Big Ed's Place

Recently, I’ve been thinking about some old, lost, intimate friendships.

Now I should be clear that I use the term “intimate” to be emotional rather than physical. I can have sex with someone without an emotional connection. That’s not to say there isn’t an intimacy there, but it’s rather different. The parts of my soul that I bare, if I do bare them, are rather different than what I share with emotionally intimate friends and partners. For me, the most intimate activities involve conversation. I bare my soul through words–not what I do in the bedroom (though I must admit, cuddling can be awfully intimate).

This should be no surprise to readers here. I often write about my life, and I try to bare my soul, sometimes hiding it behind a veneer of fiction, sometimes not. I believe that’s how we connect, and why not be the one to start? I think it strengthens my fiction and makes it more authentic and it certainly gives my other work here more style.

Given what I share here, it should be no surprise that I share pretty openly in my daily life. The people who reciprocate often become friends, if there’s enough of a connection or other relevant circumstances. It provides a deeper support community for me, and it allows me to be truly supportive of others.

The hard part, though, is that often life circumstances change and so must the nature of the friendship. I noticed this first when friends started getting married. Certain conversational topics, like sex, dried up. While they might have been willing to talk about what they did with their boyfriends/girlfriends, they wouldn’t bring up anything about life with their spouse. I “got it” when I got married myself (there’s a reason there are no stories about sex with my wife on this site).

However, it’s not just the development of new intimate relationships which can crowd out the intimate friendship. I’ve had several die because the awkwardness of sustaining it was too much to bear. We discovered some serious barrier, like politics, that made it difficult to maintain respect for each other and thus be able to share openly. Others saw the onslaught of life changes, such as kids or relocation take their toll.

But sometimes, a relationship will hit a level where there’s nowhere else for it to go. This has been most often occurred to me in friendships with women. We reach a point where greater intimacy would require sex, and that’s not going to happen, so we back off. Then we discover that it’s damn difficult to sustain a friendship at a lower level.

In some ways, that’s what happened with the friendship that was the inspiration behind Friends and Benefits. The actual relationship went differently than that in the story, but still ended with a dispute about the nature of the friendship itself. She didn’t want to date me, and called me “ugly” on more than one occasion. I was tired of the sex play that wasn’t escalating or being either physically or emotionally fulfilling.

Yet recently I realized that, at its peak, that friendship was more intimate than relationships I had with some former lovers who remain in my life. With the former lovers, there was a clear post-intimacy path. We kept some parts of our connection and let others go because they were clearly no longer appropriate. Some of those relationships have then faded, like all friendships do, until we just exchange Christmas cards. Others maintain smiles and wistful unspoken memories. At least one had a “whoa! Is she attractive! Wait a minute, I used to date her.” moment.

So, with my old friend, I can’t help wondering if we’d have stayed in better touch if we’d actually become lovers, and then ex-lovers. It’s an experiment that can’t be tested, of course. Nor would I want to if it meant missing out on meeting my wife.

There are other memories of past relationships that have flitted through, recently. There’s also some realization that some of those types of emotionally intimate relationships aren’t appropriate anymore. I kind of miss them, even though I wouldn’t trade what I have now for them at all.

So I guess it’s just nostalgia of the rose-colored glasses kind. Maybe that’s just a sign that I’m getting old.

Okay, I’m stealing the line from Pretty Woman, but it’s been so true that I realize that it may be distorting my views on how much of the rest of the population looks at sex as well as affecting my writing.

I came of age during the AIDS hysteria in the mid-80′s. We knew sex could kill you, but no one had any meaningful statistics to assess the risks of various activities. Sitting around my dorm room, we actually had discussions about dental dams for oral sex on women. Of course, by the late 90′s, we knew that the risks of AIDS transmission via oral sex on women were damn low. I looked them up in 1999 or so and there were only three cases of women catching HIV from other women and other cofactors were suspected. Gay men may have been dying of AIDS, but gay women were never a risk population. That wasn’t obvious, though, just a few years into the epidemic.

As a result, I’ve been tested for HIV a half dozen times, mostly as a precaution or a chance to reset my baseline. I could confidently inform the girlfriend du jour that I was clean. However, that didn’t lead to us giving up condoms. In twenty years of being sexually active, I had intercourse sans condom less than ten times. I’d say less than five, but it might be six. It wasn’t until my wife and I were actively trying to get pregnant that condoms were set aside.

