What You Can Learn From Bad Writing

www.sadiesins.com

A quick rant I realized would be better served as ‘what to do when you encounter poor writing.’ Learn. When you see something doesn’t work, problem solve it so the next project you have can benefit later. The best tool a writer can gain is self editing. Solving problems in other works helps you learn to look at your own work objectively and see what’s lacking.

So I watched this tonight with the bf. I don’t have a lot of time for reading, but I do have a few hours here and there to give to a movie. My main reason (outside of entertainment) is to learn as a writer. What I want to emulate and what I don’t. Here is what I learned from the failure of this movie.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t watched any other movies in the Oceans series. They never appealed. The idea of an all girl heist though did, plus the great cast, which just makes this all the more annoying.)

• You need character connection. I didn’t care about any of them. At all. There was no emotional connection. There was no reason to empathize with these characters. None of them were struggling, none of them had problems or anything relatable. No pain in their lives. They were just there, pawns, with nothing to learn, nothing to prove, nothing to gain, and with no interest in growing.
• You need stakes. When jail looks easy, when being poor with only $45 is as simple to remedy as conning someone at a register and snagging a hotel room, nothing matters if it all goes wrong. There were no stakes. There was no threat of violence or death. No mortality. It was a bunch of girls playing a game and the worst consequence was being locked away for a while. Yawn.
• You need conflict/drama. Everyone was ‘IN.’ Everyone. No one fought it. No one fought each other. There was no one who wanted more, no one who couldn’t stand another character, no one who had something to prove. No egos. No sick child, or backstabbing sister, or nosy neighbor, or jealous ex. No broken leg, or sudden fog, or a panic attack, or a flat tire. This again comes back to that problem of lack of character development. They threw a bunch of characters in there but never fleshed them out. They didn’t come with baggage and unpredictable behavior like normal humans. They were perfect pawns and because of it they didn’t add an element of interest.
• You need doubts. Every single character there had no fear of failure. They had no fear of jail. They had no fear of their family being targeted by other teammates because maybe one of them is a crazy bitch. They had no fear of leaving their kid alone to fend in the world cuz they’re in jail for the rest of their lives. Is the money worth it? Is the thrill? Is your life that bad that you’re throwing it all away over a hopeful payout? These characters were robots. Worse, they were sociopaths. They didn’t even get a thrill from their wins just as much as they felt no fear from losing. Boring.
• You need feminism. They built an all girl cast for a reason, then they never followed through with how women kick ass. How they’re brilliant, how they’re overlooked and underestimated, and trying to reach impossible standards of external beauty plus work and home life perfectionism while their inner lives suffer. Because the characters were so 2 dimensional, the whole point of an all women cast was lost because the things that women are dealing with were ignored.
• You need character goals. What would 38 million dollars mean to you? What would you do for that kind of shit? How committed would you be to get that money? How could that greed fuck up your actions? How could that motivation push you to be the best at something you might not be so great at anymore as you age? How could it get you to hurt people you love or cut off from society or crawl through a sewer or something? Get some fucking complexity in there! Character growth, push, pull—anything!
• You need fuck ups. OMF, it all went according to plan. They told you what they were going to do and then they did it. That is not a movie; that’s a boring ass documentary. That’s leading a dog around a ring and being mundanely pleased when you win an award. Oh, it might be the ‘perfect plan’ but it makes for a fucking shitty movie—and that’s the biggest issue.

Things that work aren’t entertaining. Characters who get along aren’t entertaining. Movies without conflict about well off women who are bored being housewives or running their current successful business aren’t entertaining. You need the exaggeration, the contrast of rich and poverty. You need the drama. You need the conflict. You need the doubts and you need shit to go wrong. You need that one character who you’re certain is talking to the Feds but you can’t replace them because they’re essential, but wait, no, it was the other one and it wasn’t the Feds they were talking to, but your ex who tries to rob you with a bomb you manage to escape, but one of the other girls is caught in the explosion because life is fucking messy and shit goes wrong and if you were only a better person, less greedy, someone else wouldn’t have ended up dead.

*breathe* XD

You need humanity and its flaws, ugly and beautiful. A lab created diamond is flawless, and because of it, cheap as dirt. The real diamonds are identified and known by every flaw they hold. People are murdered by relatives to inherit these rocks. Entire communities are enslaved and left starving and in poverty while forced to mine diamonds even when we have so many already in the world, diamonds are fucking worthless and their circulation controlled to appear otherwise. Why? Because that’s humanity for you. Insane, impractical, driven by motivation and fear and self hate. Flawed and shiny.

Good stories are about people, not about plans. More so, it’s not the end (though the character should be driven to that goal and running from their fears and conflicts and sometimes fighting every damn step of the way) but the journey of how they get to the end that should be the focus. It bothers me that I keep finding lackluster storytelling among these beautiful sets, dazzling designs, and big named actors. Shouldn’t this shit be a given at this point? When did Hollywood forget how to write a solid story?

Dark Fantasies For Abuse Survivors

www.sadiesins.com

An in depth look at abuse, the intelligence of the body and psyche, and how dark topic erotica helps survivors accept their bodies, their arousal, and themselves

Today I want to talk about dark fantasies for abuse survivors. Basically, I want to talk about why I write what I write, and the importance of it. I found my country under siege, in absolute pain from millions of sexual abuse survivors this month with the Kavanaugh hearings and the injustice of him being confirmed. This occurred as well when Trump, an accused rapist and assaulter was raised to the level of President of the United States and women (and men) worldwide screamed their rage and pain for another man being rewarded while taking from the bodies of women.

America has a rape problem. We have an incest problem. We have a pedophilia problem. And far far worse than all of it combined, we have a denial problem.

“Studies by David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, show that:

• 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;
• Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident;
• During a one-year period in the U.S., 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
• Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
• Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.”

