Tag: writing

Header image for guest post featuring an interview with Nour Fakhoury by JD Harlock

[Guest Post] Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury’s “Titties”: Resistance Against Misogynistic Censorship in the Arab World with Erotic Graphic Novels by J. D. Harlock

Published on by Amy

Something a bit different today, friends! Writer J. D. Harlock approached me about doing this interview with graphic novelist Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury about her new erotic graphic novel, “Titties.” It’s a fascinating read and I can’t wait to read the comic, too.

Amy x

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury’s Titties: Resistance Against Misogynistic Censorship in the Arab World with Erotic Graphic Novels by J. D. Harlock

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury is a SWANA graphic novelist who, after graduating from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in 2015, sought to immerse herself in the world of visual storytelling. Following years of honing her craft in the Lebanese art scene, Nour joined Samandal Comics, a SWANA comics collective in Lebanon dedicated to developing the medium of comics in the Arab World. Currently, her work is primarily focused on autofiction, which presents intimate stories with an exaggerated art style in hopes of accentuating them.

Recently, Nour agreed to sit down for an interview to discuss her semi-autobiographical erotic graphic novel Titties. Titties explores the tumultuous sex life of a character loosely based on the author in one-page stories recounting adventures with various sexual partners. By presenting these encounters in an unapologetically explicit manner, Nour hopes to provoke the reader to confront the uncomfortable realities prohibition, repression, and marginalization of sexual experiences. Ultimately, this fearless act of transgression is all in service of pushing the limits of self-expression in Lebanon, where censorship is increasingly present, with few options left to resist the status quo. 

Here are some highlights from my conversation with Nour.

Cover image of the graphic novel Titties by Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury. A cartoon of a woman reclining on a red bed with her hands behind her head. She is naked apart from a pair of red panties.

J. D. Harlock: As someone who’s been blessed to have spent his entire life in Beirut, it pains me to say this, but the Arab world isn’t known as a hub for graphic novelists, such as yourself, Nour. Even if titles are available in bookshops in Lebanon, the selection is typically limited to a select few titles from countries like the US, France, Belgium, Japan, and the UK. Speaking from experience, it’s almost impossible for a local to read enough to learn the craft without spending a fortune or sailing the high seas of digital piracy. In addition to my excitement when I meet a fellow comics fan from this part of the world, I’m always curious to find out how they became fans of the medium in the first place. So Nour, tell us how you first came to experience the exhilarating world of sequential art?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: When I was a child, a French comic artist whose name I can’t recall came to our school for a presentation. What intrigued me was the notion that you could draw the same character over and over for pages to tell a story. Back then, people used to call me “Miss Curious” because I would ask too many questions about people’s lives. I wanted to hear their stories, the intimate ones—the ones they wouldn’t share over coffee with a neighbor. It is as if I wanted to know the origin stories of people, where they come from, and how they became who they are.

Of course, this desire is directly connected to Palestine, where lies my own origin story, which I’ve unfortunately never had the chance to explore in person due to the Zionist occupation. Since words were never my strong point, I’ve always had difficulties expressing myself through writing. Doing it through drawing, however, was seamless. Even when I hear a song, I rarely focus on the words, but feel the feelings in the images.

So, between my love for stories and my connection to drawing, it was evident I’d specialize in it. Of course, now I’ve also tamed the world of words, and I use them more and more in my dialogues and descriptions. However, when I first started illustrating comics, most of them were silent.

J. D. Harlock: How did you end up joining Samandal Comics?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: My introduction to Samandal Comics happened while I was at university. I discovered their publications for the first time and realized that there was a comics scene in Lebanon with an audience for adult comics. Eventually, I met Lena Merhej, one of the founders of Samandal Comics, while working on an anthology in which we both have stories featured. A year later, Samandal member Joseph Kai invited me, Karen Keyrouz, and Tracy Chehwan to join the collective and have our generation take the lead. Without hesitation, I agreed.

J. D. Harlock: And why did you choose Samandal to be the publisher of Titties?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: I chose Samandal to be my publisher because I wanted my story published and read in Lebanon by Lebanese people. However, when it came time to print the comic, the printing house had reservations about the content. It was too explicit and daring. My second option was to print it with our collective in France and then distribute it in Lebanon, which is what I ended up doing.

