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COMMENTARY ON THE DRAGON AND
UNICORN STORIES -- PAGE 1 of 2
Submission file version
Date posted: Sept 25/2011
© 2011 Fred Brown
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The stories are located here:
The Dragon’s Deal
Been Reading A Little Tanith Lee Lately
Multi-page document. Fave this page only.
I won't ever count these two stories on my Personal Best list.
Good 'n clever, yes, but too short, too much the 'trick' stories. Anybody
notice how similar they are, a riff on the same theme? It's obvious.
They both take a fantasy trope-unicorns and virgins, dragons and
princesses-and give it an identical solid twist thataway. Bam! Snap
ending, and reader goes Whuff! (or Ouch!)
Actually, the original dragon piece stopped with "Good heavens, my
dear, who ever told you I was going to eat you?" Fine for the original
audience, but I looked closely at it and realized the story shouldn't end
there.
Sacrificing the snap ending (a bit) leaves the reader with a much
more entertaining [erotic] mental picture. And some strong thoughts about
a future story. I now have a couple of interesting characters on my paws
here and a ton of interesting questions to answer.
It's a mark of how far I've come as a writer that I can see this.
The unicorn story also needs thinking about. An apparently evil unicorn?
With a nastily lethal sexual fetish? Really. Somebody should stop him,
don't you think?
Never, repeat, never would have seen that back in '98 when these
two were written. I'll put it down to looking at them through fur writing
eyes (ie., these are fur characters). They were intended purely and solely
as a couple of short, compact, humourously squicky little pieces written
for a readership that ate up all the squick I could write.
Uhhh. . . hold it. 'Humourously squicky?' That's gotta count as an
oxymoron of some kind. The connotations to the word squick are also
questionable, implying a flavour of extremely gory violence that's
somehow sexually arousing.
Ie., the sort of stuff you'd find in extreme BDSM 'play,' for example,
but less perhaps than in guro material (*no* humour to be found
in that). What's going on here? What deep, dark, twisted secrets is
the cute kitty with the murderous shiv about to reveal?
Nothing so deep, dark, or twisted as might be suspected. Sorry.
From where I sit, weird as all batshit maybe, but what writer hasn't got a
bucket o' that bouncing around between their ears? Hmmm? Hmmm? Be
honest.
I could scratch my head about where the blame lies, the Internet
or the feminists. Or if blame is even the word to use? Truly dunno.
Do you remember the very first piece of Internet porn you ever
saw? I do, back in '92 on the first 'real' computer I owned. It had an
80286 CPU, ran Windows 3.1 and had a 14.4 Kbps modem. Whee, power,
powwerr!! :- )
(The pic? Three girls at the beach, backs to the camera, in tres cute
G-strings. Delicious. Naylor's Original Life webcomic did a segment
on the Ass-Man Through History a few weeks back. I all but fell off my
chair laughing.)
But there's much, much more than cheesecake tush porn on the
Net, isn't there? Can get pretty. . . intense, can't it? (Read: *tight*)
Oh, and you don't need to go onto the Net to find that sort of
thing either. I lived in Toronto for a few years, '81 to '87. Feelthy
bookstores! Magazines! Rental videos! Never did visit any movie
'theatres;' the strip clubs were enough. Toronto the Good, eh?
<Ppphhbbt!> (well, that's the rep the city likes to project.)
One more thing Toronto's got: some really good feminist studies
courses. How and why I got into one in '82 is a separate story. But
when I say good I mean *extremely* good, such that the Toronto
Women's Bookstore must've taken at least 800 bucks off me as I
bought up the whole course reading list (three pages worth).
Unusual thing for a guy to take that course. Two of us in it. But
hugely valuable. It has paid off in the writing, and I can go toe-to-toe
with damnnear anybody on the subject and with some authority.
Except. . .
Back in the 80s, a huge debate raged in the feminist world about
porn. A group of filmmakers at the Canadian National Film Board
produced an appropriately titled movie: Not A Love Story. They pulled
no punches, and I can say that because we saw it when it was screened
at York University.
<KER-ZAP!!!>
And a high-voltage one, because the last ten-fifteen minutes of
that film dealt explicitly with the intense, 'tight' stuff, including shots
from magazines and clips from films. I wonder if they cleared the
copyright with HOM Studios.