* http://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-abuse/child-sexual-abuse-statistics

When these topics are discussed, they’re spoken as if some outsider, some stranger is roaming the land assaulting the naive and unsuspecting. What isn’t mentioned is many of these sex crimes occur in the house, in bedrooms, and are committed by family members. 34% of reported sex crimes are of family members—and let’s be real, when a family member sexually assaults, it is unlikely that it will ever be reported at all. This is a generational problem of abuse, one where many who have been abused find themselves abusing their own family in the future. This is a harsh, painful reality not just in this country, but all over the globe, and because of shame, because of denial, because of the way people would rather pretend reality doesn’t happen and blame some idea of a ‘predator,’ these crimes continue to occur.

So let’s talk about it.

How do I know sexual assault is more likely to occur by someone familiar than by a stranger?

I get a lot of readers who reach out, but they don’t always want to talk about my stories. They feel compelled to share their trauma, their pain, the fact that someone in their life, usually a loved one, usually when they were at their smallest and most vulnerable, took advantage of them. Why do my stories bring not only these past memories to the surface for abuse survivors, but also help them feel comfortable to talk about these experiences and face them? Because the author behind these stories is also an abuse survivor, and she didn’t know it when she started writing, but she was creating her own therapy in her erotica.

I was raped by my grandfather when I was three years old. On a conscious level, I didn’t know this occurred until I was the age of 35. I’m 36 as I write this post now. I have been writing erotica for three years up to this point, and have been having sexual fantasies far longer than that.

The first time my brain sent me one of these hidden, repressed memories, I was sitting in bed, reading a book by Janina Fisher titled ‘Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors.’ I was only in the prologue, and it was fascinating. I got to this passage where the author was explaining how the brain, the creative right brain, creates a false reality for the trauma victim to live out their life in a world completely crafted around that traumatic moment, and all that had to happen was for the left brain, the logical brain, to come in and pluck the consciousness free, and the false reality would crumble and PTSD would switch off.

Do you know what my brain said to me in that moment? A voice inside me, my consciousness said, ‘Oh yeah? Ya wanna fucking bet you can handle this?’ And that was when I had my first recovered memory.

And no, I couldn’t fucking handle it.

I spent the next half an hour, 30 minutes of my life, certain I was going to kill myself. I woke up my boyfriend, explained what I couldn’t really explain, and we sat in his car while I had a nice freak out repeating again and again, ‘I don’t know if this happened or not, it doesn’t feel like a real memory, but why would it be in my head if it wasn’t real, so it must have happened, but I don’t know if it did.’

He eventually said, the brilliant, compassionate man that he is, ‘It doesn’t matter if it happened or not. It’s real to your brain.’

And that was it. I could stop questioning. I could stop denying. I could stop asking ‘can I and this thought exist in this body together?’ It was my battle with the thought that had caused the distress and suicidal wish to not have to share space with that thought. And it was my acceptance of that thought that allowed me to exist in my body, in that car, in the present being okay with the fact that when I was three, my grandfather raped me.

I learned to sit with that thought a lot the next few weeks, this foreign, sickening, confusing thought and coexist. I had so many questions. Who was I with this thought as part of my identity? What did it mean for my current relationships to have this sexual betrayal of my boundaries during my very beginning in the world? What about as a writer? Was I hurting people with my writing? Had I been hurting myself with my writing? Why was I writing these dark stories and was it a way to hurt others?

Eventually, a new change came along with every answer I was seeking. One night I was reading an article about Eckhart Tolle, and the thought resurfaced again, this time with new memories far more vivid than before. This time I accepted it all with a ‘yes,’ and I had an ego death as my PTSD created false mind that existed since I was three years old crumbled away. No longer did I have to worry about coexisting with that thought because neither myself or my memories were real. I just was, and there was no right or wrong to define the thoughts that streamed through my mind. Thoughts just were as they pertained to me. They existed in the realm of my mind but they did not define me.

I existed, my thoughts existed, my body existed. It was enough.

Writing As Therapy

Writing erotica was what allowed me to get to this point of acceptance. Specifically, writing dark erotica that goes into taboo subjects such as incest, noncon/dubcon, bestiality, shota, slavery, and bdsm. These were sexual fantasies I admitted an attraction to, one so great I was willing to share it with the world and face whatever judgment might come. It didn’t matter what others thought; this belonged to me. It had value, a purpose, even if I couldn’t fully name it. I knew it was important. These last three years have been my sexual revolution and it’s far from over.

I questioned a lot of my writing when I first had my repressed memories resurface. Why was I writing Teddy, this highly sexual child, when I believe with all my heart that abuse against children is wrong? What message was I sending to my inner child self who endured sexual abuse? Was I trying to inflict some sort of pain on that child memory? How embarrassing to realize it was Ky’s grandfather whose face he shared that bred him to be his slave, while I was named after the man who used me as a child. My subconscious had been trying to tell me these things from the moment I started writing, and I hadn’t listened. In not listening, what was I missing? What was that inner self trying to say? Why was I abusing these characters and calling it erotic?

I was writing Hellcat during this time, and let me say, that book nearly died a million deaths. I almost stopped writing completely, and was considering something like urban fantasy, or nonfiction, or anything to avoid this conundrum of writing sex. That is, if I could write at all because for some reason words weren’t actually words, and I couldn’t organize things in my head the same way as before. It was like relearning how to think, never mind write.

Ego death had changed something in me. It had stripped all the rigid structure of the world away and had left me with questions instead. I like to write concrete imagery, concrete surrealism even—I like a concept to slam someone over the head instead of tickle them, and ego death had made it very difficult to find that solid footing again. There’s a reason for that, btw. I like the concrete because when I was a child, I was completely unhinged from it. My PTSD based mind was a terrifying place of unformed half realities and nightmares, a maze of emotions that felt more real than solid ground, so when I write, I combat that journey into my mind by creating a solid foundation to walk on. Otherwise, how frightening the dark woods that await just outside my path.

In all my inquiry, I started hearing the answers, answers that at first were difficult to face because they had to sit with that uncomfortable thought at the root of it all. Why was I writing what I was writing? Because I needed to accept it. I needed to accept that no matter the age, the human body is equipped with nerves and basic software that allows for sexual arousal and gratification. I needed to accept that no matter the object, the body can and will respond sexually to things/people/animals/thoughts/situations in a sexual way and that it is completely normal. I needed to accept that even when abuse happens, a person can still go on and live a life stronger, better, empowered. I needed to accept that fantasies are important, that denial of fantasies lead to a denial of self, and that fantasies don’t require anything but acceptance.