J. D. Harlock: What inspired Titties?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: I recently read several comics by Ulli Lust and Julie Doucet. I loved their narrative style—works of autofiction revealing so much vulnerability and crudeness while simultaneously depicting relationships with intimacy. These comics made me reflect on both my narrative style and my relationships.

Meanwhile, I was in an open relationship for the first time, and I was hooking up with several people at the same time. Navigating that experience for the first time in my life was eye-opening. After each sexual encounter, I started drawing pages as if to process what had happened, and I would share them with friends as a way to recount to them what was happening and have a laugh. After a few months of doing so, I realized that I had what could become a comic.

J. D. Harlock: Given the subject matter and how conservative certain segments of Lebanon are, were you worried about any potential backlash from its release?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: Of course, I was worried, but I also knew that this comic would be distributed in safe spaces. As for my parents and family, I knew they wouldn’t read and see it. They are absolutely not my target audience. However, both my parents knew I was publishing it. Obviously, my mother wasn’t pleased, but she understood that this was my life and my work. She knew how to detach herself from it. On the other hand, my father has no clue what’s inside the comic; he only knows it’s a feminist work exploring women’s sexuality.

J. D. Harlock: So, how would you describe the response to the release of Titties so far?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: The response was wonderful. Initially, we printed a small batch to see how readers would react. It sold out right away, so we printed several more editions and all of them sold out, too! A friend of mine had to buy more than ten copies because each time his visitors saw it, they’d snatch it off his shelf! Eventually, it reached the shores of Italy. An Italian publisher translated it into Italian and sold copies of it there, too.

J. D. Harlock: What were you hoping to achieve by sharing these experiences?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: I wanted to normalize discussions of sexuality and sexual orientation in Lebanon so that we can be open to experimenting and exploring our kinks. Readers were meant to laugh with the protagonist, shattering the taboos that repress our sexual experimentation. I hoped to accomplish this through the “female gaze,” which is frankly lacking in Lebanese literature.

I also wanted to connect sex to the external world—politics, nonsexual traumas, and their impact on the body and desire. We tend to think of sex as a purely sexual act. But it is informed by everything that surrounds us.  There is no way to tell if this is what my readers got out of reading Titties, but I received great feedback from readers. I hope this story impacted them the way I hoped it would.

J. D. Harlock: Do you plan to release more work in the vein of Titties in the future?

Nour Hifaoui Fakhoury: Yes, I am currently working on the second tome of this comic, Titties Too, in which the character explores her bisexuality or pansexuality also through an open relationship. At the same time, I’m also working on an erotic lesbian graphic novel called Labrys with a Belgian publishing house that’s even more visually explicit, in which the characters are in a long-distance relationship. With this graphic novel, I hope to explore long-distance sexuality facilitated by new technologies such as vibrators connected to phones.

J. D. Harlock: And that’s a wrap for now! Thank you for your time, Nour. As always, I’m looking forward to reading these graphic novels—as I usually am with all of Samandal Comics’ releases when they first hit Lebanese shelves. And I hope we can have another interesting deep-dive about them when the time comes!

About the Writer

J. D. Harlock is an Eisner-nominated SWANA American writer, researcher, editor, and academic pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of St. Andrews. His writing has appeared in Business Insider, Newsweek, The Cincinnati Review, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, The Griffith Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and New York University’s Library of Arabic Literature. You can find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Twitter & Instagram.

[Guest Post] Revisiting My Erotic Fiction with a New Perspective on Consent by Alex Holmes

Published on by Amy1 Comment

I’m pleased to be welcoming Alex Holmes (he/him) to Coffee & Kink with his first guest post. I’d also like to thank him for his extraordinary patience while I took a million years to read, edit, and publish this piece.

Alex has also, coincidentally, covered the subject of revising your boundaries downwards in this piece. This is something I think we don’t talk about enough and something I really want to write about more in the future. So look out for that coming soon!

Heads up: this post discusses forms of violence including rape, sexual abuse, “stealthing” (which is also a form of sexual violence,) murder, and intimate partner abuse. If that’s likely to be triggering for you, please skip this one if that’s what you need to do to take care of yourself.

