Donna George Storey

Better than Famous (Or “Just Say No” to Celebrity Culture)

by Donna George Storey

This month my study of stardom comes to its long-awaited conclusion. I’ve argued that celebrity culture is the media age’s expression of a deep-seated human need to create mythical figures in our mundane lives, modern-day gods and goddesses who are in the end visions of our idealized selves. Indeed fame is more about the needs of the fan than any inherent superiority of the famous—if we all can become famous for fifteen minutes, then it’s fame itself that matters more than anything else, even truth.

Accordingly, although I’ve enjoyed throwing around names like Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton (and tipping my hat to Nancy Reagan) for comic effect, I do believe the most significant aspect of celebrity culture is its function as a mirror of our society’s yearnings, fears, and values. The dramas of the famous are our hidden hang-ups and fantasies projected on the screen for all to see. And while few readers of the ERWA blog probably invest much interest in the latest doings of Angelina Jolie, I believe that the illusions of fame impact every creative artist to some degree.

Even if you yourself have never dreamed of mobs of fans winding around city blocks, waiting for you to sign their treasured copy of your novel, perhaps you’ve dealt with the annoying responses at parties when you mention you write. “Are you published? I haven’t heard of you. Has your novel been optioned for HBO?”

Too many people confuse celebrity with quality. If you aren’t famous, you aren’t good. “Success” must be measured by spots on the bestseller list, Pulitzer Prizes, major motion picture adaptations. Or perhaps your party acquaintance is satisfied with a more modest appearance in Best American Erotica. Yet we’re still playing by the rules of fame. I for one was slow to figure this out. When I first started writing, I longed for the validation of publication, then of winning a place in the best-of’s. My circle of acquaintances would ask, “How’s your writing going?” and slowly but surely I had progress to report. Ten stories in a year. Fifteen the next. A novel.

It was never enough. “What’s next?” they’d ask. “Do you have an agent yet?”

I no longer give a list of the year’s accomplishments when someone asks me how my writing is going. Because I’ve realized at long last that those measures of success are an effort to find satisfaction in others’ opinions of me. That is what fame is—the opinion of others. Sometimes it is based on a good reason. Often it is just their distorted projection with no relation to who you are or what you’ve actually done. Frankly, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve accomplished in my writing. I don’t need to prove anything to myself anymore. That is indeed enough.

Thus the most important way to say no to the insidious influence of celebrity culture even in the lower ranks of writers: Never lose sight of the pleasure and aliveness of your creative process which can never, ever be properly valued by another person. If you write, you succeed.

Not unrelated to this point is the relatively passive role fame assigns us, whether fan or celebrity. Sure, a fan can be quite active in terms of chasing down the object of her worship or collecting memorabilia or the latest gossip. But the decision about who matters is made by the vagaries of the “star-making machinery” (to quote Joni Mitchell). Is there any other rational reason why Kim Kardashian is a household name?

The other day I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and I came across an inspiring antidote to this passivity in her essay, “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable.” Solnit describes her attempt to find or make a language to describe the things in our lives that can’t be quantified or categorized, an effort that lies at the heart of the revolt against capitalism and consumerism (the engines of modern fame). In short, Solnit urges us to become producers rather than consumers of meaning.

I like that because producing meaning is what writers do everytime they create a story. So of course, the best way to do this is to keep writing. At the same time, whenever we encounter assumptions about success, fame, and what constitutes “good” writing, we can interrogate those assumptions, agree or disagree, and better still make up our own new measures of value. In other words, we move from letting the market and celebrity culture define creative success to, at least sometimes, defining worth for ourselves.

It takes a lot more energy to think rather than let someone else make the decisions for us, but it’s the easiest way to become the star of our own universe.

Thanks for bearing with me through Justin Bieber and Dolly Parton. Keep writing and shine on!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Common Appetites: Erotica, Desire, and Celebrity Culture

By Donna George Storey

As I’ve continued my musings about celebrity culture over the last several months, I’ve noticed that a number of the comments I’ve received explicitly or implicitly question the relevance of celebrity culture to erotica writers. After all, with very few exceptions (E.L. James certainly, Zane maybe) erotica writers are not celebrated millionaires. We aren’t ushered to the best tables in chic restaurants, our clothes are not critiqued by Us magazine. For this let us all be grateful.

However, I think erotica and the fascination with celebrity do have some important elements in common in that they both satisfy a psychic need for a great many people. As I mentioned in my first column on this topic, I’ve always been mystified by why so many people would write to an actor who played a doctor on television for advice on their medical problems. And even people who are not that misguided seem to believe that these complete strangers are worth our time and attention to even the slightest degree.

Because of course, Angelina Jolie could not matter in any significant way to the majority of us beyond a few hours’ entertainment. And yet, judging by measure of the attention and resources devoted to reporting on her life, she clearly does matter.

Why?

Well, first I would argue that it is not Angelina or Dolly Parton any real person who matters, it is what she represents to us: a beautiful, glamorous (or powerful, invincible in the case of most male celebrities) being as the object of adoring attention. The celebrity is an idealized self, worshipped simply for existing in such desirable perfection. For that matter, Marcus Welby is the kind, caring, infallible doctor we all wish we had to care for us–and probably don’t.

In my study of celebrity, several authors made the point that in the past people became famous because of something they did to affect history on a grand scale—Julius Caesar, Queen Elizabeth I, Napoleon, Madame Curie. But today the majority of celebrities are famous because they’re good at performing, especially pretending to be someone else on the screen. Not to dismiss the immense difficulty of being a good actor, but what this means is that we are admiring a fantasy, a fiction.