I never understood the excuses people make for not wanting to use condoms. I thought it was brain dead stupid. A slightly better pleasure is worth risking your life for? Puh-leeze.

Now that safety consciousness did not stop at condoms. I never had sex with anyone without a conversation about STD status beforehand. I turned down some sexual offers because I didn’t know the person’s background. I was once in a strip club where a dancer was sticking licorice in her pussy and offering it to customers to eat. No way, my friend. It’s probably not a risk, but I just couldn’t get past my first reaction of “what are the germs on that?” I also was once offered full service by a dancer and I turned it down, to later discover she had active herpes. I never understood sex with complete strangers because a condom isn’t guaranteed protection against herpes and I’d just as soon do without that virus, thank you. The conversation beforehand was a must.

It also didn’t stop at STD’s. I had condoms break on me four times before a courtesan acquaintance recommended Magnums. I figured anyone who had to protect herself professionally probably had worked out the best brand to use and I’ve been happy since. So I also discussed pregnancy with all my partners and made sure we had a second birth control method in place in addition to condoms.

The end result was that I caught nothing. The only two pregnancies I’ve been responsible for were planned.

Which probably explains part of why my twenties were probably a bit less wild than some of my contemporaries. And certainly less wild than the generation that came before, where HIV and Herpes were unknown, and the generation that came after, where the true statistical risks were known and not just conjectured.

So there are things I don’t ‘get’ at anything deeper than an intellectual level. Dogging. Glory holes. Random hook ups. These are things people do and enjoy, but I just twinge enough inside to realize that I wouldn’t.

Furthermore, I’ve realized it’s difficult for me to keep the disbelief out of my voice when others talk about things I consider unsafe. I get the furrowed brow and my body language conveys, “well that was stupid” even if I bite my tongue.

This spills over to my writing. I’m not sure I could write a dogging story and make it fun and erotic. I do know I include condoms in my stories, which is a tad unusual for porn and erotica. I know that safety issues have contributed to me intentionally writing some sex scenes as non-arousing (Allen’s bachelor party in Friends and Benefits comes to mind).

All in all, being a “safety guy” has a price that I hadn’t quite been aware of before. However, I’m certainly glad I am.

Shortly after a Slate article appeared criticizing Amazon for carrying erotica/porn titles that could get pretty raunchy, Amazon yanked all incest erotica. However, these days one can do a simple search on Amazon and find titles like “My Son’s Slut.” These books are allowed, because the characters having sex aren’t actually related, ya see. They’re stepmoms and stepkids, stepbrothers and stepsisters, and so on. One author in fact confirmed that she was able to get her book reinstated because it didn’t actually involve blood relations having sex.

This is silly on many levels, but I’ll focus on only one aspect in this post. What difference does this fig leaf really make?

How much difference is there, really, between two fictional characters having sex and going “Oh, mom!” “Oh, son!” if there’s a paragraph early in the story explaining how Mom is really Dad’s second wife? The sex scene is the same. The implications are pretty similar, as we’re talking ‘family’ by most definitions. Adoption advocates and advice columnists worldwide argue that a genetic relationship is only a small part of being a parent or a family. One could argue that it’s less taboo, but the whole story exists to play with that taboo, otherwise why even make the characters related by a “step” relationship?

The difference is simply that Amazon has a fig leaf that lets them say they don’t allow books that go too far.

In many ways, this reminded me of a visit to a Northern Virginia strip club a decade and a half ago. The club was like most strip clubs—racy decor, loud music, and plenty of scantily clad attractive women walking around and on stage. Except that, as the dancers took off their tops, they were wearing small band-aids over their nipples

Huh? I can see everything except a square inch of her breasts. She’s dancing just as erotically/seductively/naughty/fill-in-your-adjective as if she was topless. What difference does the bandaid really make? Heck, it’s even smaller than a pastie from the fifties!

Well, it turns out that, at least at that time, the laws of Virginia did not allow topless dancing. And ‘topless’ was defined by having a visible nipple.