Amy x

So, I have a confession: a few years ago, I wrote a series of erotic novels (under a pen name, before anyone stops reading this to go hurriedly searching for them!) They did pretty well, as erotica goes. But these days, I’ll admit that I’m hugely conflicted about them.

Don’t get me wrong, they were decent books – well-written (if I do say so myself), decent plot (ditto), plenty of “action,” and they sold well enough to pay a few bills and get excellent reviews along the way. They still sell, albeit occasionally, and I still get the odd quarterly royalty payment from them even now. None of that was the problem.

The issue to me, now, is that two of those books are very clearly based around an implicitly consensual non-consent (CNC) setting that’s, in hindsight, more distinctly borderline on the “consensual” part than perhaps I’d like if I were writing them today. Put bluntly, they feature a very obviously “fantasy” slavery setting that a decade or more later I’d have to say I’m not particularly proud of. I was younger and I’ve learned and grown since then, what can I say?

Now, these books were very clearly set in a fantasy alternate history, behind a very clear These stories are fantasy. In real life, consent and safety are two of the most fundamental cornerstones of BDSM…’“introduction, and no-one – I felt then – was going to take the “captured heroine” thing seriously as an expression of how women should actually be treated. Moreover, a significant proportion of the readers were women, and all the comments I ever heard about those stories –from all genders – were entirely positive. They were fantasy. People got it, and readers enjoyed them.

The stories obviously played to the same fantasy audience as Roquelaure and Reage (to be clear, though, they weren’t anywhere near as well written as either!): the idea of fantasy helplessness, of being in a situation where choices were taken entirely out of our hands and safewords and traffic-light check-ins were unheard of, appealed to audiences of all genders, it seemed. No-one suggested that there was anything going on other than some relatively okay-ish erotic writing and a little fantasy alone-time.

In private, I’d continued to practice kink with consenting partners, and with discussed and agreed-upon limits, aftercare, safewords, easy-release knots, safety rules, and regular wellbeing check-ins. At no point did I equate that world – other than in an occasional “shared storytelling” sense – with the fantasy land of poor Princess Elizabeth (my protagonist) and her unfortunate downfall and eventual rehabilitation and revenge.

I started thinking (again) about this stuff recently, in response to the Andrew Tate arrest and the unfolding horror of what was allegedly going on in his house in Romania. It coalesced into a coherent (I hope) set of thoughts in response to a number of tweets I’ve seen talking about masculinity in BDSM, and how – apparently, according to a certain section of Twitter populated entirely by profile pics of faceless men in suits and ties, often holding a leather belt – “feminism has no place” in D/s. Women, apparently, have no place in dictating what Dominants (read: men, or so these people assume) can and can’t do. Essentially it was toxic, who-gives-a-damn-about-consent? masculinity writ loud.

Those tweets, and the stories of misogyny and the radicalisation of young men lured in by Tate’s philosophy that were coming into the mainstream media in the wake of his arrest, triggered some of those concerns I’d had previously. This raised (or maybe re-confirmed) a bunch of questions for me about how we talk about consent. As much as I believe I’ve learned and grown in the period since my books were first published, and as much as the stuff I’ve written more recently (and the way I try to treat others in the bedroom and in general) is hopefully a little more “two-way-street,” it saddens and disturbs me that, in the third decade of the 21st Century and sixty years since the height of the Sexual Revolution, an article on consent even has any reason to still be written. And yet, here we are.

I’ve always believed that, in any D/s scenario, the power lies with the bottom, not the top; submission is a gift that’s given to a partner, not taken, and it can be revoked just as quickly if things no longer feel safe or enjoyable. Similarly, we know that consent isn’t a fixed, one-time thing. It’s fluid, and it can be withdrawn if something no longer feels right. We’ve heard a lot recently about “stealthing”, in which men receiving consent for safer, condom-clad sex only to surreptitiously shed the contraceptive and try to slip in bareback in the hope that their partner doesn’t notice until too late. A note to those men: if it wasn’t what was consented to, then it’s non-consensual. And there’s another word for that.

But consent can also be withdrawn for stuff that you thought you wanted and then it turned out you didn’t; sure, if you like being spanked then you might think “I quite fancy being caned”, or paddled, or whatever. It’s a reasonable progression to consider. But after the first stroke you realise that, in fact, it’s a very different experience and actually you’re really not into it at all. It’s entirely reasonable to ask for it to stop. That’s withdrawing consent, and it must be respected and accepted without question.