Now, we all walked out feeling heavily booted to the head, as the
filmmakers intended. So I wasn't alone. And their PoV was open to some
criticism too, save that you need to know Ellul's propaganda theory to do
so properly. Porn is a special type of pre-propaganda, IMHO.
But sitting in a dark theatre surrounded by feminists (friends) while
taking a feminist studies course is *not* a good time and place for a
22-year-old Canadian chap to learn that BDSM porn is a turn-on!!
It was only much, much later, after I came back down to Earth,
that I wondered if anybody else in that room had felt the same. Hetero
or lesbian, it would have been an even worse shock for them.
That shock has stayed with me. It was with me when I went shopping
for magazines. Ditto with the few vids I saw. So at the least I'm a lot
more critical about porn (especially BDSM) than the average 'consumer.'
Count blessings.
That's the setup. Now for the punchline.
By the mid-90s the writing ambition was heating up to ignition
temp. Got some journalism training in '93. Also heating up was the
volume and intensity of the porn I was surfing. I'll never need to buy
another magazine again.
And it's all free, free, free, isn't it? Or one helluva lot of it is, and
that shouldn't make us all a bit suspicious? What was most free, however,
was all the porn posted to USENET newsgroups. (Wiki that if you need to;
what we used to use in the Stone Age before anybody knew how to spell
'social networking.')
Newsgroups! Oh boy, what fun it is, where all kinds of people
post just about *anything*. All ya gotta do is click, then wait for it. . .
Oooo. Didn't know you could do that on a trapeze. And the kangaroo's
wearing handcuffs too.
This isn't to say I spent all my online time on BDSM porn. Some,
to be sure, but then one healthy sign [about porn] is not getting stuck on
just one type. That said, God bless the folks who were stuck on one type
or other because they sure posted a ton of stuff for the rest of us.
It was therefore only a matter of time before I stumbled over one
particular small, obscure, and very specialized newsgroup: alt.torture.
Quick semantic note: Don't Panic, this isn't torture in the sense
that Amnesty International uses the word. This was in the sense that the
people posting to that group were *very* serious about BDSM play. To
the point of making it a lifestyle in a lot of cases, either as 'masters' or
'slaves.' 'Limits? We don' need no steenkin' limits' could have been the
group's motto.
And there were no pictures posted to the group. Oh. That's a bit
disappointing. But not very in light of the discussions going on. Image
groups were easy to find. This kind of material was not. And there were
stories being posted. Won't say it was where a newbie ought to start, but it
was a place where a newbie could ask questions and get a civil reception.
Remarkably flame-free zone, I observed.
Didn't have anything to contribute, of course, so merely lurked for
a while. I came to the group with some knowledge, so newbie as such I
wasn't, but. . .
Back up: did you say, stories were being posted?
Oh yah. Writing quality was overwhelmingly crappy, but the mark of
a fetish story (any fetish) is how well it punches the buttons, not
whether it's a Nobel Lit contender. Looked at as a genre, you must
grant that BDSM fic is rather limited in terms of plot, character, theme,
etc. Somebody's a dom, somebody's a sub, so now what do they do?
And how much blood-loss can somebody take or inflict?
Which isn't fair to the few writers who did get rich stories out of
the [squicky] tropes and conventions of BDSM. As for the rest, groan. I
could do better than that with one hand tied behind my back (the right
genre to say that, mmm?).
Then my funny bone inserted itself into the mix, backed up by the
aforementioned underlying heebie-jeebies about BDSM.
Don't remember what it was, but a chance came to make a comment.
Couldn't stop myself. What got typed was a small funny, a joke of an
aside. Replies came back: LOLs all round. Good one.
I did it again. Same result. A third time. Same.
Humour? On *this* newsgroup??? Unheard of, if not unprecedented.
But appreciated. Did I have a possible edge here? A unique way of
looking at this stuff, this generally grisly genre? Such that I could find
a few whoopee cushions hidden in the torture chamber? Lemme see now,
where do I start. . .?
66 posts later I finally stopped. Added up, perhaps 400,000 words
were written between late 1996 and spring of 2000. That's a helluva lot of
material, it's theoretically publishable, save that it would kill me to edit it.
The title of the whole project?
The Short-Short Torture Stories. Okay, that title might be a tough
sell to publish but it went over just fine on the newsgroup. Duh.