I later realized that the club had done a great job of never claiming it was a ‘topless’ strip club. But other than some careful wording of their promotion material and the band-aids, they were a topless strip club. They just needed the fig leaf in order to stay open and, presumably, profitable.

Obviously, other examples abound, all of which tend to drive me nuts.

The problem with fig leafs, is that they’re reductive. They take the entire experience—a book, a dance club, etc.—and reduce it to a single small element, which the fig leaf declares to be the key element. There’s no evaluation of the whole or of the context. It’s thrown away so we can concentrate on the single element covered, or uncovered, by the fig leaf.

This is immature.

It takes some sophistication and adult consideration to evaluate a work of art or other situation in its entirety. One must actually consider the item and look at it from many angles and not simply take the shortcut of scanning for a single element. One must reserve judgment beyond the initial impressions.

This is hard, even for people who are physically adults. Just look at the political debates that rapidly reduce diverging views to “they’re a [insert political party] therefore they must be evil!”

Furthermore, it’s often wrong. Anyone with some sophistication knows how to create an obscene monologue without using a single one of the obscenities banned from radio and television. Is the obscenity in the word, or in the concept contained behind it? The reductive fig leaf focuses in on the wrong element. Just look at Japan, which has created whole industries devoted to arousing images that don’t show pubic hair.

The people buying “Daddy” titles on Amazon want the incest. The writers are structuring them on incest. They’re incest stories with the exception of an occasional use of the prefix “step-”. But we can’t be adults and accept those facts. And I hate what that says about our society as a whole.

A discussion recently on one of the discussion lists I subscribe to fell into the question of how to keep stories from being ‘so-so.’ Another person complained that after a while, there seemed to be too much of the “same old same old” in erotica. I felt my reply was worth having a more permanent home.

So if I may be presumptuous about the evolution of “erotic charge”…

At first, there’s simply an erotic charge from rarity. A boy in pubescence gets an erotic charge from seeing a bare breast simply because he hasn’t seen many/any. Playboy is “wow!”

Then the charge gets attached to the act, as in much of porn. “Wow! They’re actually fucking!” Internet video loops are arousing for the college boy.

When the simple act loses some of its charge, one can add acts, add partners, or add taboos. This is “throwing in the kitchen sink of story codes” as often happens in stories on the various free sites.

And when the codes become ‘same old-same old’ (or if the reader didn’t find them particularly attractive to begin with), then we’re left with only one choice.

That last option is the erotic charge has to come from the characters. They, and the situation they’re in, has to provide the juice and not the sexual acts themselves. This requires some skill for the writer.

The specific sex acts in almost all of the stories that one finds in the best anthologies, or with the best ratings on free sites or Amazon, are actually pretty boring, taken in isolation. They’re often just a variant of “Insert Tab A into Slot B.” But with deep characters, we get more than the sex act to, ahem, chew on.

In her post on EAACon, Remittance Girl (RG) said, “Porn is about sex. Erotica is about desire.” I’ve been thinking about that and I think it’s too restrictive.

Now I really don’t want to wade into the semantics and definitions of erotica and porn. There are plenty floating around, including my own non-definition. Basically, they boil down to porn has a pejorative definition and erotica doesn’t. However, for genre purposes, I like a marketing definition I’ve heard (sorry, can’t find the link). Porn’s goal is to get its consumer off. Pure and simple–it’s designed for orgasm assistance.

One of the reasons I like this definition of porn is that it allows the fetishes to be captured. Women in high heels stomping on bugs can qualify as porn, even though with the lack of nudity, it doesn’t fit most laws governing obscenity. The goal is arousal and then orgasm. It’s pretty simple.

Of course, the subtlety of that definition is that, traditionally what we call porn is oriented toward getting men off. This is, of course, sexism at its finest since much of our world’s culture, historically and in many parts of the world today, doesn’t want to acknowledge that women want to get off. But the definition allows for “porn for women” to exist. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with examples.

So, then what is erotica, besides “not-porn”?

If it’s “not-porn” it has to be about more than getting the consumer off. It could of course include getting the consumer off, but that can’t be all it is.