Most importantly, I needed to accept that sex, sexual desire, sexual thoughts, and sexual identity are a part of my body, this body I have been so detached from for so many years of my life because of the actions of one man whose face I can’t remember, and it’s okay to be in this body with those aspects of myself.

What happened once I could accept that what I wrote was valuable to me, to my healing, to that inner child I had ignored for so long? My writing flourished. I could look at my stories objectively instead of having my subconscious come in and try to take over and battle with if it should be allowed to be heard or not. Hellcat was the most fun writing such a raunchy, sexy, highly controversial story yet (come on, a shapeshifting demon lover? Awesome!) and I’m totally looking forward to writing the sequel.

I could embrace my fantasies now instead of just kind of tolerating this strange compulsion to write. I could love what I do again, instead of constantly questioning if the bullshit and judgment and forever being laid raw was worth it. I was the one judging me, and if others were, well, too fucking bad for them.

The act of writing was me accepting my fantasies exactly as they are, and that realization freed me to be a better writer. When I could accept that writing was a part of accepting everything about me, I could love every moment of the process and really put my stories out there proudly for others to read no matter the topic.

Dark Erotica As Therapy

Many people don’t understand fantasies. They think a fantasy is a reflection of the life you want to live, such as winning the lottery or becoming a rockstar. But have you ever talked to people who say they totally dream of winning a million dollars but they never actually play the lottery? Does your wannabe rockstar friend never bother to even pick up an instrument and learn to play? A fantasy isn’t necessarily the life you want to live; it’s just the life you want to explore in your mind. And that’s perfectly fine.

Books aren’t real. Fantasies aren’t real. They can’t reach out and force you to react, to respond, to attack, to be scarred, to be happy. A fantasy exists solely for it to be experienced in the human mind, and it is up to each individual human how that fantasy is fully experienced.

This might be difficult for some people to understand. For those who do, where this concept is so obvious you can’t understand why it’s even in question, I want to explain the traumatized brain a little. I’ve lived with PTSD since the age of three, and with that comes a very confused understanding of what is real, and what isn’t. When listening to classical music with no lyrics, for example, I could become so depressed or overwhelmed with emotion that I feared for my safety. I believed it was the music’s fault, that it was hurting me in some way, blind to how my brain had interpreted sound and then created a concept in my mind that resulted in internal pain. This is the same with words on a screen/page for many people.

These inert symbols you’re reading right now only have meaning because your brain is placing meaning on them. Yes, for the most part it is a shared, agreed upon meaning within the language and society who speaks this language, but there are still variants to that meaning. The same way I can type the word ‘cat,’ each mind will have a different idea of what a cat is. Some might have an emotional response to the word ‘cat’ because of current or past experience. They might have been scratched in the face, or have terribly allergies, or they might have seen a cat die gruesomely. Depending on these experiences might change how they view the word ‘cat.’ It might be so extreme to even see these three letters combined ‘C-A-T’ that they feel overwhelmed, angry, frightened, out of control, hysterical or full of sorrow.

Did that word do anything to them? No. But that is the power of the the mind, and that is part of what dark sexual fantasies battle when in the public eye. Some people cannot accept that words on a page are just that, and instead they see these words as a call to treat others poorly, criminally, abusively, etc. Be grateful if your mind is free from this confusing lack of emotional intelligence, because the people who cannot discern fiction from reality are suffering, and their actions usually cause suffering as they try to oppress people in their need to force others to agree with their irrational viewpoint.

When you’re reading a dark sexual fantasy, you’re not reading a reality. No one is going out saying this is how to live your life. The relationships revealed in dark erotica that lack balance, that lack stability and sanity are that way for a reason. You’re looking into the mindscape that is revealing itself in familiar descriptions to make it more relatable while other, deeper concepts are conveyed.

There is only one character in a love story. There is one person finding the other half of his/her self. One being who must face fears found only in his/her own eyes, and accept everything he/she sees and learn to love that reflection. And when that love story is also a lust story about dark topics, that one character is learning a lesson abuse victims struggle with going forward. Pleasure still feels like pleasure. Pain can feel like pleasure because pain is still just sensation, and the body in its amazing, adaptable coping strategies, seeks to transform pain to pleasure to make even the most horrendous bearable. Pain can be pleasurable and pleasure is okay.

What it takes to survive, to cope, to sit with a thought that has haunted you for a lifetime is accepting that we are still just base animals, that pleasure works in our bodies just like any other base animal, and once judgment is removed, there is no longer this wish to define what happened to a victim as wrong, or destructive, or a reason to murder the victim to save face in a family, or hide the victim away because they remind you of what another did. When you no longer have to define the abuse, you don’t need to define the person it was inflicted on as a victim, or guilty, or weak, or tragic, or a liar, or a slut, or whatever else pops in the cruelest of minds who cannot sit safely with these thoughts.

Why do people hate victims? Because they cannot face the weak, vulnerable person they once were who was victimized. Every time I see a victim blamer, I know I’m looking at an abuse victim who never learned to forgive his/her self for being weak when he/she wanted to be strong and in control. When someone refuses to offer comfort in the face of the most heinous of pain, I know it’s because he/she felt to receive comfort during such a time would destroy him/her.

Comfort means acknowledging the pain, and for those who can’t acknowledge, they prefer the cruel void of lies. They cannot sit with the thought and accept it. Instead they must destroy the thought, must blame the victim, must run, and run, and run for a lifetime to never have to find themselves alone with that thought with no compassionate, beautiful soul beside them to remind them that it doesn’t matter if it’s real, your brain just wants you to accept it.

