SUBSPACE

My mind traces, trails the words of her mantra.

“A submissive is to be measured from the inside, for it is his soul that is enslaved, his body simply follows.”

When I know that she is coming, my mind slips, slides away, stealthily embracing the stillness of the hours, the silence; sibilance, shushh. I traverse to a subspace; a phrase used within a Domme sub relationship. Within that concept is a place where the sub knows that he is safe. His Domme knows too; she is pleased and gratified. She knows that her sub trusts her and that is how it should be.

We have talked about subspace, she and I; she hadn’t known that it is a phrase used in mathematics. It’s a space contained within another space; it makes complete sense to me. I am ready to surrender; my whole soul is engaged. If the world were to look, the world would witness a sacred intensity.

My senses are sharpened because of the blindfold. Darkness heightens each sensation. She circles me; I hear the slow tap, tap, tap of her red killer heels on the cold, concrete floor.

She pushes my helpless body; I sway, I quiver. I sense her smile as she sees her work, hanging by the wrists, the cold, heavy chain links hooked to an old wooden beam.

I inhale her fragrance. Chanel; always Chanel. She smells of sex too; I scent my own stinking arousal, mingling beneath the surface. I inhale musky sweat and raging pheromones. My erection jerks; the cold, hard concrete floor teases the very tips of my toes. The chain links chink and rattle as I struggle for purchase. This isn’t the first time that she’s kept me hanging; dangling.

The last time necessitated a trip to the emergency room with a dislocated shoulder.

She is gentle, for the moment. Her fingers circle my cock, a cool hand plays with my testicles; bouncing them lightly. Her long fingers pinch the delicate skin of my scrotum. Her tongue strokes the tip of my cock; licking up the pre-cum, wiggling her hard, pointy tongue into my urethral opening. It amuses her to push the tip of her pinkie finger inside. I don’t know why she does this, she never answers when I ask her; but then it is not my place to ask.

My erection throbs; I moan my arousal; groan my pain. She is involved in a process of pushing me further than I think I can go. I hear the whoosh of her riding whip; my body jerks anticipating the pain of the slashing crack across my erection. But it doesn’t happen; she’s teasing me; teasing my erection. It’s a diabolical teasing because I know that sooner or later I will bellow with a nauseating rage as the pain bites.

What I dread most is when she leaves me hanging in the dungeon.
Alone.

Sometimes she is away for hours; it seems like hours. There are vast spells of invisible, unremembered time. Sometimes, I think I glimpse eternity.

I drift.

Is it unreasonable to attempt to call up the sensation of pleasure? To fill in the horrible discord in the black behind my eyelids; to soften and soothe the harsh hard disdain of the clashes and chimes in the soiled darkness.
I breathe…consciousness slips and slides…giddily.

Her name is always on my lips…Jasmine; is that her real name?

I don’t know.

Adrenaline, endorphins and always, always my moaning arousal. A bowel contracting, clenching, heated fear of what’s coming. We have to traverse it. Acceptance is part of the process, a blessing; an article of faith. If she orders me to eat my own shit later I will do it. A debauched, depraved, distorted Eucharist.
My torso, front and back, is a gore of blood, flesh and bone from the lashings; old wounds broken, new wounds opened. The slow trickle of blood dripping tickles down my spine, trickling into my anal crack.

When pleasing pain turns to pleasing pleasure.

I cling to these moments, and replay them; savouring every soft, subtle change…I embrace the gnawing pain, my spirit soaring into a soft cantata, ribbons of colours that you would never believe strewn about my mind…images spliced and sutured, a slideshow in the darkness that flickers behind my eyes…from where they come I do not know…a stately pleasure dome, gleaming in white marble…a woman seated in the front passenger seat of a car, her head bowed, her dark, gleaming hair hiding her face.
A lamp light in a quiet Chelsea street illuminates the interior of the car. Her dark, sleek hair moves as she breathes.

The woman sits very still…thinking about what…I wonder. The question, the question that should have never been asked, goes unanswered.
There’s a stuttered attempt at conversation…she says his name…Eli…she turns to face him; she smiles. It’s the same smile she’d hit him with across a crowded room; a quiver tingles.

I’d pushed and pleaded until she divulged her secrets; and on that night, the night that I had begged to be her submissive, she had told me of what would be expected of me; the heights that a Coterie slave must aspire to. She did everything she could to dissuade me; to make me go away. She spelt it out explicitly; I would be an owned creature, beaten, whipped, forced to endure every, and any perversion that she threw at me. There would be humiliation too, when I would be an object of ridicule; there would be intimate examinations in public. There would be pain; searing pain that I could never have imagined possible.

I would be property and nothing more.

On that same dark summer’s night, when she had confounded me with images of males in bondage; males begging, mouths open in silent screams, imploring for release. A male being raped, the rapist; a woman mounting him in the manner that dogs do when they mate. The woman wears a giant cock. The latex is in the process of almost sliding out of the anus; or maybe the cock was preparing to thrust back in. It didn’t matter, I could see that the cock was slick with slime from male’s rectum.

A large breasted, tightly corseted, dark haired woman stands at the male’s head holding leather straps linked to a metal thing in his mouth.
The male wears a horse’s bridle. A further symbol of property; as if I needed reminding.

And the next photograph in the series; the rapist’s cock, buried inside the male’s rectum. The male’s head thrown back, whether in ecstasy, or despair, I couldn’t tell.

“The photographs only tell half the story,” she said. “Despite the debauchery and humiliation, his swaying erection tells a different tale…the inflicted depravity arouses him.” She paused, “On that night, Joseph was screaming for someone to touch his cock; to let him cum.”

“You were there?”

“Yes.”

She told me that she wanted me naked and my fingers trembled as I fiddled with silly buttons, a zip that always stuck, and my belt. “Take your time,” she said gently. She continued turning the pages of the album, a half smile playing around her lips as she glanced up and noticed my erection. She took my measurements; the length of my cock, its circumference at the head and the base. I felt like an animal, a horse, or a bull, being prepared for an auction. I inhaled sharply as she slid back my foreskin; I wished, ah, I wished that she would lower her head and take me in her mouth, but I knew that there wasn’t a chance in hell.

She drew my attention to another photograph; another naked male, this one was caged. His hands gripped the iron bars; his eyes were furious; his long hair streaked with sweat. The photographer had focused the lens of his camera on the tip of the male’s hard cock; a bubble of precum exuded from the prisoner’s urethral slit.

“I deny them release,” she’d told him. “They are denied orgasm; these males that you see, here, in the photographs, are almost through their training programme. They orgasm only at my command. Yes, they are aroused, but they are unable to reach the point of ejaculation, until I give them the sign.”

She’s shown me the tools of her trade; her toys. A huge black inflatable dildo was probably the most useful item in her collection.

“The anus and rectum have to be stretched, a little more each day. At the conclusion of the process some men are begging for more, even though the dildo is inflated to its capacity.”
“But more than anything it’s an aid to breaking down resistance,” she said softly; stroking the dildo. “Many men associate anal penetration and pleasure with homosexuality; they soon learn that the prostate is there for a reason.

“The prostate rewards direct stimulation. Males are physically rewarded for receiving anal sex and anal play…if they can get around the taboo and relax.”

She noticed my attention was drawn to a vicious, spiked stainless steel cock cage.

She noticed my erection.

“It has to be fitted while the cock is flaccid,” she said.

My erection was dealt with swiftly and crudely with a jug of iced water. To demonstrate how the instrument would work, she handled my soft cock gently, pushing it through into the cage; a cock ring, already attached and in place, was secured and tightened behind my ball sac. I watched her, watching me, testing my reaction to her fine, delicate hands fingering my cock. When she snapped a padlock shut, I knew that my fate was sealed; the padlock would serve its purpose of keeping everything in position. It was also a reminder to the submissive that it is the Mistress who owns the cock; the submissive was completely under the Dominant’s control.

“Know that this is the last time that you will be given explanations,” her words were clipped. “If this life is not for you, then I give you permission to leave now; no recriminations, continue with your life as if you’d never met me.”

I did not move.

I did not want to move.

I had to prove myself worthy.