There!! It's said! When or if somebody tries to rag on me about
this lot I'll club them over the head with this journal and say, now don't
you feel so much better? For trying to shoot me with a secret from my
literary past that isn't one? Everybody knows, ya twerp. Knife-Kitty's
covered his tail, ha!
If this sounds like I'm a bit paranoid about the SSTSs, maybe a
little. I have this mental picture of me getting successful as a writer,
going on some high-profile CBC talk show, the interviewer asks, 'Now
tell us how you got started as a writer. . .'
At which point my agent will fake a heart attack to distract
everybody while I escape out the side door. It's a plan, anyway.
Seriously though, 400K words worth of BDSM fic? And humourous
BDSM fic? That's just not going to be believed, mainly because
punchlines and whips do *not* go together in most people's minds.
Pity for them. They did in mine. It was 66 posts worth of jokes, to
be truthful, all keyed off of my subsurface anxieties about BDSM. And it
took that much writing for me to finally come to grips with that, insofar as
I'd learned a ton more about how BDSM, and human sexuality, really
works (and/or I'd just gotten better at rationalizing).
The essence of any joke is short-short-short. The first few posts
were lists of semi-one-liners, duds mostly. Then characters began
appearing, the humour a little more authentic to the situation I put
them in. But still short.
From there recurring characters began popping up. Can a pretty
but sadistic nurse, for example, be used to generate some laughs? Sure.
What about a writer who fantasizes too much (as I parodied myself)? The
stories got longer, the humour less punchline dependant.
Whole posts were given over to a particular theme. Dragon and
Unicorn came out of the two posts that took a 'torturous' look at fairy tales
(Rapunzel with all that hair was dead easy). And on it went. Not always to
wild applause but more than enough to keep me going. Every two weeks
or so for three and a half years.
To look at the posts near the end compared to the ones at the start,
you'd never know it was the same writer. I had developed that far, was
writing proper short stories with better-than-cardboard characters and
plots. One recurring character generated a 40K word magic-heavy fantasy
novella (you'll get to read it once it's been furrified). Another two
recurring characters were slowly but surely falling in love. Romance with
nipple clamps. Cue the sappy violins above the screams, please. . .
All still with the humour, but I'd come a long way from the
whoopee cushions. When you can make your girlfriend laugh--who
dislikes BDSM--you know you've got it. Look out, Thurber, I'm
gaining on you.
Well no, as the inspiration faded, then went down for good. I had
begun working seriously on SF by then (early 2000s), then ramped it up.
The SF short stories I have in inventory directly owe their existence to the
skill I gained with the SSTSs. As for the novels I have in mind, we'll see.
Two should be resurrected from the back burner and made into fur stories.
Yeah, about fur stories.
I read around on FA and I find myself thinking, hmmm, this feels
sorta familiar. All that time spent muzzle-deep in one admittedly sexual
genre has given me an angle on this stuff.
Won't even begin to argue for similarities; that's silly. But is there
something. . . congruent here? Might be able to make a [speculative]
case.
Let's start with the instant I tripped over Bernal's Champagne, back
in 2007. Why does she strike me so strongly, as a character? The art
is good, it's certainly erotic, but so are megatons of art out there (call me
well-qualified to say this).
None of which has ever prompted this level of certainty, that I
was so convinced there were stories to be told about her. I printed the
image out (the one of her sliding down a stripper pole onto a purple, ah,
'stage prop') and stuck it on the kitchen wall. Been staring at it for nearly
three years, plus an accompanying shot of Sasha, Bernal's trademark
bunny fur, in a pink slingshot swimsuit.
(Gotta be fast when company drops over and yank 'em down.
Forgot a few times; nobody's said anything.)
For both images, the initial impact has not worn off. Both still as
strong as when first seen. This is Not Ordinary. All porn has a half-life
beyond which it just will not arouse. Why do these two fur women seem
to trash that rule? A lot of fur art does much the same. One four-panel
sequence from Polecat of his Tasha (as skunk fur) *ain't* going up on the
wall, but it is flat-out unforgettable (drool).
So here's a thought experiment in three parts. In art or in writing,
fur characters are an obvious blend of the human and the animal. Not that
Bernal drew her this way but that Champagne pic is what you'd get if you
fed two images and some data into some sort of magic box (next release of
Photoshop, maybe?).
