Jailbait

This month will be the twentieth anniversary of the end of a romance, a most painful chapter in my tale.



I was an exceedingly imaginative child and adolescent, given to long bouts of daydreaming and secret story-telling, and when it came time for actual relationships, this tendency of mine didn't diminish. So it was that every relationship until Sarge was framed as a story; I was a smart, manipulative little bugger, both worldly and totally unschooled not to mention maybe pretty, as adolescent girls are, a lethal combination that really got me into trouble a few times, including this one. Anyway, when I was 17 and completely obsessed with Keith circa 1972,



who was for me the pinnacle of sex appeal, I discovered a really fantastic biography of the Rolling Stones, incredibly well-written by a fellow who had followed them around through several early tours and gotten to look and act, in the process, quite a bit like them. I masterminded a plan with my sissy to write an innocent fan letter to this author and then ultimately seduce him. The plan worked, alas, but to quite devastating effect.



This author was at the time in his late 40s, and I had just turned 18 when our romance of letters turned rather heady. I still thought it was an adventure, but had not been entirely won over yet. I sent him my white silk scarf, liberally sprinkled with my parfum du jour, "diorissimo." I still can't smell its lily of the valley note with out feeling a cold chill...




and then his letters became more pointed







Well, that was the trouble: I not only thought, but had been absolutely certain that the old coot would fall at my feet...and when he told me that he loved me, and began to hint at a life together, I decided to fall in love too...




When I look at these embarrassing journal entries, in such an earnest young handwriting, I want to cry for my own innocence. It's true that I wasn't literally jailbait at 18, I could smoke and vote and marry and fight, but I was a very, very young and impressionable 18. Maybe that was part of the allure, I don't know. I'd had romances before, some with dangerous characters who I'd gently push away before it got really tricky, but never with an adult who promised me this weird mixture of danger and security.

When the affair ended, as of course it should have, I was utterly devastated. I didn't recover for a ridiculously long time, in fact I daresay I was sleep-walking through my entire miserable sophomore year at college. And at night I often dreamed that I checked my campus mailbox to find a letter addressed in that very familiar hand...


Twenty years later, two decades older, I understand what it means to be with someone for a long, long time, and I've learned all about the white magic of sex, I mean how it can be a force for good and not corruption and manipulation, and I feel terribly sorry for that girl's naivete. It really was her own fault, but as a life lesson perhaps it could have been avoided. You know how one's old romances come to seem silly and fatuous with time? Well, this one seems a little silly but somehow will never be funny, at least not to me...

Kiss the Boot of Shiny Shiny Leather

As I mentioned, the Severus fan fic represents the full range of S&M behavior. There is every permutation, from mild spanking all the way, at the other end of the spectrum, to rape and torture. Although that savagery isn't exactly consensual, as I guess traditional S&M is, it's obviously thrown in to set the mood, as it were.

And then there's the symbolic sado-masochism, typical of even the most Mary Sue-ish of romance novels: the hero is cold and dismissive to the interested party, repeatedly shaking them off in humiliating manner, often the rejection takes place in front of people (a bit of exhibitionism there--and the hero asserting his power). This cruel behavior only serves to heighten the interest of the admirer. Kind of old-school, really, and I should know as I've read "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre" dozens of times, as well as every single book by Mary Burchell. Needless to say, I'm certainly well-versed in the psychological components, at least as represented in overwrought romance novels. In all of these, though the hero relents at the end and shows his sweet side. And I always ask, whither the dark side? Surely a girl or boy who is initially attracted to cruelty will not be satisfied in the long run with kindness? But I suppose that kind of challenge would also grow tiresome in the end...

Although I'm attracted to fictional darkness and cruelty, I'm not sure it translates well into real life, although I've run into it often enough in boyfriends, and surprisingly in myself at times. But it's not a good basis for a stable marriage and family life... which is of course why these heros need ultimately to be tamed and domesticated...it wouldn't be so sexy in ten years with the hero still irritatingly chilly and distant, but maybe at that point having exchanged the elegant frock coats for a stained wife-beater. Anyway...