She ordered me to wear the device for the remainder of the evening; it was pure torture. My cock persistently struggling for an erection that could not be; the spikes clawing into my cock. Pain was not a big enough word to describe the ache roiling through my groin, into my tight, trapped balls.

I sense her return. It is her fragrance that I scent first. I hear her breathe. She does not speak; I am bursting to ejaculate, but I am physically unable to; it’s the result of her training. Orgasm is impossible, until she gives her permission. I hadn’t believed her when she had told me about absolute control over a man’s orgasms. I now know it to be true. I now know the meaning of real love.

I hear her cranking the wheel that controls the device; my feet hit the floor, my knees sag, my body slumps. She removes the blindfold and unlocks my chains; her arms wrap around me. She’s strong, but not strong enough to support the weight of a man in his prime and we both sink to the floor. She’s holding me close; skin on skin, my cock trapped between our two heated bodies. It’s that golden, blessed moment when she takes me in her arms, strokes my hair and tells me that all is well, all is very well indeed and that she is pleased with me.

She whispers as she soothes, and in these moments it’s as if her words have magical properties invoking spells of enchantment.
“Why should my endeavour be so loved?” I whisper.

“You think too precisely…” she replies. “Just be…just be…”

Her whispered words have taste, texture, scent, colour… they make no sense; sometimes they make absolute sense, as if she has pondered, selected, tried and tested each syllable.

I feel her nakedness; our breathing is rapid, sticky sweat covers our bodies, sliding us together. Always assertive, she circles my cock, wrapping her fingers around its girth at the base, guiding me inside her; her strong cunt muscles grip tight…I thrust, we move together, slow, then faster; keeping time, time, time. The exquisite tingle begins, centred within my anus, at the base of my balls surging into my cock, up my spine, even to the very roots of my hair. There are seconds of lurching inevitability she whispers “cum,” and I ejaculate, the warm, golden rush claiming me.

It’s powerful, my orgasms are always powerful since her, and for a few brief seconds; perhaps only three, I am floating above my body.

I gaze down at the two of us joined together.

“I love you slut slave,” she whispers; she nibbles at my lower lip. “Do you love me?”

Such a question; a question she’s never asked before.

I breathe my answer. “Yes Mistress.”



The quote at the beginning is from Tied Moments

Thanks to Jeff Busey and Ed Tomalta for their help with matters concerning male arousal.

Please visit me at my Amazon Author page

A COOL REVIEW OF REBELLIOUS SLAVE by ED TOMOLTA

To all males that willingly, even eagerly, submit to the dominance of the female, there comes a moment in the life of the id when they, that is, WE, fantasize about a society run by alluring, erotically sophisticated and completely indomitable women. I have no doubt that there are households around the globe where the functional equivalent already exists. For the rest of men, this ultimate state of servitude remains a steamy urge nursed in private.


Perhaps more articulately than any other contemporary female erotica writer I have read, billierosie has fashioned in tight prose just such a realm. Read
her story, Rebellious Slave and you will be swept away by a tide of lust and psychological surrender to a secret society where women rule men with a will and creative genius designed to ensure that Nature is guaranteed to have Her way over vain men who in a more conventional world, hold the illusion of the upper hand.



The plot turns on what has become of Reuben, a natural submissive whose wandering eyes have betrayed him and set him on the path of ruin. But the prospect of calamity does not threaten only this lone weak male; a breach of order in The Coterie might expose the secret subculture to the enmity of the outside world. This, determines Mistress Claudia, ruler of the sect, cannot be left to chance.


In her stern elegance, with European manners and an iron will, Mistress Claudia is native to rulership over any man and fit to raise a generation of dominant women whose long training will shift the balance of power between the genders. She is coolly forceful and strategically brilliant. And she is as revered by her chosen pupils as she is feared by the men whose destinies she shapes with her confident hands and regal words. Her path of conquest is established, following a centuries-old tradition, a lineage of female supremacy that will not be unraveled over a meaningless tryst.

Then there is Melissa, Reuben's wife and a favorite in the court of Claudia. Her story, the fate of the hapless Reuben and the future of The Coterie are interwoven shrewdly by the writer. Raw eroticism is on display too as this story unfolds. The weakness that short-circuits the male mind and goads his libido into fatal mistakes is stripped bare in a seductive narrative that reveals the feverish tension between the sexes. Melissa holds a lot of promise as a dominatrix; Mistress Claudia would not waste her valuable time on a foolish girl, a poseur. But her young charge has erred badly and the implications are ominous for everyone. Bad judgment leads to bad behavior and soon, the damage is done. But is it irreparable? At Coterie HQ, the doyenne of female domination anticipates the threat and responds with her creative and uncompromising will.

Rebellious Slave is a story of the world as countless men and women already feel it in their loins. For them, it is real enough.

Rebellious Slave is at Amazon US and at Amazon UK as Kindle e-reads.

Rebellious Slave is also available in paperback at Amazon US and Amazon UK

THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR JEKYLL & MR HYDE

“Even if we have not read Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” most of us are familiar with the concept -- a Jekyll and Hyde personality. The concept connotes a rare mental condition of a “split personality,” where within the same person there are two distinct personalities. The novella's impact is such that it has become a part of the language, with the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" coming to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next. In Doctor Jekyll’s case the two personalities are apparently good and evil, with completely opposite levels of morality.

“Written in 1886, it was an immediate success and is one of Stevenson's best-selling works. Stage adaptations began in Boston and London within a year of its publication and it has gone on to inspire scores of major film, television and stage performances.”
Wiki

The tale is well known. Amiable Doctor Jekyll, invents a potion, which transforms him into the brutish Mr Hyde. There is another potion that changes him back to Doctor Jekyll. In the persona of Mr Hyde, he commits the sort of atrocities that nightmares are made of. But the transformation becomes involuntary, and Doctor Jekyll is unable to reverse it because he has run out of the original batch of the powders. “The brute that slept within me” is now in control.

When he falls asleep as Jekyll, he wakes as Mr Hyde. Could the character of Hyde irrevocably take over? Concerned that he had overstepped his bounds, Jekyll chooses to give up the freedom of Hyde and for two months maintains the identity of Doctor Jekyll. But he is tortured with Hyde's longing to freely take part in evil doings, and he once again he takes the potion. During this transformation, Hyde commits murder.

There is a manhunt for Hyde, and Doctor Jekyll vows never again to make the transformation. He sets out to try to remedy the evil inside him. But he has given too much power to his evil side. Hyde is an irrevocable part of Jekyll's character, and the many transformations and evil behaviours have only strengthened his power. One night, while contemplating Hyde's deeds, Jekyll spontaneously transformed into Edward Hyde.
Finally, Hyde kills himself, thus finally releasing both Jekyll and Hyde.

Stevenson never says exactly what Hyde takes pleasure in on his nightly forays, generally saying that it is something of an evil and lustful nature; so Stevenson is writing within the context of the times. Whatever Hyde has done, it is abhorrent to Victorian religious morality. Stevenson had to take into account Victorian sensibilities. Hyde may have been revelling in activities that were not appropriate to a man of Jekyll's stature, such as engaging with prostitutes or burglary. However, it is Hyde's violent activities that seem to give him the most thrill, driving him to attack and murder Sir Danvers Carew without apparent reason, making him a hunted outlaw throughout England.

I think that if it were written today, Mr Hyde would be a counterpart to someone like Josef Fritzl. We wouldn’t be talking in veiled terms of evil and lust. We would be talking explicitly about rape, sodomy, torture, incest, bestiality, necrophilia. We’d be thinking about stuff that even Hannibal Lector couldn’t dream up. But I think that Stevenson’s novella is all the more compelling, because of what he doesn’t say. Our own imaginations are more powerful than anything that can be written down.

Realizing he will soon be Hyde forever, Jekyll leaves behind a testament; pointing out that while Jekyll often felt like a charlatan, Hyde felt like a "genuine man" years younger and far more energetic than his more "sociable" self. He also states in his final confession that although Hyde knew people recoiled from him, he, Jekyll, did not.

“The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” pre-empts Freudian psychoanalysis. As far as I can ascertain, Sigmund Freud was not talking about the Id, the Ego and the Super Ego, before 1899, when he published “The Interpretation of Dreams.” As I said earlier, Stevenson published his book in 1886.