Again a part of me has long been bemused by the seductive falsehood of fame—that a fan can be in any way intimate with a “person” who is made up by PR. But I’ve finally come around to see that we want and need this idealized figure with its soul-satisfying life trajectory of an individual’s struggle to achieve notice then mass acclaim and love followed by a stint in drug rehab then a comeback or two. Celebrity culture thrives because so many people crave the fantasy of intimacy with this chosen creature, of knowing them through images and words. Knowing them—and even more speaking to or getting an autograph from them—gives us a moment in the spotlight by association.

Erotica may be hidden away in nightstand drawers, but it also relies for its power on a fictional intimacy created on the page. Compelling erotica makes us feel we know the characters, that we are with them in their most ecstatic moments. The arousal they feel is mirrored in our own bodies, their pleasure sizzles straight to our own erogenous zones. The encounter is of necessity idealized or at least streamlined in some way—there’s no quicker way to lose the magic than a blow-by-blow description. The story, too, follows a satisfying arc from attraction to consummation. I know there are exceptions, but most erotica does offer at least a spotlight on a secret sexual realm.

Again there are exceptions but most erotica offers us idealized sex, with satisfaction mutually achieved. Sex with no awkwardness, mess or disappointment. Sex as we wish it could be, technically and emotionally.

And while writers here might not need to worry about being mobbed for autographs at restaurants, I’m sure many of us have received a few fan emails from admirers who seek a connection with the creator of a fantasy that touched them. A connection of words and ideas only—although now and then a reader tries to push the boundary further to a personal level (always rebuffed politely and cheerfully in my own case). One might argue that these readers are merely grasping at phantoms, but beneath the “lies” I believe there is something real: a mutual desire in both creator and audience to transcend of the repression and limitations of ordinary life, to be seen as magical and beautiful and loved.

To borrow an insight from a friend of Michael David Gross (author of Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame), this reaching out to celebrity represents an internal need, yearning to be seen and appreciated and known for the special person we hope we are.

Next month I’ll conclude my discussion of celebrity with some thoughts on combatting toxic assumptions about success.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Let Dolly Parton Tell Your Mother You’re Gay: Celebrity and the Ideal World

by Donna George Storey

My inquiry into the allure of celebrity continues this month, but first I want to remind my readers that I do not give a rat’s ass about Justin Bieber’s latest bad-boy escapade or Kim Kardashian’s butt. Nonetheless, I am oddly fascinated by the reason why so many other people do seem to care. And while it may seem that most of us humble erotica writers need never worry about becoming the objects of celebrity worship, our society’s attitude toward fame and success does have an impact on every creative artist who seeks an audience. Like it or not, we create in the shadow of fame.

Because celebrity worship is never really about Justin or Kim. They are interchangeable, infinitely replaceable. Fame, like most erotica, is about an ideal self in an ideal world.

When I’m interested in a topic, the first thing I do is read lots of books about it. There are plenty of books about fame, from breathless biographies and memoirs to get-out-the-dictionary theoretical treatises. Fortunately I found a book that was a little of both called Starstruck: When a Fan Gets Close to Fame by Michael Joseph Gross. Gross grew up in a farming community in the Midwest, a closeted gay youth who reached out to a wider world by writing to 5000 celebrities requesting their autographs. In that more innocent time–when autograph seekers weren’t the aggressive operators they are now, bent on the profits of resale—4000 of these movie stars and world leaders obliged the earnest young boy’s request.

Gross is a journalist now, with press-pass access to celebrities. Predictably his attitude has become more critical and self-aware. The best parts of the book are about his own relationship to fame:

“I know that stars and fans all live in the same three dimensions, but I still imagine there’s a velvet-roped realm of existence that’s more vivid than the everyday place where I live.  I know that a meaningful life grows from well-chosen commitments, well cared for; and yet, I can’t help but wonder if maybe celebrity offers a shortcut.”

Although I’m throwing around outlandish names like Paris Hilton and Dolly Parton, there’s a parallel fantasy world for writers. I know I certainly harbor a few ridiculous fantasies about someday maybe, just maybe, “making it” as an author which would mean… wow, what exactly? A high-powered agent who returns calls immediately, a huge sale and marketing budget for my books, sold-out readings (yes, I’d be the type of author people would buy tickets to hear read, right?), movie deals, Immortality.

Gross interviews a number of celebrities and numerous fans for this book, but a particularly poignant voice comes from Chad Evans, a fan of Debra Messing, who was in one play as a child, but hopes to go to Hollywood, get head shots taken and go out to auditions. Evans believes he deserves stardom because he has interesting things to say and people should hear him. I assume he doesn’t feel he has that in his own life.

Yes, we can laugh at his naivete about what is really involved in “making it,” but after I was finished shaking my head at poor Chad’s foolishness (one play as a child?), I realized that the core of my own fantasy—to have a responsive agent—is not so different. I, too, feel fame as a state where the chosen people are treated with respect and dignity, where they are listened to and loved just for being themselves. Don’t we all deserve that?

Fame, or rather our ideal of it, is rather like an extended coddled childhood. Indeed I’ve always felt that the endearing “beauty” required of movie stars is a sort of shortcut for the glow we see when we look at someone we truly love. We also know it is all too easy for a beloved celebrity to fall from grace when they act like spoiled brats, even if we enjoy the voyeurism of a train wreck all the more. Yet celebrity wouldn’t work its magic if most of us didn’t feel on some level that it must be better on the other side of the velvet rope.

One of the more mind-twisting aspects of this wish for us writers is that we then assume that the people on the other side are different and better, that they can do things we cannot.

Now we get to Dolly Parton. When Gross had the opportunity to do an interview with her, he was very excited. This is because Dolly’s song “I Am Ready” about a woman facing death inspired Gross to tell his mother he was gay. His mother had Alzheimer’s and didn’t really understand, but it made Gross feel as if he’d done something important. He very much wanted to share this story with Parton when they met.

