression, and erotica taps into that. Including fetishes, but the question of BDSM and coercion can get muddy. Really muddy.
The explosion of pseudo-BDSM narratives around 50SoG and the copycats, focused more and more on humiliation, aggression, and abuse in place of exploring the connection those things create, or even the taboo. Or even the id, they were just endless repetitions of the same kinds of bare misogyny and sex, with no depth. The taboo-busting of Story of O or One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed bored me, or triggered me, and held no interest at all. I have to admit I gave up reading after a while, and then writing because I knew that was a niche I couldn’t fill.
But I just finished the 2015 standout Asking for it by Lilah Pace and I am glad that I did.
I was nervous — I’ve been on edge since I got word, through the whisper network, of a missing stair in games publishing. It isn’t exactly something I personally need to be wary of but nonetheless, it’s given me pause.
That’s not even counting the usual discomforts, or the latest film I had to teach with rape plotlines, not to mention Charlottesville and epic racism, and how so many of these awful men start out practicing their violence on the women in their lives.
Nervous about reading this is probably an understatement.
Except what I did was drown in it by one fell swoop. I read it on my commute home, got there and made tea and finished it. Cursed at the ending.
I have never read anything that so comprehensively deals with both rape survival, PTSD, and sex. It was incredible. The writing was solid, unobtrusive, perfect for the subject matter. The handling of the internal aspect of PTSD, the trauma of rape, the fallout, was superb.
I’m still on edge, but this was brilliant.