UK law removes anti-bdsm rules, recognises “full and free consent”

Posted on February 2, 2019 by jaime

There’s been a major break-through in the UK’s frankly insane and stupid censorship laws.

Books, films and sites – such as this one – that depict bdsm in a consensual context can now freely discuss bdsm, and depict it in text or images.

These marks were, technically, unlawful in the UK. Not inflicting or enjoying them, but showing them. Shades of “hide your shame, woman”

One of the oddities of the UK law was its bigotry. Acts like face-sitting or sexual spanking between adults are perfectly legal, but they couldn’t be depicted in erotic media. The purpose of law is supposed to be to protect people from harm. It’s not supposed to protect people who don’t like the idea of some sexual activities from thinking, “yuck”.

For example, if Theresa May and Jacob Rees-Mog, say, were to film themselves having consensual sex and release the footage to the internet, I’d think that was yucky. I’d find it repellent if I saw it. However, I don’t need the law to fix my problem. That’s easily solved by not seeking out images that I don’t want in my brain. I’d avoid seeing the May-Rees-Mog tapes, which is easy to do.

So, what are the changes?

Certain types of “violent” porn are now permitted so long as the sex acts are consensual (the wording is ‘full and freely exercised consent’,) do not cause serious harm to participants, are not ‘inextricably linked with other criminality’ and are not likely to be viewed by anyone under the age of 18.

Obscenity lawyer Myles Jackman, who has campaigned for these changes for a number of years, said that the change had wider implications for the law. He said: “It is a very impressive that they’ve introduced the idea of full and freely exercised consent in the law. Even for people with no interest in pornography this is very important for consent and bodily autonomy.”

Media superhero Pandora Blake, in her civvies

Activist and queer porn filmmaker Pandora Blake, who also campaigned to have the ban on the depiction of certain sex acts overturned, called the news a ‘welcome improvement’.

“This is a happy day for queer, feminist and fetish porn.”

It means, incidentally, that one of my own books, that had been legally problematic – because I described a consensual caning that left welts that lasted a few days – can now be published in the UK. So, even though I don’t live in the UK, I am significantly better off as a result of these reforms. I’m not the only one.

Acts that were banned that can now be depicted include:

Spanking
BDSM
Female ejaculation
Urinating (also known as watersports)
Strangling
Face-sitting
Fisting
Humiliation

Thanks to…

Myles Jackman, legal superhero

Myles Jackman and Pandora Blake both worked hard, sometimes under huge stress, to get this change through. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude, and admiration beyond all measure, for sticking to this cause and ultimately winning it for all of us.

I dare say non-kinky civil libertarians are pleased too. Because government control of public speech always – always – begins with speech about sex. But, unless the censorious forces are stopped in their tracks, it never ends with sexual content.

And every country affects every other country, so this has world-wide significance. I’m living in Australia, also Antarctica, and this victory in the UK means that similar, chilling, legislation is less likely here.

So thank you, with respect and admiration, to Pandora Blake and Myles Jackman!

Sinful Sunday: The dreaming of Mrs Willy Nilly

Posted on December 23, 2018 by jaime

      SECOND VOICE

Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street, walks fourteen 
miles to deliver the post as he does every day of the 
night, and rat-a-tats hard and sharp on Mrs Willy Nilly.

        MRS WILLY NILLY

Don't spank me, please, teacher,

        SECOND VOICE

whimpers his wife at his side, but every night of her 
married life she has been late for school.

Dylan Thomas, Under Milkwood

The responsibilities of fictional characters in erotica

Posted on October 27, 2018 by jaime

A lot of people have attacked the fictional character Christian Grey for being a bad dom. Of course, he’d be a terrible dom if he was real. He stalks lip-biting inner-goddess Anastasia, spanks her and takes a strap to her arse, all without her consent.

I’m sure he behaved badly in the second two books as well, but I haven’t been able to read them. Call me a snob and call me a cab, but after skimming Volume One I was out of there.