But then he got to thinking—was it professional? Would Dolly secretly roll her eyes at the imposition? A friend urged him to do it so he could have more time with her and “get something out of it,” our culture’s best reason for every act. Gross had resolved to do so, but alas, Parton postponed the interview. He was deeply disappointed and angered. Again, why? Another friend provided solace by suggesting he look within. Why was it important to tell Parton her song made such a difference in his life? How did he hope she would respond?

He then understood “fandom’s most essential misconception:  a fan’s intimate relationship with an entertainer’s work is an intimate relationship with the person who made that work.” And it is not. The great significance of “I Am Ready” to his life had nothing to do with Dolly Parton. The courage to tell his mother this important truth was his accomplishment.

“We like to imagine a world where Madonna’s happiness is more complete than ours, where Dolly Parton could someday be our friend… These are falsehoods and evasions, and they articulate a vital need.  We work in an economy where everyone, it seems, is finally a cog.  All too often, daily life makes us feel insignificant.  But our culture is still haunted by the notion that a man was God; we have an ineradicable longing to believe that individuals are unimpeachably significant.  Fandom helps give hope to that longing—and at the same time reveals its sadness and absurdity.”

This is not to say I will never daydream about having an agent who returns my calls, but the appeal of celebrity culture—the idea that someone out there has transcended the humiliations of ordinary life to become a king or queen on earth–certainly makes a lot more sense. And so does the wisdom of listening to our fantasies and yearnings for the deeper insights they give into what we need. As erotica writers, we are particularly close to the healing magic of honoring desire.

Dream on!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

What’s “Good” about Paris Hilton? (Fame and Fortune, part 2)

by Donna George Storey

Celebrity culture and the often unexamined assumptions that slither into our brains because of it are not good for writers, whether aspiring, veteran or even genuinely famous. I firmly believe this. And yet, as I sat down to write this month’s continuing meditation on fame and the writer’s imagination, I felt drawn to talk about what’s actually “good” about the role of the famous in our ordinary lives. There is clearly something deeply appealing about glamorous, rich, but most of all “seen,” people we don’t know. Weird Al’s new song, “Lame Claim to Fame” is a hilarious illustration of the strange enchantment of even the most tenuous connection to these magical beings.

It’s easy enough to claim immunity, but none of us are, really. (Even academics have their “stars” with endowed chairs and faculty positions reserved for spouses.) There is something rooted in us, our ancient hierarchical programming perhaps, that compels us to seek an aristocracy of some kind. Yet the celebrity aristocracy occupies a much different place in our lives than the kings and dukes of earlier times. Our stars are exposed to us in endless “intimate” images and details of their private lives, some controlled by their managers, some not. We can easily pretend we “know” them and have a stake in their stories as well as the right to judge them. In that sense, stars unite the national and even global community (at the level, say, of Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan). They make the world a village.

The combination of intimacy and distance is important. We can enjoy the dramas of the British Royal Family as entertainment; if our tax money were at stake, it might not be quite so fun. (Overheard on a train to York back in 1989–an English woman commented drily to a fellow countryman, “The Duchess of York is pregnant again. Of course, we’ll have to pay for it.”) We can smile or roll our eyes at the endless cycles of celebrity life—innocent young star rises, corrupted young star falls victim to drugs and engages in drunken criminal acts, older, repentant star graduates from rehab and makes a come-back—without enduring the actual pain and disruption of addiction or an eclipsed career.

The familiarity of celebrity touches us writers in more mundane ways. I try to resist, but I am still swayed when a book gets a positive blurb from a writer whose name I recognize. At the very least, I admire the author’s luck in getting that plum endorsement. Such a blurb feels like a positive recommendation from a friend, an opinion I can trust, saving me the trouble of deciding for myself where I should direct my time and attention.

Except, of course, it is none of these things.

That’s because celebrity is above all a fiction. Overnight successes, models who “eat lots of fruits and vegetables and work out with a personal trainer” but never diet harmfully, fairytale weddings, bestselling writers who find contentment relaxing on their estates by the pool while they idly type out their latest ticket to immortality. None of this is real, and if ever it is, it doesn’t satisfy for long.

Celebrities are our dukes and duchesses, our heroes, our villains, our inspirations and cautionary tales. They allow us to watch drama at a remove, both in space and relevance to our lives, but they remain images, never full human beings. In the electronic media age, we need an ever-renewing visual “face” for the myths, symbols and fantasies our minds feed on. Celebrities themselves are most keenly aware that their personhood is subsumed in an image others project upon them. Some, in various ways, benefit from this position (money, professional power, invitations to the right parties). Fortunately for the scandal sheets, just as many lose their way in the hall of mirrors. Finally, I get to you, Paris Hilton!

Yet, ultimately, celebrity culture is about us, the ordinary folk, not the bodies in designer clothes parading on the red carpet. Without the mediocre masses, who would need the velvet rope, the security guard and bouncers? In next month’s installment, I’ll explore the deeper needs that are masked by the yearning for fame. Until then, stay cool!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

So Why Aren’t You Famous?

by Donna George Storey

I’ve been meaning the write a column about our culture’s obsession with celebrity for some time, as I believe this inescapable aspect of American life affects even humble erotica writers. However, the subject always seemed too huge and I was never sure where to begin. I finally realized that I can extend the discussion of fantasy and celebrity over several installments, which leaves me the leisure to begin with an explanation my own relationship with celebrity culture.

On the face of it, I’ve always been more bemused than enthralled with celebrity worship. I first remember seeing its dangers at around age 9 or 10, when I heard that TV viewers used to write to Robert Young, the actor who played Marcus Welby, M.D. on television, asking for medical advice. How could people be so stupid as to confuse an actor with a real doctor? Yet not long after Ronald Reagan was elected president, followed by Arnold Schwarzenegger winning the California governorship in a recall election. Again I wondered how so many people seemed to believe an actor’s heroic triumphs on the screen could translate into real-life competence where there was no script, no studio pressuring for a happy ending.

