During high school, my guy friends and I loved nothing more than to kneel in the corner of the Borders erotica section and whisper the most sordid sex stories to each other. Nothing like a few “torn bodices” and “throbbing members” to brighten up your after-school experience!
Flipping through a book of short stories, a veritable Hemingway oeuvre of innuendo, I came upon an exceptionally ridiculous tale (pun intended). In some sort of unforeseen, sexy future, a woman was being held captive by two well-endowed men in loin cloths. The burly babes dragged her into a dungeon and tied her to ropes suspended from the ceiling.
A practically poetic internal monologue assured the reader that the captive was enjoying herself. I love it when the future is consensual!
One of the men pulled out a bag of supplies. First a canister of whipped cream, which he shook up and squirted inside of her—apparently, yeast infections don’t apply to fantasy. Then the other grabbed a banana, peeled it, and somehow stuffed it inside her without turning it into a smoothie. What a woman! Invincible to infection and flaccid fruit!
Eventually, as these things go, gratuitous boning ensued. It was comic and creative. Goofy and highly unlikely.
That’s what fantasy is all about: a complete suspension of belief. It’s a pure—not practical—point of sexuality, so that you may explore what really gets you going. And it was at that precise point that I realized I was far more turned on than my male compatriots. When I read the excerpt out loud to my friends, they howled with laughter.
I laughed along, because it really was silly. But I realized they weren’t just laughing at the absurdity of it all. They were laughing because they were disgusted. Those giggles were not just for the fruit, but for the very idea. The humiliation, the overpowering—that’s what hooks the reader. The rest is just (de)flowery details. My friends didn’t understand how someone could get turned on by all that. Meanwhile, here I was in the corner of Borders desperately trying to cover my ladyjuices with laughter.
I’m not ashamed, damn it! Yeah, I got turned on by a futuristic dessert dungeon. But all erotica is silly (count porn in, too). That’s sort of the point.
It plays to our basest desires, suspending us in fantasies that may be unachievable, or even unwanted, in real life. Do I really want to be trapped against my will in a dungeon and violated with an overripe banana? No. But a fantasy can be as perfectly absurd as one wants it to be, and while you can sit in the corner of a Borders and quietly snigger at it, you’ve also got to remember that somebody is reading it and getting off.
Don’t let a couple extra “pounding members” make you lose your sensitivity to the unique spectrum of sexuality.