Revising Your Boundaries Downwards

But it’s even more nuanced than that. What about those things we used to love, but which kind of don’t fit quite so well anymore? We all talk about how, particularly in long-term, supportive relationships, our boundaries and trust develop and things that perhaps we didn’t feel comfortable asking for become easier or more natural. But it happens the other way, too.

Sometimes, stuff that used to make us as hot as fuck sometimes just feels kinda… ookie. That’s ok. We’re allowed to have that to happen, and we should be able to say “yeah, I don’t want that right now, actually” without incurring the “well, you used to be fine with it” huff.

Fantasy and Reality Are Wildly Different Things

When I was researching for my books (and yes, I did actually research stuff), I did a fair amount of talking to people in BDSM groups, in person and online, to find out what was and wasn’t considered okay, rather than just relying on my own take. I realised I wasn’t the oracle on this, and that other people had a great deal more experience and knowledge than I did. Part of that involved spending some time in online chat rooms and message boards, where I was amazed at the number – and it’s a stupifyingly high number – of supposedly Dominant men who thought that, simply because someone has a lower-case letter at the start of their nickname (signifying their being a sub), they’re fair-game for opening up with “on your knees, slut.” I watched it, time and again, thinking “would you start off with that opener to someone you’d never spoken to before down the pub?” There is, it seems, a significant number of people who can’t tell the difference between dominance and simply being an aggressive asshole.

So what’s the point of all this? I guess, fundamentally, it’s one that every good partner should know. Whether we’re in a D/s scenario, in a more vanilla setting, or just living our lives together, respect and communication are paramount. That trust is fundamental, and it’s built slowly and lost in an instant. Afriend of mine used to say that “trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.”

Consent is an active thing, and it’s constant, fluid, and not “one time only”. The safety and welfare of our partners is way more important than our particular fantasy or getting our rocks off – and that goes for dom/mes as well as subs. Aftercare and check-ins are fundamental to safe and consensual play, both ways around.

To bring it full circle back to those old erotic stories again, the fantasy idea of being chained up in a basement and used for fun – or whatever – is more common than you might think. CNC, bondage, and the loss (or temporarily giving away) of control can be fun, if they’re done within the right situation and context.

The kind of content Tate was peddling to millions of boys and young men across the world, though, normalises the misogynistic, violent, oppressive view that they really have a right to take away women’s consent, control, and agency. In a world where one in three women and one in four men suffers some kind of intimate partner violence, and where over 130 women are killed by a partner or family member every week globally, that line between consent and coercion should be at the forefront of our minds in any interactions – regardless of what the Tates of the world would have us think.

You can find Alex on Twitter @AlexJH1973, on Facebook @alex.holmes.96780, and on Instagram @alexh1973. In lieu of accepting payment for this piece, Alex asked me to make a small donation to Studio Upstairs, a mental health arts charity. You can learn more about them, and donate if you feel so inclined, here.

Header image for a post on erotic fanfiction by Kelvin Sparks

[Guest Post] Erotic Fanfiction as Sexual Exploration by Kelvin Sparks

Published on by Amy

Today’s guest post comes from a new-to-C&K writer! I’ve followed Kelvin Sparks (he/him) on Twitter for some time and enjoyed many of his writings. I’m delighted to be publishing this essay on the history and appeal of sexually explicit fanfiction!

Amy x

Erotic Fanfiction as Sexual Exploration by Kelvin Sparks

When discussions of fanfiction reach the mainstream, one of the go- to jabs is always to talk about erotic fanfiction as a punchline in itself. Even when fanfiction has its defenders, they often try to distance ‘the
good stuff’ from explicit works within the genre. This is something I don’t think is fair, not just because I think erotic work is unfairly maligned in general, but because of the history of explicit fanfiction as a safe space for people (particularly women and/or LGBTQ+ people) to explore sexual ideas and fantasies.

A Short History of (Explicit) Fanfiction

Although people have been a) interested in building on existing stories and characters and b) horny for pretty much the entirety of human history, fanfiction as we know it currently is rooted in the sci-fi fan
culture of the 20th century.

