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All In My Head © Cecilia Tan So there's this word, "fantasy." Walk up to the average Jane on the street and ask for a definition, and you're likely to get one of two answers, either it's a genre of storytelling, like science fiction, that has magic and stuff in it. Or you must mean “sexual fantasy." As in, what you have when you fantasize. Two separate meanings, for most people. But not for me. I started writing smutty science fiction when I was too young to know what sex was. I don't mean I didn't know about reproduction and intercourse--my liberal mother and medical doctor father explained that when I was about six years old and a potential baby brother or sister was on the way. When it came to "sex,” I didn't really know what lovemaking was all about. I didn’t sneak peeks at porn books or magazines when I was a kid, didn’t see a porn movie until I was almost twenty. And at age ten, eleven, twelve... I still hadn't had any of my own. So exactly what went on in bed was a mystery to me. As such, trying to imagine what sex would actually be like was an interesting exercise, as intriguing and exotic as imagining, oh, what life would be like on the planet Xurg where women ruled and gravity was only half what it is on Earth. Trust me, when I was ten, this was intensely interesting. And more often than not, well, it turned out to be the clothing-optional planet Xurg, where women ruled but were required to do one day a week of sacred whore service. Just to give an example of the kind of fantasy I would have. When I fantasized, it was fantasy of the other kind, too. Let's not forget the erotic Let's Pretend games I played with my friends, as well. When I was five years old I had a friend who would come over to play "Batman and Robin." Yes, even at that young age, the erotic undercurrent in that TV show was detectable to me. As such, what we actually played, usually, was "Batman and Catwoman, " taking turns being tied up and threatened with various tortures including "The Urine Trap." Sorry, I don't recall the exact details of that particular trap now... I do recall I used to masturbate myself to orgasm after my friend would leave. Yeah, five years old. Explains a lot, doesn't it. Then there were the fantasies about Captain Kirk, specifically that time he was sent to the slave planet and forced to kiss that alien woman. Or how about the time the crew were being controlled by these god-like characters, and Spock and Uhura were forced to kiss? I'm sure if I try really hard I can dig up some more examples from my subconscious, but you get the drift. Sci-fi equaled sex in my mind from the very earliest. Fantasy equaled fantasizing--it only seemed natural. And notice how the word "forced" keeps coming up. Who can say whether these early influences steered me toward S/M, or whether my already natural inclination and interest in power games attracted me to those scenarios? I certainly can't decide which came first, the chicken or the egg. But certainly one thing pushing me toward fantasy and sci-fi settings for my sexual fantasies was the fact that, even at that age, my sexuality was far from mainstream, and there was more room for me to fit myself into far-out scenarios than into "real life." I was always interested in bondage, multiple partners, bisexuality, and gender play. Looking around the "real world" I didn't see much evidence of that--Catwoman was my one S/M role model, David Bowie my one bisexual role model--and let's face it, Bowie was pure science fiction himself back then. It took changing the setting to faraway planets or strange societies unlike our own for me to come up with fantasies I could inhabit for myself. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and now I can see how significant all that was to my writing career. When I started trying to write actual stories in my teens, I even produced some erotic science fiction. I still have one manuscript, in my spidery impatient handwriting, which details a woman being raped by a woody, plant-like alien that grows protuberances with which to penetrate her. This was way before the anime squidgy tentacles fad, and way before I'd ever been penetrated with anything other than my own finger. Okay, there was that disappointing experiment with the Ballpark Frank (they plump when you cook 'em, you know), but that was just that once... And I wrote smut for my friends, casting them and the celebrities they drooled over in the starring roles. One of my old high school friends got back in touch with me recently and sent me a manuscript that I'd written about myself and a famous person. The really funny thing is, I later actually slept with that person. But you’ll have to wait for a different essay to hear those sordid details. This essay is about writing. As I was saying, it's now so obvious how significant these early fantasies were to the direction my career has taken. Because combining fantasy and "fantasy" is what I'm known for, what I've built a career on. When I was twenty three years old, I moved to Boston, and was single for the first time in many years. This, I thought, was the time to both start my writing career and forge the adult identity that I'd been held back from previously. And for the first time in my life, writing came easily. I sat down and wrote a story from start to finish, and I don't think it is a coincidence that this story summed up everything I desired at that point. It was also the first story I had ever written where I knew it was ready to be shared with the world, where I knew when I reached the end that it was complete. I had just discovered that bondage and S/M existed in the "real world" but I hadn't yet gone out and experienced any of it. I knew I wanted to surround myself with a pansexual community, gay, straight, bisexual, trans, all mixed together, but I didn't know if that community existed. I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between masochism and submission, and the contrast between being owned and being subdued, not to mention the stark difference between rape and consent. All this stuff came to a boil in my mind, my libido, and my imagination, and out came a story called "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords." The story was like a magic spell, or a prayer, perhaps. The power in a spell, or a wish, or a prayer is in defining what it is you want--you make it all that much more likely that fate or circumstance will deliver your desire to you if you can articulate what it is. Fate, as it would happen, would deliver to my door shortly thereafter a living embodiment of Arshan, the main character in the story. A few years later, he broke my heart, but that only goes to prove that real life and fantasy do diverge. Or does it? Another story I wrote shortly thereafter, exploring another desire, featured my current partner of almost ten years. I saw him at an S/M party, playing with someone else. It was love at first sight, and I practically fainted. I had to leave the room while he was tied up and being beaten. I went home and wrote the story "Heart's Desire," placing myself as the narrator, a woman who gains a princely slave. The story again worked like magic, and a few weeks later, there was my own princely slave in my bed, and he's still there, nine years later. I suppose in many ways this means my writing is my sexuality, to some extent. I was writing erotica before I knew any other kind of fulfillment, and I'm still doing it. In fact, during the years when I wasn't writing erotica, I was neither creatively nor erotically fulfilled in the long term. It wasn't until I wrote(and self-published) "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords," that I felt I had arrived as a whole person and as a whole writer. This was before I found my old, old teen manuscripts, and so I thought I was discovering something totally new about myself. But of course the themes had been there all along, the slavery, bondage, forced-sex, as well as the writing itself. I suppose what I'd had to do was rediscover it as an adult, bring it into my conscious, rather than unconscious mind. And that's pretty much what I think every story is. I write some stuff that has neither sex nor science fiction in it, too. But any story reveals the subconscious. Sometimes like a hypnotic confession, sometimes like a cryptic Tarot reading. Ultimately, that is what some of the best sex does, too, allowing us to lose our self-consciousness and reveal another plane of emotion, understanding, or self. So once again, sex is like writing, writing is like sex. Writing is sex. Writing is identity and loss of identity at the same time, just as good sex reaffirms who we are, even as we lose ourselves in each other. © 2001 Cecilia Tan |
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