I’ve never made it a priority to know which celebrities are trending or who’s the hottest new leading man or lady—in fact I’m rather proud of my ignorance. As a democrat and an iconoclast, I don’t really see why someone deserves special treatment just because they starred in a movie or TV show. Celebrities usually seem to attain their place through good looks or “lucky” parentage. (My loss of innocence as to the value of literary celebrity was a slower process, but certain recent blockbusters proved the final blow to my belief in the publishing industry as a meritocracy.)

Yet, as much as I might want to ignore celebrity culture, it isn’t ignoring me, in particular in my writing life. I first experienced this personally when I put together a book proposal about my mother’s death from the diabetes drug, Rezulin. In retrospect, the effort was as good a way to deal with grief as any, but I learned that it would be quite the uphill battle to get such a memoir published even if the safety of pharmaceutical drugs is an issue critical to everyone. Nobodies do manage to find publishers, and sometimes their books sell, but bookstore research showed that celebrities had cornered the market on personal tragedy memoirs–Brooke Shields is the voice for postpartum depression, pundit Morton Kondracke had enough recognition to publish a book on his wife’s Parkinson’s disease. Granted I surely could have worked harder to get my story published as a book, but I followed the advice of the standard agent’s nonfiction rejection and wrote an article instead.

But the secretly corrosive effect of celebrity culture really hit home when I published my first (and thus far only) novel, Amorous Woman. I’d always wondered if I had it in me to write a novel, and with a little help from my friends and numerous cases of Snapple, I managed to finish a book I felt told my truth about my experiences in Japan. Many people were very appreciative and supportive, but plenty more hit me with “Is it on the bestseller list? When will it be a movie?”—all reminders that I was not a “real” writer because it only counts if your writing makes you rich and famous.

This was more an annoyance than a dark crisis, but I do remember feeling miffed that all the effort and life-research I put into writing the book didn’t seem to count if it didn’t become a national sensation like, gee, about .001% of books published. I distinctly remember thinking how ridiculous it would be if you had to be a celebrity to matter at all. No food, no water, no basic human dignity allowed to anyone who didn’t at least have a small part in an HBO drama. In a sense, that’s what we do to writers when we assume only the rich and famous are worthy of consideration.

Maybe there are some writers who are so well-grounded that they are immune to our society’s definition of success: riches, fame, invitations to the best parties, and most important of all, having an agent who returns phone calls. I’m more than halfway to being that writer, but I still find that the assumptions of a celebrity-worshipping culture distort my sense of what to write, in particular, the value of writing to the market. I’ll talk more about this in next month’s installment, but for now I invite you to think about the ways you embrace (me: a guilty purchase of a magazine with an article on darling little Prince George) or resist (me: reading academic deconstructions of fame in the mass media age, which actually do help bring sanity).

As spinners of fantasy ourselves, the fantasy of celebrity is a relevant issue to our work and our imaginations. I look forward to discussing it with ERWA blog readers in the months to come.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

“Knowing” Sex: Science, Fear and Meaning in Erotica

by Donna George Storey

I haven’t seen the Showtime! series Masters of Sex yet and probably should as part of my ongoing research on sex and culture, but I did recently plough through the book that inspired the series, Masters of Sex: William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America to Love by Thomas Maier (Basic Books, 2009). I don’t intend to give a full book review, but let’s put it this way: there’s still plenty of room for an intelligent, nuanced study of the lives and work of Masters and Johnson in the future. Yet in spite of its sensational-journalistic sensibility, Maier’s book did make me ponder yet again the deeply-rooted obstacles erotica writers still face decades after Masters and Johnson compiled their ground-breaking data.

William Masters began his career as a gynecologist specializing in fertility problems. Although he and his colleagues used all of their intellectual and surgical powers to help infertile couples conceive, they were forbidden to study the natural process by which human life was created. Clinical experimentation on human sexuality was not only scandalous, it was illegal in some states. The book quotes one doctor as, more benignly but with due disgust, asserting that a clinical study of sex as Masters and Johnson undertook in their laboratory would take the “mystery” out of it. Another gynecologist said that when his patients complained of unsatisfying sex lives, he had no help to offer but a warm hug, insisting that the hug did wonders. (To which I reply either “a hug” is a euphemism for much more, or this particular doctor was way gone in his god fantasy.)

Possibly we’re so used to regarding sex as a sacred mystery or a lawless instinct in need of severe legal and cultural restriction that this willed medical ignorance does not at first seem as horrifying as it truly is. What if the medical profession decided cancer was clearly a mark of god’s retribution and thus we should not destroy the “mystery” of the affliction by attempting to understand and treat it? A warm hug would surely provide the cancer patient with adequate intervention?

Very fortunately, William Masters had the courage to begin to study this taboo but fundamental aspect of human existence. Virginia Johnson’s initial key contribution was recruiting women to be subjects for the higher good of replacing myth with fact. Many eagerly participated for just that reason (I believe them—and thank you, sisters!) Johnson and Masters were, for a time, media stars. Their books were best sellers and did indeed overturn a lot of myths about sexuality, female and male both.

Still I’m sad to say that while sex guides and manuals are readily available in the present day, scientific studies of sexuality are still seriously underfunded. You can get grants for any kind of weird diet study in the name of the “obesity epidemic,” but to my knowledge, there’ve been no major breakthroughs in our understanding of human sexual response since the publication of Masters and Johnson’s work. (Please correct me if I’m wrong—even the discovery of the G spot is still controversial and not supported by the few later studies.)

