WHAT HAPPENS TO

A WRITER OF

EROTICA WHEN A

READER TAKES HER

FANTASIES HOME

WITH HIM?

BY MOLLY WEATHERFIELD
I recently received a fan letter routed to me by the publishers of the comic S&M novel "Carrie's Story," which I wrote a few years ago. I like to get fan mail, but I always open the envelopes with some trepidation. It's the downside of being a pornographer, even a pseudonymous one: Having exposed the private parts of my sexual imagination to absolute strangers, I'm fair game -- ready or not -- if they want to expose themselves to me.

And this letter was a bit disturbing. The writer had loved the story, and now he was looking for "people to talk to about this lifestyle." He also wanted to get directions to certain locales in the book -- he seemed to think he might meet my characters there. As testament to his sincerity, I think, he enclosed his business card -- sales representative, building materials. And what he seemed most sincere about was his belief that my book was documentary narrative.

I hadn't anticipated this situation when I'd started writing porn. I'd thought I might outrage people, or disgust them. "Yuck" was pretty much the response I'd imagined, especially at some of the more extravagant scenarios I'd dreamed up. Being taken literally (or congratulated, as I was, in another letter, for my knowledge of "the scene") was the last thing I expected. My God, I thought, putting down the letter, how can I tell this guy that I made it all up?

But, of course, I hadn't exactly made it up either. I'd copped a piece here, borrowed a bit there, drawing upon a private treasure trove of favorite passages from hot books I've been reading since adolescence. I was surprised, when I began writing, how accessible these barely acknowledged memories and fantasies were, how easily I could tell them in my own voice. I can do this, I marveled, the Sunday I began my first story. This is fun, I thought, still writing away in my bathrobe as the sun began to set. And this is mine -- an autobiography of my fantasy life, themes and variations, tradition and individual talent happily intertwined.

Pornographers write within traditions, though that might seem a pretentious way to describe it, and mine was what my husband called "chateau porn." It's the de Sade sub-sub-genre, featuring incarceration, initiation and exaggerations of rank and hierarchical order, all under the aegis of this or that secret society. Think of the Friends of Crime ("Juliette"), or the Roissy brotherhood ("Story of O"), or, more recently, Anne Rice's the Club ("Exit to Eden") and Sara Adamson's eponymous the Marketplace. In my novels, the secret society is called the association (with a little a -- dim Lacanian joke). These organizations are always heavy on infrastructure; I gave mine an argus-eyed computer technology and put a very detail-oriented programmer dom in charge (the programming details were a fringe benefit of my day job).

It was fun to dream up, and fun to work on, too. Writing pornography is its own reward, delirious self-indulgence compounded by the orderly pleasures of making sentences and paragraphs. I still sometimes reread my own porn, because I don't have to browse around it looking for the good parts. My stuff is all good parts -- for me. When one of my characters tells my hapless heroine that he knows what she wants, that's me -- writer and dominant -- talking to me, reader and eager submissive.

Sometimes I wondered if I wasn't really writing an extended dialogue between my mind and body. Sallie Tisdale has speculated -- quite correctly, I think -- that S&M pornography is an exploration of what it feels like to be "dominated by sex." The paradox of wanting to be forced to do (or to feel) what you're clearly aching for is not something I expect to understand entirely in my lifetime. And the mystery of who's really in charge -- "active" mind or "passive" body -- is a pulsing mandala, a set of Chinese boxes. But even if I never quite understood it, I learned a lot about how it works and how to work it. And I know that, for me anyway, it only really gets good when it's relentlessly elaborated, embroidered, fleshed out and embodied in rules and roles, strictures and structures.

Fantasy needs rules: Just listen to a couple of 7-year-old boys squabbling over the intricacies of a role-playing game. Fantasy is orderly, methodical, planting one foot in the familiar and one foot outside of it, and always knowing which foot is which. It needs a dungeon-master, an art director, an orchestrator, to keep track of all the moving parts.

And fantasy is funny. Elaborate fictions of sexual power and domination are shaggy dog stories about taking the longest possible route between point A and point B. And then (redundancy being part of the joke) doing it all over again.

I thought a lot about this. I tried to make my readers laugh while I made them hot. And I received some nice responses in a few sex and punk zines. It was cozy, reassuring, knowing that I was writing to people who were in on the joke. And it was gratifying to think that I'd shaped the jokes skillfully enough to communicate both sense and sensuality.

It was fun -- until I received that letter from that distressingly humorless reader, the man who wanted a road map to "the dressage shows they have" -- his syntax suggesting that he thinks there really is a "they" who really have these shows. It was like watching "The X-Files" with friends, all of you hooting at it, and then remembering the appalling statistics on how many people really believe in alien abductions.

"He doesn't expect you to reply, you know," my husband said. "He's exciting himself by hoping you will, but he doesn't really expect it." The man was playing with his own boundaries of belief and common sense, my husband continued, by flirting with the possibility that I'd write back and tell him that the world of my book really existed.

No, I insisted. I have to write, to clear things up, to put belief and common sense firmly in their places. Although it was clear from his letter that what excited him in my book was the absolute consensuality of all the sex, I was haunted by dark, Dworkinesque images of him trying out my scenarios with less than willing partners. After all, if he didn't get the jokes, what else didn't he get?

Maybe he should join some BDSM club, I thought: Don't they sometimes stage elaborate, costumed rituals -- pony shows and slave auctions -- perhaps like "X-Files" or Trekkie conventions? I've never been to one -- I'm too shy, and anyway, I like to run the show myself on paper (which is probably the ultimate shyness). But I needed to think that somebody was running this man's show. And maybe he'd enjoy it, though I suspected that the people he'd meet wouldn't be as pretty or rich as the ones in my book. I researched Bay Area and Northern California S&M resource guides. And I wrote two halting drafts of a letter, trying, I thought, not to patronize him, thanking him for his kind words and wishing him luck. Neither draft was quite right. I'd have to begin a third.

Instead, I deleted both drafts from my hard drive and double-clicked to close Microsoft Word. Enough, I said to myself, can it. You've been had, I thought -- blushing as I never do when I write porn -- by a lonely aluminum siding salesman with the wobbly handwriting of someone who rarely puts pen to paper. And good for him. Because while I'll never know how deeply he believed in my fantasy, I now knew that a part of me had wanted him to believe in it.

Of course it makes me nervous to think of someone reading my stuff without the layers of shared reference that cushion the raunchier scenes like cotton batting. Most days, I still prefer to imagine that the people who read my book are people who might shop for witty sex toys at a feminist vibrator store -- it's safer that way. But some days, I'm obscurely thrilled that a book that I wrote could cross a few class and cultural boundaries and elicit an unforeseen response. Some days, I'm brave enough to consider the lessons of that response: that what fantasy elicits is not exactly belief or disbelief, but something trickier and more fluid, something like desire -- for an alternative world, and for communion, recognition, a listener. A reader.
SALON | March 3, 1998

Molly Weatherfield is the author of "Carrie's Story" and the forthcoming "Safe Word: Carrie's Story II," both published by Masquerade. She is a computer programmer in San Francisco.