All the action starts on Wednesday

So this Wednesday I will begin my year of erotic exploration. One post every day including fiction, memoir and essay. All of it about sex. Some of it about zoophilia - quite a lot of it probably as this is the focus of my thesis.

In the lead up to the grand opening of my year of the beast, I would like to quote Xavier Pons from his book Messengers of Eros.

"Authors also represent sex in a somewhat different sense - by acting out their own sex in their writing. Although a language is common property of all who speak it, its practice, especially through writing, is not a gender-free activity, conducted in exactly the same manner by men and women, by heterosexuals and homosexuals. Something of the author's gender and sexual orientation will appear in their very writing, which is an extension of their own self, flesh turned into ink."

I wonder as I read this if I am able to write about sex as I do because of my sexual fluidity. I desire a wide range of people, creatures, objects. I have no specific urge to have sex with an animal and the idea of sex with some animals provides me with a barrier to arousal. I grew up with dogs. I know how dirty they can be. Still I can see the erotic potential of fur, and anything that has come from the sea has a certain tactile appeal. I will go to places that I have not allowed myself to go. Will you come with me?

offensive material

So my Facebook Page has been disabled due to offensive material. I linked to this site. Who is the person that censors what we post? I want to know why I was deleted but they do not have to tell you. This is a privately run space. We have no recourse. I will have to think about this some more.

sans citations

Why Porn?

I have been listening to the frightening Gail Dines and I don't want to give her more airplay by naming her here but I must vent. She has been taking up my vision, turning it enraged red, and I will respond to her more formally in my exegesis where I will cite the good folk too, the advocates of pleasure, my tribe. For now I have to clarify my argument. No references needed, this is a friendly conversation between me and you.

Honestly? From the heart? I think sex is important. I think it is important for literature particularly. The reason is that literature when it is good, shines a light on the relationships between people. We are one thing out there in the world but sex changes everything between us, even if it is just for that moment when we are locked in that carnal embrace.

I rage at authors who take us right up to the heart of a story, then lacking the skills to write a climactic scene, come back to the scene when the heart of it is over. I see this often, even with some of our more celebrated authors. It always seems like a cheat to me. I want to know what has happened, to be there through the action, not one step removed, looking on as if it were a crime scene.

Sex changes everything and because of this, it is often the most honest moment of a story, the moment when we see characters behaving openly without their armor of carefully chosen clothes and words. So many writers take us right up to the moment of sex and then return, when the sex is done. I have the same frustration with them as with the ones who refuse to show the final confrontation. Take me with you. Don't leave me here in the cold to wonder.

Explicit writing about sex, pornographic writing takes us to the heart of it. The words we choose are important. How we describe the genitals says so much about our relationship to them. How we kiss, touch, finger, fuck. All of these things are unique to the specifics of that relationship.

In literature the more extremes of literary pornography act as a kind of ice breaker, forging the way for other, smaller, less robust ships to sail in their wake. The Story of the Eye, Little Birds, The Delta of Venus, The Story of O, the work of the Marquis de Sade, these are the ice breaking barges that ram into our polite avoidance of sex. These are the works of pure sexuality. Sex up front and foremost. Pornography, if you will, designed for us to look at sex in all its pleasures and perversions.

Ultimately I would like to send my ice breaking works of fiction on ahead, my pornographic novellas. I see them ramming headlong into the thick cold territory that Gail Dines and her cohort have frozen over. Behind my ice breakers will come my quieter works, delicate works of fiction, novels, short fiction, each one using sex as it should be used, as a light shining onto the relationships between us. Illuminating. I hope that my great fearless barges will make way for other writers to claim the same space. Ultimately I hope there will be other, modern pornographic writings taking huge chunks out of the icy terrain beside me. I know that Frank Moorhouse will be steering his barge into a different part of the landscape when Sonny is published next year. More icebreakers please. More literary porn. Fellow writers of smut? I welcome your assistance.

ready steady

From the 1st of June I will start upkeeping this blog. A sex scene a day just like in the old days. These scenes may not be true. I am interested in your responses to the work. I will remove the comments filter so that you can comment without me interfering.

What is going too far? A dear friend of mine hid me on facebook. I was re-posting youtube videos of people collecting semen from dogs. I was watching them as research for a scene I was writing. I needed to know the ins and outs of a dog's penis. I could not write from experience, but at least I could write from some visual stimulus. I thought that my facebook friends would be interested in sharing in this with me. Apparently I was wrong. I had crossed a line, his line. I was hurt because this man was a dear friend, my best friend and I felt that his hiding of me on facebook was some kind of betrayal. He is my best friend but I am probably not his. He draws his line above videos of dog penises, my line is somewhat further along than this. I suppose we all have our very different lines. I love him best, he loves someone else best. We can't bring someone along with us on our journey but we can travel side by side for a while if we are lucky, each with our very different responses to the world we are traveling through.

