Let's write about sex, ladies

AFTER Fifty Shades of Grey, a new wave of women's erotica has shed the handcuffs for a no-holds-barred look at female sexuality.

"Were you shocked?" It's the first thing author Nikki Gemmell asks me when I tell her I have just read her latest work, I Take You.

After all, in writing the risque novel Gemmell admits her remit was to break through as many taboos as possible.

“I don’t think I could go any further,” she says. “As I was writing it I was thinking, can I really put my name to this? (I Take You) is the riskiest thing I have ever done.”

Welcome to the new frontier in female literature - to boldly go where no author has gone before.

But this is not some post Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon catering to the masses of women who tittered politely at the seemingly saucy inclusion of bondage in an otherwise romance novel.

This is no-holds-barred female erotica and, while these books have always been quietly written or discreetly lining shelves, they are now high-profile and a marker of the modern woman of today.

For Gemmell it all began a decade ago when she wrote The Bride Stripped Bare. Already a published author, when it came to penning the now infamous novel a routine process swiftly took on a life of its own and turned Gemmell’s world upside down.

“I had written three novels, got married and had a baby in quick succession and was in a different headspace and energy when I came to write Bride Stripped Bare,” she says. “I just wanted to write extremely honestly about sex within marriage.”

To provide inspiration for the story Gemmell had emailed her close female friends asking them to reveal one thing they loved a man to do during sex and another they didn’t enjoy. It resulted in a piece of literature which redefined conversations around women’s sexuality - and what they should and shouldn’t be feeling, according to societal norms.

“I started to write it and it just wasn’t working. I had intended to put my name on it and was being so cautious because I wanted to protect people,” she says.

Struggling to bring the work together, Gemmell was reading a passage from Virginia Woolf one day in which the author - who once famously said “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman” - referred to anonymity as being a refuge.

“I thought, ‘of course! I don’t need to put my name to it’ - everything just freed up ... ,” Gemmell says. “I felt I was suddenly emboldened in the most exhilarating way to tell the truth. It felt really fresh, honest and raw…And then it all blew up in my face around publication time.”

Due to the salacious subject matter of Bride Stripped Bare - and the buzz surrounding its release - the press were determined to uncover the identity of the author simply known as Anonymous. What followed, Gemmell says, was truly debilitating - suddenly she herself was laid bare and had nowhere to hide.

“That felt excruciating and it took several years to get over it - I lost control of my literary career…I lost control of my life,” she says. “It was a really traumatic time - it took me three years to work my way through the Bride Stripped Bare abyss.”

But there was one thing that made the then 37-year-old determined to keep going - the feedback she received from women the world over thanking the Australian author, who at the time was living in London, for telling it how it is. That, and the support of her friends, family and husband, who mercifully was turned on by the racy novel.

“It was really only the contact with readers (that broke through) - I was getting letters from all over the world with women saying ‘thank you for writing the things I’ve always wanted to say’. That’s what gave me the courage…to publish the next two under my name.”

In 2011 With My Body followed and, I Take You was released late last month, completing the naughty trilogy.

Gemmell says it also helped that these days she is in her forties - a time in one’s life where she believes “we finally have the courage to be ourselves as women”.

I Take You - a modern take on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover - centres on Connie Carven, an upper class woman who breaks free from her husband’s repressive and disturbing sexual demands. Gemmell was determined to finish her trilogy with a bang.

“In this post-Fifty Shades world I wanted to freshen the writing about sex - where do we go from here, what could possibly come next?” she explains of her motives.

“I got the feeling I would never write like this again - I wanted to go out with something really shocking and thought provoking.”

Her resulting tome makes Fifty Shades of Grey look like a Mills and Boon novel. But that’s not to say Gemmell doesn’t appreciate the effect E.L. James’s bestselling book - and its sequels and numerous spin-offs - have had on women’s attitudes towards their reading material.

“I welcome it (Fifty Shades) in terms of it has brought about a revolution in female reading and for that I love it.

“We discuss books like this openly now. Each generation has had a ‘sex book’ which you would read clandestinely and slip under the pillow and didn’t want people to know you were reading it. I think we’re doing very different things but are lumped into the same genre…I don’t mind,” Gemmell says.

It’s a trend that is encouraging and benefiting other writers as well.

Another Australian author, Holly Hill, has been breaking down the same boundaries since 2007 when she published Sugarbabe, a real life account of her search to find an older man to keep her in sexual employ.