While plenty of people talk about Star Trek as having the first fandom in the 60s, many of the activities associated with this early fandom activity were derivative of more general sci-fi fandom culture. For example, Star Trek fan magazines (or ‘fanzines’) weren’t something original or exclusive to the fandom, but were simply more specific versions of sci-fi fanzines, which printed amateur writing. The difference was that Star Trek fanzines, starting with 1967’s Spockanalia, contained and popularised derivative fanfiction rather than original work.

Star Trek was also influential on modern fandom in other ways. For one, the term ‘slash’, used to refer to same gender (primarily male/male) pairings within fanfiction, comes from ‘Kirk/Spock’. While not all explicit fanfiction is slash fanfiction and not all slash fanfiction is explicit, the reputation of K/S (as the pairing was also known) fans was often as smut-peddlers. While it’s hard to know specific details about the early history of smut fanfiction—first-hand sources are hard to come by—we do know that by 1978, it was prevalent enough that the editors of Star Trek fanzine Fantasia discussed the “rift between the porn-haters and the porn-lovers”.

Fanfiction—and specifically smutty fanfiction—became more visible as internet use became more common. While internets had been used for fandom since pretty much their creation— bulletin boards and mailing lists were promenant in the 80s—the creation of the world wide web and more widespread internet usage in the 90s drove some of the most prominent fandoms of the period, such as The X-Files and Xena.

For the most part, fanfiction was kept in private archives, although the creation of Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal in 1998 and 1999 respectfully changed this. Fanfiction.net banned NC-17 fanfiction in 2002, and while Adultfanfiction.net initially filled the void, Archive of Our Own (created in 2007) has become one of the leading alternatives. While AO3 doesn’t hold a monopoly on fandom— FanFiction.net is still under use, and other sites like WattPad have thriving fanfiction communities—it is one of the leading communities, especially when it comes to erotic fanfiction, which is still banned on FanFiction.net and is less prevalent on WattPad due to its younger demographic.

Why Do People Like Erotic Fanfiction?

The main reason that people enjoy erotic and explicit fanfiction is pretty clear—people enjoy erotic media! The real question here is why do people enjoy erotic fanfiction over other kinds of erotic work and art?

Written erotica in general provides a space that’s low risk while being explicitly erotic. A fantasy or desire may feel unapproachable or anxiety inducing in real life, but fiction allows us to play with these fantasies and desires in a space that’s totally controllable. If you like the idea of bondage, for example, reading erotica about bondage may feel easier than actually attempting to act out these fantasies because a book can be closed at any time.

Written erotica tends to have an easier time expressing emotional aspects of sex than visual erotica (which isn’t to say that either is better than the other, just that they are different mediums), and for people who experience a lot or most of their satisfaction from the emotional aspects of sex, written erotica can feel more satisfying.

Fanfiction erotica can heighten some of the characteristics that written erotica already has. Because fanfiction is derivative, the audience for it already has a familiarity with the characters involved, as well as some kind of emotional connection to them. I would also argue that the writing side of fanfiction has a heavy focus on emotional continuity. In order to write a character so that they’re recognisable as their canon self but distinct enough to fit into a new universe, a writer needs to have a good handle on their interiority, meaning that fanfiction often becomes a very character-focused and emotion-focused type of storytelling.

Both the derivative nature of fanfiction and the internal tropes of the genre can make it feel even safer to explore erotic ideas than conventional erotic fiction. Fanfiction archives often display information about the content included in the piece of fiction. For example, with Archive Of Our Own, pieces of fanfiction are given clear warnings for content like character death or violence, and authors can choose to tag works with various bits of information about their content, such as (for example), ‘Threesome – F/M/M’, ‘Rimming’, or ‘Rope Bondage’. This kind of archive system not only lets readers know about what content they’re likely to see, but allows them to search for specific or particular themes or types of content.

The nature of romance or erotica centric fanfiction often means that readers know that their preferred pairing (or more than pairing) will end up together, but the appeal of reading fanfiction is to watch the journey unfold. This safety—as well as the community built into fanfiction as a genre—means that it can feel like a safe space to explore ideas, both as a reader and writer and not necessarily connected to erotic preferences and practices. Plenty of people I know within fandom discovered that they were queer and trans through fanfiction, sometimes discovering it was even a thing because of fic and sometimes having their first encounter with depictions of what it was like to be trans/queer in terms of internal emotion be fanfiction.