So, Stevenson was talking about repression, and the return of the repressed and demonstrating the concept through his characters, before Freud had even thought of it. Although the reader of Jekyll and Hyde is led to believe that the threat of evil comes--as in earlier Gothic stories--from without, it is actually within the breast of the good and kind Jekyll that the danger lurks. Perhaps Stevenson himself, was afraid of what he had unleashed in his creation, Mr Hyde.

It is a creepy tale. It has been a long time since I read it, but whenever I think about Stevenson’s novella, I think about the CI programmes on Sky, that I am addicted to. Sky even has “Serial Killer Sunday”. I watch programmes about Ted Bundy, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Before Ted Bundy was executed a senior policeman asked; “what’s all this about Ted?” Ted Bundy’s response was; “I like it…”

It seems that serial killers, really cannot stop killing. And neither can Mr Hyde. Stevenson’s creation, revels in the choking ashes of the dark and primal.

I think of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”, where the monstrous Humbert Humbert, the handsome academic, who hides his paedophilia so well, constantly insists -- “I am not a monster.”

Is there a monster lurking beneath the surface in all of us? When I think about some of the weird stuff that I think about, that I write about in my fiction, I sometimes think -- where the hell did that come from?

The only honest answer that I can give is -- I don’t know. And what is “normal?” Is that knock on the door Mr Hyde rattling to get out?


I read this in the Observer newspaper some years ago.

“We acknowledge the receipt of your order for 5 triple furnaces, including 2 electric elevators for raising the corpses. For transporting the corpses, we suggest light carts on wheels. We are submitting plans for our cremation ovens which operate with coal and have hitherto given full satisfaction.”

So went the estimate from the Berlin heating firm, to the Commandant at Auschwitz.
Who typed it? Who priced it? Who put it in the mail? Nice normal people I don’t doubt.

From Bruce Kent in an open letter to the Observer newspaper. 13th November 1988

“ ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ was initially sold as a paperback for one shilling in the UK and one dollar in the U.S. The American publisher issued the book on 5 January 1886, four days before the first appearance of the UK edition issued by Longmans; Scribner's published 3000 copies, only 1250 of them bound in cloth. Initially stores would not stock it until a review appeared in The Times, on 25 January 1886, giving it a favourable reception. Within the next six months, close to forty thousand copies were sold. The book's success was probably due more to the "moral instincts of the public" than any perception of its artistic merits; it was widely read by those who never otherwise read fiction, quoted in pulpit sermons and in religious papers. By 1901 it was estimated to have sold over 250,000 copies.”
Wiki



Here is Johnny Cash, growling out the lyrics to “The beast in me.” It seems appropriate…

ANOTHER PLACE, ANTHONY GORMLEY

The light was fantastic; tactile, translucent, diaphanous, sublime. The sky huge, giving us an Artist’s horizon of the Albert Dock. Industry and nature. Man’s machines and the natural world. The weather was perfect. The weather woman had told us wind and rain. She was wrong.

The clouds were strata, high and thin. And it was high tide.

We giggled. Where were the iron men? We’d driven all the way to Liverpool, to see Antony Gormley’s ANOTHER PLACE installation on Crosby Beach, and nature had defeated us. We'd come on a pilgrimage; such a long way. But as King Canute famously discovered; you can’t control the mood of the ocean waves. So we just stood and breathed the cleansing scent of the salty sea air, and watched the crashing waves.

Then, as we watched, the tide turned. Slowly, slowly, before our eyes, the waves receded, revealing a sandy beach. Dylan pointed to what looked like a rock, appearing just above the waves. Is that one? Then I spotted another. We watched for a while, then turned back to the first. A man was emerging, as the tide withdrew. And as the ocean sucked the waves back, more and more iron men appeared.

Antony Gormley constructed the iron men after making a cast of his own body. There’s 100 of the iron men, scattered over the vastness of Crosby Beach. The final men are just uncovered at low tide. They tell you not to walk out to the men farthest away. The ocean is unpredictable, and the tides turn quickly. It would be easy to get cut off. There’s quicksands here too.

Nature is dangerous.It’s impossible to see more than two or three iron men, at any one time. They stand, alone, lonely, just staring out to sea. Blank eyes fixed on the horizon.

First just the heads, then the bodies, then the whole thing. It was like watching primal pagan gods, emerging from the ocean. It gave me the feeling of what it must have been like to be one of the first men. Just looking at the vastness, amazed -- and filled with wonder. As always, in the presence of great Art, of things that are so much bigger than me, I felt tearful. Such a gift Antony Gormley has given us -- just because he can.

I don’t know what the installation is supposed to mean -- if anything. Some people say it’s a comment on the first men to emigrate. A sense of loss. Of leaving the homeland and staring out across the huge Atlantic Ocean. Daring to leave; not knowing what’s on the other side. To boldly go, (sorry, couldn’t resist).

But it doesn’t matter. It means different things to different people. It doesn’t have to mean anything. The light, the sounds of the ocean, the vast expanse of beach, the skies. For the two of us -- we just felt privileged to look and wonder.

FEMALE BONDAGE

Ooh! Tie me up…tight…I can take it. Blindfold me; gag me. Show me to your friends as I sink passively into my humiliation. Tighter tighter. Blindfold me as well. Stuff my panties into my mouth so I can neither breathe nor speak. Then you can rescue me; untie me. By indulging me in this secret ritual, you show me that you love me.


Check out Aubrey Beardsley’s dirty picture. The woman is stuffed -- literally. She is being whipped; tormented by her master. Beardsley draws a degrading image; yet the woman does not struggle. She acquiesces. She is passive.


The passivity of women, portrayed in bondage images, struck me, as I put this piece together. It’s the contrast to the piece I put together a few weeks ago, on male bondage that I find intriguing. The men struggle furiously; violently against their tormentors. Their desperate cries can be heard through the canvases; they echo in the marble sculptures. The women do not cry out; they just take it.


If the old Masters are deliberately intending to arouse, is the sight of a strong man struggling, a turn on? And the sight of a docile woman, meekly succumbing to her fate, erotic? Traditionally, the answer has to be ‘yes’. The themes of struggling man and helpless woman, are reflected in contemporary pornography and old stories. Look at Laocoon fighting his adversaries; those muscles! The Sleeping Beauty, the most passive woman in our fairy stories, isn’t just surrendering to her fate, she is sleeping through it; until, of course she is rescued -- by a strong man.


But to get back to bondage; what’s going on? Why do folk want to tie each other up? Are they sexually strange? Is there such a thing as sexually strange? Or are the web sites coming up on the search engine, just tapping into a fetish that’s been going on for centuries, in those very old stories and paintings?


The bondage of Andromeda is a topic that has fascinated artists for centuries.



Edward Poynter paints Andromeda in 1869. She bows her head. She submits. Her hands are tied behind her. Her blue, silken robe, restrains her further.

Here is Andromeda’s story.


In Greek mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, king and queen of the kingdom Ethiopia.
Her mother Cassiopeia bragged that she was more beautiful than the Nereids, the nymph-daughters of the sea god Nereus and often seen accompanying Poseidon. To punish the Queen for her arrogance, Poseidon, brother to Zeus and God of the Sea, sent the sea monster Cetus to ravage the coast of Ethiopia including the kingdom of the vain Queen. The desperate King consulted the Oracle of Zeus, who announced that no respite would be found until the king sacrificed his virgin daughter Andromeda to the monster. She was chained naked to a rock on the coast of Jaffa. Luckily, the hero, Perseus, was sailing by, fresh from slaying the Medusa. He fell in love with Andromeda and rescued her, just as she was about to be devoured by the sea monster.

Gustave Dore paints Andromeda, also, in 1869. Dore paints her delicately. You can count her tiny toes. Her skin is fragile; translucent. She is a helpless victim.

Rembrandt paints Andromeda in 1629. His Andromeda has a look of desperate fear on her face. Still, she does not struggle.

Tying up women is an ancient art, that is thriving today. You can read stories about it on the web; you can look at pictures. I got 715,000 hits just from typing in ‘female bondage’ to Google. Interestingly, I got twice as many hits for ‘male bondage.’ Why is that I wonder? But that’s maybe a topic for a different discussion. Although, any suggestions will be gratefully received!