The obvious “more” is desire. Erotic romance is as much about the craving for the partner as it is about the sex. Literary erotica often addresses the conflict between what the protagonist wants, and what they believe they should have. It’s connected to our base. We know when we’re aroused that we are feeling desire and that desire can be the basis for art and literature and much of our common culture. Even if it’s not explicit sexually, there are plenty of examples in art of the conflicts that arise from desire. Heck, take Romeo and Juliet, or Othello, or Anthony and Cleopatra, just to name three Shakespearean works where desire plays a central role.

But I think there are other “mores.” After all, sex is Big. Every person on the planet has to deal with it, even if they do so by cloistering themselves away from it.

A “more” I’m particularly fond of is “curiosity.” I did a lot of my sexual exploration not out of desire but out of “hmmm, I’ve never heard about that. I wonder what it’s like?”

The twin to the “more” of curiosity is “wonder.” I’ve tried to capture this is some of my voyeurism tales. A Mall Tale is about surprise and wonder far more than it’s about sex, because, well, read it to see.

I also happen to like “thrill.” It’s pretty clear that sex is often a significant part of the traditional thrillers. “Bond Girls” exist for a reason. That said, I haven’t read many ‘erotic thrillers’ to know how that subgenre would stand.

Finally, the last one off the top of the head is “bawdy.” I’ve tried to capture this from time to time, most notably in my One-Eyed Dick story.

Is there room for all of these in erotica? Are there more?

I hope so, but as I wrote last week, I think the genre is still expanding and sorting out its sub-genres.

My wife was talking to a friend that had one of those harmless google searches turn up porn sites on the first page. In this case, it was related to swinging while pregnant and the fetish of having sex with very pregnant women.

Having just had a very pregnant woman in the house, I had some thoughts on the topic of pregnancy, sex, and the fetish of combining the two.

Now I personally don’t have this fetish. So I’m projecting and assuming. I do know that pregnant women often have a very beautiful, attractive glow. I also know that the hormonal fluctuations can make them particularly amorous. So I kinda get it.

But it seems to be one of those things where the fantasy is better than the reality. Does the fetishist consider how difficult it can be to work around a pregnant belly? How late pregnancy makes pressure on the vagina less than pleasant? How the simple fact that things are pushed around inside there complicates everything? Somehow, I suspect not. That’s not even counting the challenges pregnant women face such as fatigue, constantly needing to pee, and other symptoms that can make getting amorous not exactly pleasant.

At the same time, the fetish itself is somewhat contradictory. I once read an article by some anthropologists who argued that the attractiveness of the 3:2:3 bust/waist/hips ratio (36-24-36 anyone?) was pretty universal. It could vary in the particulars from culture to culture, but there seemed to be a constant desire for men to want women with clearly developed breasts and hips. Biologically, it makes sense. That 3:2:3 ratio guarantees the woman is post-puberty and not pregnant. I.e., she’s a viable breeding partner. Obviously, the pregnancy fetishist picks women who are rather clearly not viable breeding partners.

Which perhaps is the point. If you don’t want to get a woman pregnant, what better way than to pick one who’s already pregnant?

Of course, I am just speculating. But with a new baby in the house, I’m just amused by the concept that the pregnancy stage was the sexy one.

Last week, Nobilis Reed posed a question: If there was a treatment that could safely and easily change a person’s sexual orientation, what sort of uses would you expect it to be put to?

My response was strong and negative. I believe that the first use would be for oppression by conservative organizations. They’d pressure or force gay members of their communities to convert to straight. Eliminate the sin but save the sinner. For there already exist ministries that brag about how they can ‘convert’ people to heterosexuality. The folks in those communities would jump at something that they knew would work beyond doubt.

I base this in part on a man I knew in the mid-90′s. He attended three meetings a week for sex addiction in addition to a ministry that was trying to convert him. His “addiction”? He couldn’t stop fantasizing about sex with men. He couldn’t fantasize about sex with women. So he was putting himself through hell trying to change himself. If he didn’t, his family, his friends, his church, and his entire social life would disown him. He couldn’t face the possibility of such ostracization.

While I knew him reasonably well, his wasn’t the only story I knew. Boys being expelled from BYU and losing all contact with their family because they kissed another boy. A girl raped so she’d have sex with men instead of girls. That’s not even counting what I know of through the press. There’s been a great deal of evil done in the world in the service of homophobia.