So here’s my question—why don’t people WANT to know about sex? Why aren’t we insisting that our doctors and scientists delve deeper into this important aspect of our lives? Now I’m the first to admit that science has its own severe limitations, but isn’t it sad that we’re still held hostage to an ancient fear of sexuality? How ironic indeed that the Biblical word for sex is to “know” another person, when religion is so often used to perpetuate sexual ignorance.

In mulling this over, I came up with a few ideas—all based on fear. Fear of finding out we don’t measure up sexually. Fear of female sexual response if women were more educated about their potential. A continuing fear of the chaos that would ensue if science confirmed that the sexual urge and its satisfaction are just plain good for you.

In her comment on my April column here at ERWA, Remittance Girl introduced a concise and elegant explanation for all of this fear and willed ignorance and how it affects the response to erotica, which I will now define as writing that seeks to delve deeper into the truth of sexual experience, a study that can be taken on by any sincere amateur who will nonetheless learn much about her own sexuality in the process. RG paraphrases Slavoj Zizek thusly: “You can either have explicit sex, or you can have depth of meaning in narrative, but you can’t have both. That is forbidden.”

Is this refusal to give sex deeper meaning (beyond procreation) why scientific studies of sex are still severely circumscribed as well? Can you imagine the NIH enlisting subjects to participate in laboratory sex for the sake of a greater good?

In fact, I do believe there is a link between the work of Johnson and Masters and the efforts of erotica writers to explore the complexities of the erotic experience, to give it a broader and deeper meaning, to take it seriously in the pursuit of greater knowledge, as any scientific study implicitly does. What we do as erotica writers has meaning, it is important, and it carries on the legacy of all doctors, philosophers and writers in centuries past who chose sexual knowledge and self-knowledge over fear and ignorance. So there, I was a little depressed about all this when I started writing, but I see now there is truly hope and it’s in our vivid imaginations and the fingers tapping our keyboards.

Write on!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman (recently released as an ebook) and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Two Cool “New” Ways to Shame Sex Writers

by Donna George Storey

A few weeks ago a friend sent me a link to an article entitled: “Why Is It So Hard for Women to Write About Sex?” by Claire Dederer (The Atlantic Monthly, February 19, 2014). I clicked the link expecting something along the lines of an article I read at the end of the last century when I first started writing dirty stories, this one by Jane Smiley, who confessed that she was writing a new book with explicit sex scenes and found herself blushing as she wrote. After all, ladies aren’t supposed to descend to explicit descriptions of sex that might arouse, even while they touch upon topics like incest for the sake of literature.

However, to my surprise, The Atlantic article contained a new twist on the reason good girls feel shame when they write about sex. You see, Dederer is writing a memoir about sex, “specifically about having an awful lot of it awfully young—too young—as a teenager in the 1980s.” So far so good, in terms of a surefire hook for the publisher’s sales department. Yet Dederer’s difficulty with the writing process reportedly lies in the fact that she was and is ambivalent about sex, an experience of “doubt braided tightly with the desire.” More than that, apparently she actually thinks during sex and somehow got the message this is bad and she shouldn’t let anyone know that she does this. (I got that message, too, but have mostly moved beyond, thanks to erotica!)

Without going into a detailed summary of the article, what struck me most is that while Dederer acknowledges that female sexuality is seen as normal and real in our times, she worries that her attempts to express ambivalence, complexity or anything other than the sentiment that sex-is-awesome-give-me-more will make her “seem anti-woman, or anti-sex, or anti-sexual-woman (or just a downer).”

Moreover, according to Dederer, men don’t have this problem because their desire is visible in the uncomplicated form of an erection. Which, gentlemen, I hope you will agree, is a brutal simplification of the male experience of sex in our culture. Surely you feel ambivalence, know complexity, suffer pressure to speak of sex in certain accepted ways rather than challenge the cliches with honesty?

I’m not sure which bothers me more, the dehumanizing assertion that male sexuality is uncomplicated because we can see boners or the assumption that women are now allowed to write about sex but are only allowed to do so in positive and uncomplicated terms in order to affirm that women feel desire? As erotica writers, we are all aware of the restrictions of genre upon our writing, but I hadn’t realized it was this bad over in Literary Land. No wonder Dederer finds it hard to write about sex.

But for Dederer the landscape is not totally bleak. She has discovered a few female literary models that give her inspiration when she sits down to write about “giving a blow job to that creepy hippie Malcolm in the patchouli-smelling van in 1984.” One writer in particular, Lidia Yuknavitch, intrigued me enough to place a request for her novel, The Chronology of Water, through interlibrary loan. I liked the scene Dederer quoted from competitive swimmer Yuknavitch’s memoir about ogling the older female swimmers when she was a girl. At first she claimed to be horrified and disgusted, but in a humorous twist in the very next paragraph she confessed to being enthralled and aroused by their strong, hairy bodies.

Alas for the foes of sexual shame, The Chronology of Water yielded but another means to silence a writer taking tentative steps toward honest sexual expression. Allow me to share an extended passage from the introduction to Yuknavitch’s memoir written by her fellow writing group member, Chelsea Cain, the author of numerous best-selling thrillers.

Chuck Palahniuk brought up the idea of inviting her. ‘She writes this literary prose,’ he told us. ‘But she’s this big-breasted blond from Texas, and she used to be a stripper and she’s done heroin.’ Needless to say, we were impressed.


I already wanted her to sit by me.


There was more. Chuck told us that some really famous edgy writer—I didn’t recognize her name, but I pretended that I did—had given a talk at a conference about the State of Sex Scenes in Literature and she’d said that all sex scenes were shit, except for the sex written by Lidia Yuknavitch. Maybe Chuck didn’t tell us that. But someone in the group did. I don’t remember. I think I was still thinking about the stripper thing. A real-life ex-stripper in our writing group! So glamorous.