SWINGERS, by George Pappas

I am so pleased and yes, honoured that George Pappas comes to my blog this week to talk about the Swinging life style and his great novels, “Monogamy Sucks” and “Dear Hef”!

Monogamy sucks for me and I think for a lot of other people too. Every time you turn around there’s another celebrity or politician cheating scandal. I believe this is a microcosm for what is happening in our larger society. I mean studies say there is a 50 percent chance someone will cheat during a marriage and of course we know that 50 percent of marriages fail in this country. So all is not well with monogamy and relationship contrary to popular belief, which is what I explore in my novel Monogamy Sucks.

I don’t think people are realistic about monogamy and its potential limits. I personally don’t think monogamy is natural. It is something that is imposed and encouraged by society and tradition, but it doesn’t work for a lot of us in this modern world so ripe with temptations. So people stray and cheat, and the whole notion of monogamy begins to appear hypocritical.

Open relationships and swinging are not for everyone. You have to keep an open mind and can’t be judgmental. But swinging is much better than cheating. Swingers don’t have to lie about their desires for others. All I ask with my book is for people to consider alternatives, keep an open mind and not judge others.

Swingers are not freaks - -- they come from all walks of life. You probably know a swinger right now and don’t know it.

Swingers fall in love, have families, own houses with picket fences, work day jobs, go on vacations and live the mainstream life except in their bedrooms and sex lives.

This book all started with my own monogamy crisis. When I was in my mid- thirties, I grew dissatisfied with monogamy and conventional relationships. It led me on an interesting journey into the swinging lifestyle. I wanted to write honestly about my experiences and to dispel a lot myths about swinging and swingers in the media, TV and movies. I essentially learned that swingers are like everyone else except in the area of their sex lives.

I started writing my novel Monogamy Sucks in March 1998, however, because of my fears and doubts that anyone would be interested in my story, I kept my novel in my computer for more than 12 years as I worked on many drafts. Early in 2009, I read an article on the Huffington Post about how a number of bestselling books started out first as blogs. So I decided to launch my novel on a blog one chapter a time in May 2010. Several months later, digital publisher Lazy Day Publishing offered me a book deal. I seriously doubt if that would have happened if I hadn’t put my novel out in the blogosphere and tweeted about it on Twitter. I believe Twitter is an essential tool in promoting my book and novels in general as is Facebook, blogs and the Internet overall.

I call my book real life erotica or reality fiction. I hold nothing back. It is like Tucker Max meets Sex and the City -- an unflinching look into the male sexual mind.

My book is frank, funny and shocking at times but above all -- it is painfully honest.

My novel -- really all my novels -- give women intriguing insight into how some men -- more than would admit it -- really think about sex, monogamy and relationships.

I have also has started a sequel to “Monogamy Sucks,” and I am eventually is looking to turn Jake Dalmas’ erotic adventures into a trilogy of books.

The story is told in the form of a fictional diary by my book’s protagonist Jake Dalmas, who is looking for answers to deal with his growing disillusionment with conventional relationships and monogamy.

A few years later, I realized that these sexy, bizarre, funny and even at times inspirational experiences would make an interesting novel.

I knew nothing about the swinging lifestyle before my own personal journey. I was going on myths and misconceptions about this hidden world that still persist today. So I had to research everything about swinging for this novel. To just write about it without participating seems patently dishonest to me and would only perpetuate the myths about swingers that are already out there.

The story is loosely based on my experiences in the swing world, and the stories of others I met along the way, but I want to stress that this is a work of fiction and it’s not non-fiction, a memoir or autobiographical.

I see Jake’s journey as one that has largely gone untold in fiction. There are a lot of books out there honestly documenting the female point of view when it comes to sex and relationships, which I think it a great thing, but there are too few novels detailing the male view on the subject. Furthermore, swinging has not been adequately explored in fiction as it no doubt should be. Contrary to popular perception, there is a lot more interest in swinging among the general public than people might think. Just look at the explosion of porn on the Internet and sex and swinging Web sites.

This is a great time to be a writer. Finally, authors are finding that they have many avenues to pursue their dreams of being a novelist.
Readers and my fellow writers and critics have started to embrace my book and my character’s journey which is reflected in the growing number of impressive reviews on my Amazon page and on the Internet.

As with the rest of the entertainment industry, the Internet will completely transform the publishing business in the coming years. Writers should embrace the immediacy of the Internet as a beneficial means to expose their work and develop their own audiences rather than wait around to be discovered by an agent or publisher. That’s the future of publishing – do it yourself -- whether the publishing industry wants to acknowledge it or not.

The next best selling writer or literary star more than likely will be found on the Internet and not in the usual places such as writer workshops or universities.

Look at Amanda Hocking. She was discovered through her blog and now has prosperous writing career. Stories like hers have been an inspiration for many of us writers.

I have also has started a sequel to “Monogamy Sucks,” and I am eventually looking to turn Jake Dalmas’ erotic adventures into a trilogy of books.

In my most recent novel entitled DEAR HEF released in September, the dark side of Internet hook ups meets Hugh Hefner and Playboy cool. It is also funny, sexy and explicit in detailing my character’s online adventures and how he e-mails Hef the details (or what he calls his "Playboy Training") as a clueless fan.
I’ve also been invited to write a story for an erotica anthology coming out in October on Lazy Day Publishing entitled "Indulgence." It will have some paranormal elements which will be new territory for me.

In an interview with “The Next Big Thing”, George Pappas was asked what other writers does he compare to within the Erotica genre?

George talks enthusiastically about Charles Bukowki’s “Women,” Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” Anais Nin’s “Henry and June,” to name a few.

“Each of them bravely and uniquely explored controversial sexual and societal issues in a frank, unsentimental manner exposing truth and hypocrisy alike. I treasure novels that truly take me on a journey and challenge my preconceptions about life.”

George was then asked about the inspirational writers; writers who had influenced him to write MONOGAMY SUCKS.
“The two most influential books on me as a writer are Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and Anais Nin’s “Henry and June.” Miller’s and Nin’s eagerness to explore erotic subjects in a serious way that were considered taboo at the time (1930s and 1940s) has always impressed me. Miller’s frank and brutal honest prose and Nin’s sensual, erotic and insightful diaries and description of her own sexual awakening have impacted my own writing. I say this humbly, but I view my novels “Monogamy Sucks” and “Dear Hef” as my attempts to write modern versions of Miller’s and Nin’s seminal novels.

“I wanted to write honest books about swinging, monogamy, sex, Internet sex, but leave in all the troubling, shocking and funny encounters most other erotica books leave out. Despite its explicit content, I don’t consider what I write erotica. I call it real life erotica or reality fiction without the erotic trappings of your typical erotica novel. I want to make you think and laugh not just turn you on.

An interesting and intriguing essay from George I think you’ll agree. I don’t believe that the mainstream and its conventions take kindly to criticism. It isn’t at all surprising. We’re talking about a hegemony that has propped up the status quo for centuries. Open any book on English critical theory, or the social sciences and you’ll find chapters devoted to hegemony. One definition of hegemony talks about the concept of Imperialism. But hegemony is also about the construct of society; basically how we organise ourselves; how we run things. We are protective about our social order; in terms of monogamy – one man, one woman for life, but as George Pappas so succinctly puts it, “monogamy sucks.” It does for him, and for a lot of other people too. Monogamy has certainly sucked for me and I’ve had to find my own way around its suffocating conventions. Monogamy is there because it always has been, because that’s the way it is. Okay, monogamy is there for good reasons; financial security, emotional security, love, but it increasingly appears that monogamy is not for everyone.

All that George Pappas is asking through his books, is that we consider that there might be another way, and the statistics that he cites in the first paragraph of his essay for failing relationships are persuasive. His books convey a personal politics that is frightening for the mainstream.

“…but right now I have no illusions about the prospects of my books in the mainstream...
as an author, poet, etc...I scare people in the mainstream it seems...”


The message in George Pappas’ books is revolutionary and in some ways shocking, but I think that his quest rings of integrity and wholeness. Dark forbidden desires…that’s what we are talking about – isn’t it? And as writers and readers of Erotica we delve into the darker side of desire every time we open a book or open our word processor. All swingers do is to act on those desires.


