"But if I enjoy a fantasy, I don't want it to be
scripted by another person."
Lisa messaged me at work a day after I emailed her Erotic Notion #13: Gift for a Spanish Woman.
"This was a sexy tale," Lisa wrote, "but contrived. A lover or ex-boyfriend would never go to all that trouble to arrange an orgy for a woman. And how do you know that the woman wants to sleep around, or likes black men in general or these three in particular?"
"This story," I said, "is more about the man creating a fantasy for a woman than the woman actually enjoying it. It's open-ended enough to allow the Spanish woman to fill in the rest with her own preferences."
"But if I enjoy a fantasy, I don't want it to be scripted by another person. Not one bit. What if the man dreamt up an elaborate lesbian fantasy for the woman? Or some pathetic bondage fetish? That would not be erotic to her or to me the reader. Maybe the Spanish woman could say, 'Man #1, I want Man #2 to fuck you in the ass while you suck Man #3's cock.' That's a video stream our narrator wouldn't want to watch."
"You're probably right," I said, making a mental note to delete her from my next lesbian threesome fantasy. Nonbisexual women (even those who would never deign to sleep with me) were such party poopers.
"Why do fantasies always have to be so elaborate?" Lisa said. "Why can't it be, a woman seduces a man she meets at a party? Or a woman has a fling with a man she used to have crush on in high school. We don't need complicated payouts or airline reservations to make something sexy. Spontaneity is the key to sexiness."
"I'm not really disagreeing," I said. "But aren't elaborate fantasies fun too?"
"Nonsense," she said. "Let me tell you a story. Once a college boyfriend of mine paid for an elaborate weekend trip to the mountains, and instead of being fun, it was a pain in the neck. We arrived late, the room had mosquitos and we ended up fighting half the time about something stupid. That whole weekend (which he'd planned as an elaborate surprise for weeks) cost him a bundle, and yet it wasn't half as fun as the night he met me at the gym and we made out in the car half an hour later."
"Maybe you're right," I said, "but aren't you a little hard-to-please? Half the time the woman seems to be complaining about the man never planning surprise weekend trips or erotic escapades. If the man did no planning but let himself be guided by the moment, that could be very boring. Tell me something. We can agree that the fantasy setup for the Spanish woman was contrived and unrealistic. But wouldn't it still be a turnon? If you ever faced such a situation, wouldn't you end up taking advantage of it?"
"That is the difference between fantasy and reality," Lisa said. "How would I know that the three men were disease-free? Or what if I were trying to get pregnant or having my period?"
"It sounds as though you are agreeing," I said. "Certain details need to be planned before spontaneity can even be possible. And spontaneity – well, I have no objection to that – but it always contains a seed of rejection or nonseduction. People don't automatically enter into menage e trois or elevator sex whenever the opportunity arises (if it does). By definition, erotic stories aren't about nonseductions; they are about surrending to the allures of the imagination and finding yourself for once in control of your own desires."
"Wait, Be back 5 minutes."
I went back to work, keeping the chat window open at the bottom of my screen.
Lisa buzzed me back, writing:
"Sorry – had a phone call. Eroticism is not about control and surrender. It is about responding to the unexpected, the gradual unmasking of social convention, recognizing human wants and needs. I don't mean to become philosophical. But your story just misses the whole point of sex. To spend all this time contemplating these farfetched erotic fantasies just makes it harder to find erotic fulfillment. (Sigh). Well, at least I tried to warn you."
Written, May, 2005
