Rant for the day by Larry Archer!
Does Stephen King dismember his victims with a rubber knife? Did Jaws chomp up Captain Quint with plastic teeth? Did Maverick shoot down Russian fighters with a BB gun or bang Kelly McGillis with a dildo? What about Chucky and that delicious Jennifer Tilly (pant, pant, pant). No, No, No, No, and No!
So why do we have to put on a rubber when we bang out some smut story on our Underwood? This is not Randy “I can’t put my arms down” from A Christmas Story where we have to protect ourselves against our parent’s imagined fears, both seen and unseen?
I am continually amazed when someone says, “Your characters didn’t use protection in your story!” WTF?
Why is it that Dean Koontz can dismember his characters with abandon using a chainsaw, but I can’t have two people screwing unless they have a raincoat and rubber gloves on? You know, the big thick yellow ones that come up to your elbows and ensure you don’t get any of that icky “stuff” on you.
When you can get an STD from reading one of my stroke stories, then I’ll consider making my characters wear a rubber when they play hide the wiener.
In school, I had to read “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which was about some guy who dreamed of being different people; fighter pilot, doctor, and probably porn star in the Hustler version. He didn’t wear a rubber and probably didn’t put on his seatbelt either!
Fictional books are often a form of escapism for the reader. We get to imagine anything our little pea brains can conjure up. Like getting to bang Stormy Daniels, why should Donald get all the fun, not to mention watching hookers pee on the bed? Personally, I would have chosen the Playboy Playmate myself, but there is no accounting for taste. I’m more of a leg man than a boob man.
When you lust after your next door neighbor, the stripper who sat on your lap, or maybe the milkman, do you think about running to the drugstore or gas station to pick up condoms? I know that I don’t! The feeling of skin on skin is far better than with a layer of plastic in between and much easier to fantasize about.
Writing an erotic story, I don’t think about safety, and I don’t want my readers to think about it either. Getting laid with a rubber is not near as much fun as bareback so why would you want your characters to put on protection before doing the nasty? Just like Dean Koontz, I don’t worry about my characters as they are all fictional and impossible to hurt unless I allow it.
Well, other than the times Wifey has on her leather bustier, thigh-high leather boots, and riding crop that she uses to correct her slaves! Then I’ll stand back an extra three feet to be sure I don’t get anything splattered on my camera!
My erotica is not designed to teach you a safe sex lesson, just the opposite. If you wanted safe sex, then you can screw your boring wife or husband on the first and third Friday (let me check my calendar). We want to have sex in the produce aisle with that hot chick from People of Walmart. Just flip her skirt up and make mad passionate love amidst the cantaloupes while hoping the guard on his electric scooter doesn’t catch us! Afterward, we’d zip up our pants and join Wifey as she tries to figure out which detergent to buy to get those stains off the front of her blouse she bought from Monica.
Like in a story I’m working on. The husband finds out his wife was in a gangbang and asked if they kissed her. Her response, “Why would they want to kiss me, they just wanted to fuck me!”
I’m not sure why reading someone’s comment that your characters needed to wear a condom puts me over the top, but it always does. Like Walter Mitty, I want readers to imagine a situation they would never normally find themselves in and especially not in their normal safe, dull environment with their pipe and slippers.
Few of us are ever in a situation where they can do things like be in a gangbang or be the gangbang’ee, so literature is the escape mechanism to let our imagination fly free. Sort of like those rock climbing crazy people on a sheer rock face without a rope.
In the real world we have to make compromises, like not smoking when we fill the lawnmower with gasoline, but in our minds, we can be King (Queen) of the World. Sort of like ZZ Top when they sing, “We could have had Miss October, but we waited until November.”
That was the rant for the day, and maybe next month I can finally post the article I wrote like two months ago, which keeps getting thrown under the bus.
Remember that reading erotica does not cause STD’s but may create friction burns, kind of like the carpet burns you got in high school. Use lubricant as necessary and remember to stop when you need glasses.
As always, check me out at LarryArcher.blog or on Twitter at @Archer_Larry.
“Erotica from the Dirty Mind of Larry Archer.”
P.S. See Lisabet I can stay under 1,000 words!
Hi Larry – good post.
I know we’ve had the ‘condoms in fiction’ discussion before, and while I agree that nobody is going to catch anything without them, I’ve used them in my own works to try and give the story a ‘reality’ feel.
As you know, many of my stories involve hotwives, swingers and couples in open-marriages. I’ve used the ‘safe sex’ card a couple of times to show that although my characters are sluts, they do consider ‘their husbands’ sometimes. But obviously as soon as they know the other men are free from disease, then they’ll gargle with it, take a bath in it, and accept as many donations of it inside them as the guy can manage to produce.
I also think condoms can add something to a story – particularly when they go bare for the first time. As a reader, I’m happy to read stories with or without condoms, but I think the plot in some instances can be helped by the idea of a condom – even if it’s just dismissing the use of them because the woman wants to feel skin on skin and the sticky finale.
For the same ‘reality’ feel, my bulls tend not to have fifteen-inch dongs, nor can they perform five times in a row without a rest.
Delores
Del,
Thanks for your comments. Always great to hear from you.
Sometimes my characters use condoms, sometimes they don’t. I write erotica in many different moods.
In Hot Brides in Vegas, which is pure erotic escapism, nobody mentions protection.
In some of my more realistic erotic romance tales, I’d be violating plausibility if the characters went bareback early in a relationship.
As Del says, sometimes a condom (or the deliberate decision not to use one) can add a lot to a story.
However, as someone who reached sexual maturity during the Golden Age after birth control pills and before AIDS, I definitely would *prefer* not to think about condoms. Icky things!
I fully understand and appreciate your comments but feel that they are typically not appropriate to my genre. I think one of the reasons I often differ in opinions with other ERWA writers is that I don’t write literary erotica and basically do stroke stuff. A lot of the ERWA writers write literary erotica and so naturally look at erotica in a different light.
I believe a person who writes literary erotica doesn’t fully appreciate the differences between literary and stroke. I know that you can flip between both and write really good literary stuff as well as really hot stroke material. I think that is a talent most literary writers don’t possess or try to understand.
While I am the last one in the world to comment on writing style, I firmly believe that you cannot apply the same rules to stroke that you do to literary. I need to qualify that in that many writers apply a straight person’s rules/attitudes to stroke material where you see cheating, fighting, and divorce. My writing reflects my views and our personal experiences in life where HEA is more than just an acronym.
One of my goals in writing is writing stuff that I like and not writing for a market, so I don’t try to tailor my stories to fit other people’s needs. I realize this is probably not a good idea from a sales point of view but if I was writing to really sell, I would probably be in YA or some market that sells tons. If I can find people who like my brand of smut fine otherwise I’m not concerned.
Since I’ve been writing, I’ve found that my audience is surprisingly female, which was a shock to me. I always assumed that stroke stuff would be a male audience but about half of my readers I correspond with are women. My rationale for this is that it’s not “right” for a woman to enjoy NSA sex, but a lot do. I see the same things in swinging and swingers have a saying, “The husband gets you into swinging but it’s the wife that keeps you there.”
One of the things I’ve come to realize is that my outlook on sex is considerably different from a lot of people and I think that is in a large part because we are swingers and sex is more casual (best word I can think of). Even before we were in the Lifestyle, our attitude about sex was probably aberrant to some extent. LOL
I don’t know if ERWA members would appreciate it but I probably should do a blog post about why I think I’m different from most writers of erotica.