And George is in esteemed company. DH Lawrence first published Lady Chatterly’s Lover in Italy in 1928. It was 1960 before an unexpurgated version could be read here in England after a famous court case where the Crown accused Penguin Books of peddling pornography.

James Joyce, probably one on the most influential writers of the 20th century, famously said that public reception of his work made him feel like an exile in his own country.

And my own writer friend, Jan Vander Laenen is clearly irritated by the way his work is viewed in his own city, Brussels.

“About the Flemings and the gays here, they treat me as if I don't exist anymore although many people begin to recognize me in the streets. Maybe they read me in private and loathe me in public. The literary agent here was afraid of the consequences taking me as a client, the politicians are afraid to help me, and a lot of gays don’t simply accept that I also describe the darker side of the gay world."


I’ll let George have the final word.

“I hope readers will take a chance and read my provocative novel Monogamy Sucks, or Dear Hef and won’t be put off by the controversial content. They really are like no other novels they will have read. However, my books have some relevant and interesting things to say about sex, relationships and monogamy, and is an intriguing exploration of the male sexual mind. I think my novels appeals to both sexes, but it really seems to have struck a chord among women, which was unexpected. Yes, my books are explicit, but I believe the themes are more universal than one might think.”

Love or abuse? Liberation or bondage? Looking at the themes in “Good Pussy Bad Pussy – Rachel’s Tale” by A. Aimee

I wrote “Good Pussy Bad Pussy – Rachel’s Tale” because of my fascination with sex! Yes, like most people, I’m obsessed, fascinated, tormented and enchanted by sex. And it’s no wonder since sex is the most powerful drive, urge, impulse of them all! Or as I like to say – Nothing satisfies like sex. Nothing completes like sex. Nothing releases like sex. Nothing can compete with sex!


So I wanted to write about orgasm as the ultimate surrender and a portal to ecstasy and bliss – in other words, I wanted to write about orgasm as a state that is so intoxicating that everyone wants to experience it! And then I wanted to add to this an exploration of the conundrum that arises if we reach this intoxicating state of surrender and bliss in and through situations (and/or with people) that we don’t particularly like or find acceptable.


In other words, what happens when the body experiences one thing while the mind is screaming something else? And by this I mean – our bodies are designed so that when we are stimulated sexually, the sensations are pleasurable whether or not we like the person we’re with or the situation we’re in. Interestingly enough, this is something many people experience even though most people will not admit it or talk about it because they consider it shameful. And because experiences like this are so taboo, when something like this happens, it leaves most people confused, ashamed and/or upset. Because how can something be both objectionable and pleasurable at the same time? It’s a real dilemma. So what does it mean? And how do we live with experiences like this and deal with them?


This is what happens to Rachel, the main character in “Good Pussy Bad Pussy” In her attempt to escape an unhappy marriage, she runs away and discovers and experiences great sexual release in ways that surprise, delight and shock her but which are not always socially acceptable. Hence the title of the book – Good Pussy Bad Pussy.


And then I wanted all this to take place against the backdrop of our modern day society – with all its ideas about marriage, fidelity and monogamy which so often block or twist or pinch off our natural sexual drive/energy and our ability to joyfully experience our own sexuality.


So the book asks many questions. Questions like – what is Rachel, the heroine of the book, really experiencing? Is it love or abuse? Is it liberation or bondage? Is she really free or not? And who is making these choices for her? How much of all that happens to her in the book is based on social programming and negative social norms about sex? These are some of the questions the book poses through the dilemmas Rachel faces in the book.


So yes, I tried to mix all this together and from what readers and reviewers are saying, I can see I have at least managed to stir some of this up. Many reviewers say they initially didn’t like the main character, Rachel, because of what she does, but then as they follow her through the story, they come to understand her and finally really love her and her journey.


So I hope you will enjoy Rachel’s journey as much as I have! Her journey has been so compelling that it has continued in a new book entitled "Good Pussy Bad Pussy in Captivity".

Here's Amy's web site her Twitter account Here she is on Facebook and at Goodreads

You can buy Good Pussy Bad Pussy and Rachel's Tale at Amazon US Amazon UK

Good Pussy Bad Pussy in Captivity is at Amazon US and Amazon UK

GO EAST YOUNG MAN

Anthony Adler has an intuitive feel for arousing his reader. How can sex be subtle yet explicit at the same time? In Berlin Exile we read about the dark world of bdsm; we learn about it too. A reader coming here after reading and loving 50 Shades will pretty soon realise the lack of authenticity in EL James’ book. I don’t know how far Anthony Adler has personally delved into the real world of bdsm; maybe he has dabbled, maybe he’s a sophisticated Master or maybe, like EL James, he’s read a few stories and researched the Internet, but his response is to give us a book that really is a magnificent turn on for the reader. We keep turning the pages and that is, after all, everything that a writer desires. Of course we’d love fame, even more so we’d love riches, but more than anything we want our reader’s attention. And that is exactly what Anthony Adler gets. His book is superbly crafted erotica.


Here’s our protagonist.

Jamie Stolts really only has himself to blame. His reputation lost, his high flying position in a prestigious public relations company gone…along with his enviable salary. He's just closed a brilliant deal with a company in Japan and he's feeling pretty pleased with himself. Jamie has just turned 30 and his 5 year plan of being a company director in the next couple of years is beginning to look like a reality.


Caught out, after a highly charged erotic thrill with the boss’ daughter and Jamie is out…high powered job gone…exclusive lifestyle shattered…all that's on offer is a dubious job in Berlin. It's not a question of go west young man...it's go east.


Berlin Exile is a story of a young man's personal, emotional and spiritual growth. I don't mean spiritual in terms of a religious belief…it's more about an introspection…Jamie thinks about his behaviour and the reader starts to see a real change.


Anthony Adler’s book has a resonance of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. In the same way that we don't like Pip at the beginning of Great Expectations, so it is with Jamie in Berlin Exile. Okay, Jamie is fun, Anthony Adler presents him as a nice enough guy…a little superficial, a little promiscuous, he likes to be in control…but he's not without kindness. He just doesn't want to be tied down…and that's why he shuns any relationship that looks as if it's going to extend beyond one night. Told in the first person, we get to know Jamie quickly.


So, Berlin…there’s suddenly a lot going on in Jamie’s life; new people, new friends, a new love. Jamie’s work life in Berlin is refreshing to him. He feels a connection with his work; it’s not just a means to an end…he is working with good people, kind, talented people, people whom he likes and as their boss, he feels responsible for; it’s a complete contrast with what was his work life in London. The reader catches Jamie making comparisons; he thinks how unnecessary it all was to be overtly competitive, unkindly aggressive, where the reward was either a pay rise, or being noticed by “right” people.


Early in Berlin Exile Jamie talks about music, the music that to a great extent, has defined his life. He loves the great classic stuff; the Stones, the Beatles, the Who.His musical tastes are defined by nostalgia and nostalgia is always deceptive…we yearn for something to was never really there.


It's as if Jamie realized that new music was there, he just hasn't been open to it. He hasn't listened, not really. And just as Jamie is beginning to question his attitude to work and to women, he hears the music of Berlin. His musical tastes change into something profound; something esoteric. He is drawn to the enigmatic, charismatic band Null Eins Null and in an equal measure, he is drawn to the enigmatic, charismatic exotic Silke.


There’s a world of bdsm here and though it’s not for the faint hearted, Anthony Adler is never crude. I won’t say that Jamie embraces the lifestyle immediately, for Jamie it’s a slow unfolding…a learning about control. Who is in control? In his previous life, being in control was an imperative. Through Silke, Jamie learns about relinquishing control and finding peace; a profound harmony.


Anthony Adler is an impressive writer of erotica. He stands out, way above his peers. I look forward to hearing more from him. This book was a pleasure to read; Anthony Adler is a new, young writer who knows how to tell a cool story, he knows how to craft memorable characters, he knows how to maintain control of a narrative.


Berlin Exile will stay with me for a long time.

