One of the things I have to do today/tonight is write the intro for Best Women’s Erotica 2007. So I just re-read the intro to BWE 2006, and now I’m all fired up. What’s funny is that in the intro I talk about cupcakes and warm frosting and the spaces in between kisses, and last night I had a few bites of the most amazing cupcake ever — it was like heated chocolate cake batter. It was like I’d never had a cupcake before. And now it feels like I haven’t kissed anyone in a million years. I want kisses and cupcakes, hm. And I want the kind of kisses where you feel like you’ve never kissed anyone before in the whole world.
So for the hell of it, I pasted in my introduction to Best Women’s Erotica 2006 after the jump. If you’ve never read my books, it’s a nice fingerful of what my books are like.
* * * * * * *
Introduction: Buttercream Frosting Erotica
This collection of the best erotica written by women, for women is meant to be read nice and slow, like a slippery hot afternoon fuck on sweaty sheets, when you don’t want to eat… food. The stories are to be carried with you for days after you read them, like sense memories. While compiling this heady collection of hot erotica, I purchased a container of buttercream frosting body butter and wore some behind my ears throughout; and like the delicious sweetness of a warm, fluffy cupcake, a whiff of a particularly memorable story would catch up with me while waiting at a crosswalk for a light to change, or in a quiet moment between kisses. While reading the submissions, I often wished I was in each of these stories, usually before I had to fold up my iBook and flee whatever cafe I was reading them in, too aroused to sit still.
Too much information? For me, it was a good sign to have so many good stories to choose among, and San Francisco isn’t a bad place to meander from wifi to wifi with a laptop, among Victorians and community gardens, with visceral, delicious erotica freshly coursing through my veins. It was a dream come true to become the editor of a series that had been part of my erotic upbringing, and an important part of my generation’s emerging dialogues on sex. The responsibility loomed, and yet I felt just a little bit punk coming into it as a sexually articulate young woman who had a few unconventional ideas about what she’d like to see in a collection that so boldly proclaims to be the best, the hottest, for women — now. It just wouldn’t be true to itself — nor I true to myself — if the collection didn’t rebel against the past, spread its legs and give the finger to its contemporaries, and frighten all those stodgy old horses I’ve felt have taken over the world of erotica lately.
Not that all of the literally hundreds of stories I received in my call for submissions were as sublime as I described; I did reach a point of frustration when I read the twentieth story that started out hot and sweet, then had a breakup, or a death, or a depressed main character. And I kept thinking, What the fuck? It’s a head-scratcher I’ve been scratching about for several years, as I’ve read every collection of women’s erotica and female-edited erotic anthology I could get my hands on. Looking over these stories and the heavy-handed editing in the collections I wonder, do some people think that “women’s erotica” needs to be dark or drama-filled in order to be taken seriously?
I’ve noticed a huge difference in the way that previous generations of women have edited erotic anthologies in comparison to my generations’ attitudes about sex. We don’t think that “literary” erotica, especially women’s erotica, needs to be somehow qualified by sadness, anguish, pain or suffering (unless you mean a tidy spanking). I think that’s a holdover from older generations’ beliefs that because the writing is about sex, it needs to be something more, or less, to be taken seriously as literature. Which of course has a totally different meaning now in the world of blogs, which I see as living, breathing books. Raw erotica: alive, no constraints.
Together we deliver a message to the publishers, editors, TV writers and filmmakers who imbue the hot fuck with a moral: you’re not relevant anymore. Our erotica is alive. For girls like me, emotional pain and gender stereotyping hinders our hot fucks. We do crazy things and get off like screaming tattooed banshees doing them. We get hard-ons. We suck, we lick, we conquer, we cut and bleed, we cuddle. Our erotica is edgy, yes, but it is joyful. You can wank to it. You want it to happen to you. Its edge comes from authenticity of experience; I get the feeling that a lot of erotica editors try too hard to capture that hunger, that drive that comes from being a real woman on the street, feet on the ground, looking for sex with lips like sugar and a view of the world that’s slightly askew, like a familiar puzzle all rearranged to make a new picture. It’s a feeling that you experience and can’t fake, like a sweet scent you can almost taste, that reminder of your very fist warm cupcake.