In 2008 the equally frank Toyboy followed - chronicling what happened when Hill retired as a “sugarbabe”, and turned the tables, hiring a toyboy to fulfil much the same role for her. But, like Gemmell, it is her third in the same vein, 2013’s The Velvet Pouch, which is the most unapologetically candid and risqué.

Hill describes the memoir “a daring and controversial love story about what really happened when I let my boyfriend cheat in an open arrangement”. For four years she and her then partner tried out various notions of “negotiated infidelity” and Hill faithfully recorded every salacious encounter.

Hill - who is also in her 40s - says in the time since she published Sugarbabe there has been a literary revolution for the better.

“It is a completely different environment,” Hill says. “eBooks have provided three main things: anonymous purchase; closet-enabled reading - no one knows if you are looking at porn or algebra notes; and eBooks also cost less. That means people can afford more ‘risky’ - and risqué - reading material.”

The reaction to each, she says, “follows models of social change”.

“In times gone by, my fans might have been regarded as ‘those freaks who thought the world was round’, yet social change models would merely describe us as innovators or early adopters and we make up about 16 per cent of the world’s population,” Hill says.

“Behind us comes the early majority (34 per cent) with the remaining 50 per cent being the late majority and laggards. Right now the early majority are reading Fifty Shades. The late majority might think it should be kept under the counter and the laggards are probably praying to God that He directs His wrath upon the demonic temptress author and evil booksellers that are subverting poor innocents,” she says.

While she has had some reservations about the personal nature of her novels, Hill wouldn’t have it any other way - as she’s championing a greater cause.

In The Velvet Pouch, Hill’s mission is to not only titillate but also educate.

“Every woman knows that we are harder on each other than we are on men,” she says. “I’m hoping The Velvet Pouch will help more women realise that the girl with the slutty clothes or the gorgeous sex worker or the flirtatious secretary isn’t the enemy, rather she is a celebration of our gender and part of our repressed selves,” she says.

“When the word ‘slut’ races into our mind if a woman does something wrong, we are merely expressing our internalised misogyny. Until we (as females) can come to terms with her, we will never reach gender parity.”

In fact Hill says, since releasing her book in late April, the strongest reactions have not been to the fetish themes, candid girl-on-girl action, or racy passages of the book. It was the home truths that really sent people reeling.

“Readers were less surprised by the sex and more disturbed by the armchair journey to a more realistic version of themselves,” Hill says. “Through my eyes, they uncovered hidden truths about themselves and their relationships that they didn’t know existed.

“When you find yourself getting turned on, or biting your nails in angst, or urging a character forward, it’s more about your own buttons than any the writer might have. The sex scenes aren’t saucy so much as honest - I’m one of the only writers I know who includes mannerisms and thoughts and nuances into sex, just like real life does,” she adds.

But that doesn’t mean men aren’t getting in on the act - last month Sydney author John Purcell outed himself as having penned erotic series The Secret Lives of Emma under the nom de plume Natasha Walker.

Since debuting the first book in the series in 2012 the trilogy has gone on to sell 50,000 copies, reached the Top 10 in Australian fiction charts, and Natasha Walker was the third highest-selling debut author in 2012.

Purcell said he had chosen to write under a different name to protect his family, but in this more liberal literary environment felt the time was ripe to come forward.

And the senior set is throwing their keys in the bowl too. A book titled Online Dating After Sixty: One woman’s journey of love, lust and losers by 65-year-old Australian Carole Lethbridge is slated for an October 2013 release.

As far as Gemmell is concerned, she has done her bit for the cause and her next project is set to be a children’s book. However she still delights in the legacy she has created.

“What I love is women at the school gate are having conversations with me that I would never have imagined having in the open,” she says. “I can’t imagine us doing that 10 years ago.

“(But) I do feel for me that’s it - I’ve closed a chapter of my life - for me it is literally shutting the book on the whole thing,” she says.

Similarly Hill is stepping out of the bedroom but continues to tell it how it is on her website and blog hollyhill.net.au

“I’m becoming more generalised. Instead of advocating for sexual freedoms, same sex marriage, euthanasia, surrogacy rights, and so on, I’m going to start fighting for the human right to full self ownership,” she says of what’s next.

“As long as we are of legal age and sound mind and it doesn’t hurt anybody else, people ought to be able to do what they like with their own bodies.”

And where does lifting the lid on this secret women’s business - via the pages of a book - leave the men of the world? “I think they (the men) are learning something,” Gemmell laughs.

“I think more risqué females are part of our social progression,” Hill says. “It is becoming OK for women - the innovators and early adopters we spoke about earlier, plus teenagers and 20-somethings - to be highly sexed and not caged by exclusivity.

