Putting The Head Back In Hedonism

“Give me the good stuff and give me lots of it now!”

I’m the kind of person who has always preferred to eat his dessert first so yeah, I can relate to that quote.

The quote is taken from an online journal I recently started reading and her most recent comment suggests she’s been reading my blog here. A comment like “I read your journal (you know who you are)” is surely directed at me or, at least, that’s what the Voice of Vanity within would tell me. It may not be the case at all, but let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and carry on regardless. She goes on to say she wants to see herself mentioned more often by me, so here goes.

The idea that two people can correspond through abstract prose, such as you find in a blog, is one that has appealed to me for many years. I once read the book Quiver by Justine Ettler – an Australian author in the grunge-lit genre that was popular in the early 90s. The book was bought on impulse, primarily because of the picture on its cover that featured a stylish black and white image of a woman who bore all the hallmarks of a dominatrix: busty, tight-fitting leotard and with riding crop in hand. There was only her torso shown and it reminded me a lot of the cover of Germaine Greer’s book, The Female Eunuch.

Ettler’s novel turned out to be one very, large yawn. It opens with the description of some Sydney flat the morning after a wild party. Now, I’m no critical expert on fiction, but after reading several pages, I still hadn’t gotten to the end of what essentially was a shopping-list description of everything in that flat. Boring doesn’t even begin to describe it. The rest of the book only went downhill after this, and I can’t even remember most of it; such was the stupefying nature of the prose. Apparently (according to the synopsis on the back cover) it was supposed to be a romp through the seedy underside of Sydney, with measured doses of BDSM themes thrown in to titillate the reader. The fact it was written in the first person perspective led me to believe Ettler’s inner girl was all too clear for the reader to see. I have no idea whether or not Justine is her real name, but I’m guessing it’s an alias drawn from the title of the dear ol’ Marquis de Sade’s most famous novel of the same name.

Whatever the case, Ettler’s book inspired me to write a novel of my own. I wrote several hundred pages that essentially attacked her book as nonsense and her as a charlatan. It was filled with every taboo I could imagine, much like the Marquis himself might have written – not out of any literary sensibility but rather simply to make Justine look even more stupid than nature intended. Cruel? Perhaps. A waste of time? Undoubtedly, because I lost interest in it before it ever got half way finished. But there was still an underlying experiment at play – a what if type of scenario as in what if my novel became the beginning of a correspondence between Ettler and me – a correspondence that wasn’t done in the usual brief form of letters but rather as a series of novels by two people?

Anyway, I’m straying from the point. That type of tag-team writing is now common place, especially in the Blogosphere and in particular, within the genre of BDSM fiction.

There’s certainly a lot of crap out there in this genre, and I make no apologies for my own contributions to the mire. When I first started writing for online publication (mostly in the old Usenet hierarchy of alt.sex.stories.*) I wrote what most beginners write: stroke stories in the third person perspective, past tense. Occasionally these would have some small redeeming quality but mostly, they were written for my own amusement and that of one or two readers I picked up along the way. After a while, I did try and craft stories that were a bit more intellectual than this, but it quickly became apparent there wasn’t any audience for these. Not online, anyway.

A few years ago I read a great novel (by William Goldsworthy) called Honk If You’re Jesus in which he wrote from the perspective of a female scientist. It was a perspective I’d never considered for my own fiction but it sparked an idea that grew almost into a complete, Frankenstein type of character – a submissive woman and her journey into the world of kink. I was never completely weird about it – her – in that I didn’t need to dress as a woman or be submissive in my own real-life kinky play. The character was largely drawn from a mix of fantasies shared between Mrs P and me, our own real life experiences in the kink world, and a healthy dose of my own perverse nature to blur the lines between fantasy and reality. It was also a fascinating experiment on a number of levels.

For starters, as a man (and a one who identifies as a dominant one at that), it gave me a clear insight into just how dimwitted many of my peers are. Their letters, often which began with illiterate gibberish and demands to serve them and praise the inane pictures of their penises, were a stark peek into what I now believe submissive women undoubtedly have to put up with online. Girls, as a token sister, my heart goes out to you.

But more interesting than this was the way writing from this perspective forced me to really make an effort in understanding what might go on in the head of a submissive woman. Obviously, men aren’t necessarily equipped with the right emotional wiring to ever fully understand this, but it was interesting nonetheless. If nothing else, it allowed me to get more intimately involved with Mr P, not just on a purely physical level, but at depths I might never have plumbed had it not been for my kooky little experiment. In retrospect, I guess I got so deep I missed all the superficial warning signs of what ultimately has become our separation, but there ya go.

I forget the point I originally wanted to make in this entry. Oh wait! Hedonism.

Yeah. I live for pleasure. Everything else one has to live with and endure all seems a bit pointless if there isn’t any underlying pursuit of pleasure involved. I’m not entirely without a sense of morals when seeking it and will joke my hedonistic motto reads a bit like a motel sign: No children; No pets. I tend to leave the old people alone too, but I’m open to most other things. More on this next time…