Big Ed's Place

Up front, I must state that my work is entwined with Nick. He hosts this site on his server. He lets me play in his Universe, writing Summer Camp stories. I return the favor by serving on his reality team and reviewing his rough drafts before he releases them. Does that bias this review? Probably, but I’ll let you the reader judge how much.

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Sometimes a single song fits a mood and a time better than anything else. For me, Poe’s Hey Pretty (the Drive-By Mix) is the ultimate song to listen to late at night, driving alone on the highway. There’s something haunting about the music mixed behind the narrative of a guy being seduced by a girl in a fast car, and lines (“too bad dark languages… rarely survive”) that stay with me when I’m finished. It gets me ‘in the mood’–not for sex, but to pick up the pen and write. Which is often what I do when I pull off the road and have a chance to relax.

It’s not quite as good in the day, or sitting anywhere than behind the wheel. But there, it’s perfect–five out of five stars.

In my last musing, I wondered about whether there was more taboo porn available as a result of the internet. I mentioned the ‘jolt’ that the taboo can give. I figured I should expand on that.

There’s a rush that comes with arousal and, eventually orgasm, and there’s there’s a rush that can come with sex. In particular, mixing adrenaline and testosterone (or estrogen I suppose, but being male I have no point of reference). Sherri refers to this in Chapter 26 of Friends and Benefits: “That creates adrenaline, which is a powerful cocktail when mixed with lust. It’s kind of like a speedball of heroin and cocaine.”

Now, I didn’t come up with the analogy–I stole it from Spider Robinson. But in my experience, it fits. The rush or jolt that happens when arousal is mixed with adrenaline is pretty damn potent. I’d even argue it can be addictive.

So–how does one generate that ‘speedball.’ Well, “new” sex often does it–the trepidation and uncertainty of trying something one hasn’t (or someone one hasn’t). So does bdsm, in many scenes and scenarios. Risky sex, like being in public where one could get caught certainly qualifies. And so, I believe, does playing with a taboo.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean crossing the line and engaging in the taboo. Simply flirting with it or getting it secondhand may be enough. I think simply considering the forbidden can often be enough to add to the rush.

A great example of this, I think, is interracial sex. Now I grew up in the American West in an almost completely white suburb. Of course the few blacks and other minorities at my high school dated whites–there wasn’t anyone else for them to date. And so it really wasn’t considered a taboo. Contrast this to the American South, where a county clerk recently turned down a license for an interracial marriage. It could certainly be a taboo for Southern white women, particularly those that are older. And there’s certainly a genre of interracial “big black stud” porn that seems to have some demand. Is that because it’s a taboo turn on for some? I suspect so, even though it doesn’t do anything for me.

So, is taboo porn popular because of the speedball? I think partially. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it just is what it is. No better and no worse than the rest of human sexual experience.

The movie Shortbus has such a whimsical, happy heart that it’s fun. It’s the first explicit (orgasms are shown on screen, both male and female) non-porn film I’ve seen that left me smiling at the end. read more »

I composed Dr. Seuss Provides the Girls in a whimsical mood as a result of a poetry fest sponsored by Girl Friday. The story went on to win a 2004 Gold Clitoride award for Best Erotic Poem. Alas, Girl Friday’s retired, and the Gold Clitoride awards are no more (they were popularity awards run by volunteers and the load became too much), but I think the whimsy remains.

I’m particularly proud of two things in this poem besides the whimsy. First, I strictly held to the Dr. Seuss meter. Second, I never used the same word in a rhyme twice. Given the number of stanzas, I think those are both pretty cool accomplishments.

So I added 231 words to Love’s Labor Found, bringing it to 2960. Again, not a lot–perhaps an hour or so of actual writing, but still forward progress. And forward progress is indeed the point.

But as I wrote those words, I started musing about the ‘speed’ at which the story is moving to the next major plot point. I may go back and add some words to make the pacing better, but right now it’s bam–into the next plot point. And as I think back, that seems to be true. I write tighter when I write slower.

Now that isn’t necessarily a good thing. One of the points of the Crappy First Draft is to evoke things from the subconscious that might not appear if I’m not just writing writing writing.

But right now, it’s an interesting thought.

The web is filled with free dirty stories. If you’re willing to wade through a swamp of crap, you can occasionally find decent freebies. But some sites make it easier than others and storiesonline (www.storiesonline.net) is one of the best. read more »

One of the side effects of story codes (blogged about here), I believe, is the growth of stories with taboo elements in them. I’m primarily referring to incest, bestiality, and rape stories here, since necrophilia and the various scat type stories still seem to occupy a very small niche. The reason is, as I mentioned previously, is that it’s now easy to search for codes. So if a reader gets a jolt from a taboo, they can easily find a lot more stories with that same taboo. Therefore, in a classic feedback loop, if a writer on a free site wants more readers, they need to incorporate the codes that people are searching for.

