Secretary: My happy place

Although I'm mostly blogging about erotic novels that have influenced me, writing in my last post about the movie Exit to Eden got me thinking about Secretary, a truly great romantic comedy that also happens to be about a BDSM relationship.*  Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader -- and really, do I need to say more?  Is there any actor in the world more skilled than Spader at taking a vile character and making him utterly appealing?  Boston Legal, anyone?  I think I'll just drift off into happy fantasies now.

Oh, er, yeah, hi.  I'm back. 

Secretary has the most important element of a romance: two characters who make each other better at the deepest level.  Not by switching to contact lenses or to a career selling cupcakes, but by helping each other face the truths about themselves that they could not face alone, and embracing those truths. 

If you haven't seen it, make time for it. 

*  Yes, I'm using BDSM in the more general sense of a relationship that includes dominance and submission and lots and lots of spanking, not in the technical sense of a relationship that includes dominance and submission and spanking and safe words and constant checking in about consent. 

Is there anything kinkier than painting my house?

In my last post I wrote about Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty novels.  While we're on the subject of Anne Rice, I would be remiss if I did not mention Exit to Eden, which she published under the pen name Anne Rampling.  A cover blurb on a recent edition of the book sums it up:  "They will explore their most forbidden desires, including love."  

At first glance Exit to Eden is similar to Rice's Sleeping Beauty books. It is set on a sex island.  Some people volunteer to be naked slaves.  Other people pay to use them.  It has some scenes that could be set in Beauty's kingdom.  But despite that, it doesn't have much explicit sex in it.  It is less erotica and more love story, and a great one at that, in which two people who happen to be kinky learn to be their full selves through their love of the other.

But I am less interested in the book than in the movie adaptation.  I forget who the movie starred as the main love interests from the book.  But the movie added two new characters.  Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Akroyd played undercover cops who infiltrate the sex island to chase a McGuffin.  As embarrassed outsiders to all things BDSM, their purpose was to make the general public comfortable going to a movie about people who are insiders to it.

The movie got terrible reviews, but I loved it.

SPOILERS AHEAD

My favorite part:  A hot slave keeps following Rosie O'Donnell around, begging her to use him.  When he asks her one too many times how he can fulfill her fantasies, she says in exasperation, "Go paint my house."

And he does!  He's actually a rich investment banker!  He's perfect!  A kinkster by night who does the dishes  (or pays someone else to do them) by day!  Now that's a love story. 

Erotica is in the eye of the beholder

Going back to my musings on erotic writings that have been important to me, in the order that I read them, next on the list would be the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy.    These were books written by Anne Rice under the pen name A.N. Roquelaire -- although by the time I found them the title proclaimed they were written by "Anne Rice writing as A.N. Roquelaire."  (Rice was at the height of her fame for her vampire novels at the time.)

These books were so hot that when I innocently picked one up from the general fiction section of the Barnes & Noble where I spent most of my lunch breaks at the time (the early 1990's) and started thumbing through it, I literally dropped it on the floor. 

The trilogy reimagines Sleeping Beauty as a naked sex slave in a kingdom of naked sex slaves.  (If you've read my novel, Mindgames, you know that naked sex slaves are my thing, so . . . .)  It is slight of plot and characterization, but it is oh so pretty.  Beauty is a sweet, innocent masochist who is turned on by humiliation, and by being spanked, and by sultry stories her friends tell her of being anally penetrated by a carrot.  Beauty stands for all of us. 

Notice I am writing of the trilogy and not of the quartet.  Rice published a fourth book, Beauty's Kingdom, in 2016.  It has none of the courage of the first three books, and is overall a plodding, politically correct read.  Beauty comes back to the sex slave kingdom twenty years after leaving (I think she had been kicked out for being too horny, or something), takes over, and declares that from now on all sex slavery must be consensual.  Yay?  Luckily there are plenty of beautiful young submissives who flock to the chance to be dominated, but I don't remember any of them or anything that happened to them -- because it wasn't hot.  A bunch of people had sex and liked it.  More power to them, but I don't need to read their stories. 

Strange bedfellows

You may be going about your day thinking, "I bet that a smutty dystopian romance novel has nothing to do with how I should be approaching my stock portfolio this month."  Turns out you're wrong.  Surprise!

Mutual Fund Observer is a non-profit monthly magazine with a target audience of "intellectually curious, serious investors" interested in deep dives into innovative, independent new and smaller mutual funds. 

In it's December issue, MFO advises on how to "reduce your 2020 risks by 50% with this one move!"  That one move is to sit tight and not worry about clickbait headlines about financial doom.
Avoid fretting by distracting yourselves -- with books!

The writers at MFO have offered their favorites, including my novel, Mindgames * -- the aforementioned smutty dystopian romance.  Thank you!  

* If you're outside the US use this link.