Yes, we said, invite her. Please.


She showed up a few weeks later, wearing a long black coat. I couldn’t see her breasts. She was quiet. She didn’t make eye contact. She did not sound like she was from Texas.


Frankly, I was a little disappointed.


Where was the big hair, the Lucite platform heels? The track marks?


Had Chuck made the whole thing up? (He does that sometimes.)


How was he describing me to people?

Wait, the great Chuck Palahniuk sponsored Yuknavitch for his writing group (even if he does stretch the truth a bit in introducing her)? Does it get cooler than that? But alas, I’m sure ERWA writers are all too familiar with Cain’s preconceptions about women who write about sex or have experience as sex workers or even have large breasts—we’re slutty exhibitionists who provide great material for characters in thrillers, never people with demure wardrobes and complex or even introverted personalities.

The most notable part of this excerpt, however, is the proclamation by the unnamed but famously edgy writer that Lidia Yuknavitch is the only writer on the face of the earth who can write good sex scenes. That’s right, folks, there’s only room for one voice to speak to us about sex in The Right Way!

Before we dismiss the unnamed famous writer’s opinion as a theatrical gesture—or a paid endorsement—might I point out that holding up some legendary stud or beguiling courtesan as a model against which ordinary mortals fall short is a time-honored way to shame people about their real sexuality. Allowing only a small elite of sexual superstars permission to express their experiences is another effective way of silencing the rest of us. Clearly the only thing worse than having ordinary sex is writing about sex in a way that doesn’t crown you as the bestest, coolest sex writer ever.

But remember, this only works if we feel shame about our sexuality and our ability to express it. It probably sells a lot of books, too, this idea that one gifted individual has a special knowledge and skill in sex writing that no one else can match. We eagerly reach for enlightenment from without and, for me at least, always come away unsatisfied.

Given that the literati seem to buy that there are but a very few acceptable ways to write about sex mere decades after respectable people were finally given permission to write about it at all, a question bears asking—how much progress have we really made when it comes to the opportunity to express sexual experience with honesty, whether that be joyful, dark, or a combination of the two? In my opinion, ERWA writers consistently and generously illustrate how well this can be done, even if The Atlantic isn’t giving us equal time to talk about how fun and easy it is. At the same time, we do live in a sex-phobic culture that is very adept at twisting old weapons into new ones to keep too many people scared they’ll do it wrong.

Here is the dirty secret beneath all of this judgment and angst—if you want to write your truth about sex, you can’t do it wrong. There is room for many voices and many experiences, the more the better. Each of us can make up his or her own mind about what touches, amuses, arouses, angers or even shames us.

Start there and writing about sex becomes much easier.

And so I send my best wishes to all courageous writers who speak their erotic truth in spite of the cultural forces aligned against us. May you all, woman or man, find writing about sex inspiring, soul-expanding and challenging in the best of ways.

Enjoy!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman (recently released as an ebook) and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Digging Into the Past—and the Future—of Book Promotion

by Donna George Storey

The New Year always inspires me to do some housecleaning, but this year I found myself craving a deeper level of de-cluttering. Of course, this involves more than just filling up the trashcan, it means asking a lot of questions, too. What’s in this box that’s been sitting on top of my filing cabinet for years and do I even need what’s inside? The answer led me on a little trip down memory lane, but also posed new questions for the future of writerly self-promotion.

The particular box I mentioned just so happened to contain my promotional materials for the original paperback edition of my novel, Amorous Woman, which was released in the US in June 2008. (Predictably, it’s been re-released with another publisher as an ebook and takes up no space in my office). This included postcards, bookmarks, a well-thumbed reading copy of the novel and a sample press kit as well as a stand-up sign decorated with Japan-themed stickers: “Take An Exotic, Erotic Trip to Japan with an Amorous Woman.”

Ah, the memories!

It was educational—and utterly exhausting—to promote my novel all on my own, as the majority of writers must. In some ways I still haven’t recovered, and yet I met so many wonderful, generous people and had countless adventures that still make me smile. Reading with “In the Flesh” at the glitzy Hollywood Hustler. Speeding past the junkies collapsed on the sidewalks of downtown LA in a decrepit taxi at 1 am after taping the Dr. Susan Block radio show. The countless emails, phone calls, guest blogs, radio interviews, bookstore readings, bookstore visits begging the owner to help out a local author. This experience, more than any other, made me feel like I was a real writer because my eyes were truly opened to the reality that writing a book is but the small first step in reaching readers.

With Eden Bradley at our exotic, erotic booth (that’s my kimono in the background)

The contents of the aforementioned box took me back to one event in particular—the West Hollywood Book Fair where I was part of a booth of “California Erotica Writers” in September 2008. (For anyone interested in a more detailed description of that hot, busy day, check out my blog post, The Last Hollywood Hustle).

Advised by a book fair veteran to provide freebies for the fairgoers to get their attention, I ordered some fortune cookies with my own erotic fortunes as follows:

Sip hot tea; swallow. French kiss your lover’s most sensitive spot.

Blindfold your lover; order him/her to remain still. Do things to make this difficult.

Caress your lover’s body with silk; try velvet, then your tongue.

Have your lover pick a number from 1 to 10. Caress his/her secret pleasure spot for that number of minutes.

FOR HIM: Sip crème de menthe; spread it over his member with your tongue. Blow gently.

Your lover’s been naughty. Maybe s/he needs a gentle spanking?

Give your lover an erotic book; mark your favorite passages first.

FOR HER: Don’t take off your lingerie tonight—make him (or her) “work around it.”

Have phone sex—even if you live together.

Make love anywhere but the bedroom. Be creative with the furniture.