For homophobia fits part and parcel with conservative communities. The root of social conservatism, particularly religious conservatism, is that there are rules that must be followed. The rules dictate the individual’s role in the community and how they’re supposed to act, think, and feel. It creates a cohesiveness and unity to the community that is impossible otherwise. There’s greater security the tighter the rules are. Authoritarianism has less street crime, after all.

However, it wasn’t until I started exploring bdsm that I had greater insights into the value of the rules. For many in social conservative groups, the rules allow them to relax. It’s much like a submissive in bdsm. They know what they’re supposed to do, they do it, they’re loved and cared for. That can be damned attractive and sometimes makes me wonder if the difference between 24/7 bdsm’ers and some socially conservative marriages is simply the fetish wear.

Homosexuality is a problem in those communities. It upsets the defined male/female roles. It also plays against the traditional definition of masculinity. In fact, homophobia is often socially taught as part of what it means to be a man. Boys learn to call each other ‘fags’ as an insult pretty early on. That’s one reason why lesbianism is a bit more acceptable. The traditional definition of femininity doesn’t have homophobia built into it.

Those cultural views have shifted in the West, and done so particularly fast in the United States. The main reason appears to be personal knowledge of gays. The more people knew outed gays among their circles of family and friends, the more they accepted the political changes. It’s easy to deny rights to “those damn gays.” It’s hard to deny Uncle Harry those rights. Or “our friend Ann.”

But that acceptance is coupled with the belief that “it’s not Harry’s or Ann’s fault.” If homosexuality is fixed biologically, then there’s no sin to accuse them of. We don’t burn people at the stake for being left-handed anymore, after all.

Now I happen to personally believe that it shouldn’t matter whether homosexuality is a choice or not. What’s done in private is no one else’s business. Additionally, I happen to think sexuality is more fluid than hetero/homo/bi. I knew one woman who identified as lesbian as she only fell in love with women, fantasized about women, dreamed about women, and wanted to be with women. Except for a couple of times a year when she wanted a hard cock inside her. I know another woman who never had any romantic or sexual interest in other women, but had no problems having sex with another woman as part of group scenarios. I’ve known people who identified as hetero or homosexual at different points in their life.

But arguing that it shouldn’t make a difference is a nuance and nuance is lost on black and white rules followers. Maybe in a couple of generations homophobia will go the way of the acceptability of slavery. However, one only has to look at the American South post-Civil War to realize that’s going to be a long time coming.

That’s why I think Nobilis’ hypothetical orientation change would do far more damage than good in our world. Hatred and homophobia would win out over whatever good might come of such a procedure. While I like to speculate on a world where someone might fall in love with a friend and then change their orientation to make sex with that friend possible, it’s just too hypothetical for me to really consider.

Recently, I came across a blog written by a former strip club manager, Strip Club Hound. I’ve been enjoying it and one of his posts dovetailed neatly into last week’s post on objectification. In it, he talks about a customer who said, “what do I have to do to get one of these bitches to go out with me?”

Err, you can’t.

As Strip Club Hound discusses, even though the customer was being nice to the dancers on the outside, they could sense his attitude anyway. Strip Club Hound says

Dancers in a club are very sensitive to how men view them. They know they’re sex objects to the customers who come in. If they’re going to relate to a man in any other way than to just sell him lap dances, they want to believe he thinks of them as more than just sex objects.

Now I happen to think this applies to women in general and not just strippers. Strippers may just be more conscious that they’re being objectified and reduced to bodies on display.

The thing is, the objectification is then usually mutual. The customer who sees a dancer as just tits and ass is most likely viewed as just a wallet to the dancer. The problem comes when the customer wants to pretend he’s more than a wallet, but won’t (or doesn’t know how) to stop objectifying the dancer and see her as a human being. There’s a fundamental hypocrisy there that the customer often doesn’t see.

The thing is, it’s this hypocrisy that’s causing him the pain. Want to be someone who is seen as dateable? Desirable? More than a wallet? That’s what the customer asking the dancers out wants, right? Because if it’s just to get laid by a beautiful woman, I’m pretty confident that enough money would get him some dancer at the club. It’s not a huge enough step to go from lapdances for pay to sex for pay if the money’s right. So either the customer is being cheap or stupid.