If Christian Grey were a real person bdsm communities would have warnings about him, for his weird, unethical and non-consensual behaviour. He’d finish up getting charged with assault and being in the centre of a massive media scandal: “Billionaire in kinky love-nest rape!” That sort of thing.

However, as a fictional character his behaviour is a lot better. He’s made a lot more women come, with Fifty Shades in one hand and their bits in the other, than any thousand real doms combined. Even if you include me. That’s a significant contribution to human happiness, and you can’t ignore it.

As a fictional character, my main criticism of Christian Grey is that he doesn’t do nearly enough spanking and commanding and binding the Anastasia of Steel. I skimmed Fifty Shades Freed looking for the bdsm scenes so I could critique them, but I never found any. I’m sure I just didn’t look hard enough.

In the interminable schoolgirl spanking saga I’m writing, there are two headmasters, and they initiate certain of their students into various kinky sexual practises. Obviously, if they were real and lived in our world, they’d both belong in jail.

They’re not breaking age-of-consent laws, and the age gap between them and their charges isn’t all that great: about eight years.

But they’re in a position of authority and there’s no question at all that they’re misusing their authority in ways that, uh, conflict with the criminal code in any civilised society.

On the other hand, these two imaginary men are written to give pleasure to their readers, and my impression is that my spanking headmasters, like the “naughty schoolgirl” scenario itself, appeal particularly to a female audience. I am that audience’s humble servant.

There is, eventually, a happy ending to the Jennifer-and-Maddie saga, but at the rate at which time moves in my stories, that ending will probably arrive some time in 2021. In the meantime, my point is, I’m happy to write it and make it as sexy as possible. While being fervently against corporal punishment and sex between teachers and students in the real world.

I’m not saying that fictional characters have no ethical requirements at all. We erotica writers who consider ourselves to be on the side of the angels (especially the sexy, spankable, fuckable angels) don’t write bestiality, or eroticise rape, or write scenarios involving people under eighteen, though the age of consent where I live is sixteen.

But still, there is a difference, a space, between fantasy and real life, and it’s a space that erotica writers spend a lot of time in. It’s fluid and it’s complex, like the best sex, and we need to defend our freedom to have erotic fantasies that are perfectly sexy without necessarily being perfectly ethical.

We know the difference between fiction and fantasy, on the one hand, and the real world, in the other.

We need to take action in the real world to challenge the beliefs and indulgences that make it far too easy for men to rape and get away with it, and to give support to organisations that support women who’ve been subjected to rape and other violence.

At the same time, we need to defend our right to have erotic fantasies, and to share them with others.

Erotica is a powerful tool for improving human happiness, and for helping people to find and explore their own erotic selves without censorship or condemnation.

Pleasure is, at least, undervalued. It shouldn’t be shamed.

Introducing another novel: The Tale of the Tawse

Posted on May 19, 2018 by jaime

The Tale of the Tawse is in five parts, and contains 83,706 words.

Plot

Freddie Underwood is a New York-based public relations writer and event organizer. He’s at a conference in Glasgow, after which he plans to meet his lover Sharzad Malouf in Rome. He meets Daphne Rintoull, an artist who’s been dumped by her lover, and beds him on the rebound. So he has two women in his life.

The story follows his relationship with Shar from first meeting in New York, their time together in French Guyana, to Rome. He helps her confront a teacher who put her in hospital, when she was a four-year staying in an English boarding-school because her parents had unwisely involved themselves in mid-East politics.

With Freddie’s support, she confronts the man, and is able to see him as small and fearful; a ghost is laid. She celebrates that, and Freddie saying he loves her, by walking into Trevi’s pool. She does the Anita Ekberg walk from La Dolce Vita, until she slips and falls in. Freddie performs an unnecessary rescue and realises they are similarly foolish.

They have to part when Shar has to go back to work. They are in love, though they can’t see how they can be together, in the US or her country.

