Nicola Vincent-Abnett

Nicola Vincent-Abnett
"Savant" for Solaris, Wild's End, Further Associates of Sherlock Holms, more Wild's End

Saturday 16 March 2013

This IS the Porn You are Looking for


This week I have mostly been talking about the books I wrote that were not published, have not been published and I do not expect to be published any time soon.

Today I’m going to talk about porn.

You’ll remember the kerfuffle about 50 Shades of Grey. You’ll remember me talking about the book with regard to self-publishing and the horror it engendered in me. You’ll remember me saying I wasn’t tempted to read it. You might even remember this blog I wrote about the poor young woman in the knicker shop.

Then the unthinkable happened. I was asked, as a professional courtesy to read the porn that is 50 Shades of Grey. They call it ‘Erotica’, I believe. Had it not been for the fact that I was asked nicely, and that I felt obliged, professionally, to do it, I would not have read this novel. I’m not E.L. James’s target market.

I would just like to say that I have nothing but admiration for any writer who can sit down and weave a story of, say, 80 thousand words or more. I know that this is far from easy; I’ve done it myself more than half-a-dozen times, and I know it takes it out of a person. Neither do I envy any writer’s success. There is room in the marketplace for everyone. What is good for any other writer has to be good for me. Anything that spurs the public on to buy a book, and anything that makes a reader want to read is good for me as a writer. So, I say thee, Brava! Ms James, and, if I ever meet you, I’ll be happy to compare writing notes.

That said, and happily said, too, 50 Shades of Grey wasn’t my cup of tea. The writing didn’t thrill, and, frankly, neither did the sex.

The problem with this book, and I did only read the first of the trilogy... The problem with this book was that it posed one of those impossible challenges. This book made me ask the question, “If I was going to write a sex book what would I write about? And what would it be like to write it?”

It was only a few short steps, and a little rejigging of my schedule, and I began on a project that I called Addled Kat.

Addled Kat is about a journalist and blogger who meets a man at a family wedding. There is a good deal of friction between them, but the sexual attraction is palpable. Her past is too vanilla and too safe, and he brings out the dangerous side of her she didn’t know existed. 

Kat has a funny, close relationship with her sister, and her blog entries are witty, spiky and on-point. Bob is cool and a bit alpha, but he’s also clever and has a past. They have art in common and social networking. There’s also some house-porn and lots and lots, and LOTS of sex.

It turns out that writing about sex is really very difficult and very, very technical. It’s like choreography or mapping out a fight. 

I wanted to write about the sex, though, and I wanted to make it sexy... properly sexy. I wanted everyone who read the sex to feel that it was real and to have a response to it. I didn’t want the readers to laugh (unless, of course they were supposed to), I didn’t want them to cringe, and I really didn’t want them to be embarrassed. Most of all, I wanted my readers to want to read the sex scenes over and over again. I didn’t want them to skip over the juicy bits because they were lame or a bit wince-worthy, I wanted them to want to come back for more.

The worst of it was that I couldn’t actually tell whether the sex was any good. I was so busy concentrating on choreography and language... I was so busy working out the optimum length of a scene to give the reader the time they needed to assimilate their responses to it... I was so busy making the whole work as one entity, making it inclusive and immersive, that I lost track of my own visceral responses to the actual sex.

When it came time to pass the novel on to my beta-readers, I had absolutely no clue what sort of criticisms to expect from them.

I could not have expected the responses that I got.

Porn is an odd thing if you’re a woman. It is, by its very nature, exploitative of women, and I want nothing to do with that. Plenty of women involved in porn have been happy enough to stand up and say that they love their jobs, are well-paid, and have never felt exploited, and, who knows, that might even be true for them, but... honestly... who are they kidding when it comes to the industry as a whole? No nine year old girl ever grew up saying they wanted to be a sex worker. Enough said.

Porn is, for the most part, male-centric, and, for the most part, that’s because it’s a visual medium. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about written porn. I know how I feel about the porn I wrote. I call it Clit-Lit, and I don’t think of it as exploiting women. I think it rather celebrates the woman at its centre, and I hope it rather celebrates the women who might one day read and, I hope, enjoy the novel.