Berlin Exile is at Amazon UK And Amazon US

You can find Anthony Adler at Twitter @FickSchon

MALE BONDAGE

There’s something strangely alluring about the sight of a strong man in ropes and chains, struggling to be free of his bonds. Well, I think so, anyway. All that muscle, straining. His sweat making the bonds slippery, ever tighter. The struggle is hopeless; he sees defeat staring him in the face and still he is spirited enough to fight on.

You’ve only got to type in the word ’bondage’ into any search engine, to be overwhelmed with images, and stories, of men and women, bound and helpless. Mostly, it’s consensual, at least I hope it is. A little piece of BDSM, being acted out by adults involved in a highly charged erotic game.

But bondage is nothing new. The Internet generation cannot claim to have invented it. Neither can writers of porn and erotica. Bondage is in ancient art and old, old stories.
Laocoon and his sons are bound and helpless by fierce serpents. There’s a statue of Laocoon in his death throes, in the Vatican in Rome. Pliny attributes it to three Rhodian sculptures, Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus.

Laocoon’s exotic punishment is for committing a sacrilegious act; that of procreation in a place holy to the god, Poseidon.

Punishment through bondage, for a sin, real or imagined and often trivial, is the catalyst for many modern bondage stories. A slave forgets to collect his master’s dry cleaning, and is tied to a whipping bar; he is helpless and is whipped. The whipping is secondary; it is the fact that he is bound and helpless, that is the important part of the ritual. In another story, a submissive craves his punishment and will contrive to get it by inventing any misdemeanour. He visits his mistress in his lunch break and is forced to return to his office, wearing a cock cage beneath his pants. The cage is screwed tightly, pressing painfully against his balls, yet still his cock struggles valiantly for an erection that just cannot happen.

Strength and power are contained, controlled and relinquished.

The old stories are even in the Bible. Delilah contrives to discover the secret of Samson’s great strength. This is a man so strong and powerful, he has ripped a lion in two. Eventually, he tells her. His strength is because of his long hair. Delilah tells Samson’s secret to the Philistines, and Samson is shorn of his locks while he sleeps. His strength is gone and Samson is bound and chained. His eyes are put out and Delilah pockets the silver that the Philistines have paid her.Samson is punished through bondage and humiliation, for breaking his oath with God by cutting his hair.

Michelangelo’s REBELLIOUS SLAVE, can be seen in the Louvre, in Paris. The bondage is there for all to see. The slave is being punished. His hands are tied behind his back; he is engaged in an active struggle against his bonds. Michelangelo has left the marble raw and unpolished, emphasising the grittiness of the subject. The expression on the slave’s face is of agonized humanity. A rebel that has to be controlled.

I shall be posting a piece on female bondage soon -- to redress the balance!

Just Good Friends?

Was there something sinister about Lewis Carroll's fixation with seven-year-old Alice Liddell? Not necessarily, says Katie Roiphe. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Still-She-Haunts-Katie-Roiphe/dp/0747265585

The Guardian, Monday 29 October 2001

It is true that the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, author of the inimitable classics Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, liked little girls. Or, as he once wrote: "I am fond of children (except boys)." He took exquisite, melancholy photographs of little girls. He befriended little girls on trains, and beaches, and in the houses of friends. And one particular little girl, Alice Liddell, came to be his muse and great passion.

Unfortunately for Dodgson, the 21st century does not look kindly on a single man who is beguiled by seven-year-olds. Feminist critics have darkly suggested that Dodgson was a paedophile. They have condemned the beautiful photographs he took and objected to his objectification of the immature female body, and read all sorts of rapacious nonsense into the Alice books.

At the other extreme, many of Dodgson's defenders have protested too much. They have attempted to argue that he was utterly without feelings for little girls. One of his early biographers wrote, "There is no evidence that he felt or inspired any pangs of tender passion", when of course there was an abundance of evidence that he did. His defenders tend to portray him as a shy, stuttering bachelor with a fondness for children that may as well have been a fondness for stamps or porcelain puppies.

Is it possible that neither view of him is correct - that he was neither the child molester nor the pure, white-haired reverend? It is possible that our crude categories, our black and white views of romantic feeling, cannot contain someone like Dodgson. It is almost impossible for us to contemplate a man who falls in love with little girls without wanting to put him in prison. The subtleties, for those of us still mired in the paranoia’s of the 20th century, are hard to grasp. When one thinks of a paedophile, one thinks of a lustful, over-the-top, drooling Nabokov love, but that is not Lewis Carroll. His love was more delicate and tortured and elusive; his warmth, his strange, terrified passion, more intricate and complicated than anything encompassed by a single word.

Dodgson's affection for what he called his "child friends" was always mingled with a vague yearning. He wrote to one 10-year-old girl, "Extra thanks and kisses for the lock of hair. I have kissed it several times - for want of having you to kiss, you know, even hair is better than nothing." This is typical of his correspondence. He converted whatever his feelings were into the whimsical, quasi-romantic banter that eventually made its way into the Alice books. He wrote to one mother of a potential visit with her daughter, "And would it be de rigueur that there should be a third to dinner? Tête à tête is so much the nicest."

There was a romantic intensity to the friendships that Dodgson struck up with children, a hint of hunger, of never quite getting enough. This was especially true of his relationship with Alice. There was always a sense that he wanted more of her. And yet, can we really blame him for that - as long as he didn't act on his feelings? If he turned himself inside out, turned the world inside out with his powerful imagination, in order to avoid them?

He was not alone in his obsession. The era seemed to breed a certain type of neurasthenic man who had a well-developed and intellectually complicated disdain for overt physicality and who found himself drawn to pre-teens.

Take John Ruskin. He also fell under the spell of an Alice, among other young girls he encountered. One particular street urchin whom he glimpsed in Italy made a big impression on him. It is one of the paradoxes of Victorian culture that the sentimentality, the frilly, sugar-sweet view of the child often coexisted with darker sexual urges; that they fed each other, and the squeamishness about sex led to a perverse attraction to anything innocent and pure. Children were safe, and in their safety, certain thoughts - dirty, sensual thoughts - were allowed to flourish.

It is almost impossible to claim that Dodgson was drawn to little girls on a purely spiritual plane. His deep aesthetic appreciation of their physical presence was too conspicuous. He wrote to Gertrude Thomson, an artist who sketched girlish fairies and nymphs, "I confess I do not admire naked boys in pictures. They always seem... to need clothes, whereas one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up."

It's clear, then, that Dodgson had a submerged erotic fascination with the nubile female form. But what to make of it? What if he did love children, and in that love was a sexual element? What if he admired the bodies of little girls and never touched one? There is no doubt that he was tormented by what he called "the inclinations of my sinful heart". Even his mathematical writings were marked by his struggle. In the introduction to Curiosa Mathematica, Part II, he wrote that fixing one's mind on mathematics as one lay in bed could ward off "unholy thoughts, which torture with their hateful presence, the fancy that would fain be pure". Strong language for a book about trigonometry.

The picture we get of is of a man afraid of his own dreams, struggling for command over himself. In one of his most charming analyses, the biographer Morton Cohen actually charted Dodgson's moments of greatest torment and insomnia in his diaries and found that they correlated to the days on which he saw Alice.

But Dodgson's response to any heightened agitation he felt with children was this: he sat with Alice in a boat gliding along the glittering river and made up stories, the more outlandish the better. His feelings rhymed and punned themselves into expression. He chatted her up with the manic energy of Wonderland. His frustration, his alienation, blossomed into the caterpillar at the hookah and Humpty Dumpty and the Mad Hatter. He channelled his devotion into a wild and lovely literary universe; his imagination so dangerous and inflamed, it fled the real world. He called the Alice books a "love-gift". And because this love is unrequited, because it is impossible, ethereal, because he cannot allow himself to fully feel it, there is a hint of sadness. As he puts it, "a shadow of a sigh" trembles through the story.

To me, there is a nobility in a self-restraint so forceful that it spews out stuttering tortoises and talking chess pieces rather than focus on the matter at hand. There is something touching about a man who fights the hardest fight in the world: his own desire.

You can feel the loneliness on the page. You can feel the longing in the photographs. You can witness the self-contempt in his diaries. How can one not feel sympathy for a man who writes in his diary, "I pray to God to give me a new heart", but is stuck, in spite of his astonishing powers of invention, his brilliance, his immortal wit, with the one he has.