“As I say in The Velvet Pouch, if women were proudly promiscuous, we would rule a world full of happy men.”

I TAKE YOU EXCERPT

He is there, in the thick of it, of course. Deeper Connie walks into it, deeper, until she comes across a small shack, one she knew was here, of course, but has barely registered in the past; a place for storing lawnmowers, axes, wheelbarrows, rakes.

He is chopping wood, getting rid of several large, fallen branches. Startled to see her, as if no one ever intrudes upon this, his secret place. Not happy. Wanting his solitude, the sweetness of it; needing the place where the world cannot find him and instinctively she knows this is it, she has stumbled upon it.

The churn in her belly, at the sight of him, Connie cannot help it. She sits on a rough bench by the shack, in a pool of replenishing light, watches, catches her breath. She will not be gone just yet; she wants to ask about the bird, wants to ask about so much.

Mel keeps on chopping, anger tingeing it. At the intrusion, the discovery, the watching. Abruptly stops. Looks down at her, stares at her, into her. Axe loose in his hand.

“The bir—” she goes to ask but, “You’re cold,” he says over the top of it.
“Am I?” She nervously laughs.
“Your hands.”

Oh. She looks down. Orange and purple, the deep mottling on her skin, she hadn’t noticed, he had. “You need to get warm.” Something so sure, calm, authoritative; not a question but a statement and instantly acted upon. Mel disappears into the shed and emerges with a hessian sack. Rough, a bit grubby, sprouting its fibres.

The challenge.
Which she can accept, or not.

Connie’s cheeks patched with sudden heat. “Thank you,” she smiles, and places the sack over her lap.
Then in that roguish whip of a day she leans back, and watches. Just that. She will not be going anywhere for some time, in the vast peace of this space, she will not give him any talk because he does not want it, his whole body is telling her that.

He is so self-sufficient, comfortable, at ease with all this. Dirt on his hands, under his nails, across his cheek where he’s wiped his sweat. She wants to lick it off. Smell him, snuffle into his secret furrows; it would be a healthy smell, there, under his arms, she just knows it. A working, moving, dynamic scent, close to the sky, the earth.

Unlike Cliff, who likes to be shaved, clipped and trimmed, at all times, perpetually neat, devoid of smell, devoid of anything close to the animal in life. Unlike Cliff, who when walking used to appear somewhat ungainly, with his great height, this man has a natural grace. Seems almost too fine for this work. There’s a beauty to him. It’s held back, contained. Quiet, listening, watching, observing; not eager for the world and its traps.

Extract from I Take You by Nikki Gemmell, 4th Estate, $27.99

THE VELVET POUCH EXCERPT

“You look absolutely stunning,” said Dino, leaning in the doorway, his eyes full of genuine admiration.

I whirled around, conscious that my ill-covered bottom was currently being illuminated by a fluorescent light that enabled you to spot a pimple at fifty paces. His eyes travelled up and down me appreciatively and I began to think that maybe I really did look sexy.

Weren’t such things in the eye of the beholder, anyway?

“Thank you so much for wearing them,” he whispered, kissing me. “You’ve got no idea how thrilled I am that you’re actually prepared to wear them for me! Most girls I know would laugh and then turn up in some posh frock that cost half their salary.”

He scowled and took a gulp of his drink.

I laughed and felt slightly ashamed. It dawned on me that up until this point, I’d been allowing my vanity to thwart other people’s pleasure. In the past, feeling self-conscious had always seemed like too big a price to pay for the happiness of others. I was prepared to buy them jewellery and expensive presents, but there was no way I was willing to feel foolish for their amusement. Since when had I started taking myself so seriously?

Judgments aside, it now seemed as if the best pleasures in life were sometimes the easiest to deliver. For one of my sugar daddies, it had been all about desserts - I still suspected that a sour-cherry strudel with grated Toblerone gave that man a bigger smile than he’d worn in years. If someone we loved wanted us to dress in suspenders and fishnet stockings, why on earth shouldn’t we?

Starting to feel a lot more comfortable, I sat on the edge of the bed. Dino poured me a glass of wine and we toasted each other, looking deep into each other’s eyes and drinking to an adventurous life.

“How do you feel about baby oil?” he asked me after a while with a glint in his eye.

“Er ... it’s very moisturising,” was all I could reply.

“You are about to see it in a whole new light.”

Extract from The Velvet Pouch by Holly Hill, HarperCollins, $29.99