Now, when I look back without the fragmented PTSD mind, I can see the reality of my childhood when I was so young, the dark presence always at the edge of my vision, the monster stalking me in my otherwise cozy, grandmother’s house of memory. Being trapped in a crib, at the most vulnerable, and having vision be darkness on the brightest of days because of his shadow. I can feel compassion for that trapped child, when before I tried to erase her so completely that I didn’t even know she was living inside me suffering from that abuse. She’s not suffering anymore. I have not locked her away, I have not blamed her, I have not hated her, and now she can just exist as we all just want to exist. Free.

The Burden Of Consent In The Society Of Victim Blaming

I want to speak of this because of the many very logical sounding arguments that have been raised about there being ‘no evidence’ in the Kavanaugh situation (while evidence is blatantly ignored.) The truth of the matter is, you cannot prove consent. You cannot prove a yes or a no when looking back. Unless people are writing contracts, and even then, if you are in mid interaction and you change your mind, consent is withdrawn and now it’s rape. This can and has happened to actors in the adult industry, and for fear of losing their jobs or being shunned from the industry, few speak up when it occurs.

You cannot hold consent up and go here is the proof she was okay with it! Here is the proof he wanted it! Here is the proof that the interaction is fine even though this human being in front of me is claiming it wasn’t.

Consent is the heart of rape and all sexual abuse. It is when one party in an interaction does not want that interaction to occur. It can be when both parties of that interaction don’t want it to occur but feel pressured by society and ritual to interact anyways. Rape is not one act, not so defined as penetration, or touch of a certain area, violence or bruises, etc, so much as at least one individual did not consent to that interaction. When it pertains to minors, it will always be considered rape, because as a society, and as a law, we have decided that until a certain age, young people are not capable of understanding sexual interaction enough to give their consent. When parents give their minor of a daughter away to be married to an adult, they are giving her away to be raped because she is still a minor who has no ability to consent to sex on an equal standing. And yes, this practice is still happening in America.

The only proof of consent is within the individuals involved, and if you are not listening to those individuals when they say they did not give consent, then you are taking away their right to have consent. If women are ignored or told ‘they’re confused,’ every time they come forward after being raped, those denying their stories are indicating that women are not allowed to decide consent when it comes to their bodies.

It is patronizing, demeaning, and all around offensive to tell a woman that she cannot decide her own consent to sexual intercourse. This is not a message we have for the male gender even though the epidemic is not constrained to just women. Within the LGBTQ sphere; religious, military, and educational institutions; and the privacy of the home, male rape is happening and in desperate need of addressing. Culturally though, this message of not being allowed to decide one’s own consent is repeated generation after generation for the female gender.

A woman owns her body, and it is her right alone to decide if another person can interact with her in a sexual manner. If she says the sexual interaction was/is unwanted, she has a right to decide that, and she has a right to be believed for not giving her consent. She is the only one who has the right to give consent for her body, and she must be believed or her consent is not counted.

We are responsible for our actions, not the actions of others.

There has been a lot of push back against victims, blaming them for not stating their boundaries, for not speaking up, for not predicting and protecting themselves while in these interactions. What is continuously overlooked, quite deliberately I’m sure, is that we are all responsible for our actions. We are responsible for OUR actions, not the actions of others.

If you don’t want to rape someone, it is your responsibility to ensure the person you are with is consenting to the interaction. It is not on the other party to prove they do not want to have sex. It is on the person who is asking to ensure that they are gaining consent.

This means any interaction when alcohol, drugs, extreme tiredness, or any other influence that could make it difficult to discern if either 1) the other person is capable of consenting in their current state and 2) that you are capable of understanding if they are consenting in your current state, is your sole responsibility. It is not up to other people to have to defend themselves and their bodies from unwanted advances; it is the responsibility of the advancer to stop, to listen, and to respect what boundaries are in place.

Our culture is so ingrained in victim blaming that even in this obvious, basic understanding that we are responsible for our actions, we instead blame the victim for not stopping the actions they didn’t consent to. Madness.

Sex between coworkers where the power is imbalanced, or just in unbalanced relationships in general be it financial, societal, and age require an extra consideration of those imbalances. Can an employee truly consent to a sexual relationship with their boss when they could face a loss of work, income, and financial stability if they refuse? If they could potentially be shamed by peers, by coworkers, and forced to leave the workplace if the relationship is revealed? This is why proper offices disallow sexual relationships in the workplace; they understand the line of consent is completely blurred when power disparities are in play.

It’s the same with teachers and students of legal age. When someone is in an authority position where they can decide if the other passes or fails, gets advanced on their future career goals, etc, it is their responsibility to understand consent cannot fully be given if a sexual interaction were to occur, and in that case, to not have a sexual interaction with the student.

To be accused of rape and then blame the victim, is to take personal responsibility out of the hands of the person being accused. We should all be aware of our actions, especially when interacting with other human beings. It’s basic common courtesy. We ask that little of others when interacting with us, and we should assume the same accountability of our own actions when interacting with another.

We are responsible for our action, all of them. It’s what our laws are based upon. Ignoring this responsibility when it comes to sex only creates a society of invisible victims.

Emotional Intelligence

There has been such a loss or plain lacking of emotional intelligence when it comes to these topics. I understand why; I understand people don’t want to feel guilty for their interactions and so they just brush accountability off. I don’t imagine there isn’t a single couple out there who hasn’t had a misunderstanding of consent, or even a full out rape where one party is either oblivious or intentionally trying to block it out to keep the peace. These interactions don’t have to define a relationship, but they will when they are ignored and not acknowledged. You cannot be with a person, choose to spend your life with them, help them in their endeavors, and ignore the fact that boundaries were ignored, pushed, lost completely, and could still be left up in the air.

Do you know when you have sex if your partner is consenting? Every single time? Do you assume because you’re together they are automatically consenting? Is it the end of the world if you ask just to be sure?

Do you have a partner where, if you ask if they’re consenting, you suspect they might just say yes to not hurt your feelings? Do you understand that many partners say yes to sex just to keep the other person feeling confident in the relationship because they would rather be raped than hurt the feelings of someone they love? Did you know that you can rape someone and still have them love you? Can you face that and move forward with your partner as stronger individuals?

