Res ipsa loquitur

The spouse is reading a book about Shakespeare. It claims that Shakespeare must have had an unhappy marriage, because none of his plays are about happy marriages. The spouse scoffs at this. "Nobody wants to see a play that's like their marriage, and nobody wants their marriage to be like a play," he says. "If you're lucky, your marriage is the opposite of dramatic."

Remember "Moonlighting"? Remember how sexy Maddy and David were as they bickered and maneuvered and claimed not to feel what they were feeling? Remember how fast all that sexy went away as soon as they actually acted on what they felt?

And yet ... And yet. As a person, I like having a relationship that can be measured in decades. As a writer, I like a challenge. And I don't believe that there's no way to write an established relationship except as the grave of a romance or a backdrop for nonromantic derring-do.

You can write a long-term relationship that still has the romantic and sexual tension you need to keep the sex sexy. Not many people do, but you can.

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So I wrote a nice little post about elements of the season, and then I started thinking about Misrule as applied to porn. You know, where masters serve their slaves, and women give orders to men, and everything is turned upside-down, often with copious amounts of alcohol ...

The Feast of Fools, as described by the Wikipedia. Note the early bishop's particular quarrel with the effects of the season on soldiers: Their military discipline is relaxed and slackened. They make sport of the laws and the government of which they have been appointed guardians. ... Does not the champion, the lion-hearted man, the man who when armed is the admiration of his friends and the terror of his foes, loose his tunic to his ankles, twine a girdle about his breast, use a woman's sandal, put a roll of hair on his head in feminine fashion, and ply the distaff full of wool, and with that right hand which once bore the trophy, draw out the thread, and changing the tone of his voice utter his words in the sharper feminine treble?

I've moved this series to my webpage. You can find it here.

I've moved this series to my webpage. You can find it here.

I dreamed I was a character in a crossover threesome by paian.

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saridout and _inbetween_ evidently haven't consumed their recommended daily allowance of "Aliens make them do it" stories, so here's a small collection of my favorites. I welcome other recs!

Blake's 7 (Avon/Tarrant): Duty by Pat Jacquerie. Long and hot and hits nearly every kink I've got; this is one of my most-often-re-read stories.

Stargate Atlantis (Sheppard/McKay): Proof by Contradiction by astolat

Stargate SG1 (Jack/Daniel): Objectives by astolat

Voyager (Paris/Torres/Kim): Epiphany by Merri-Todd Webster (aliens aren't the first cause, but they have input)

Voyager (Chakotay/Paris): First Contact by Ruth Devero (this is a pose-as-slaves story)

Who on earth wrote that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy slash? It was called Aliens Make Ford and Arthur Have Sex, and I thought it was at Yuletide, but I can't find it.

For obvious reasons, these stories are a lot more common in sci-fi universes than in realistic or magical ones. In Harry Potter I suppose the equivalent would be "Death Eaters force them to have sex" -- those usually hit my torture squick, but I quite liked icarusancalion's Ron/Draco story, Beg Me For It.

So I've been thinking about magic (of the Harry Potter universe variety) as applied to sex.

I've seen magical sex aids in a number of stories, but mostly they're just variations on a Muggle theme. (It's like "Penthouse" -- only the pictures move! It's like a vibrator -- only it can change shapes and textures!)

But it seems to me that magic could go so much further. If a witch or wizard went to the magical red-light district (what chaos_rose cleverly named Horizont Alley), wouldn't you think there'd be a much wider variety of devices available for purchase?

How about a glove charmed to do anything a hand can do? Perhaps it could even be charmed to imitate the feel of a particular hand -- for long-distance romances, say, or to broaden the market for some particularly skilled magical prostitute.

How about erotic scenes captured in a Pensieve, so you could experience them as though you were right there in the room?

How about something along the lines of the Mirror of Erised, except that instead of showing your heart's desire, it shows the desires from somewhat lower down?