Meanwhile Daphne has told a Roman gallery she has enough work for an exhibition, which is not true. She begs Freddie’s help and support. He keeps her brave while she creates the extra work needed. He writes her an exhibition category full of the most ferocious art-wank.

At the opening, he thinks she’s seducing a critic (who she’s actually trying to escape), and drags her off to have jealous sex with her in a broom closet. They disturb a tin of paint thinner stored above them, and fall out in front of the Minister for the Arts, an actual Fascist, and the media. So Daphne’s exhibition is a tremendous success, making the news and not just the arts pages.

They also part, but not before they have admitted that they love each other.

Freddie returns to New York. Both women, for different reasons, invite him to be with them in a couple of months, at a climate change conference in Wellington, New Zealand.

Freddie has to admit he’s out of competence. He no longer knows what to do.

(Is there a sequel? Of course there is.)

Potentially important aspects of my manuscript

1 It’s a funny book, with a hell of a lot of sex in it. Much of the sex is bdsm-flavored, though light and romantic, and neither scary nor impersonal.

2 It’s a rom/com set in the real world. For a book with bdsm elements, it’s refreshingly free of billionaires, werewolves and mysterious islands.

3 It’s told from a male point of view, but beta-testing drafts indicate that the text is woman-friendly.

The Rise of the Cocky Billionaire

Posted on May 12, 2018 by jaime

Well, I’m a billionaire in Thai baht. I’m rising because I had a bad cold and now I seem to be getting rid of it. I’m cocky because I’ve got a cock. I am be-cocked. My cock works well, rising in the presence of submissive women who want my attention, and later it sets, like the sun.

So that’s how I got “cocky” and “billionaire” into my title. I know, though, that “billionaire” and “cocky” are two words that make me avoid a book, especially if they appear on the cover.

With “billionaire” it’s partly because it suggests the book is going to be derivative of the “Fifty Shades” books, and god knows that’s a terrible model. There’s also the way sex gets mingled with a kind of right-wing economics. No questions are asked about how the billionaire got his money, and that’s the most real human-interest part of “billionaire” to me. As well as, are they paying their share of taxes?

Instead there’s a sort of Ayn Rand approach, that the very rich have no obligations to the society they live in. They’re just desirable because they can take a girl around in their private jet or yacht, and they can take her shopping.

There’s something faintly insulting to both men and women is this sexual idolisation of the billionaire. It suggests that a man isn’t a dom because of his personal qualities, but because of his wallet. He dominates the heroine because he’s rich. Similarly, it suggests that women aren’t attracted by personality, humour, eyes, and so on, but by wallets. That’s a shallow and cynical take on human nature, and also, thank fuck, a false view. it doesn’t remotely resemble the world I live in or the dominant and submissive couples I know.

Then there’s the “cocky” thing. The attributes of the “cocky” man seem to be that he’s good-looking and really, deeply knows it. So when he does something obnoxious to the heroine at their first meeting, and she responds angrily, he knows she’s aroused by him to the point of soaking through her jeans.

So he says, “I know you want me,” to this woman he’s just met, and then, “but you’ll be begging me for it later.” And he saunters off.

A “cocky” man, encountered in real life, would be what is usually called “an asshole”.

I don’t think it’s any surprise that “Faleena Hopkins”, the woman who took out a copyright on the word “cocky”, (which she did not coin, and she was not the first to use it in an erotic romance title) and started threatening to sue other writers who use the word, reviewed Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugs” on Amazon and said it was her favourite book.

Most doms I know are trying to be decent human beings, and most submissives react to the person and not their wallet. And they struggle to work out how to be dominant and submissive together. That’s the most realistic bdsm story. It’s also, I think, the sexiest.

Wicked Wednesday: Maddie and her girl

Posted on February 28, 2018 by jaime

This is a hot and loving scene, but it’s had to leave my blog because it’s published now, and publishers don’t like their stuff to be available for free. I’ll put up a link to where you can buy this very hot text, shortly.