When I first starting dating my boyfriend, we had a horrendous habit of trying to please the other. It was exhausting and it went on far too long. We were not ourselves but instead, so conscientious of what we perceived the other wanted, we lost track as to what we as individuals wanted. Why? Because that’s what they did on TV and in movies. All the time. We thought by mirroring what we saw, we were having a relationship. And because of it, we made mistakes. A lot. Painful, angry, tired, frustrating mistakes. And only in facing those mistakes and allowing the relationship to evolve as two people living side by side instead of two people living for each other, were we able to have the healthy, boundary strong relationship we have now.

I understand facing this can be difficult, but it is necessary to move forward. We live in a culture that shows rape as glamorous, expected, where religious organization demand it because they think a marriage contract is consent for sexual interaction. It is not. We have mothers and fathers who blurred the lines without realizing it, who thought culture was consent when it was not and then taught that message to their children. Women have faced countless eras of oppression, a history that follows in every society our gender reaches, and with it, we carry the burden of needing to fight for our rights to our body, to our boundaries, to our consent.

Being married does not mean consent to sex. Consent to sex does not mean consent to being pregnant. Being pregnant is not consent to bearing a child to term. Consent to sex does not mean consent to marriage. Consent to marriage does not mean consent to being owned and having your consent taken away.

A relationship should not be an obligation of rules and tasks on each other but where two people join their lives where they naturally meet. Until our popular culture catches up and we start seeing these healthy relationships, the poisoned messages continue through to the next generation. Women screaming other women don’t have a right to abort their babies, like their bodies belong to a fetus instead of to themselves. Women screaming god owns them, their husband owns them, that they should be grateful to be raped because it’s a duty as a wife. Mothers ignoring their daughters when they are raped by their fathers, because those mothers believe rape must be okay because it happened to them as well.

Emotional intelligence requires being able to untangle yourself from the culture, from the bias, from the pain and vast history and false concepts and honestly look at reality. Rape is called rape because someone doesn’t want the interaction. Rape is unwanted. It is not the fault of the person who is too frightened to say no for fear of death, of financial ruin, of exile from family and community to somehow solve the problem of their rape. It is the responsibility of all of us to not rape people and ensure that consent is genuine in every sexual interaction.

Shame and Repression are deadly and create the most callous of humanity

Shame is learned behavior. It is unnatural. It is the response, usually when in the face of one’s sexual and/or bodily functions, when another voice comes in and screams ‘no, bad, wrong, disgusting, evil.’ I have seen shame in dogs when after they have had an accident inside the house, their owner screams at them, makes them to feel broken and wrong because the natural urge to have a bowel movement is not accepted as natural. And then the shame comes again every time that dog needs to have a bowel movement because they cannot differentiate that it was the act of it being in the house that angered the owner and not the act of pooping itself.

In humans, shame is far more reaching and even more insidious and it goes far beyond basic potty training.

Shame begets shame. It is learned. When someone wets the bed and are made to feel shame, they usually pass that lesson on to the next generation that you are supposed to feel ashamed for your body not being fully within your control. If someone is caught masturbating and made to feel ashamed, they usually pass that message on, while feeling sick inside for having a body that functions exactly how it is supposed to function. When you are ashamed of the level of fat, the color of your eyes, skin, shape of your genitals, the way you sweat, speak—name a function or an attribute of your body, and you can find all the many ways shame can cripple a human being.

Shame lives in the mind. It destroys people one by one, generation after generation, and its hold is so great, it will kill those who fight against it. When a closeted gay, such as the Florida nightclub shooter, was faced with a community of people embracing a sexuality he shared, shame spurred him to kill to avoid facing his sexuality. It was easier to kill, than fight the shame that told him an attraction to males was evil. Every LGBTQ teen who has been forced to go through conversion therapy because someone else was ashamed of their sexuality has felt the effects of shame. Every transgender who has been struck, raped, or killed has felt the consequences of shame living in the minds of other people. Every woman who has had her clitoris surgically mutilated has felt the poison of shame taking over a culture and infecting a community. Every black woman who is made to feel ashamed because her hair is gorgeously curly instead of straight has felt the oppression of shame on an entire race and gender.

Shame automatically leads to repression in a need to stop the shame feeling, and in fighting repression, the first feeling that pops up to keep someone repressed is shame. When people first try to fight against repression, they notice shame the most. For those new to writing and self publishing erotica, one of the most alarming and hardest to battle emotions of putting their work out there is the battle with shame they didn’t even know was lurking until that moment. Shame first comes from outside us, a cruel message that who we are is wrong and disgusting. But we carry the voice within of those learned, hateful messages, and then repress ourselves and those around us so we don’t have to feel the pain of shame.

Repression is a dangerous ailment on the mind and body. It is destructive, and in repression, people are more likely to act violently and/or criminally in the real world. The same way in just refusing to accept the memory of what my grandfather did to me spurred me to want to kill myself, people who refuse to accept the basic fact that they feel arousal over things they believe they shouldn’t feel arousal over can lead to them acting out dangerously in the real world. It can be violence or risk taking behavior toward themselves, and it can be violence and inappropriate behavior towards others.

It is only through acceptance that we can live the life we want in balance, okay with who we are out in the world while not infringing on the rights and safety of others. When we deny ourselves, our thoughts, our own boundaries, we are likely to do the same to others and hurt them in the process.

Shame Leads To Lying About Reality

Pedophilia is happening in homes all over this globe, and until society is willing as a whole to accept that truth and focus these sexual actions in ways that don’t harm children, it will continue to occur. A pedophile is still a human being, the same way anyone who has sexual urges is still a human being, and this dehumanizing of those with such sexual urges, (many who were victims of pedophilia themselves) only adds to the problems of repression and shame.

