Erotic Imagination

"Protecting one's fantasy life is becoming daily more difficult... For the time being, the myth is winning its campaign against our sexual individuality, the most movingly personal images that take their associative power from our earliest childhood, our clumsy adolescence, our first loves."
            Naomi Wolf - The Beauty Myth


Our sexual fantasies and preferences are one of the precious idiosyncracies through which we express ourselves, whether in life in general or in our writing. So where do our erotic ideals come from? Childhood sexual experience is probably a major contributing factor; as innocent and inexperienced youngsters our early lusts can zero-in on an eclectic variety of objects.

This diversity of fantasy is, however, increasingly being eroded by an idea of sexual attractiveness dictated to us by the visual media. Film, television and above all advertising promote a remarkably consistent image of the beautiful body as smooth, dry, hairless and almost androgynously thin. In her brilliant book, Naomi Wolf describes the invasion of our 'fantasy lives' by this homogenized ideal of beauty.

Written erotica, with its greater independence from commercial finance, is in a great position to help reverse this erosion of the erotic imagination. Our 'clumsy adolescences' and apparent physical shortcomings can, in the hands of a skilled writer, be re-eroticized and made into stimuli to sexual attraction. Leo Tolstoy was obviously drawing on a personal erotic memory when he described Princess Bolkonskaya in 'War and Peace':


"Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect- the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth- seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty."


This remains one of my favourite descriptions of female sexual beauty, both for its eloquence and for the strangeness of the image. I am sure that the rest of you have your own collections of similar memories, so let's hear about them, and see them incorporated into erotic writing, the 'uglier' the better.


Editor's picks:

ID: 964765   (Rated: GC) Losing It  A young man finally loses his virginity after many attempts. by Brybrad

ID: 1194777   (Rated: 13+) Questions  despite my fear and desire exploding in the dark by Crys-revising

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