The cookies–Would you like to try a grownup fortune cookie?–actually were relatively successful in getting the grownups to come over to the booth so I could chat them up about my novel. Without them, I probably wouldn’t have gotten a single person to listen to my pitch! Although I didn’t intend it to be self-serving, those who got the fortune suggesting you give your lover an erotic book smiled cynically, and I vowed to substitute a different fortune next time. (I still believe an erotic book is a good gift, and it doesn’t have to be my book!) While I would never call myself an outgoing person, for the sake of my novel, I took on the role of salesman as best I could. One athletic, silver-haired gentleman even asked me if I was from L.A. When I replied I was from the Bay Area, he smiled and said, “You seem like one of us,” which pleased me then, but feels more complicated as a compliment in retrospect.

Of course, I can’t let the rosy haze of nostalgia mislead you about the thrill of my self-planned book tour to Hollywood. I stood at that booth from 10 am to 5 pm and sold 5 copies total, all to strangers—which was the best record of all of my boothmates. And all the visitors weren’t so nice. One boozy woman monopolized my time for 20 minutes, driving away potential customers. Another older gentleman chatted for a long time without buying a book, but before he walked away, he did press his crumbled, uneaten fortune cookie into my hand as a return gift.

It was fun to sift through the contents of the box and reminisce, but my present goal to clean house called me back to 2014. Would I ever use a sign, a press kit or even the bookmarks again? Would I ever attend a book fair to promote my work or traipse around to local bookstores, discovering all too intimately which owners respected erotica and which seemed to take pleasure in sneering at smut?

This, Dear ERWA Blog Reader, is my question for you. Is face-to-face promotion a thing of the past? Are bookmarks and homemade signs merely momentos or worth keeping as tools in my arsenal for promoting my next book? I cannot say that a single event I attended resulted in monetary profit, although I came away with invaluable memories. It seems to me that for reasons of cost and convenience, the future of promoting now lies solely in the Internet ether.

In the midst of writing this month’s post, I happened to read Rachel Kramer Bussel’s column in Dame, “Why Is Self-Promotion Considered the Eighth Deadly Sin?” Most writers, including myself, are more comfortable sitting alone at their computers making stuff up, so it’s no surprise that many, even the successful ones who’ve gotten world-class promotional opportunities like Jonathan Franzen, bemoan the necessity to peddle our own wares. Online promotion certainly does offer real benefits to a writer who is more comfortable writing than soliciting fairgoers to come over to her booth for a chat-up. On the other hand, I sometimes feel that all the Facebooking and Twittering is too much like making faces at myself in the mirror.

Promoting my book is not about me and my wonderful talent, as the uninitiated might think. That was one of the most valuable lessons I learned from my first efforts back in 2008. Promoting is about making connections. In her article, Rachel has a great quote from creative badass blogger, Justine Musk:

“Social media is about finding a way to tell this ongoing, multiplatform kind of story that resonates with your so-called audience because it’s about them, it’s not about you. It serves the audience, not you. Not all marketing is bad marketing. Good marketing is about making an emotional connection with the people whom you are meant to serve.”

I couldn’t agree more. But I have to admit that thus far social media has not provided the same potential for intimacy—although I do feel all warm and fuzzy from the Facebook messages on my birthday—and as I look ahead, I know it will be a challenge to find ways to make a real connection amidst all the noise and distraction of the online universe.

If you have any words of advice, please share!

Wishing you a Happy and Creative 2014!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

The Myth of Immortal Prose

by Donna George Storey

Write what you want to write instead of what you think you’re supposed to write.

That’s what I’m hoping to do, as I discussed in my last column here at ERWA, but I know there’s no quick and easy way to make the big switch. It takes time to discard old habits, to trust inner voices, to take risks. As part of this process, I’ve been thinking back to the messages I’ve gotten over the years about “good” writing from teachers, how-to books, famous writers, literary critics. Or in other words, the specifics of my supposed-to’s.

Back when I first started writing seriously, about sixteen years ago now, I was talking with a friend who had signed up for a pricey writing workshop with the former editor of a national magazine that published fiction. She mentioned that this teacher’s highest praise for a student’s story was “this is writing that will last.” And indeed, he urged all of his students to aim to write “something that will last.”

At the time, I took this as simple wisdom from an expert. After all, wasn’t that the dream of every writer—to be so amazingly talented that we attain immortality like Shakespeare? That guy lived four hundred years ago and everyone still knows his name! Of course, as I became more familiar with what the writer’s life really involves in our commercial age, I realized that “lasting” means your book is reprinted many times or that it’s taught in high school or college classrooms year after year. Unfortunately, authors who achieve either of these goals are rare, and in the latter case, most are already dead. Gradually my goals became more modest. I was satisfied—in the best way–if someone told me that my story lingered for a day or so after s/he read it. Perhaps I would never be immortal, but whenever a reader confessed that s/he read a particular story of mine many times for erotic inspiration, I knew I’d made a true connection, the highest praise an erotica writer can hope to hear.

Yet I still believed that there were “important new voices” up there in Literary Land, penning gorgeous and unforgettable literary prose that would earn them a throne next to The Bard for all eternity. I didn’t really question this (I’m now somewhat embarrassed to admit) until very recently when I happened to read a book by Leslie Fiedler, a renegade English professor who both entertained and scandalized academia in the latter half of the twentieth century by embracing popular literature as worthy of analysis. (He is also credited with coining the term “postmodernism” among other things). I originally sought out his book What Was Literature? for an essay on Rhett Butler as a symbolic Black Stranger in Gone With the Wind, but I ended up reading the whole book with great enjoyment. 