Take for instance Cate Robertson’s Just Watch Me, Rodin, where a young woman makes her rent by posing nude for an older male artist who pushes her sexual boundaries until one day she proves his pushing is no match for her appetite. Slip into the lyricism of Sydney Beier’s Reading to Horst, in which after picking up a handsome stranger in a German cafe, a female American tourist discovers that erotica really is the language of lust. In The Upper Hand by Saskia Walker, watch how one clever woman gets the best of her cute young male spying neighbors. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Spike gives us a come-uppance of a different kind, in which a young Goth girl shows a pushy “man’s man” who wears not just the pants, but the spike-heeled shoes.
When a woman has had enough of the sexual constraints put on her by her lovers, her own ego, she might become the daring character in Ayre Riley’s Mr. Right(s). Or, she may go all the way into her most taboo fantasies (while maintaining a persona that hints at nothing), like the woman in Geneva King’s Utterly Nondescript. Or, she might literally push her heightened senses into her headiest sexual fantasies, such as the protagonist in Kellie Gillespie’s Another Assignation With Charles Bonnet. But if she seeks out relief in the form of Donna George Story’s Therapy, all bets are off on the outcome of any sexual revelations she might have in store for her hapless therapist.
We go to great lengths to get satisfaction, but if you’re like the girl in Fulfilling Megan by Bonnie Dee, you’ll do whatever’s necessary to get off, even if it means making your boyfriend have sex with a stranger for your own gratification. Some couples wind up making strange bedfellows with… fellows, such as the sexually rapacious lesbian couple in Jean Roberta’s The Arrangement. Mired in conflict with a mean (but sexy) boss, any girl is bound to do as the heroine in Elizabeth Coldwell’s Heat, and turn the boiling point of conflict into pure fire. And should the heat become too much, try eating ice cream like the namesake character in Consuela by Alicia Wag, who seduces a young female student and gets her involved in one sticky sexual encounter after another — including the lover she keeps secret.
If you’re the kind of woman who pokes around where she shouldn’t, especially when it comes to sex, you’ll find yourself feeling sympathy spanks for the naughty girl in Eva Hore’s A Spanking Good Time. Or, maybe you’ll enjoy the predicament in Busted by Jordana Winters, where uniform fetishes and public sex collide in one intense, sweaty encounter. Magenta Brown’s Textual Intercourse goes beyond an adult text operator’s sexual cliches and into reality, putting a neat twist on all those “pizza delivery” fantasies. And Teresa Lamai’s In Snow beautifully blends searing sex and the intricacies of intimacy, culminating in a ballerina’s most memorable performance.
Get a taste of several virtual sexual thrills as seen through the eyes of a politically powerful man tired of living through the trysts of others in Lee Skinner’s clever Vicarious. Also tired of wondering if the grass is greener is the woman in Paid for the Pleasure by Adrie Santos, who takes a plunge into the world of answering anonymous ads and allows a man to pay her for his — and her — pleasure. A step further into someone else’s sexual world is where L.E. Yates’ Cruising goes, as a woman who gets off haunting gay male cruising spots gets more than she bargains for when she meets one of her own kind. Turning the tables once more, a dancer takes — and gets — exactly what she wants from the men at a bachelor party in an incendiary group sex scene in Deal by Emerald. At the end of it all is Alison Tyler’s Four on the Floor, a triple-X tale of a snarky couple who hunts and conquers other couples as their sexual conquests.
I hope you enjoy that I’ve run totally sexually fucking amok putting together the stories in Best Women’s Erotica 2006. I filled it with erotica that totally turns my head around and makes me want to fuck, or at least thrust a few fingers in the panties for a little squeeze. Erotica like a stolen fingerful of frosting. Erotica for girls like me.
/intro