Child sex dolls exist and have already seen bans because of this fear of ‘normalizing’ pedophilia. Well, as a child who was raped, I would have preferred the normalization of having sex with dolls instead of the reality of children being molested. As someone who was once part of an institutional religion so ingrained with pedophilia and sex crimes that until the most recent Pope, the leadership was training deaf altar boys into sex slaves, I’m sure those boys would have preferred that these men of the cloth were allowed to marry, or have sex with consenting adults, or masturbate and fantasize without such crippling shame that they sought out the most vulnerable to attack. They certainly would have wanted society as a whole to stop pretending it wasn’t happening, to stop choosing concepts of god and religion over the actual safety of children.

Shame and repression have saved no one, but have damned countless. A sex doll is a far better option than a child. One is a real crime with a real victim, while the other is a concept with no crime or child being harmed. For every ‘well meaning’ individual who ignores the reality of what is happening to protect a concept of a child, real children are forced to suffer for their ignorance.

Rape is happening all over this globe. The Nobel Peace Prize was just awarded to two amazing people who are fighting against sexual violence being used as a weapon of war. Until we as a society can accept that women and men are being raped, adults and children, their bodies violated and taken out of their control, and that this is an actual crime that must be stopped, nothing will change. It baffles me how we blame the victims, how so much hate rises up when accusations are heard. Our society can’t face the reality that rape is happening and that people do not want to be raped. We go so far as to protect those who blatantly commit these crimes and instead destroy those who speak up against them. It is as if the world is running from the truth of rape at every turn.

We are too afraid to look at sex. There are too many who have been victimized who just want to pretend these crimes aren’t happening, that if they can erase it, they will never be touched by the pain of it. Shame screams loud every time sex rears, the voice of our mothers, fathers, victims, authorities all telling us that sex is why we’re broken, why we’re failing as humans. If only we could just remove sex, we would be pure. It doesn’t work that way. Like the Catholic church who is so pure they rape their children and their followers ignore it. Reality doesn’t work that way.

Denial of the body is denial of reality. Denial of sexual urges is denial of reality. Denial of reality leads to shame, repression, and crime.

By denying, by hiding from reality, society has allowed sexual crimes to grow, has accepted it as a norm, and then blamed the people who dare speak out and want better as if to reveal the rampant sex crimes happening all over the globe is to summon them into the world for the first time. These problems are not disappearing no matter how many times I hear of the police refusing to test the hundreds of thousands of rape kits waiting in their labs, or the public saying ‘she’s just confused,’ to the daughter of the man who molested her growing up. Those who are speaking up are not going away, and there are more to replace them every day because these crimes keep occurring.

Ignoring the problem has done nothing but traumatized all of humanity. How amazing would it be to find a way to heal us all instead.

Murdering the accused does not fix the problem but just leads to more repression

This will be probably the most controversial part of this post, and in that sense, the most important. We are all human. Sexual urges are normal. When shame is placed on people who have normal sexual urges, they act irrationally, criminally, abusively. I’m not saying there are not the anomalies out there, and even still, I call for rehabilitation instead of this cry of death, destruction, and pretending nothing is happening at all.

Was my grandfather a monster in every other aspect of his life? To the best of my knowledge, no. He built the house my grandmother and their children lived in. He did his best to provide a life for his family. I was taken from that family when I was very young after the sexual abuse, and the physical abuse from my father, and over all neglect. I didn’t see much first hand, but they were people, all of them. Human beings struggling in the world, trying to do the best they could while crippled in poverty, PTSD, trauma, and abuse. In my sister-in-law’s family where her father molested her and her siblings, I didn’t see a monster of a man domineering over his daughters, but a flawed, broken individual who could not break free from his own actions while trying to provide what he could for his family.

In the same way a victim of abuse can be saved, I believe a perpetrator of abuse can be saved. But first, we must admit that abusers are people too, and that the crimes they commit are crimes that need to be stopped.

We do not have to be defined by our worst of actions. We do not have to be labeled by the things that have happened to us, or the things we have done. But there must come acceptance of those acts first, otherwise both abuser and abused are trapped in that event, defined, with no way to move beyond.

To get past the pain we inflict on others, we must face it, admit it, repent however we can, and strive to do better from all we’ve learned. We must learn and grow, and neither is available when we merely condemn. This is a community effort, a society effort, a family effort because it is at the heart of every family that these incidences of abuse strike the deepest and most painful. Silence is not golden. Silence is where the wounds fester and rot away what little humanity is left, leaving people abused and traumatized and not living in their lives. For the world to heal, we have to face the pain, the wounds, and start treating the problems that leave us feeling trapped.

Humans hurt humans. There is no monster in human flesh; it is a human being. Until we can face that in our genetics, in our society, in the very nature of what being human is, is also this, this ability to do terrible things to each other, we can’t ask to be better. Until we face that within everyone is the capability to do harm, we cannot move forward to do the most help.

It Is Not The Duty Of The Traumatized To Forgive

I want to be clear about this. I do not come from my mindset of forgiveness and hope because of my experiences in being traumatized. I don’t even come from my mindset of forgiveness and hope because of my experiences in healing from trauma (although it did play its part.) I have that mindset outside of the realm of what happened to me, where I have compassion for all human beings and see that even the cruelest of us can also be a victim, that being a victim can make us act monstrously, and that actions do not have to be who we are if we are allowed the ability to change.

It is not the responsibility of a survivor to forgive anyone but his/her self. A survivor owes no one but his/her self when it comes to healing. We owe no one, especially our assailants, anything.

I come from a place of privilege where I can talk about these things and not be triggered constantly. It is a privilege to be able to be free of trauma when so many still live with it, still live feeling abused, oppressed, in constant pain and anxiety of another attack. It is a privilege to be able to study this with a clear head and emotional intelligence and then be able to express my thoughts and emotions in a way others can understand. I am privileged to be able to be so well adjusted, and although I worked my ass off to get to this place, I still readily admit it.

I understand my privilege, and I want to be clear to any and everyone who has ever been victimized: you don’t owe anyone anything. Take care of yourself. You are the only one you will live with every day until the very last breath, and you need to take care of you. It is your duty, your only duty. Love yourself and let the rest of the world burn if you have to. You are allowed.