I.e., more searching for the taboo leads to more stories with the taboo.

Now erotica about these taboos is certainly not new. Bestiality, incest, and rape can all be found in Greek myths, Victorian era porn, and the various underground porn comics and novels available for most of the 20th century. Heck, your local adult news stand probably has letters magazines devoted to incest and Penthouse Variations even published some woman-dog letters in the mid-70′s.

So did the internet change anything? Yep. Availability.

Porn on the internet is easy to find these days. It’s easy to get just about any variant of porn with judicious googling or a willingness to wade through spam and sleazy sites. Heck, someone’s been googling “toddler erotica” and turning up my site (there’s an old blog post about me having a toddler that’s turning up and my stats tracker tells me how people get here). Furthermore, it’s easy to stumble across new types of porn. You don’t have to be looking for stories about the taboos to find them on the free sites.

So… those women-dog stories I stumbled across long ago and couldn’t find again if my life depended on it? Well, anyone can find a few thousand woman-dog stories with a few clicks of the mouse. And so if someone gets turned on… we’re in that feedback loop again. The internet will provide that for which people seek.

This is, of course, not limited to porn. The internet makes all niche areas easier to access, and communities easier to form. If you’re into yak herding or flying experimental helium balloons, you’re much more likely to find information and community online than in your local physical neighborhood. This is, in general, a good thing.

So… is the availability of taboo porn a bad thing? On the one hand, there’s an argument that increased exposure desensitizes. We’re less likely to be outraged over taboo acts if we’ve read a hundred stories involving them. Also, the constant “hit” can be addictive for some people (and that’s for a future post).

On the other hand… most people are perfectly capable of separating fantasy and real life. They can handle the idea of being turned on by a taboo and still never want to do it in real life. I’m also very suspicious of those who want regulations or laws that restrict the ‘most’ for the few that have trouble separating fantasy and real life. As soon as we move into trying to restrict the market and exchange of ideas, we’re perilously close to creating ‘thoughtcrimes.’ It’s not too far a slide down the old slippery slope to move from trying to criminalize discussions of rape fantasies to trying to criminalize discussions of fantasies about killing politicians to trying to criminalize fantasies about opposing politicians. Ask the Dixie Chicks what they went through for opposing Bush, and imagine the force of law and police behind it. As I wrote in my first post, freedom really starts in the bedroom. And that includes the freedom to fantasize.

Furthermore, I suspect the lure of the taboo porn will also prove to be somewhat cyclical. A lot of the attraction (discussed in a future post) is because it’s new. Based on my own experiences and those of people I’ve discussed porn with, it’ll fade. It doesn’t take too long reading those hundreds of taboo stories to realize that most of them are crap, and then to reach the point where quality is more important than the story codes.

At least I hope so. Because in my writing, I (generally) want to be realistic and capture sex as it is or could be. While I will occasionally touch on a taboo, it’s because I want to play with some related aspect of sexuality, rather than the taboo itself. Does that mean that I too am increasing the amount of taboo porn on the internet? Yeah, I guess it does. But maybe by having quality writing that also goes into the implications of the taboo, it won’t increase the desensitization. We’ll have to see.

I managed 79 words on Love’s Labor Found this past week. That brings me to 2729. At that rate, I’m making a tortoise look fast.

But actually, I feel pretty good about it. It’s not like I haven’t been busy–both in real life and here. Most of the art on this site is now higher quality than it was a week ago. Tzratzk and I figured out a way to improve the sharpness of the images after I added the titles, and I’m pleased with the result.

So what those 79 words represent is: I actually fired up the story and did something with it. I moved. I wrote. I did more than read espn or storiesonline. A tortoise crawl is still a tortoise crawl.

And of course, part of the reason that analogy seems apt right now is that I have a bet with another writer. He’s a rabbit. When he’s in a writing mood, he can kick out a few thousand high quality words. But days and weeks can go between those spells. We’ll see if my tortoise grind can inspire him to write.

This one, unfortunately, requires some history. When I first started writing and posting my stories, the storiesonline site (run by Lazeez) had a different rating system than it does today. Readers could give a story a rating between 4 and 10 and, after 10 votes, the average score would be displayed. The top stories on the site held ratings above 9.6. Stories above 9.7 were extremely rare.

Part of this rarity was a phenomena where anonymous readers would slam stories in order to reduce their rank. It was common for a highly rated story to suddenly get a bunch of 4′s, knocking it out of the top 20. It was petty and silly, but a fact of life.

The other phenomena that several of us authors observed was that the codes seemed to affect the story as much as the quality. Mr. Freeze made the comment at the beginning of the story in an online discussion group, and the quirky idea for this story showed up in my brain. I released it to storiesonline in 2004. In classic ironic fashion, it quickly became my most downloaded single chapter story. Whether that’s the humor or the codes, I’ll never know.