He had impure thoughts, yes. What matters, in the end, is what he did with them.

Katie Roiphe's novel about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, “Still She Haunts Me”, is available at Amazon.co.uk 

And at Amazon.com

The Go-Between and Freudian Repressed Memory Syndrome -- L.P.Hartley

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”

L.P.Hartley’s inspired opening sentence to his remarkable novel, “The Go-Between” is memorable and often quoted.

“The Go-between was first published in 1953, the following year it received the Heinemann Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. Its film version was also very successful and won the principal award at the Festival de Cannes in 1973. The novel is a memory story: a man in his sixties looks back on his boyhood, recalling the events that took place on a summer visit to an aristocratic family in Norfolk in the 1900's. Hartley uses double narrative, the young Leo's actions told by the older Leo, and it shows us how it has affected his life”. WIKI

The novel, “The Go-Between” is a compelling illustration of Freudian psychoanalysis. It explores the ideology of sexuality within the context of Victorian England and the imagined world of a twelve year old boy on the edge of puberty. But more than anything, “The Go-Between” is an exposition of Freud’s “repressed memory syndrome”.

“Repressed memory is a hypothetical concept used to describe a significant memory, usually of a traumatic nature, that has become unavailable for recall; also called motivated forgetting in which a subject blocks out painful or traumatic times in one's life. This is not the same as amnesia, which is a term for any instance in which memories are either not stored in the first place (such as with traumatic head injuries when short term memory does not transfer to long term memory) or forgotten.
The term is used to describe memories that have been dissociated from awareness as well as those that have been repressed without dissociation. Repressed memory syndrome, the clinical term used to describe repressed memories, is often compared to psychogenic amnesia, and some sources compare the two as equivalent.
According to proponents of the hypothesis, repressed memories may sometimes be recovered years or decades after the event, most often spontaneously, triggered by a particular smell, taste, or other identifier related to the lost memory, or via suggestion during psychotherapy”. WIKI


Freud used the term repression to describe the way emotionally painful events could be blocked out of conscious awareness so that their painful effects would not have to be experienced.

The trigger for releasing the adult Leo’s repressed memory is his diary, discovered after a lifetime of blank, barren emotions. The trauma that has caused his memories to be suppressed is the imaginings of a sensitive young boy on the verge of puberty who conveys messages between two secret lovers. In repressing his memory, Leo’s life has been one of neurosis, negation and sterility.

Leo’s conscious mind has actively pushed into his unconscious mind the major, traumatic event. For Freud, repression was a defence mechanism - the repressed memories are often devastating in nature, but, although hidden, they continue to exert an effect on behaviour.

Leo Colston, is a bachelor librarian in his sixties. He is a self-proclaimed “foreigner in the world of the emotions.” Colston’s discovery of the diary he kept in the summer of 1900, the year he turned thirteen, precipitates the release of the repressed memories of the people and events that led to his withdrawal from emotional relationships. The young Leo, imaginative, sensitive, and eager to please, his values and vision determined by the self-centeredness of a child, visits the estate of a schoolmate.

Yes, the catalyst for the story is the diary. The diary isn’t detailed in terms of narrative, but the words, phrases and illustrations within its pages lift Leo into the world of dark, stormy memories that he has repressed. He tells us that most of the writings within the diary are in code. A code that the adult Leo has to recall and translate.

“Try now, try now, it isn't too late”

“Excitement, like hysteria, bubbled up in me from a hundred unsealed springs. If it isn't too late, I thought confusedly, neither it is too early: I haven't much time left to spoil. It was the last flicker of instinct of self-preservation which had failed me so signally at Brandham Hall.”


The adult Leo has an epiphany, a sudden realisation that the key to his frozen life is in the pages of his diary. 

So repressed are his memories, that he cannot even remember the name of his childhood school friend. The diary tells him; “Marcus.”

The child Leo, invents a story, a romantic tale about the profound events of that summer in the year 1900.

Bruno Bettleheim in his book "The Uses of Enchantment" makes the point that fairy tales;

"... carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious , and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time. Our own narratives carry a similar message, both to ourselves and to whoever we are asking to share them with us.”

Already, the diary is helping Leo to remember his story.

"To my mind's eye, my buried memories of Brandham Hall are like effects of chiaroscuro, patches of light and dark: it is only with effort that I see them in terms of colour. There are things I know, though I don't know how I know them, and things that I remember. Certain things are established in my mind as facts, but no picture attaches to them; on the other hand there are pictures unverified by any fact which recur obsessively, like the landscape of a dream."

The adult Leo realises that something profound happened all those years ago, and something profound is about to happen in his present.


"..the past kept pricking at me and I knew that all the elements of those nineteen days in July were astir within me, like phlegm in an attack of bronchitis, waiting to come up. I had kept them buried all these years, but they were there, I knew, the more complete, the more unforgotten, for being carefully embalmed. Never, never had they seen the light of day; the slightest stirring had been stifled with a scattering of earth.”

Among other things, "The Go-Between" is about class distinction and its warping effect upon the life of one small boy. The story is set in the days before World War I, privileged days that seemed to stretch endlessly before the British upper class. The boy, Leo, comes to spend a summer holiday at the home of a rich friend. And he falls in hopeless schoolboy love with the friend's older sister, Marian.

Marian is engaged to marry well, to Lord Trimingham, but she is in love with a roughshod tenant farmer, Ted Burgess, and she enlists the boy to carry messages back and forth between them. The boy has only a shadowy notion at first about the significance of the messages, but during the summer he is sharply disillusioned about life, fidelity, and his own place in the great scheme of things.


In the family's matriarch, Mrs Maudsley, Hartley give us a woman who seems to support the British class system all by herself, simply through her belief in it. They show a father and a fiancé who are aware of Marian’s affair with the farmer, but do nothing about it. They are confident she will do the "right thing" in the end, and she does.


Everything that will become of this boy in his adult life is already there, by implication, at the end of his summer holiday.  Leo ends up being warped by the final tragedy that turns him into an emotionally hollow adult. 

So twelve-year-old Leo spends the summer of 1900 at the country estate of his much wealthier school friend, Marcus Maudsley, presided over by a patriarch who;

"sitting down looked much taller than standing up"

and a matriarch "who seemed to take up more space than necessary."

What begins as a delicious idyll of scorching skies, afternoon swims, tea and cricket, soon darkens toward storm. Leo suffers his first crush on Marcus's elder sister Marian, becoming an unwilling go-between in her complicated machinations with a war hero beau and a local farmer. Leo's defining characteristic is his naiveté, which everyone exploits for their own amusement, and the reader chuckles along manipulated by Hartley's irony, making us complicit in the tragedy to come.


The adult Leo informs the reader;


“My secret- the explanation of me- lay there. I take myself much too seriously, of course. What does it matter to anyone what I was like, then or now? But every man is important to himself at one time or another; my problem had been to reduce the importance, and spread it out as thinly as I could over half a century. Thanks to my interment policy I had come to terms with life, I had made a working -working was the word - arrangement with it, on the one condition that there should be no exhumation. Was it true, what I sometimes told myself, that my best energies had been given to the undertaker's art? If it was, what did it matter? Should have I acquitted myself better, with the knowledge I had now? I doubted it; knowledge may be power, but it is not resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less is it instinctive sympathy with human nature; and those were qualities I possessed in 1900 in far greater measure that I possess them in 1952.”


The summer is hot, too hot for Leo in the warm winter clothes he has brought with him to Norfolk. Marian offers to buy him a new set of clothes more suited to the weather. They leave for Norwich to go shopping on the following day. Leo, the adolescent boy is delighted, but the adult reader already has the dark, uncomfortable stirrings of duplicity.

The violation of Leo’s twelve year old soul has begun.

Leo's romantic imagination favours heroes and villains. At Brandham, he invents his own fairy story. He is the hero, already in love with the beautiful princess and like many before him, his love will be his downfall. The reader already knows that Marian will betray him.


After they have finished their shopping in Norwich, “she dismissed me,” and Leo wanders around the cathedral for an hour. Leo is happy; excited. “Never had I felt in such harmony with my surroundings.”


Leo leaves early to the appointed meeting place. He catches sight of Marian.

“She seemed to be saying goodbye to someone, at least I had the impression of a raised hat.”