The first image would be a female fox, cute 'n vivacious 'n bushy-
tailed. The second would be a hot, big-boobed, platinum-haired human
stripper. The data would be that pose, the sliding down the stripper pole
with hand above, one leg out, one knee up. One of these days I'd like
to know if Bernal was drawing from something real-life.
So experiment part one: Picture the stripper in this pose. Just a
typical piece of porn, right? Good for some arousal perhaps a few times,
but of no power or strength after that. And it would be quite obvious why
the pic smokes. Our sexuality 'reads' that image and sees all kinds of
meaningful signals. Back-of-brain gets all the erotic information it needs,
assembles it properly, and then boing! Or if you're lesbian, squoosh. (Gay,
dunno what you'll do; probably focus on the, er, stage prop?)
Then Back-of-brain gets bored with it. There's a 'seen it, done
that' factor built into our sexuality. Our mind still receives the sexual
signals from that image but their meaning has changed, have become
devalued. Then we go surfing for mo' better porn. New, that is.
Experiment part two: Picture the fox in the same pose.
Anatomically speaking that would be difficult for a real fox. Vulpine
legs don't work the way human legs do, and putting a paw up to the
stripper pole might be hard on her shoulders. What kind of an image
is this?
It might carry some flavour of erotic charge. But it would be nothing
like the stripper pic. The pose would be the largest part of it, and the
symbolism inherent in the purple thing. The fox is recognizably female.
She is clearly engaged in a sexual act. Art of this scene would not perhaps
be that appropriate for FA but it'd go over quite well in other places.
Still, what this pic transmits doesn't really fit what our mind is used
to processing, in terms of what it needs for arousal. The fox's body
does not match the human form of the stripper. Fur, muzzle, ears, tail, no
breasts, paws: not human. Totally different signals. A male fox would perk
right up, though.
'Female' comes through okay, but not much beyond that. Mind you,
'female' (or 'male') and 'mammalian' is about the bare minimum we
need to get turned on. Blame evolution. We've all gone our different
ways, sexually speaking, but there's still a lot of common machinery
in all of us, tails or no tails.
So it takes us some effort but we can interpret this fox-and-stripper-
pole pic as erotic. The signals are technically way off but our mind can
still work with them to generate fantasy. The sexual semiotics of
the image are still within range of what human sexuality is set up to
handle.
Sexual semiotics? Yes, I said semiotics. Crucial idea here, and
actually dead simple (although you wouldn't know it after ten minutes
of Googling the word).
Say only that there's what we perceive [in the world around us], and
then there are the *meanings* we attach to all that. See an apple, and
the most basic meaning flashes up in your mind: the word apple. This is
because you speak English and you learned the word in kindergarten.
Somebody French would think 'pomme.' Either way, the next meaning of
any significance that comes to mind would likely be how good apples
taste.
Then you eat the apple. Perception, meaning, action: this is the
core of what semiotics is about and it gets whompingly complex from
there. Semiotics grew out of linguistics and studying how and why these
orderly sounds and squiggly symbols work in our minds and eyes and
ears. Turns out to have broader application. Look how much Google time I
just saved you. (And now I'm hungry, damn it).
Semiotics can be useful in thinking about human psychology and
cognition (and can give you lots to argue about). But it's also useful in
thinking about human sexuality.
Perception: we see a big boob (or hard cock). Some kind of signal
that can be interpreted sexually zaps us. Meaning: The back part of our
head doesn't waste time putting it into words but it sure as hell knows
what that means. Action: The front part of our head takes the message-
something sexual here--then must decide what *that* means and what to
do about it. Sex doesn't give us many choices, of course; lotta compulsion
involved too.
Animal sexuality is set up so there's no front part to get in the way.
Their actions in response to sexual signals are usually pretty direct
and unmediated. Our sexuality is a two-stage sort of thing: a set of low-
level semiotic processes that respond directly to sexual input and generate
arousal. Then our 'higher order' semiotic processes take that and run with
it. Usually through the bedroom door. Compulsions.
Given how strong sexual arousal is, small wonder that people screw
up more often than they screw. Thanks, Evolution, for blessing us
with a system that genuinely blows our ability to think straight--in a
real biochemical way--when we get horny. ('Did somebody say 'blow?''
Champagne giggles.)