Cunt as “a nasty word for a nasty thing”: a thought

Posted on July 22, 2017 by jaime

The Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Captain Francis Grose.

In 1785 Captain Francis Grose published the first edition of his “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue”. The book’s a useful collection of old, outdated slang. Gross claims he got most of the words by hanging out with soldiers.

The Dictionary is best remembered these days for Grose’s listing of “Cunt” and his definition: “a nasty word for a nasty thing”.

That looks horrifically misogynist, and it’s always quoted as an example of Grose’s, or more generally of male, misogyny.

I’ve started to wonder, though. The first issue, for me, is that the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue doesn’t really have anything else that comes close to the level of fear and hate of women, or at least their genitals, that definition seems to demonstrate. And it gives more space to thieves’ cant (language used by criminals) than to sexual words, So could Grose have been saying something else?

Nasty as she wants it to be.
(Drawing: Betty Dodson)

We know the word “nasty” has a strand of sexual meanings. It’s everywhere in rap. “Do the nasty”, meaning, “have sexual intercourse”, anyone? But “nasty” has sexual meanings in blues, too. Which takes it back to the 20th century, and maybe the 19th, in US black culture.

But it’s older than that. The sexual use of “nasty” may have re-entered non-black English from its preservation among black culture. It’s not uncommon for words to survive in one cultural group while they disappear elsewhere.

So we go back in time looking for early uses, and we don’t find much, because sexual words seldom made it into print, before the 19th century.

But it turns out that “nasty” meant “lewd” from the 17th century.

Francis Grose: Geddit? Just kidding, folks!

“Lewd” means something like “overtly sexy”, with a connotation of “slightly more overtly sexual than the speaker is comfortable with.” But the sexual meaning is clear. “Lewd” is always a compliment, in my book.

So, remembering that this meaning of “nasty” was in use from the 1600’s, and that Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was published in 1785, it’s possible to see his definition in another way.

Was Grose making a sort of joke? “Cunt: a sexy name for a sexy thing”?

If so, he was Winding Up The Straights. And We Fell For It.

Jerusalem Mortimer – among others – is on sale!

Posted on February 25, 2017 by jaime

My first story sale is in print! And available in an e-book!

The story is called Desires. Gee, if you really loved me, you’d go buy the book it’s in.

You can buy it here. It’s available in paperback and as an e-book. I recommend the paperback because you can sit it on your shelf and take it down when you need to spank someone with it, or be spanked.

Also, there are people who won’t have sex with you if there isn’t at least one book in your house. And in my experience Book Nerds Make Better Lovers.

The book is Identity, and it showcases a diverse collection of essays and stories by over twenty writers of sex fiction and non-fiction, and sex toy reviewers. It presents a range of talent from established writers and new writers, all of whom are coming to the 2017 Eroticon Conference in London.

It’s a sex-positive anthology, moving from the heteronormative to show a truly representational cross-section of erotic identity.

In this unique compilation, the central theme of identity is explored from many different angles. Some authors discuss their personal identity as writers, others how their fictional characters explore who they are through sex. Yet other writers examine the impact of the erotic identity, sexuality or personality and how this is celebrated or must remain hidden.

As well as the amazing Jerusalem Mortimer, whose story really is rather hot, Identity features work by Velvl Ryder, Malin James, Eve Ray, Marie Rebelle, Meg-John Barker, Teresa Caves, sub-Bee, Emily Jacob, Jenny Guérin, Ella Scandal, Alun Norley, Ina Morata, Miss Ruby Rousson, cleareyedgirl, Heather Day, The Other Livvy, Zak Jane Keir, F.F. Sexton, Zoë King, Charlie Powell, BibulousOne, Emmeline Peaches and Girl on the Net.

If you’re already reading them you’ll know that’s an amazing line-up. If you’re not, then this is an excellent place to start!