Erotica Is Supposed To Titillate, Otherwise It’s Not Doing Its Job

I just want to end this on what I believe would be dangerous to overlook when I categorize dark erotic with sexual abuse survivors. Erotica is supposed to arouse you. It is supposed to get you off. It is supposed to create a sexual response out of a thought crafted from text on a screen/page. The arousal (and if you’re so lucky) the orgasm, is essential. Erotica is an embracing of sexual arousal out of thought, and if you’re not embracing it fully and instead are full of doubts, fears, pity, shame, etc, you’re not in the experience. But that’s okay, because you can try it again and again until you do learn to embrace it.

Dark erotica can be a guide to learning how to accept difficult thoughts and concepts in the mind. It is, in its own unique way, exposure therapy combined with positive reinforcement through the pleasure centers of the body and mind. It is a therapy done in the privacy of your own mind with no one but yourself to judge. When you feel that judgment, you are the one harming yourself, and in the same way, when you learn to release that judgment, you are the one freeing yourself.

I create dark, taboo erotica to remove shame from people’s psyches, and to help normalize sexual arousal in the body with the understanding that it’s safe, no one is hurt, and that it requires no action beyond. It is okay to have your thoughts and feel aroused. It is normal. It is exactly how you feel and it’s fine.

I don’t know why I feel the need to say it, but maybe it’s because of how erotica has been slurred for so long as being without value, or worse, ‘dirty, evil, wrong,’ and in doing so, society has said our sexual arousal is wrong and should just disappear. Our sexual urges are not disappearing, and the repression of said urges has led instead to mental illness, crimes, and trauma. You know what has never molested a child or raped a person? A fuck fic. Masturbation doesn’t hurt anyone (unless you’re doing it wrong. *wink*) Erotica is supposed to make you feel aroused. It’s supposed to help you enjoy a sexual feeling and enjoy your body. It’s okay. Even if the thoughts that lead to it are perceived as ‘dark,’ erotica is still there to help you enjoy that sexual exploration.

In exploring all the ways that we fear or are uncertain about sex in a fantasy setting, we are learning to accept that sexual thoughts are okay in our bodies and minds.

Erotica for sexual abuse survivors helps you come to terms with the fact that your body feels arousal, may have felt arousal during abuse and/or when thinking or remembering abuse, and that it’s perfectly normal and okay. That doesn’t mean dark erotica is supposed to make you feel okay about abuse or to normalize abuse in the real world; it just means you can feel okay with how your body copes, how it functions, how amazing it is to turn pain and fear into pleasure. And even if you do walk away feeling okay when thinking about abuse that has happened to you, that’s perfectly fine too.

For those who have been victim to abuse, who have spent their entire lives trying to get past one terrible moment or a series of moments, if they can be okay with what happened, then they are finally free. I know because I am finally free.

That can be just as unsettling thought for someone to sit with, I admit. Not just to have the thought ‘I was raped by my grandfather at the age of three,’ but to also have next to it, ‘I am fine.’

I allowed myself that. I allowed myself to accept and let go, and I allow myself freedom today because of it. I would rather see the world heal, than suffer forever in pain of what cannot be changed. But that’s the funny thing about healing. You have to admit the wound is there first, you have to scream that pain until you, the one suffering, is willing to hear it. Then the healing can finally start.

It’s okay to get to that place of okay, no matter how repulsive it might seem when you’re not okay. Again, that’s my privilege of having healed. I don’t feel disgusted anymore at the idea of being raped. I don’t feel disgusted at the idea of being okay with being raped. I can allow myself to be okay with it. It’s a process.

I hope your process doesn’t take you 30 years like mine did, but even if it does, getting to acceptance is such a beautiful way to live. I want to see this world heal, and I know it’s a person at a time, an acceptance of truth at a time. With each person who learns to accept themselves exactly as they are, their thoughts, their desires, and just exist being okay with existing, the world becomes better.

When I stopped hurting myself, I was no longer being hurt. My trauma had ended over thirty years ago but I was still suffering from the pain I was committing on myself. To stop that cycle was to stop my pain. I want that for everyone; a world where we don’t have to hurt ourselves for a lifetime just because of the hurt that happened to us in the past. And yes, I know erotica is a great tool in getting to that place of self love. It asks nothing of you but acceptance of how you feel in response.

Book Banning Is Discrimination

www.sadiesins.com

No one ever told me writing would result in a constant struggle with society. No one ever said sex isn’t protected under freedom of speech. It’s convenient for a company to have a ‘policy.’ The rules. This type of writing is okay while this type doesn’t belong. We don’t make the rules; we just enforce them. Banning books is discrimination. It is an attack on free speech, and it discriminates against not only the authors but the readers of those books that are told their topic of interest is not welcome.

I am a bisexual woman, and I have been discriminated against a hundred times more for the words I write than the people I fuck. Every book feels like I’m slamming on an invisible door, shouting I have a right to exist. I write dark fantasies. I am willing to admit that dark fantasies exist in every human being and I write about them. I know the dangers of denying the aspects people keep in the shadows. Many of my stories go into what shame is and how it holds people back. Shame begets shame. It never makes someone feel better. Freedom from shame is the only way to learn to love yourself as you are. Human, not divine.

I was raised in a shame-based culture. Most of that shame came from an institution I endured every Sunday. It’s where my parents learned shame, and I was indoctrinated into the soul crippling, self-hating world of religion. God loves us all just so long as you are weak, hate your body, and are obedient. The freedom of religion to practice in America is protected under our laws. They allow religion to write incredible fantasies of people dying and coming back to life, of magical acts and winged men and demons. These laws allow religion to tell children their bodies are unclean, women are born inferior, and sex is wrong unless it’s for reproduction.

Look in any bookstore; the bible isn’t in the fiction section. It’s not hidden away although it inarguably has harmed more people than I can even imagine by the shame it places on everyday functions, never mind the wars it has been the center of. You know what you’ll be hard pressed to find in a bookstore? Books about sexual fantasies.