PAGE 2 OF 2 >>>
UNICORN STORIES -- PAGE 1 of 2
Submission file version
Date posted: Sept 25/2011
© 2011 Fred Brown
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>>>>> Commentary On The Dragon And Unicorn Stories <<<<<
By Fred Brown, Sept 25/2011 
fwbrown61
Copyright 2011 All rights reserved, all commercial
infringements prosecuted, website display permission
available upon request. Non-personal distro is infringement.
fwbrown61The stories are located here:
The Dragon’s Deal
Been Reading A Little Tanith Lee Lately
Multi-page document. Fave this page only.
I won't ever count these two stories on my Personal Best list.
Good 'n clever, yes, but too short, too much the 'trick' stories. Anybody
notice how similar they are, a riff on the same theme? It's obvious.
They both take a fantasy trope-unicorns and virgins, dragons and
princesses-and give it an identical solid twist thataway. Bam! Snap
ending, and reader goes Whuff! (or Ouch!)
Actually, the original dragon piece stopped with "Good heavens, my
dear, who ever told you I was going to eat you?" Fine for the original
audience, but I looked closely at it and realized the story shouldn't end
there.
Sacrificing the snap ending (a bit) leaves the reader with a much
more entertaining [erotic] mental picture. And some strong thoughts about
a future story. I now have a couple of interesting characters on my paws
here and a ton of interesting questions to answer.
It's a mark of how far I've come as a writer that I can see this.
The unicorn story also needs thinking about. An apparently evil unicorn?
With a nastily lethal sexual fetish? Really. Somebody should stop him,
don't you think?
Never, repeat, never would have seen that back in '98 when these
two were written. I'll put it down to looking at them through fur writing
eyes (ie., these are fur characters). They were intended purely and solely
as a couple of short, compact, humourously squicky little pieces written
for a readership that ate up all the squick I could write.
Uhhh. . . hold it. 'Humourously squicky?' That's gotta count as an
oxymoron of some kind. The connotations to the word squick are also
questionable, implying a flavour of extremely gory violence that's
somehow sexually arousing.
Ie., the sort of stuff you'd find in extreme BDSM 'play,' for example,
but less perhaps than in guro material (*no* humour to be found
in that). What's going on here? What deep, dark, twisted secrets is
the cute kitty with the murderous shiv about to reveal?
Nothing so deep, dark, or twisted as might be suspected. Sorry.
From where I sit, weird as all batshit maybe, but what writer hasn't got a
bucket o' that bouncing around between their ears? Hmmm? Hmmm? Be
honest.
I could scratch my head about where the blame lies, the Internet
or the feminists. Or if blame is even the word to use? Truly dunno.
Do you remember the very first piece of Internet porn you ever
saw? I do, back in '92 on the first 'real' computer I owned. It had an
80286 CPU, ran Windows 3.1 and had a 14.4 Kbps modem. Whee, power,
powwerr!! :- )
(The pic? Three girls at the beach, backs to the camera, in tres cute
G-strings. Delicious. Naylor's Original Life webcomic did a segment
on the Ass-Man Through History a few weeks back. I all but fell off my
chair laughing.)
But there's much, much more than cheesecake tush porn on the
Net, isn't there? Can get pretty. . . intense, can't it? (Read: *tight*)
Oh, and you don't need to go onto the Net to find that sort of
thing either. I lived in Toronto for a few years, '81 to '87. Feelthy
bookstores! Magazines! Rental videos! Never did visit any movie
'theatres;' the strip clubs were enough. Toronto the Good, eh?
<Ppphhbbt!> (well, that's the rep the city likes to project.)
One more thing Toronto's got: some really good feminist studies
courses. How and why I got into one in '82 is a separate story. But
when I say good I mean *extremely* good, such that the Toronto
Women's Bookstore must've taken at least 800 bucks off me as I
bought up the whole course reading list (three pages worth).
Unusual thing for a guy to take that course. Two of us in it. But
hugely valuable. It has paid off in the writing, and I can go toe-to-toe
with damnnear anybody on the subject and with some authority.
Except. . .
Back in the 80s, a huge debate raged in the feminist world about
porn. A group of filmmakers at the Canadian National Film Board
produced an appropriately titled movie: Not A Love Story. They pulled
no punches, and I can say that because we saw it when it was screened
at York University.
<KER-ZAP!!!>
And a high-voltage one, because the last ten-fifteen minutes of
that film dealt explicitly with the intense, 'tight' stuff, including shots
from magazines and clips from films. I wonder if they cleared the
copyright with HOM Studios.