Leo does not say anymore than that. He doesn’t have the reader’s sophistication of suspecting a liaison; an assignation.

But if naïveté is his defining characteristic, Leo’s naïveté is his fatal flaw. In a cruel twist the flaw is made tangible by the Lincoln green suit gifted by the Maudsleys on his birthday;

"It is your true colour," chants Marcus, "Green, green, green."

The reader is older, wiser than the boy Leo. The boy’s powers of intelligence are inferior to ours, so we have a sense of looking down on the events with a notion of absurdity. Of course it is absurd that the boy Leo, should imagine himself in love with the beautiful Marian and Hartley draws the reader in to a mood of smug complicity. But the reader has to respond sympathetically to the boy Leo’s dilemma. Leo’s world is introverted and unworldly; Hartley presents the reader with a very grown up situation, in which the child has no defence against the power of adults.


This is something we can all relate to; when adults had conversations while we were present. Their words laden with innuendo. We can remember feeling disconcerted, that something is being said that we don’t quite understand. There is laughter that confuses and disorientates us; is the laughter at our expense? We remember the dark, hot discomfort. We recall being compromised at having to break a sacred vow. Adults shouldn’t do this to children; but they do. It must have happened to L.P.Hartley too, for him to know.


The man Leo, imagines the boy Leo confronting him with the life he has wasted.

“If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, cataloguing other people's books instead of writing your own?”


The older Leo, has his answer ready.

“Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.”


The hot weather continues, but Leo doesn’t mind it now that he is wearing cool summer clothes.


The heat, brings out notions of sex, as it does for all of us. And Leo is no different; but his ideas of sex are hazy and he simply imagines his own nakedness. He experiences his first feelings of erotica.

“My notions of decency were vague and ill-defined, as were all my ideas relating to sex; yet they were definite enough for me to long for the release…of casting off my clothes, and being like a tree or a flower, with nothing between me and nature.”

There is a bathing party planned and Leo is disappointed to learn that he will not be allowed to swim. He won’t have the pleasure of wearing the swimming suit that Marian has chosen for him. His mother has written to Mrs Maudsley, telling her that he is frail.

As the party approaches the place where they are to bathe they see a man diving into the river. As he swims towards them, Denys, Marcus’ elder brother, realises that it is Ted Burgess, the tenant of Blackthorn Farm. He has a right to be at the river. He is not a trespasser; it is his land. Ted Burgess is a man glowing and shining with health; he is in his prime.

While the rest of the party are bathing, Leo spies on Ted Burgess. Leo is the voyeur.

“ Believing himself to be unseen by the other bathers he gave himself up to being alone with his body. He wriggled his toes, breathed hard through his nose, twisted his brown moustache where some drops of water still clung, and looked himself critically all over. The scrutiny seemed to satisfy him, as well it might. I whose only acquaintance was with bodies and minds developing, was suddenly confronted by maturity in its most undeniable form; and I wondered, what it must feel like to be him, master of those limbs which have passed beyond the need of gym and playing field, and exist for their own strength and beauty? What can they do, I thought, to be conscious of themselves?
Now he had a plantain stalk in his left hand and was rubbing it gently along the hairs of his right forearm; they glinted in the sun and were paler than his arms, which were mahogany coloured to above the elbow. Then he stretched both arms high above his chest, which was so white it might have belonged to another person, except below his neck where the sun had burnt a copper breastplate; and he smiled to himself, an intimate, pleased smile, that would have looked childish or imbecile on most people, but on him had the effect of a feather on a tiger -- it pointed to a contrast, and all to his advantage.”

The passage is highly erotically charged and is intensely homoerotic, as Leo awakens to the sheer beauty of the male. But it frightens him too, as he recognises unadulterated masculine power.

After the group has finished bathing, Marian indulges herself in a dalliance; a little flirtation with Leo. He helps her to dry her hair. Marian is simply amusing herself. For Leo it is entirely different. He tells the reader;

“A labour of love it truly was, the first I had ever done.”

The stage is set, when Leo’s friend Marcus develops the measles and Leo is left to his own devices. The tragedy gathers pace when Leo stumbles on Ted Burgess’ farm house and is caught sliding down the farmer’s haystack.

Ted gives him a “business letter” to give to Marian, but only when she is alone. Leo is sworn to secrecy; there would be “trouble” if anyone should find out.

Leo doesn’t understand a lot about the world of adults, but he understands that a secret is sacred. The bond should never be broken.

And so Leo becomes “postman” for Ted and Marian. Lord Trimingham has already christened him “Mercury, messenger for the gods”, because Leo once took a message to Marian for him. Leo likes the allusion; he also likes Hugh Trimingham and he likes Ted. And we know that he loves Marian. He is torn.

"Why don't you marry Ted?" Leo asks Marian.
"Because I can't," she replies.
"Then why are you marrying Trimingham?"
"Because I must."

She understands, and she is tough enough to endure. The victim in this story is the boy, who is scarred sexually and emotionally by his summer experience. He is on the verge of puberty; adolescence. The experiences of those hot, stifling summer days have turned the adult into a sort of bloodless eunuch.

And the day comes when Leo discovers what Ted and Marian’s “business” is really about. Lord Trimingham enters the room, just as Marian is handing Leo a letter for Ted. He succeeds in thrusting it into his pocket without Trimingham seeing. But in her haste, Marian has forgotten to seal the letter. Eventually, on his way to Ted’s farm, Leo succumbs to temptation and reads the first few sentences. What harm can it do?

“Darling, darling, darling,
Same place, same time, this evening.
But take care not to -”

“The rest was hidden by the envelope.”

Leo isn’t just devastated, he is mortified. He is hot, then cold.



“Not Adam and Eve, after eating the apple, could have been more upset than I was”.



But most of all he is acutely embarrassed. He knows nothing of sex; the facts of life. He is at an age at which boys giggle and sneer at courting couples holding hands. They are “spooning”. Stolen kisses are a joke. He likens Ted and Marian and whatever they have been doing, because he doesn’t really know, to dirty postcards he has seen at the seaside. He sees them as ridiculous and he cannot believe that his Marian would sink so low. “Spooning” is what they called it in 1900’s England, even if Leo doesn’t know what it really involves. But it is degrading, dirty, something to giggle and nudge about.

I’ve just finished re-reading “The Go-Between”. I watched the 1970’s film adaptation yesterday. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay and Joseph Losey directed it. The beautiful Julie Christie is Marian, Alan Bates is the handsome Ted, with Edward Fox as Trimingham. Dominic Guard is the boy Leo and he won a BAFTA for his performance. The film is well worth renting and the book is simply stunning to read.

There’s still a few chapters that I really do need to discuss, but I’m going to stop writing now, except to say that the boy Leo suffers a complete mental breakdown after the tragic dénouement.

The reader can see it coming. The strain is too much for his young emotions. He has experienced pure ecstatic love and putrid betrayal in the same time frame. It’s enough for an adult to comprehend, let alone a twelve year old boy.

“And I had a curious experience, almost an illusion, as though a part of me was stationed far away, behind me, perhaps in the belt of trees beyond the river; and from there I could see myself, a bent figure, no bigger than a beetle, weaving to and fro across the ribbon of road”.

Leo’s young mind is fracturing.

I don’t want to spoil it, give anymore away for anyone who hasn’t seen the film, nor read L.P.Hartley’s superbly crafted novel of complexities, which is “The Go-Between”.
I’ll go back to where I started, with Freud and his theory of repressed memory.

“Psychological repression, is the psychological attempt by an individual to repel its own desires and impulses towards pleasurable instincts. Such desires, impulses, wishes, fantasies or feelings can be represented in the mind as thoughts, images and memories. The repression is caused when an external force puts itself in contrast with the desire, threatening to cause suffering if the desire is satisfied, thereby posing a conflict for the individual; the repressive response to the threat is to exclude the desire from one's consciousness and hold or subdue it in the unconscious.” WIKI


Our repressed desires return to our conscious minds in “Freudian slips,” dreams, blunders, wishes and fantasies. The stories that we tell.

Is Freud right? Well, that really is another discussion. Whether he’s right or wrong, what Freud has done for us, is to give us the tools to have an unfolding dialogue.