Aside–I’m quite serious about “some dancer.” Sure, a specific dancer may say “no” no matter what the offer, but the odds of getting some stripper to agree to sex are pretty good if the money is high enough. For example, $10,000 for one night would probably get a taker. Heck, for $1 Million, most women, stripper or not, would probably stop and think about it. If a guy can be honest that all he’s interested in is sex with an objectified body, the rest is just price and shopping around.

But if a guy wants an interaction with a person instead of an object, the currency isn’t money. It’s, at a minimum, respect. Interest, appreciation, and even simply liking the other person all come into play too. It’s treating the other person like a person instead of an object. Ultimately, it’s proof that you get what you give.

It doesn’t even matter what the woman does. When I was a regular at strip clubs, I quickly figured out that if I treated the dancers as people as with respect, they returned the niceness. Sometimes that was just attitude. Sometimes it was small favors, like extending a private dance another song for free.

There’s a place for objectification, like I wrote previously. There’s not a place for hypocrisy. So part of our ‘growing up’ is learning to spot and eliminate such hypocrisy in ourselves. It’s not easy, but always worth it.

This past week I rambled across another protest about the objectification of women. We all know that’s bad, right? No one should be stripped of their personhood and reduced to an object in the eyes or behavior of others. Every person, male or female, should be honored for their individuality and their soul and treated with respect. We agree, right?

And now that we agree, can we get back to the real world?

We all reduce other people to objects all the time. To the CEO, the factory worker is an objective set of numbers–cost, productivity, risk. The soldier’s the same to the general. The survey participant to the social scientist. Even the rape victim to the rape advocate arguing for increased police presence. People are reduced to utilitarian numbers to advance a cause, argument, or business objective.

Ah, but statistics are a special case, right? I think not. Is the grocery store clerk more to you than someone to take your money and bag your groceries? Are the other drivers on the road anything more than objects to avoid? We all reduce people to a role all the time. We turn them into titles that we read about in kid’s books. Fire fighter. Police Officer. These are the people in your neighborhood, to quote Mr. Rogers. How many of them do you even know their name?

So perhaps we’re talking about inappropriate reduction. We agree that treating a saleswoman as if she was nothing more than tits and ass is wrong. We’ve objectified her for things that have nothing to do with her role, right?

But that logic says that objectifying a stripper would be perfectly okay. Or a runway model. Or anyone who trades on those items being objectified to make a living and define who they are.

Like perhaps that saleswoman? If she dresses sexily to try to make the sale, is it still wrong to objectify her as a sex object?

And for fun, let’s step into some other areas where we as a society objectify all the time, and somehow think it’s a good thing. Sex offender. Addict. Adulterer. Cheater. Pervert. As the joke goes, “fuck one goat and that’s what you’re known for for the rest of your life.”

I’m always amused when I hear the same people decrying sexual objectification and then turning around and doing the same for sexualities they decry. “I don’t want you looking at me as if I was just a body (despite how I might dress or act), but I will look down on you for being a perverted voyeur in turn.”

Because isn’t that what it’s really about? There are times we want to be objectified. We want people to look at us and reduce us to the desirable trait of our choice. We don’t want the boss to know the whole person–if she did, she might be disgusted! Instead, we want her to reduce us to just those traits that show how great of an employee we are. Heck, if someone were denied employment because “we think you’d be a great worker, but when we look at you as a whole person, we’re not interested” the lawsuit would be instantaneous.

Sometimes that’s even sexually. I know many women that want Guy X to push aside all their traits except for how hot and desirable they are. Maybe not all the time, but at least once in a while. At the same time, they don’t want Guy Y to do the same thing.

To me, the problem of ‘sexual objectification’ is mostly one of education. Not enough “Guy Y”‘s know how to transform themselves into “Guy X.” They don’t know how to recognize “this is the time and place” and “this is not.” Strip club objectification–okay. Workplace–no. Saleswoman–it can vary moment to moment even with the same woman. A mature man can navigate those waters. A boy in a man’s body, not so much.

Objectification is something we all do, and often very appropriately. Sometimes it’s even desired. Decrying it is simplistic or naive. Instead, how about if we focus on getting more maturity in the world?

Recently, erotica author Mike Kimera hung up his pen. More precisely, he hung up his erotica pen, as he plans to fiction in other genres under another name.