Now, we all walked out feeling heavily booted to the head, as the
filmmakers intended. So I wasn't alone. And their PoV was open to some
criticism too, save that you need to know Ellul's propaganda theory to do
so properly. Porn is a special type of pre-propaganda, IMHO.
But sitting in a dark theatre surrounded by feminists (friends) while
taking a feminist studies course is *not* a good time and place for a
22-year-old Canadian chap to learn that BDSM porn is a turn-on!!
It was only much, much later, after I came back down to Earth,
that I wondered if anybody else in that room had felt the same. Hetero
or lesbian, it would have been an even worse shock for them.
That shock has stayed with me. It was with me when I went shopping
for magazines. Ditto with the few vids I saw. So at the least I'm a lot
more critical about porn (especially BDSM) than the average 'consumer.'
Count blessings.
That's the setup. Now for the punchline.
By the mid-90s the writing ambition was heating up to ignition
temp. Got some journalism training in '93. Also heating up was the
volume and intensity of the porn I was surfing. I'll never need to buy
another magazine again.
And it's all free, free, free, isn't it? Or one helluva lot of it is, and
that shouldn't make us all a bit suspicious? What was most free, however,
was all the porn posted to USENET newsgroups. (Wiki that if you need to;
what we used to use in the Stone Age before anybody knew how to spell
'social networking.')
Newsgroups! Oh boy, what fun it is, where all kinds of people
post just about *anything*. All ya gotta do is click, then wait for it. . .
Oooo. Didn't know you could do that on a trapeze. And the kangaroo's
wearing handcuffs too.
This isn't to say I spent all my online time on BDSM porn. Some,
to be sure, but then one healthy sign [about porn] is not getting stuck on
just one type. That said, God bless the folks who were stuck on one type
or other because they sure posted a ton of stuff for the rest of us.
It was therefore only a matter of time before I stumbled over one
particular small, obscure, and very specialized newsgroup: alt.torture.
Quick semantic note: Don't Panic, this isn't torture in the sense
that Amnesty International uses the word. This was in the sense that the
people posting to that group were *very* serious about BDSM play. To
the point of making it a lifestyle in a lot of cases, either as 'masters' or
'slaves.' 'Limits? We don' need no steenkin' limits' could have been the
group's motto.
And there were no pictures posted to the group. Oh. That's a bit
disappointing. But not very in light of the discussions going on. Image
groups were easy to find. This kind of material was not. And there were
stories being posted. Won't say it was where a newbie ought to start, but it
was a place where a newbie could ask questions and get a civil reception.
Remarkably flame-free zone, I observed.
Didn't have anything to contribute, of course, so merely lurked for
a while. I came to the group with some knowledge, so newbie as such I
wasn't, but. . .
Back up: did you say, stories were being posted?
Oh yah. Writing quality was overwhelmingly crappy, but the mark of
a fetish story (any fetish) is how well it punches the buttons, not
whether it's a Nobel Lit contender. Looked at as a genre, you must
grant that BDSM fic is rather limited in terms of plot, character, theme,
etc. Somebody's a dom, somebody's a sub, so now what do they do?
And how much blood-loss can somebody take or inflict?
Which isn't fair to the few writers who did get rich stories out of
the [squicky] tropes and conventions of BDSM. As for the rest, groan. I
could do better than that with one hand tied behind my back (the right
genre to say that, mmm?).
Then my funny bone inserted itself into the mix, backed up by the
aforementioned underlying heebie-jeebies about BDSM.
Don't remember what it was, but a chance came to make a comment.
Couldn't stop myself. What got typed was a small funny, a joke of an
aside. Replies came back: LOLs all round. Good one.
I did it again. Same result. A third time. Same.
Humour? On *this* newsgroup??? Unheard of, if not unprecedented.
But appreciated. Did I have a possible edge here? A unique way of
looking at this stuff, this generally grisly genre? Such that I could find
a few whoopee cushions hidden in the torture chamber? Lemme see now,
where do I start. . .?
66 posts later I finally stopped. Added up, perhaps 400,000 words
were written between late 1996 and spring of 2000. That's a helluva lot of
material, it's theoretically publishable, save that it would kill me to edit it.
The title of the whole project?