I was hooked at Fiedler’s opening redefinition of the classic distinction between literary (high) and popular (low) fiction. He wrote that literary fiction could in fact be seen as “minority” literature, read by few and penned by tormented, introverted male artistes to stimulate the intellect, whereas popular literature was “majority” literature, mainly scribbled by female hacks to drug us with cheap sensationalism. More amusing was his description of popular fiction as “optional,” whereas, for most readers, literary fiction was “compulsory,” as in school assignments that needed professional explication to be understood fully.

But what really struck a chord with me was Fiedler’s insistence that “writing that lasts” is not about the quality of the prose. It is what he calls the mythopoeic power of the story, with characters that live on in our minds long after the beautiful metaphors (if any) are forgotten. This got me thinking about which stories have indeed lasted over time, stories our culture returns to again and again in modern riffs and movie remakes. My Anglo-centric list would include the Bible, some of Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth), Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, Huckleberry Finn, Dracula, The Great Gatsby, and Gone with the Wind. Harry Potter, Twilight, and Fifty Shades of Grey certainly define contemporary popular tastes, but I’d need to reconsider their lasting impact in about 30 years. By this measure, all the towering literary figures of my youth—Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Updike, Roth—are still reasonably famous as names, but rarely read except in class or by a small minority of literati with historical inclinations.

I know my particular list is open to argument—maybe you’d delete Macbeth and Huck Finn and add King Lear and To Kill a Mockingbird–but the specific examples are less important than the redefinition of “writing that lasts.” Because I now see it’s not about the world’s admiration for a writer’s brilliant prose, fresh metaphors, and carefully structured chapter breaks—although many of these works are beautifully written and a pleasure to read because of it. The immortality belongs to the story for its power to connect deeply with readers across cultures and time.

As a writer myself, I was also very interested to learn that Harriet Beecher Stowe was inspired to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin when she had a vision during a church service of an aged black slave being beaten to death by a cruel master. The image rose up in her mind, demanding a novel to be written around it. I also remembered that Charles Dickens was planning to write a political pamphlet about poverty and injustice in the fall of 1843. However, inspired by the rousing response to a speech he gave to a workingman’s club in Manchester, he walked the dark streets of the city, possessed by images of a redeemed miser. In a few short weeks of feverish work, he wrote one of the most retold stories ever, A Christmas Carol.

So what does this mean for a writer who seeks to create works that linger if not last forever? For me it means taking one more step away from writing as ego gratification, as proof of my worthiness or cleverness–because really, let’s face it, no one cares if I can turn a phrase or not. It also means taking one step closer to stories that move me, that draw me in to their magic, that beg to be told through me.

Which stories beg to be told through you?

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman (recently released as an ebook) and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

Validation, Desire and Other Reasons to Write

By Donna George Storey

I haven’t written a new story in almost six months. Not that I haven’t had a few fallow periods since I first started writing fiction seriously sixteen years ago, but the break in the flow this time around has inspired me to listen to an inner voice that is usually drowned out by the word-rush of my latest story project.

Who am I writing for?

(Yes, I know, it should be “For whom am I writing?” but my inner voice is not particularly interested in proper grammar!)

“For my audience, the bigger the better”—that’s the first simple answer that comes to mind. Or “for myself,” which feels fleetingly self-empowering and bravely feminist, but doesn’t ring totally true. To be honest, although no work I’ve ever done has felt so personally expressive and revealing as fiction writing, from the beginning the driving force has been my desire for validation through publication. While an audience is implied, the images of success that come to mind are acceptance letters, contracts, books or journals to hold in my hands. Oddly no readers are in sight.

I publish, therefore I am a writer. That was my creed. Always an eager student, I immersed myself in how-to-get-published books of all kinds, scribbling notes on how to write a cover letter, how to hook an editor, sure-fire techniques of the selling writer (throw a lovable character into trouble, then deeper trouble to keep the pages turning). I’m not sure if any of this advice actually affected the stories I wrote, but it did reinforce my sense that ultimately I wrote to please an editor and, stretching endlessly beyond her, a faultlessly wise literary establishment.

Over the years, I eventually did get published—with over 160 credits to my name right now. Damn, even my cruelly judgmental inner voice has to admit that’s some form of validation. Yet, what inspired me to write before now seems a barrier. Perhaps it’s because I know too well what publication, after the first rush of pleasure and pride, means. Promoting your work is an endless, soul-draining task. Nor do the writing experts allow for resting on your laurels. Everyone knows a truly successful writer must produce a constant stream of novels to establish her brand and a deep backlist for new fans to explore. At this level, success is, of course, married to profit rather than a mere byline. But in order to make cartloads of cash in the gold rush of self-publishing, you must above all be savvy about what sells.

Trapped as I am in an attitude that has apparently given me what I wanted, when I think about writing another novel, I feel bored rather than inspired. Experience (or rather, feedback from editors over the years) tells me every chapter has to have a sex scene. The story or vocabulary can’t be too complex. My book has to fit into a well-oiled slot in the store (none of this genre-busting nonsense) and it has to be excitingly fresh, yet reassuringly the same as every other best-selling erotic novel out there. This is what “they” want from me. I ignore their desires at my peril.

But at long last, what I’d like to call the “real” writer inside me is saying enough. Enough of reading the market and second-guessing editors and thinking these skills are enough to satisfy my heart, mind and spirit. Write what fascinates you, she tells me. Write sex scenes only where they belong in the story and only at the level of explicitness that feels right, because sometimes suggestion is far sexier than a blow-by-blow. Write only for yourself at least once in your life. At the very least, the experience will teach you lessons you will never learn if you’re always looking to others for your reward.

It all sounds pretty sweet right now.

I can’t guarantee myself I’ll have the courage to do this, but after months of indifference, I’m finally getting excited about writing again.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman (recently released as an ebook) and a new collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey
. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

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