My Experience with Fanfiction

No blog post would be complete without some personal context or story! I’ve drifted in and out of fanfic circles over the years, sometimes having periods of time where I write a lot of fanfic all at once and at other times not writing it for months or years at a time.

During my teenage years, I was pretty active in fandom, and used it as a space to explore my sexuality. It wasn’t so much an exploration of queerness for me. I’d already come out as trans by the time I started
writing fic, and I didn’t discover I was bisexual because of fandom. But fandom and fanfic did allow me to explore my sexuality in other ways.

While I was already devouring romance novels prior to discovering fanfiction, fanfic gave me access to stories and fantasies about people outside of the cisgender, heterosexual, vanilla relationships that I found in my my local library’s romance section. I was able to read not only about transmasculine characters written by other transmasculine people, but about polyamory, about BDSM, and about fantasies I would never have come across in other circumstances.

At the same time, the fact these ideas were explored through characters I already knew and cared about made it feel far more approachable than original work with the same themes would have. It also gave me a built in audience when it came to writing my own erotic fiction, exploring what kinds of kinks, scenarios, and emotions I found compelling.

Kelvin Sparks logo for guest post about erotic fanfiction

About the Author

Kelvin Sparks (he/him) is a bisexual trans man who writes about sex on the internet. You can find him at KelvinSparks.com, or at @Kelvinsparks_ on both Twitter and Instagram.

Header image for a post about erotica and feeling gender euphoric

[Pride Month Guest Post] Euphoric Erotica by Quenby

Published on by Amy2 Comments

For the second guest post in my Pride Month series, I’m delighted to be hosting Quenby for the second time (they previously wrote an utterly charming piece about lessons in boundaries from a cat!)

I loved today’s piece about exploring gender identity and creating gender euphoric feelings through the possibilities which exist in fiction but aren’t available to us in the real world. I hope you guys enjoy it as much.

This post deals with gender dysphoria, so please take care of yourself if that’s likely to be difficult for you.

Amy x

Euphoric Erotica

This Pride Month, I’ve been thinking about how erotica can allow trans people like me to navigate the at times strained relationships with our bodies.

For most of my tenure as an erotica writer, I have generally kept my work realistic. The experiences are edited and simplified to bring a narrative to those sweaty, gloriously chaotic moments when we give ourselves over to intense sensation. But I prefer to keep things as close to my real life experiences as possible.

There are a couple reasons for this. Firstly, I want to encourage more inclusive beauty standards and write about real bodies. I want big bellies and asymmetric tits, sweat drips and positions which don’t require gymnastics training.

The other reason is that, by sticking to things I have personally experienced, I know how they feel. My aim when writing erotica is to immerse the reader in the experience, to allow them to imagine what it would feel like to be degraded in public, to be fisted, or to be spanked until they cry. To do that, I need to know what that feels like to begin with.

Recently, though, I’ve started making an exception to this rule. Why should I bind the trans people I write about to a body that feels wrong to them? In prose I can grant a body denied by nature and the medical system, one which affirms and meshes with their gender identity.

In a recently published piece of erotica I imagined my boyfriend with a flat chest and a factory installed dick, and I saw the joy that imagery brought to hir. From now on, I will not be bound by painful accuracy. Let’s use this as a way to imagine trans bodies freed from dysphoria, immersed in gender euphoria which blends with and amplifies arousal.

When we are freed from the constraints of accuracy, we can explore options which would be impossible in the real world. Wish your genitals could shift between cunt and cock as easily as your identity shifts between masc and femme? Me too! I can definitely write about that. Wish you had an androgynous gentacle rather than conventional genitals? I can write about that! (Also you should really check out some hentai.) Wish you transcended the mundane and had a 6 dimensional vortex between your legs? I love the way your filthy mind works you brilliant queerdo, and I can (try to) write about that!

For all the issues that plague the world (including the sex writing industry,) erotica can serve as a glorious escape, a way to imagine experiences and connections shared with others. So let’s use that escapism to help trans people explore their identity and imagine bodies in which they feel more at home.

