I am an unabashedly kinky person. Being born and raised Buddhist, I have absolutely NONE of the hangups that most people seem to pick up with a traditional Christian upbringing, especially in Orange County. This complete lack of fear of an almighty monitoring my bedroom antics has allowed me more than a little wiggle room in what I can and will do. A loving, understanding, and fairly kinky in her own right, partner has made this so much easier to explore. So imagine my surprise when I found out my own imagination and wandering fiction writing could spawn new kinks to explore.
The question wasn't really sex advice, more of a passing interest from a Twitter follower, who asked me if my writing ever influenced my sex life. Being a romance/erotica author, I had to admit there was a fair amount of crossover between the two worlds. She asked me for the kinkiest example and I went straight to my first full-length novel based on a story in my second collection. In it, the character who is more than a little like myself is collared and leashed in a post-apocalyptic steam-punk world by a woman who is more than a little like my girlfriend. Obviously, this has made a few appearances in our during and since writing the book (which should be out this summer by the way). Not to bore you with the details, but obviously it followed the fiction fairly closely with her holding the leash and me wearing the collar. This innocuous question kind of got me thinking about where the idea even came from and why, for the vast majority of the crossover from fiction to reality, the trend tended to be me writing it, and then us doing it, rather than vice versa.
One of the primary functions of erotica, romance, and pornography in general seems to be, on some very rudimentary level, sex education/sex inspiration, so it would stand to reason that most kinky and/or new sex acts would go this direction. But in this case, I'm the literary pornographer so all of it is already somewhere in my twisted mind. The only real answer I could come up with was that the fiction allowed me to test the waters with Nikki, since she reads everything long before it's published, and then I gauge whether or not she's into doing it by her reaction--99% of the time she is.
My overall point, getting to it very slowly, is the positive external influence erotica and porn in general can have on a relationship. I don't seem to have the hangups common to my gender, most lesbians, or American women in general when it comes to admitting outside sources into my sexual relationship. I don't honestly know why most people think it is a closed system in the first place. The collar and leash thing wasn't something I invented--the mere existence of the pictures I've been scattering throughout the blog prove this--so I must have picked it up from somewhere and that somewhere was definitely an outside source. I hate to say this, but ladies, we tend to be our own worst enemy on this, and we're almost always the ones rejecting the concept of outside help (if you're a lesbian reading this then it is 100%). Somehow we get it in our heads that our special, perfect, pure-as-the-driven-fucking-snow relationship will somehow be tainted by the evils of pornography, erotica, or any outside source; as though our sexual flowers can grow inside air-tight containers thrown in the freezer. When things in the bedroom invariably stagnate, it's suddenly a big mystery why nothing new is happening and both people are getting bored of the same-old/same-old.
Think of it this way. You might be a master chair-maker building chairs to end all chairs, but you wouldn't know the first thing about building a boat unless you read a book on it, watched a how-to video, or took a class. Same tools, same building materials, similar skill set, completely different concept/act. Inviting porn and erotica into your relationship and bedroom doesn't ruin a relationship, it makes it stronger. I don't know where I picked up the leash and collar thing, but Nikki and I both have agreed we don't care where it came from, we're just glad it came. Honestly, I probably saw it in some picture on a random latex website (yes, I'm into that too) and the lovely, perverted part of my brain thought, "Yes, I'd very much so like to do that" and it didn't show up again until I was writing the book.
Drop the hangups, lose the preconception of your relationship being a closed environment that can sustain itself, and go get yourself some erotica or porn to find something new you haven't done, but would very much like to try. Or go grab a leash and collar if you've been digging the pictures on this blog and thank me later.
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