(I'm not planning to do anything with any of these, by the way, so if anyone feels inspired to write something, be my guest. Just tell me where I can read it afterwards!)

So today the door comes off one of the cabinets. It's too heavy for me to hold it steady and wield a screwdriver at the same time, so I ask the spouse to come and hold it for me.

This puts our faces a couple of inches apart, so we mug at each other for a while, and then I say, "I wrote a scene like this for a story once."

"You did?"

"Yeah. The guy with the screwdriver says, 'I love you,' and the other guy drops the door."

He gets this goofy grin on his face and says, "Aww. That sounds so nice." (This is what he always says when I describe a particular story to him. Either that or he remembers that they're nice but forgets that they're explicit. He doesn't seem to be able to keep both of those concepts in his head at the same time.)

Then he says, "You know, you may actually have created a completely new kind of smut."

I sigh. "I've told you before. There is nothing new about this. Most slash is like this. Hell, a lot of romance novels are like this. The only thing that's not like this is the smut that men like."

He's silent for a while, and then he says, "Isn't that sad?"

cedar85 writes:

I wonder what separates those that can write smut from those who have to bite their lip to keep from giggling while writing. Does it have to do with being comfortable with oneself? Is it all about reckless abandonment of modesty? Or maybe it's my whole idea that fics are closer to my heart than I'd like to admit? Is it even something that should bother me in the first place, since they aren't even real people anyway?

We've got a lot of cultural taboos about talking about sex. And to write good smut, you basically have to learn to ignore them.

Essentially most modern people view "talking about sex" as being in itself a sexual act. And I don't know about men, but as a woman, I've spent a lifetime being encouraged only to perform sexual acts with people I'm in love with, or at the very least with people I like, trust, and feel intimate with.

So setting out to write an explicit sex scene can, to the inhibited among us, feel like setting out to have sex with a bunch of strangers.

When I first started reading slash, I was so bashful about smut that I even had a hard time writing feedback. I mean, typing, "This was really sexy" felt scary and wrong to me.

I got over that sufficiently to send a few shy little LoCs to Cesca for her Sentinel stories, and she kept saying, "I take requests." So one day I wanted to write her and say, essentially, "You do a really good version of Blair talking dirty. I'd like to see more of that." Only I couldn't bring myself to write "talking dirty" to a comparative stranger, so I spent four sentences beating around the bush trying to say it without saying it.

My first story, Anoint, was NC-17, because I forced myself -- I knew it was what I wanted to write, and I knew that if I allowed myself to get into the habit of fading to black, I'd never get out of it. But I kind of cheated because the story is tagless -- i.e. I only had to write what they said, not what they did. (Link provided for historical purposes only, not because I'm suggesting it's a good story.) So then, even after having posted one story with explicit sex in it, I still had inhibitions I had to get over.

I got over them, over time, not by writing smut, but by betaing smut, my own and other people's. Because when you actually have to go and get people's help to make a sex scene sexier, you have to talk about it. In detail. And then you get used to it.

Exhibit A is this bit from the chat log when Cesca andjulad were doing beta on Alive In Here:

Julad: I'm inclined to suggest that he doesn't even say "live"
Cesca: it's not really elegant, that
Julad: could he say "come"?
Cesca: he could, but only if
Cesca: the supporting narration connections orgasm to life
resonant8: Draco's not coming again, anyway.
resonant8: He's spent.
Julad: ah, damn
Cesca: hmmm
Julad: can't he have another orgasm?
resonant8: He really doesn't get very much time for it.
Cesca: Do it in reverse, then
Cesca: "Come on," Draco whispered, all flushed and--and never looking so alive.
resonant8: OK, my viscera suggest that that's a good solution.

I don't know if this is any help to beginning smut-writers like Cedar, but basically for me, learning to write smut was a process of desensitizing myself to that set of cultural taboos. If you think of it like that, maybe it will feel all liberating and all. Or not.