#liking plastic women is a gateway drug to liking real women | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

danieldavidwriter · 5 years

Text

Gateway

Nisha Drake stood on her balcony overlooking the city and took several deep breaths of air. It had been a long night and she really needed to straighten her head. There was always a good breeze up here, cool and clean, so she turned her face into it and flopped her head backwards to stare up into the brightening sky. She would leave today, she knew it.

The feeling had been growing inside her all week, unplanned and unexpected really, but she knew that today was the day she would go. A smile crossed her face, followed by a little laugh in her nose and a shrug of her shoulders that looked like a quiet sneeze, but was in fact a delicious burst of joy, relief, love and contentment. She spun on her heels and headed back inside, immediately kneeling down at the coffee table to scratch out another line as thick as a boot lace.

Nisha lent forwards over the drug smeared and cup strewn plastic table with a short black straw to snarl it up her nose. It stung as it clawed it’s way towards her brain in brambly clots, whilst the familiar acrid slime slid and gagged down the back of her throat, making her reach out to gulp down more warm champagne. Not the best gear in the world, more MDMA and aspirin than coke, but she liked the trashy, trippy hit it was giving and at this time in the morning anything would do. The sound of birds singing from the shadows drifted in through the balcony door, counterpointing her shame with their delicate trills and chirrups, as the first light of the day added a faint wash of colour to the greyscale streets outside.

As she massaged her nostrils to hurry the drug along on it’s journey into her blood, she felt her body prickle with anticipation and her spine judder and spasm a little deep inside the flesh of her neck. She glanced up at the guy chewing his lip expectantly opposite her. The magic was melting off him as the dawn light took hold, but she’d hoped he would stick around and here he was, looking jaded and day old like a party sandwich that was still essentially the same, but giving off clues that it should’ve been enjoyed 12 hours ago.

He was young and keen though. Full of the bravado every twenty-something first job guy had, and he had great tits. Great sirloin steak tits and broad, action-figure arms. Arms that she’d fantasised about more than once since she’d hired him and that undoubtedly made him more memorable than he should be. She obsessed endlessly over the pale and solid curve that burst out from his cotton sleeve, that fattened and stretched the fabric each time he picked up his drink or self-consciously cupped his chest. Her fingers could sense the tautness of his skin, daydream the weight of him as her hands cupped his chest and pushed up against him.

He’d worked for Nisha for two weeks already, but she still couldn’t remember his name. Nick? Ned? Nevin? It began with an N, she was sure of that, and it was his first job since graduating. A decent job as well. She was paying him way over the odds just for the sake of it. He probably had serious money in his account for the first time ever, a job that you almost couldn’t fuck up, and the effortless under-thirties looks that you don’t know you have until they’re gone. Not that that would ever happen to him, of course.

She carved out another line and gestured the straw towards him. She’d been here before, tediously role playing the crazy night crawler to build a temporary sense of camaraderie with some guy who most likely cared about her as little as she did. For the briefest moment she would feel less alone, before the daylight came back and a brutal despair rampaged into her mind with the vicious deprecation only a hard-earned comedown can generate.

He leant forwards to snort the gear and she took the moment to play with a curl of hair that fell from his fringe and danced like a seahorse in front of her. From there, she ran her hand across his cheekbone and down his neckline, over the broad, bulging muscle in his shoulder and down the vein in his arm, before jumping left to brush under the heavy curve of his chest. The music had stopped, although she hadn’t noticed at the time, and she heard his breath quicken a little and his nylon t-shirt crackle under her fingers.

I feel like fucking - she said.

Since the Gates of Heaven had opened, every night went by like this.

Nobody that was still here really cared anymore. Nobody had anything to lose, so the ritual of determined debauchery and oblivion had become the afterwork activity of choice, whilst afterwork was getting earlier and earlier every day. For Nisha, sometimes just sending an email over breakfast meant the after work fun could begin all over again.

Of the people who remained, some were squeezing the last few drops from their physicality before going upstairs, others were exploring ever darker corners of their imagination, whilst some - like Nisha - were exploiting the situation and making huge amounts of money. She didn’t need it anymore of course, she could leave whenever she wanted to, but this was the first time in her life that she’d had an idea that actually made money. Real money. More money than she’d ever imagined. After years of mediocre businesses that seemed cool enough, but in reality just about scraped along - working 70 hour weeks but earning half as much as her friends; travelling on business trips but only ever economy; pitching at investment events that felt like begging but with slides and artisan coffee - this business was next level. She only had to do about one hours work a day, and even that was really just checking that the server was switched on. After that, the money kept rolling in.