Apparently I am too rude for my university. This is something that makes me very sad at times, angry at others. I had thought my PhD would be about pressing forward into new territory. Research at the cutting edge would mean there was an edge and I would by inching closer to that edge, exhilarated by the idea that I might fall off, but also safe and supported by the creative writing faculty. It seems now that they will be my harshest critics. Work that was easily contracted and published by a mainstream publishing house I will have to struggle to push past my head of school. I am going to have to meet face to face with the head of school to explain and defend the pornographic nature of my research. Sex is still cause for concern. Sex is still not a valid form of expression.

When people have sex they are at their most vulnerable. Literature is best when it tells us something real and enlightening about human relationships. Most writers take people into the bedroom and then leave then just outside the bedroom door, resuming the interaction when all the huffing and puffing is done. But those moments behind the bedroom door are the most revealing. We human beings are so vulnerable when we make love. Our relationship with each other changes at the moment of intercourse. To leave that part of the exchange unspoken is to entirely miss the point. I am currently only concerned with those very intimate and extreme changes in our relationships that occur during intercourse. This is the story I have to tell. The edge I must feel for is the edge of acceptable sexual behaviour. I want to cross the line and re-draw it, pushing it incrementally further. This task leaves space for other writers to present their work in this newly claimed space. This will be my contribution to knowledge. This is what I will argue.

This blog will be the first place for me to begin my explorations. Your reactions to each post will be my measuring stick. From June 1st I will write one post a day. I will take risks. I promise not to let myself off the hook. I will not use a soft focus lens or spare myself from the more difficult sexual confrontations. I will look at the places that are hardest to inhabit, the perverse, the unknown, the forbidden and the biggest of the taboos.

Come with me on this journey.

Head and groin

Let me now make love with my head. It is difficult. In the discussion of sex all of the blood seems to rush to my groin. What begins as a conversation ends with a bodily hunger that consumes all semblance of ordinary human interaction. I stop listening. I am overtaken instead by stray scents, a touch, the viscosity of bodily fluids. People are reduced to a touch. The sense of their words is muted as that other channel, the frequency of sex, is turned up to a deafening level.

I must read sex and understand it. This is where my study has led me, towards French Theorists who are ironically impenetrable, towards Sontag who is glorious until her discussion of Sade causes the blood to rush to my vagina and I find myself wondering how it would be to feel her lips on me, discussing sexuality without words, her luscious thick hair water-falling around my hips. My study of sexuality is a strange unbalanced interplay between head and groin. I have set out to become a thinker of sex and yet, every time I think of it I am drawn back into the voracious appetite of my body.

And so I read the theory of it all, the mechanations of the act of writing about sex removed from the bodily participation in the act, and yet the sludge of my desire sullies the pristine pages of Foucault.

Very large woman on the bus

She has spent time on her hair although despite this there is a light snow of dandruff on her flimsy shirt. Immaculate makeup, not heavy, just enough to emphasize the doll-like fullness of her lips, her dark intelligent eyes, the roundness of her face which is reminiscent of a fruit at the very moment of ripeness. She has a clear sense of style, confident and without any need to overindulge in the distractions of lace or detail of cloth.

She is breathtaking, and as she stands, everyone watches her, but I know they are wondering how she got to be so big. I am wondering about the powdery smell of her massive thighs, and if all the world shudders when she comes.

the race

She worries that they are too alike.

"We could never be together because of the similarities" and as soon as she has said it she knows that it was a mistake.

This is the difference between them. She sees their love of Art and literature, he notices her anxiousness and vaguely contained fury. To her they are too close. To him they are too far apart.

She sees a film at the cinema and knows that he would like it too. She recommend it. He downloads it and shrugs telling her that it is okay.

They make love and she is struck by her inability to feel intimate, even when she is completely naked before him. He tells her that this time was the best ever.

They have strayed past the end of the thing. Somewhere, without a finishing line to snap with her out-pressed chest they have run the course to its completion. No one to pat them on the back or bring them post race refreshments and so together they keep running, stopping now and then to look back at the ever-lengthening distance behind them, wondering if it is up to them to shake hands and, exhausted, walk off the track.

Damp-eyed she hugs him goodbye knowing that it is for the last time. Cheerily he kisses her on the cheek and tells her that he'll see her next week. When he is gone she stands on the track and bends at the waist and breathes till the pain lessens. She could just walk away. Should. Will.

She spends a day in mourning, crying for a thing that is now lost.

He calls. He sets a time and a place and at some point in the conversation he makes her laugh. She picks herself up off the grass and performs a few half-hearted stretches. Slowly at first, but with increasing vigor, she begins to run again.