Arts
Vocal Minority Gets New Director
The Real Problem(s) with Bondage Erotica
Bondage Erotica
 |
Best
Bondage Erotica Clear Press, 2003 |
by Elizabeth A. Allen
I
mention to friends that I'm reviewing Best Bondage Erotica, an
anthology edited by Alison Tyler, and the response is a three-fold yuck.
Bondage is just so wrong, people tell me.
It's misogynistic, they say. It's
full of domination and submission, one person controlling another's desire
in the way that the Heinous Patriarchy has controlled women's desires
for centuries.
It's racist. The very terms "master"
and "slave" in bd/sm play still have the taint of African-American
servitude about them.
It's morally slimy. If you tolerate, say,
Nazi symbols in bondage play, what's to stop you from tolerating the evil
acts in real life associated with the symbols? We're on a slippery slope
here, people.
Then I wonder if those who rail against
bondage erotica have actually read any of it. If they bothered to dip
into BBE, they'd find the real problems with bondage erotica...
Bondage erotica is repetitive. At its worst,
BBE reads like bad porn: four-letter words for body parts, four-letter
verbs for sexual acts. I have nothing against raunchy language per se;
I just object to the fact that BBE uses all the same raunchy language
over and over again.
Therefore I love when someone like Helena
Settimana comes along with her little gem "Six Persimmons."
With an extended woman/fruit metaphor, Settimana amplifies "deep
velvet sweetness" and the taste of "golden juice" into
rich, suggestive double meaning. She reveals the sexiness of the English
tongue. Yum.
Bondage erotica is pretty narrow, Open BBE
at random, and you'll probably hit upon a straight, white male topping
a straight, white female. People of color exist only in walk-on roles.
I saw a few lesbians, but missed the gay men and trans people entirely.
For a book about sexual deviation, BBE's sexuality was white as vanilla
and just as bland.
Bondage erotica has no personality. Some
scenes start as intriguing crucibles for character, like Derek Hill's
"Caged," where a man has a woman imprisoned like an animal as
part of their sex games. I wonder what's going on in these people's heads
(and pants), but I never find out. This is the closest I get to any sort
of emotion or psychology: "Moaning, she clamps her mouth shut, her
body twisting with sensation." Well, duh. Of course there's sensation.
But what kind? Voluptuous swooning? Seizures of indecision? Hill leaves
a void in my imagination because he doesn't think it's important to make
the people in his stories into characters with interesting and specific
subjectivities.
Vague characters piss me off, especially
in my bondage erotica. I read for the scenarios, yes, but also for the
peculiar reactions of the people involved. Bondage play – highly
stylized, rule-bound and removed from daily existence – tests a
character's personality on so many levels. The best bondage erotica, like
Marilyn Jaye Lewis' "Safeway," a short story about two women,
phallic produce and exhibitionism, explores these tensions. In "Safeway,"
the main character "dreamily" purchases supplies for late-night
action with Sheila, her partner, but then calls Sheila a "bitch"
when she remembers Sheila's laughing, manipulative domination the first
time they met. Sex seems dangerous to the main character; yet she is completely
horny, perhaps because of the thrill of peril. The main character's conflict
makes her not just a set of actions and emissions, but a flesh and fluid
being, not so different from me.
Bondage erotica writers can't write. I'll
just quote from "Melinda," by Mitzi Szereto: "Masculine
fingers formed dark fans across Melinda's fleshy rear cheeks as their
smoky-eyed owner's female companion dropped onto her haunches to place
the intrusive object inside the wriggling backside before her."
Ow, that was painful, and not in any good
way. What's happening in this sentence? Do I even care? I'm so tied up
in the syntax that I have no attention left for the events. How does such
schlock get published?
That's because, despite all philosophical objections and despite all writerly
incompetence, bondage erotica is a huge turn-on. And that's the biggest
problem. This trangressive sort of desire evokes some of the most gut-level
revulsion and some of the world’s worst prose, yet it still pins
us down, fascinating (some of) us.
So what do we do? Well, let's take our squeamish
attraction to bondage erotica seriously. Season it with a bit of poetry.
Throw in some occasional queerness. Give the erotica some plot, a story
to keep our attention, with characters as skittish and sexed up as we
are. And most of all, let's have a sense of humor about the whole business.
Then bondage erotica will not only turn us on, but also make for a ripping
good read, all the while serving as an articulate defense for the strange,
messy, irresistible pleasures of this form of love-making.
Elizabeth Allen, Middlebury College class of 2000, now reads and writes
in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she recently married her partner.