A library of filthy books 2: The bdsm case

Posted on October 20, 2016 by jaime

These are the top two shelves of the (mostly) bdsm bookcase. It starts with Taschen reprints of Eric Stanton femdom fantasies. And a shiny gold book of historical erotic photos, most of which don’t have any bdsm relevance, but it’s there to be with the rest of the Taschen books. There’s safety in numbers. As the mathematicians say.

Then Sade, Sacher-Masoch, “Walter” and his secret life (I’ve read it all, so you don’t have to: god, that man was a terrible writer), then various books of Victorian porn, and a few samples from pre-Victorian times.

The next two shelves are mostly 20th century bdsm erotica, plus two of the 50 Shades books, which I picked up off the free book exchange table at the local rail station. Plus a few non-fiction books. The wiry brass couple fucking on the upper shelf are from Mali. And the stocky fellow with a thick (but short) erection on the lower shelf is a piece of Saami art, from Lappland.

These are the two bottom shelves. On the left of the upper of these two shelves, there’s one of the very few actually valuable books or series I own. Those three volumes are the bibliographies of Henry Ashbee, possibly better known as Pisanis Fraxi. The Index Liber Prohibitorium, or Index of Forbidden Books, and its two successors. First editions, from Victorian times.

The very bottom shelf has various books of erotic art, including bdsm art, like the works of Guido Crepax and Milo Manara.

The thing with a Playboy Bunny Symbol is the complete set of Playboy from the 1950s, on CD-ROM. I’d get the collection for the 1960s as well, but I’ve never seen it in this format. I wouldn’t bother with the 1970s, though Robert Anton Wilson was still editing and writing there at the time. But it was an important and stylish literary mag, for a while.

The duck? He’s a reed duck decoy, First Nation art from the Canadian prairies. He’s got no business being there amongst the sex books in particular. But the duck, he just wanted to be there. Maybe he’s a mallard: they – unlike most other birds – actually have a penis.

And you need a duck, don’t you, if you want to write a rhyming poem about sex.

I was walkin’ down the road an I met a little duck.

He said, “How are ya, human, you look down on your luck?”

I said,”I saw that sexy Sally, tried to slip my nip inside her tuck;

She told me nobody loves me an I’ll never get a -” And so on.

Anyway, that’s the Concavity of Depravity, where Cinderella posed, waiting for her Prince. (Who did come.)

UPDATE:

Cinderella has naming rights, for various reasons. She tells me the whole room is the Library of Depravity, and only the sex books section is the Concavity of Depravity. That seems fine to me.

A library of filthy books

Posted on October 18, 2016 by jaime

This is the sex alcove in my library. It’s been named (not by me) the Concavity of Depravity. I like it, though, so it’s become my name for the whole damn library.

Five cases of books about fucking. The case at the left, in the front, is for the pioneering sexologists: the complete works of Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Havelock Ellis, whatever I’ve been able to get of Magnus Hirschfeld, Ivan Bloch and others. Plus Shere Hite, the legendary Juliet Richters of the Australian Survey on Health and Relationships (ASHR), and various others.

That long white object on the middle shelf of that bookcase is a whalebone dildo, which is probably Indonesian in origin, and was used for pleasure and (the head is relatively small) apparently to instruct young brides-to-be on their marital duties.

The case at the front right is devoted to less pleasant topics, like diseases, rape in the family, in the community and in prison, sexual abuse of children, and other horrible things.

The case on the inside left is for historical books – Aretino, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the Memoirs of Casanova, and other good things. Also, sex work now and in the past. And pro-sex feminism, i.e. people like Lynn Segal.

At the back, shining in the light, is the (mostly) bdsm bookcase. We’ll come back to that, on Thursday.

And the inside right bookcase, which is barely visible, contains people writing Theory (i.e. late 20th century pomo wankery) about sex and gender. And writing by anti-sex feminists, glowering across at their pro-sex counterparts in the left book case.