Although I've had much experience with what I now think of as tedious relationship S&M (coldness, lack of reciprocity, psycho-sexual game-playing etc. etc., I mean with everyone trading roles constantly--how too sickeningly puerile), my one experience of physical S&M was with my last college boyfriend before, thankfully, Sgt. Pepper arrived on the scene. Now it may not seem like much, and it certainly lacked the elaborate stylized trappings of full-on role-playing, but to me it is a telling episode. This boy was nothing like a spooky, chilly, and forbidding Byronic hero, really he was a complete pothead with strange cat-shaped eyes and a clumsily obvious habit of playing girls against each other. But he did have one less prosaic perversion, which was that he loved to be bitten. He would demand it, with more and more fervency. It was fine, at first, and I was happy to oblige.

A soft nip, sweet. A harder nip, a little sexy. Harder, then harder. And harder still, I'm biting down firmly on resistant neck tendon. Harder than that, I've begun to taste blood. At this I'm the teensiest bit disturbed, and still he's whispering "harder!" When I begin to be uncomfortable at the prospect of inflicting so much pain, and my god, what will happen if the skin fully breaks and the veins burst? I mean, is that even what would happen? will we have a homicide here? well, the sadist and the masochist have definitely switched places, and suddenly he's in control and I'm the masochist. As I've quoted before, from the delightful Venus in Furs, either you're the hammer or the anvil. But I suppose often, when one traffics in such behavior, it's not clear which is which...

Slash Fic: Just Me and the Boys

Okay, I must confess that I started this entirely other website just to write an entry about slash fic. How much do I love slash fic? It's positively indecent. Well, I'm a true believer in all the many many permutations and complexities of human sexuality, so I won't judge myself on this one. But lately I've been trying to make sense of my complete obsession with this romantic fan fiction with a gay love story at the center. Written mostly by, I believe, women, and definitely read by women. In my case, given my Snape proclivity, in my spare time I've gone through quite an amount of the Harry Potter stuff.

I have to say first that I began by surreptitiously taking a look at the heterosexual Severus writing--really Byronic heroish, standard stuff (much of it beautifully written, though, I must say), weeping and gnashing of teeth and a lot of girlish yearning and chilly reception from the Potions Master, culminating in bodice-ripping, tearing off of cloaks and waistcoats, and finally hot sex on the Potions classroom desk...eh, old hat.

But the gay stories were immediately of interest to me. Let me say that there's a ton of them out there. I mean a TON. REAMS of it. Web site after web site, page after page, devoted especially to the erotic romantic entanglements of Severus and Remus. Everybody and their sister and their sister's sister-in-law appears to be writing these. Anyway, these stories are very romantic (the lead-up to the sex is logical and has narrative flow and character development) and VERY graphic. Which brings me to my question: why do I (and apparently many other women) find these gay sex narratives so appealing? In fact, much more appealing than heterosexual written porn?

A first obvious and rather disappointing explanation is that this sort of porn is safe. I mean, women are generally not realized as erotic beings in these stories, so that a female reader can be a bystander of sorts; there's no participation possible even in imagination, and therefore no pressure even imaginary. A gay Severus and a gay Remus just wouldn't be interested in me, LOL! But I didn't like this idea, though--it struck me as too simplistic.

These stories, at least some of them, tend to have a violence to their eroticism (although, even in the heterosexual Snape pieces, there's quite a bit of S & M, some of it really savage, far beyond a humble spanking. That just makes good sense in the context of that character, if I do say so). I don't know if this has to do with a womanly (girlish?) perception of gay sex? Is it a weird way of romanticizing something we're not privy to? Is it accurate? I don't know. But this brings me around to the idea that I like the speculative nature of these romances. The mystery of it, that it's something I can't really ever know about. So being allowed to peek in the imaginary window as it were, on an intimate scene and see not just acts but be given insight into feelings, is an adventure. The fact that these men's emotions are completely fake, and in fact generated by women, is almost beside the point. It's a way of playing pretend, a really super exotic pretend that would be completely off-limits otherwise.

Or maybe, because I happen to like boys like that, it's fun to read about them.