Now Mike’s been around and is pretty popular at the Erotica Readers and Writers Association (ERWA). I happen to consider his story, The Last Taboo, to be a masterpiece. He’s written many others–some very dark, some completely ridiculous (The King’s Cocksucker is ridiculously silly). As a rule, they’re very good. And I add that qualifier “as a rule” simply because I haven’t read them all.

Now Mike’s stated reason (and I’m paraphrasing here) for retiring his erotica persona is that he awoke to how much separation it was creating between him and his wife. She wasn’t comfortable with the fact that he wrote erotica and he “came to realise that the more time I spend being Mike Kimera, the less time I spend being someone that she feels close to.”

Sadly, I understand. “Mike Kimera” was just as real a “self” for him as his given name. For me, “Big Ed” is just as real as the name on my driver’s license (the DMV won’t put “Big” on it for some reason). It’s hard to say it’s a persona when it’s really just another facet of myself. Not separate per se, but not the sides that shine in polite company.

Which is where the challenge of being an erotica author comes in. I get the separation. Not because of any separation with my wife (she reads most of my stories anyway) but because of the societal one. I can’t tell my Born Again boss why I’m taking longer lunch hours these days. I can’t share my triumphs with some of my friends. And I certainly can’t whip out the laptop and write when we’re visiting my in-laws. The fact that I write about sex forces a separation between the self they see and the one y’all here do.

Now I know there are some who believe the maxim of being true to yourself and being “out” no matter what. I can appreciate the philosophy, but like most pure points of view, practicalities too often interfere. I mean, it’s easy to be “out” when your livelihood and peace in your family relations doesn’t depend on it. It’s even easy to say that being out helps to educate, which is clearly the case with homosexuality. The prejudices started to lift over the past two decades in part because so many people realized that they knew gays and that the people they knew were normal and wonderful people.

But, honestly, do I want my son to endure a frosty atmosphere when we visit my in-laws? Because even if they could accept my writing in toto, there would be no way to avoid an adaptation period where they assimilated the new facets with what they’ve already seen. Similarly, do I really want to trust that the guy who determines whether I get laid off or not won’t take into consideration that my, ahem, personal values are rather different than his?

The separation exists because the alternative is worse.

Obviously, one could argue that in a marriage, it’s different. I don’t know Mike nor his wife and I don’t know if there was any attempt to bridge the gap. I do know that giving up parts of ourselves is the process of being in love. We say, “this person is more important than this aspect of myself, and so I will change.” If we don’t, we’re not building a “we”. (and, as an aside, one of the hardest challenges is figuring out when “I will change” is the right answer and when it’s the worst possible answer. It’s never obvious). I had to give up much of my neatnik ways to make things work with my wife. We both had to give up the concept of sleep when we had a child. It was worth it.

But even if Mike’s wife hadn’t had a distaste for his writing, there likely would’ve been some separation. It’s simply from the time and energy to maintain the persona. Every minute I spend at my computer, be it writing or musing or doing website maintenance or participating in chatroom discussions, is a minute I’m not spending elsewhere. There’s a strong argument that that time could be spent increasing the closeness with my wife. That’s part of the choice Mike’s made, I’m sure.

For me, though, that’s not as clear of a trade. I need a lot of alone time to stay sane. I can steal “Big Ed” time from that, and from lunch hours, and from a variety of windows where time with my wife is not an option. I also draw a lot of personal emotional sustenance from my “Big Ed” time. My wife has noticed I’m more pleasant to be around if I’ve been writing recently, so in some ways it actually helps.

Furthermore, I truly believe in the his-hers-ours relationship model (insert gender pronouns of your choice here). Relationships thrive when each person has some aspects of their lives that are separate from the other. It gives them something to bring to the table when they’re together. I allows them to be full independent individuals. It results in a partnership, rather than a single entity with two heads. Watch any cop show to see how partnership trumps a single entity every time.

I realize not everyone will share this philosophy. My response is, “that’s fine. But show me what you really do in your life–not what you say you do or what you believe you do. The philosophy is fine, but what’s the reality?” I’ve had some interesting conversations as a result.

And in the end, there may be some folks for whom it is truly different. Mike’s clearly different than me and I wish him luck. At the same time, I can only say, I’m glad I’m me and not him. The separation of selves serves me well.