The Short-Short Torture Stories. Okay, that title might be a tough
sell to publish but it went over just fine on the newsgroup. Duh.
There!! It's said! When or if somebody tries to rag on me about
this lot I'll club them over the head with this journal and say, now don't
you feel so much better? For trying to shoot me with a secret from my
literary past that isn't one? Everybody knows, ya twerp. Knife-Kitty's
covered his tail, ha!
If this sounds like I'm a bit paranoid about the SSTSs, maybe a
little. I have this mental picture of me getting successful as a writer,
going on some high-profile CBC talk show, the interviewer asks, 'Now
tell us how you got started as a writer. . .'
At which point my agent will fake a heart attack to distract
everybody while I escape out the side door. It's a plan, anyway.
Seriously though, 400K words worth of BDSM fic? And humourous
BDSM fic? That's just not going to be believed, mainly because
punchlines and whips do *not* go together in most people's minds.
Pity for them. They did in mine. It was 66 posts worth of jokes, to
be truthful, all keyed off of my subsurface anxieties about BDSM. And it
took that much writing for me to finally come to grips with that, insofar as
I'd learned a ton more about how BDSM, and human sexuality, really
works (and/or I'd just gotten better at rationalizing).
The essence of any joke is short-short-short. The first few posts
were lists of semi-one-liners, duds mostly. Then characters began
appearing, the humour a little more authentic to the situation I put
them in. But still short.
From there recurring characters began popping up. Can a pretty
but sadistic nurse, for example, be used to generate some laughs? Sure.
What about a writer who fantasizes too much (as I parodied myself)? The
stories got longer, the humour less punchline dependant.
Whole posts were given over to a particular theme. Dragon and
Unicorn came out of the two posts that took a 'torturous' look at fairy tales
(Rapunzel with all that hair was dead easy). And on it went. Not always to
wild applause but more than enough to keep me going. Every two weeks
or so for three and a half years.
To look at the posts near the end compared to the ones at the start,
you'd never know it was the same writer. I had developed that far, was
writing proper short stories with better-than-cardboard characters and
plots. One recurring character generated a 40K word magic-heavy fantasy
novella (you'll get to read it once it's been furrified). Another two
recurring characters were slowly but surely falling in love. Romance with
nipple clamps. Cue the sappy violins above the screams, please. . .
All still with the humour, but I'd come a long way from the
whoopee cushions. When you can make your girlfriend laugh--who
dislikes BDSM--you know you've got it. Look out, Thurber, I'm
gaining on you.
Well no, as the inspiration faded, then went down for good. I had
begun working seriously on SF by then (early 2000s), then ramped it up.
The SF short stories I have in inventory directly owe their existence to the
skill I gained with the SSTSs. As for the novels I have in mind, we'll see.
Two should be resurrected from the back burner and made into fur stories.
Yeah, about fur stories.
I read around on FA and I find myself thinking, hmmm, this feels
sorta familiar. All that time spent muzzle-deep in one admittedly sexual
genre has given me an angle on this stuff.
Won't even begin to argue for similarities; that's silly. But is there
something. . . congruent here? Might be able to make a [speculative]
case.
Let's start with the instant I tripped over Bernal's Champagne, back
in 2007. Why does she strike me so strongly, as a character? The art
is good, it's certainly erotic, but so are megatons of art out there (call me
well-qualified to say this).
None of which has ever prompted this level of certainty, that I
was so convinced there were stories to be told about her. I printed the
image out (the one of her sliding down a stripper pole onto a purple, ah,
'stage prop') and stuck it on the kitchen wall. Been staring at it for nearly
three years, plus an accompanying shot of Sasha, Bernal's trademark
bunny fur, in a pink slingshot swimsuit.
(Gotta be fast when company drops over and yank 'em down.
Forgot a few times; nobody's said anything.)
For both images, the initial impact has not worn off. Both still as
strong as when first seen. This is Not Ordinary. All porn has a half-life
beyond which it just will not arouse. Why do these two fur women seem
to trash that rule? A lot of fur art does much the same. One four-panel
sequence from Polecat of his Tasha (as skunk fur) *ain't* going up on the
wall, but it is flat-out unforgettable (drool).
So here's a thought experiment in three parts. In art or in writing,
fur characters are an obvious blend of the human and the animal. Not that
Bernal drew her this way but that Champagne pic is what you'd get if you
fed two images and some data into some sort of magic box (next release of
Photoshop, maybe?).