Quenby is a queer perfomer, writer, and activist. If you liked this post you can check out their blog, or follow them on FB and Twitter @QuenbyCreatives.

Header image for a guest post on body image by Violet Grey

[Guest Blog] How Sex Writing and Kink is Rebuilding My Body Image by Violet Grey

Published on by Amy

I’m thrilled to be featuring a guest post by Violet Grey for the second time. Violet is an amazing writer and, as I discovered when I met her in person at Eroticon, an absolute sweetheart of a person as well. Please note this piece includes frank discussion of body image and body shaming, so please take care of yourselves if these topics are difficult for you. Enjoy this piece – maybe make a cup of coffee and savour this one, as there’s a lot of brilliant stuff here. – Amy x

I think it’s safe to say at some point, we’ve all felt crap about our bodies. We wish our tummies were flatter, biceps bulkier, thighs thinner, dicks bigger, boobs perkier, the works.

With social media playing a growing part in many aspects of our life and work, the discussion around body image has evolved all the more. “#BodyPositive” is a common hashtag, and backlash around the unattainable beauty standards we see in the media is now commonplace. That being said, this is a relatively small counter when compared to the billboards, photoshopping and websites that encourage disordered eating – not to mention the horrendous amounts of trolling we see online.

Seriously, it’s like something out of Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill, which parallels the very toxicity of people (particularly impressionable teenagers finding their feet) judging someone purely by their looks. The idea that if we are not ‘perfect’ we are deserving of such ridicule. It’s scary.

If I’m being candid, my body image isn’t great. In fact, it’s not really even that good but I’m working on it. My body has gone through quite a few changes in the last 18 months. Expanding, shrinking, filling out, more stretch marks, all parts of being a woman and human being.

During these changes I freaked out, put myself down and catastrophised in my own mind that no one would ever find me attractive now I no longer sport a 26-inch waist and got a little thicker in frame – least of all myself. It goes to show that falling into the trap of placing a good dollop of your worth on trying to pigeon-hole yourself is all too easy.

Especially so if you, like me, hail from a performance background, where there’s a prevalent culture of being taught that you will land more work if you look a certain way. While for the most part it’s based on ability and on embodying the role in all ways, sadly it’s not uncommon for people to be told by certain schools, directors, companies etc. that they won’t make it as an actor/performer because they are ‘too fat’ or have some form of physical trait that individual personally deems undesirable.

So when it came to my writing about sexy stuff on the internet, I was pleasantly surprised by what I’ve come across in the community. I’ve admired fellow bloggers who share pictures of themselves on their websites, expressing themselves, clothed or otherwise, in memes such as Boob Day and Sinful Sunday. One of the many things I adore about the sex writing community, is just how inclusive and welcoming it has been for me and others so far.

Most if not all of us have had our own struggles with body image. No matter your size or shape, feeling comfortable in your own skin is not an easy task.

For those who are comfortable posting pictures in these memes or just because, I commend their confidence to do so in a culture that is so hell-bent in having us tear each other down. I see the positive comments, telling each other how beautiful they are (which you are!) and it’s so lovely to see such positivity being spread for all genders and body types. It certainly makes a nice change from the vapid comments you see because of a trivial eyebrow shape or the shape of someone’s arse (*cough cough* Instagram!)

With learning more about the BDSM, kink and fetish communities, I’ve interacted with people from all walks of life who – like all communities – share a common interest. Yes, every community has its politics and the aforementioned are no exception. However, compared to others, a constant I have seen online and in real life is the appreciation of the human form, in all its forms.

From Shibari photography to online social networks for kinky people, it’s been really refreshing to be in an environment that is more inclusive and encouraging of positive body image, regardless of one’s shape or size. It’s refreshing to see different forms of expression, from colourful hair and piercings to androgyny, to bondage art, leather and latex, all celebrated rather than derided. And as a woman, it’s nice to see the female form in all their forms being told they are beautiful, and genuinely so.

Seeing such wonderful people with such confidence has and is helping me to rebuild a better, healthier perception of myself. That I am in fact, only human and that being happy and healthy is more important than ‘fitting in’, and that not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but that everyone has their own unique beauty, inside and out. My job is making sure I remember that when I feel shit about myself.

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