Female Desire Doesn't Need a Witness - on Writing Wetness, not Permission

One of the quiet assumptions that clings to most erotic writing - and, I suspect, to most sexual relationships - is that desire only counts when it is seen, as if carnal lust was a particularly tempting quantum particle.

People tend to assume that the man can be (even will be) desperately horny, but that his desperation means nothing unless it is witnessed - which is completely untrue; his desperation can still mean you’re personally aching even if you know it’s happening in the next room.

Or, worse, they assume that unless a woman is seen to be aroused, then she isn’t. (This is also completely untrue; it is, for example, entirely possible for a woman to be extremely aroused while a man is whimpering helplessly in the next room. Trust me.)

But as a writer of erotic literature, this presents something of a problem, because it means I occasionally feel compelled to lean on tropes that I might not always believe are necessary. Sometimes even I find myself writing about a woman’s visibly hard nipples, and slightly regretting that there isn’t a more… delicate shorthand.

It’s a little easier to write about a man’s visual arousal, for a couple of obvious reasons. First, for many men, arousal does tend to correlate with obvious visual clues. And second, of course, I write literary femdom with a strong focus on tease and denial, so there is often no immediate need to flag “Main Character Name was desperate to orgasm after days of being edged and denied,” just as I rarely need to write things like “He drank the water greedily; it was wet” - even though I often find myself describing wetness in other contexts.

My point is, that people often assume female arousal is inherently reactionary; a thing which happens between people and because of someone else. It’s seen as a phenomenon that blooms only when encouraged, when validated, when permitted to do so (or, in the worst cases, when convenient for the male character). It can sometimes feel as if female arousal is somehow inherently performative.

And I do not like that version of desire. It can be true - god knows there are cases where female desire is not only reacting to, but is absolutely kindled by another person - but I will also say <<Warning!! Clutch pearls now!!>> that some of the most potent, destabilising female desire I have ever experienced didn’t look outward at all. It didn’t ask. It didn’t wait to be told ‘this is expected’; it certainly didn’t trouble to check whether I or anyone else was ready for it or if it could come back later when I wasn't surrounded by people. 

It simply… was. 

Frankly, it caught me out so thoroughly that I sometimes often frequently think about it, even to this day. 

And that is, mostly, the kind of female desire I try to write, the kind of wanting that doesn’t announce itself, and doesn’t ask for permission and - crucially - knows permission is not necessary for it to exist.

Because that is the strongest kind of desire of all. 

And I think that is important, because the moment you start writing female arousal as a thing which needs to be seen to exist, you are limiting yourself. Worse, I always worry you might be cheating your characters out of their fun. 

If your books only allow female desire to be real when someone else sees the character is aroused, you either get bogged down in the technicalities (which can, I confess, be delicious to write, but which can also get painfully reductive), or you find that your narrative won't allow you time to pause and fill out all the “She’s allowed to be turned on because” paperwork - in which case you can end up with… well. Dommes who don’t really seem to be into domination.

I always find that sad. Domination is amazing, and I find it a bit unnerving when I encounter dommes in fiction who appear to get absolutely nothing out of whatever it is they’re doing to be dominant. From an authorial perspective, I completely understand how it happens (I have done it!) - but from a reader perspective, even knowing how it happens, I find it somewhat ethically… squicky.

So we writers have a problem. Male lust comes (or doesn’t…) with a handy, visual shorthand that is not only expected, but frankly encouraged and celebrated and drawn on lavatory walls with a kind of primal abandon. Female desire is inherently less visual, but essential to understanding a character (at least, within the kind of psychologically grounded erotica I write!). 

If a Domme isn't aroused by an act of domination, why exactly has she just spent half an hour edging her lucky, devoted sub until they’re a quivering mess: she must have other things to do - I never knew a domme who didn’t - so why this? Why now? If we can’t see how much she’s into it, we’re effectively playing chicken with the reader’s enthusiasm, and that’s no fun for anyone.

To be clear here, I am absolutely not arguing against writing bodies and physical responses. Writing bodies - legible, distinct, representative bodies - is a vital part of what I do, and I take a quiet, hard pride in trying to keep my characters feeling physically distinct rather than... Well, let's say 'airbrushed'.

So yes, of course I write wetness. I write physical response. I write the visible, undeniable signs of arousal, and the scent and the heat and the breath and the taste. I write the power and surrender and the trust and the pleasure of fucking, but I always try to write them in and for and of bodies. Real bodies matter, and sex is organic, and I frankly revel in writing it that way... 

But I do not think it is satisfying to write as if the physical signs of desire are the same as the source of it. For me (although perhaps I am an absolute outlier here), arousal that exists only to be seen, as if it's purely decorative, makes for a thinner, less stable, and ultimately less erotic scene than desire which is seen, but which is seen to be rooted in a person, a character with a distinct libido and an interior life and motivation and concerns of their own.

Or, to put it another way: I've come to believe that if a penis is introduced in Act One, someone should have edged it until it quivers by Act Three. (Although I apologise to Chekhov here, and also to my readers for the false impression I might ever write a Domme patient enough to wait all the way until Act Three...) 

The solution I like, therefore, is interiority: to get inside the heads of the Dommes as much as the heads of the Subs.

And I have to say, I was perhaps a little slow to learn this - I genuinely had not completely realised that it was allowed in erotic fiction (which says an awful lot, I think, about the perspective from which erotica is normally crafted…). In On Chestnut Tree Lane, although there are absolutely glimpses of what is going on for Mary Mason and the various Whitmore women, I don’t think there is a single moment where I properly allowed the reader to look inside their minds and to fully see everything they felt. That's one of the reasons I say now that I wish it hadn't been my first book: writing it now, I feel I'd do it better. 

In fact, I know I would, because I was already improving by the time I finished Mantamer - Dr Lin at least explains why she's acting as she does, and some of Shirin's motivations are tolerably clear. Even though much of Sense of Submission has to be seen through Joe’s eyes, he was interpreting interiority instead of merely looking at people, and improved immeasurably by the time I reached The Ruritanian Pretender and Anna Voss Writes the Classics, and that approach truly came into its own by the time I was writing Anna Voss’s Christmas Carol which is, in its own way, almost entirely about Cruse’s interiority.

But this weekend I have, as promised, been putting the finishing touches to Edge Close, the work I started immediately after The Ruritanian Pretender, and before Writes the Classics. And it’s been fascinating, because it is almost entirely interiority. It has to be, in many ways; it’s not a grand Ruritanian Romance, it’s not a complex le Carre-style thriller, it’s not a cold cyberpunk femdom nightmare.

It’s small, domestic, intimate; a portrait of a marriage that has grown cold, and roars back to life in a surge of confidence and assurance and - yes - arousal. And that arousal is witnessed, of course. But the most important witness to that returning arousal isn’t my male lead, George Truegood. It’s his wife, Ellen.

The engine of the novel, ultimately, is the way she learns to be her own witness and understand what she wants for herself. George witnesses the physical side of it (and trust me, he witnesses it at extremely close quarters!) - but the key vector, the most important witness of all, is Ellen.

If she wasn’t alert to what she was feeling, and why, there’d be no book.

So yes - maybe desire is quantum. Maybe female arousal can only really “count” if someone is there to witness it... 

...But that certainly doesn’t mean the witness needs to be external.

Sometimes the most powerful witness is yourself. Nobody else needs to know what’s turning you on. Not unless you choose to whisper it in their ear.