The first image would be a female fox, cute 'n vivacious 'n bushy-
tailed. The second would be a hot, big-boobed, platinum-haired human
stripper. The data would be that pose, the sliding down the stripper pole
with hand above, one leg out, one knee up. One of these days I'd like
to know if Bernal was drawing from something real-life.
So experiment part one: Picture the stripper in this pose. Just a
typical piece of porn, right? Good for some arousal perhaps a few times,
but of no power or strength after that. And it would be quite obvious why
the pic smokes. Our sexuality 'reads' that image and sees all kinds of
meaningful signals. Back-of-brain gets all the erotic information it needs,
assembles it properly, and then boing! Or if you're lesbian, squoosh. (Gay,
dunno what you'll do; probably focus on the, er, stage prop?)
Then Back-of-brain gets bored with it. There's a 'seen it, done
that' factor built into our sexuality. Our mind still receives the sexual
signals from that image but their meaning has changed, have become
devalued. Then we go surfing for mo' better porn. New, that is.
Experiment part two: Picture the fox in the same pose.
Anatomically speaking that would be difficult for a real fox. Vulpine
legs don't work the way human legs do, and putting a paw up to the
stripper pole might be hard on her shoulders. What kind of an image
is this?
It might carry some flavour of erotic charge. But it would be nothing
like the stripper pic. The pose would be the largest part of it, and the
symbolism inherent in the purple thing. The fox is recognizably female.
She is clearly engaged in a sexual act. Art of this scene would not perhaps
be that appropriate for FA but it'd go over quite well in other places.
Still, what this pic transmits doesn't really fit what our mind is used
to processing, in terms of what it needs for arousal. The fox's body
does not match the human form of the stripper. Fur, muzzle, ears, tail, no
breasts, paws: not human. Totally different signals. A male fox would perk
right up, though.
'Female' comes through okay, but not much beyond that. Mind you,
'female' (or 'male') and 'mammalian' is about the bare minimum we
need to get turned on. Blame evolution. We've all gone our different
ways, sexually speaking, but there's still a lot of common machinery
in all of us, tails or no tails.
So it takes us some effort but we can interpret this fox-and-stripper-
pole pic as erotic. The signals are technically way off but our mind can
still work with them to generate fantasy. The sexual semiotics of
the image are still within range of what human sexuality is set up to
handle.
Sexual semiotics? Yes, I said semiotics. Crucial idea here, and
actually dead simple (although you wouldn't know it after ten minutes
of Googling the word).
Say only that there's what we perceive [in the world around us], and
then there are the *meanings* we attach to all that. See an apple, and
the most basic meaning flashes up in your mind: the word apple. This is
because you speak English and you learned the word in kindergarten.
Somebody French would think 'pomme.' Either way, the next meaning of
any significance that comes to mind would likely be how good apples
taste.
Then you eat the apple. Perception, meaning, action: this is the
core of what semiotics is about and it gets whompingly complex from
there. Semiotics grew out of linguistics and studying how and why these
orderly sounds and squiggly symbols work in our minds and eyes and
ears. Turns out to have broader application. Look how much Google time I
just saved you. (And now I'm hungry, damn it).
Semiotics can be useful in thinking about human psychology and
cognition (and can give you lots to argue about). But it's also useful in
thinking about human sexuality.
Perception: we see a big boob (or hard cock). Some kind of signal
that can be interpreted sexually zaps us. Meaning: The back part of our
head doesn't waste time putting it into words but it sure as hell knows
what that means. Action: The front part of our head takes the message-
something sexual here--then must decide what *that* means and what to
do about it. Sex doesn't give us many choices, of course; lotta compulsion
involved too.
Animal sexuality is set up so there's no front part to get in the way.
Their actions in response to sexual signals are usually pretty direct
and unmediated. Our sexuality is a two-stage sort of thing: a set of low-
level semiotic processes that respond directly to sexual input and generate
arousal. Then our 'higher order' semiotic processes take that and run with
it. Usually through the bedroom door. Compulsions.
Given how strong sexual arousal is, small wonder that people screw
up more often than they screw. Thanks, Evolution, for blessing us
with a system that genuinely blows our ability to think straight--in a
real biochemical way--when we get horny. ('Did somebody say 'blow?''
Champagne giggles.)
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