They have to hide under romance. The promise of love makes sex okay. You can find some very dark sex in crime and horror. Apparently, murder or just the genre can legitimize the act of sex. It has to be an addition, not a selling point. Sex sells, but it’s not allowed if you’re blatant. No, then that book is wrong. The ideas are wrong. The people that want to read it are wrong, and so are the authors. No, that book needs to be removed so that no one else will know that something so wrong existed in so many. Let them feel ashamed for not knowing that there were others like them, that their fantasy is normal, that every fantasy is normal and healthy. Let them hate themselves, hurt themselves, conform to be something they were never meant to be. Let them be straight and shining and soldiers of God until they slit their wrists to finally be free.

I laugh that I was named after an angel. The only angel that could have been a woman; Gabriel transcended genders. There is no fucking escaping religion for me. I worked in a church for ten years, sang in a choir, was a cantor, and once fully believed in God because I knew the absolute fear of death at the age of seven and I didn’t want to die. I hated my body because my religion told me god didn’t talk to girls, that girls had to obey and be weak and never question. I didn’t know that even as I broke free of that brainwashing through bitter, bitter years to get to the other side, I would still be fighting it in my society as an adult.

I am not fighting morality or ethics or laws when my books are banned. I am fighting an overreaching religion that wants people to hate themselves and their bodies and their minds so that they will conform. People are easier to control when they hate themselves. They’re easier to break. And what better way to break someone than to tell them that their creator god is disgusted by their natural sexual urges?

What gets a sex book banned in a supposedly enlightened society?

Better yet, why are certain dark themes prevalent in gay fantasy? I was first introduced to dubcon, bestiality, incest, BDSM, noncon, and shota all in the mm genre. Why do these themes exist and why are people—those normal, healthy, godfearing people—so confused about the right of these topics to exist in fantasy? Why can you write a serial killer that murders hundreds in gruesome ways but can’t write about a kinky sexual encounter without fear of being banned?

Most topics in sexual fantasies are metaphors even if the reader and many authors are unaware. The same way dreams share certain themes, so too do sex fantasies. Familiar archetypes are used to get deep into the psyche of a reader. Incest is coming of age, learning to love self through the closest individual you grew up with. Dubcon/noncon and straight to gay are coming of age about learning to love self through a sexual experience one is too afraid to embark on without a guiding hand. BDSM is about giving up control to learn to accept self and sexual urges. Shota is coming of age to accept sexual desire. Bestiality is coming of age to accept what society would label as ‘abnormal’ desires. Slavery—BDSM without consent—again, being forced to accept sexual urges. All degradation is about being forced to accept what society labels as ‘abnormal’ (normal sexual urges) while still having society look at you as abnormal and feeling that shame; it’s facing the thing that tries to oppress you. All of these topics are about the battle against society to have sexual freedom. The irony being, that these are the topics banned from society.

I’ve been reading and writing about sex for a while now. When I decided to do it for a living, I looked into what people responded to, why these topics were so popular. I wanted to make stories speak to the truth in every kink so that even if I wasn’t fully familiar with it, I could give the reader what they were looking for. Abduction, control, the stealing of control, degradation; every ‘dark’ topic, every kink is a battle against social norms and self. What better place to find acceptance than in LGBTQ fiction? LGBTQs can explain how we are born this way and that still, we fight against a society that tells us that we’re abnormal, the minority, not fully included. For the many, those demented ideas from society we unwittingly took into ourselves and used to self-hate. Look at the LGBTQ section of a bookstore and realize that every other book in that store is about straight people and their lives, hopes, dreams, and fantasies. LGBTQ is condensed into a section instead of accepted as part of the norm. Together but not equal.

Shame makes for bad policies. It allows a group to discriminate while claiming protection or decency. It closes eyes and hearts because people are too uncomfortable with their own wiring to look closely. They make a rule, a wall, and refuse to deal with it.

Shame makes for bad actions. That gay nightclub shooting in Florida was a man fighting against his own natural sexual urges. His religion, his personal society, told him that being gay was wrong, and although he fought, he could not win the battle deep in his psyche. It resulted in death, chaos, pain and fear. Human beings are not meant to hate themselves. Shame is a learned idea, one that causes pain in that individual and then spreads pain as they grow. I write stories that explore shame and then relieve it because on a base level that is what many are looking for in a sexual fantasy. Shame has become so indoctrinated with our sexual urges that the fantasies that free us must go through the exploration of that shame first.

Unfortunately, people that are full of shame can’t see that. They’re too busy seeing the act or feeling the emotions that make them hate their bodies for not responding in a ‘divine’ or ‘moral’ way. They don’t want other people to feel so much hatred towards themselves; but they don’t realize it’s not the text that made them feel that way, but the cruel, unaccepting society they grew up in. They repeat what was inflicted on them. They oppress, suppress, hide away, and pretend that those things that made them uncomfortable don’t exist. Because of this, the people that suffer, that are looking to be free from shame, have to do so in the shadows while being told, once again, that they’re wrong, inappropriate, abnormal because those ideas aren’t accepted here.

Every time one of my books is banned, I not only feel the blow personally for being told that I wrote something that even freedom of speech cannot protect but I feel the blow for my readers. They are told that the story they enjoyed was wrong and that they are wrong and not accepted in whatever community removed that book. They are being forced into the dark over fiction, over natural urges, over the fact that they dared not to hate themselves while others still do. Every time my books are banned I face the question of should I be financially supporting an institution that discriminates against my readers and me? If I walk away, am I giving that institution exactly what they want by pretending that the topics I write don’t exist and aren’t popular, healthy and normal?

Every book I put out into the world becomes more than just a book but a push for civil liberty because of these sweeping, discriminatory policies. It is exhausting.

Banning books is discrimination. Banning books about sex is sexual discrimination. Going into a genre and deciding that one sexual act is okay and another isn’t is discrimination. You can talk all about morality, about ethics and the need to protect those from dangerous or uncomfortable ideas but what it boils down to is that someone made a rule that allows to discriminate against one type of writing. They made a policy that discriminates against a group of people. With that policy, they try to shame people into leaving or conforming instead of accepting those individuals for who they are. They take livelihoods away and hurt self-esteem. It is discrimination and goes against freedom of speech.