Porn is male-centric and visual because of how sex works.

Sex is power. Sex and death are the two things on Earth that I genuinely believe have anything at all to do with real magic. They are transcendent. They utterly change us. These experiences are transformative. Of course, as a rule, we don’t live beyond death, so sex is it.

What I’m getting at, what I’m suggesting is that the only true magical power on Earth is the female orgasm. 

Think about it. 

Sex will kill you.

Honest to goodness... If you’re doing it right... Sex. Will. Kill. You.

The sexual urge in the male is precisely that; it is urgent, and there is good reason for that. Historically, if a man is caught off his guard he is dead. If a man is caught off his guard he can be killed by a beast or another man all too easily. If he’s going to take time out for anything at all it really ought to be to spread his seed, to ensure his immortality through procreation. If he’s going to live through procreation and procreate again, he’d better procreate fast. The male orgasm comes about through desperation, and it is fast and perfunctory. It can be achieved standing up, looking around, concentrating, still, on staying alive. It is not an immersive experience, for most men under most circumstances, at least.

I’m sorry, guys, and, of course, I realise that this is a simplistic view of your experience of sex. I know that it isn’t entirely fair or true. I know that you are more complex than this, and I know that some men are capable of having and maintaining extraordinarily satisfying sexual relationships.

I’m also glad to be a woman.

Not for nothing, women were burned at the stake as witches. Not for nothing, women were denied power in patriarchial societies that sought to keep them in their places, control them and crush their anarchic sexual natures. Not for nothing was virginity invented for women: a nothing created to ensure that men controlled women’s sex lives, orgasms and procreation, not to mention secured the knowledge of who they were raising as their sons. Not for nothing, the clitorectomy... I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

Sex will kill you, and that is particularly true of women. Childbirth is a dangerous business. If getting pregnant doesn’t kill you, being pregnant will, and if being pregnant doesn’t kill you, giving birth will. The only reason to have sex in the first instance is the female orgasm.

It is magical. It is the only real magic you’ll find in this life. To talk about it, to write about it is a kind of nonsense. To think it’s possible to exploit it seems ridiculous. How is it possible to exploit that which transcends all else? It can’t be given away, passed on, exchanged, shared, bartered. It is utterly owned.

When I decided to write about sex... when I took on the challenge of writing a better book about sex for women... when I decided that clit-lit had to be better than erotica... when I decided that I could make women laugh and cry, reflect their relationships with life and art, and shopping and other women, and social networking, and life, and men... when I decided that I could do all that, and, who knows, invite a woman to enjoy her orgasm, all in one good book, I decided that it had to be worth a try.

My beta-readers tell me it was well worth the effort... All of them... 

... And they weren’t all women.





8 comments:

  1. On the other hand, it doesn't look as if it's going to sell any time soon, although I haven't lost all hope just yet. Smiles.

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  2. Addled Kat was fun, although it's not a genre I take all that seriously. The right side of tongue in cheek, if you know what I mean. x

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  3. Blimey! From murder to sex in the space of a few weeks. Dan's blog is so tame in comparison. He talks about Lego men! Admittedly Tanith Lego men.

    Art, war, religion and sex. I remember when I was a young boy reading in the Sunday Times that these are the four important parts of human society found in all cultures throughout the history of the world.

    I'm not a fan of Western produced, labelled and marketed sex. My culture has made me pretty asexual I reckon. I'm all for equality between men and women, but I think when it comes to sex women of my generation just objectify men the same way men do women. It kinda sucks. I'm in my mid 20s and the young women I meet have a completely different idea of what it means to be a man to what I think. But then my male mates have some funny ideas about women too.

    Screw it. A beer and soft core mag is all I need.

    Tom in Norwich

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    Replies
    1. That might be the saddest and most damning indictment of first world sexual culture that I have heard for a very long time, and something that we should all be trying to address. It's also one of the reasons I wanted to write about sex: to try to swing the balance away from the '50 Shades of Grey' cultural norm that we have come to expect.

      I can't say I blame you, Tom, but to be so jaded, so young makes me wonder how you can begin to forgive the society that has foisted these parlous standards upon you.

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    ReplyDelete