Nisha had created an app called Gateway. Gateway monitored local weather stations for the changes in air pressure that always preceded the Gates opening. The geolocation in your phone would tell you if you could get there in time, and through a few links to transport services it would even tell you the best route to take. Simple really, but she’d made twenty million in the first two weeks, and every single day since then her bank account had filled back up as fast as she could empty it.

She’d never felt the energy of a good idea working well before. A winner! An indisputable, surefire, class A hit. Gateway was the sort of thing that people wrote about in Forbes magazine, or shared motivational stories about on LinkedIn. In any other time she would’ve had investors crawling all over her, offering crazy sums for a piece of the action. She’d have been featured in one of those nauseating ‘top females under thirty’ lists, giving talks on women in tech and proclaiming how ‘anyone can do it if they believe in themselves’. But not in this time.

This time no one cared about her future plans or market share, her growth curve or exit strategy. They all used Gateway just once, to get out and never look back. The irony rubbed, but she forced it out of her mind, focused on the here and now and each night drank, snorted and fucked the tragedy of her hopeless success out of her mind.

Besides, she had told herself she wouldn’t leave until she was ready. Things were getting more fucked up the longer she stayed, and she had kind of like it. It was messy, exciting and very cinematic.

Nick or Ned or whoever it was, looked up at her as he inhaled his line and tried to look shocked by Nisha’s bluntness, but as he straightened back up his face confessed that he gave as little of a shit as she did, and he smiled a wasted and disinterested smile as he brushed a few crumbs from the stubble on his top lip.

Sure, why not - his voice croaked as the coke brought him to the edge of a sneeze.

He squeezed his nostrils and held his breath before moving up to kiss her, the stale smell of champagne advancing towards her in hot blows. His lips felt surprisingly soft and warm and in the brief moment that she was lost in their tenderness, Nisha felt a lump appear unexpectedly in her throat as a great wave of sorrow and loss, swelled and broke in her chest. Was she going to cry? In a panic, she flipped it. Flipped it to anger and pushed him backwards with her mouth, rising up from her knees and biting on his lip until he recoiled, sliding awkwardly off his chair. His body twisted underneath her onto the floor and his legs buckled up behind him like a corpse.

She stopped for a moment and raised herself up to look at him, her back arched and her arms locked solid.

Want some viagra?

No - he sounded shy all of a sudden, so young - I’m ok, thank you.

In heaven, Marlon was watching. He watched her often because he still loved her despite everything. He loved her even though he had to keep reminding himself that this person, this stranger who drank and snorted and fucked away every day and all of their memories, was not the same Nisha that he knew. This was another Nisha, born out of this extremely fucked up situation. She was confused, surely. Frightened, maybe. Lost? Stressed? Traumatised? Maybe a little bit of all of these things, but it didn’t matter. He knew who she really was, and that she could still be saved.

***

For Marlon, everything was wrong. Every day and every moment.

This wasn’t how it was meant to be. They’d walked to the Gates together hand in hand. They’d thrown a party the night before, to celebrate going up. She’d told him that she was giving Gateway away, making it open source so anybody could use it. She’d told him that they would be in heaven together, with no more work and no more stress. No more problems and no more stupid mistakes. But it was all a lie.

He often day-dreamed back to their leaving party, when their remaining friends had piled into their new apartment and drunk shots and jumped around wildly to Rage Against the Machine and Sum41. Lampshades were broken and drinks were spilled on their beautiful carpet, but this new life of theirs was so fresh and unmade that there was precious little else to break. No pictures, no furniture, no best glasses, no sentimental objects. Somebody broke the arm on the Technics turntable, but since they weren’t using it nobody cared. It was still revolving silently the next morning when they left.

Most of their guests that night were much like their expensive new apartment. Picked up in the last few weeks they were still strange and unknown, a little empty perhaps, gorgeous but generic, and only theirs as a result of the money they now had. The money that came in so fast they didn’t know what to do with it all, apart from rent expensive flats, cheap friends and meaningless good times. Marlon could see the fakery now, he sort of knew it then, but it had still felt amazing.

They were a strange bunch, those still here.

The most moral and virtuous people had gone within the first week of the Gates opening, racing eagerly to get to the afterlife that their childhood had promised them. Whether raised on old testament brutality or glossy Sunday school pamphlets, whether they wore a cross or a hijab, carried a knife or rosary beads, now was their moment of truth and excited validation and there was no reason to delay.

Your average person went up a few weeks later, reassured by endless 24 hour news items and social media discussions that the Gates weren’t an alien trap or some kind of government conspiracy, and deciding that the chaos that was rapidly taking over the non-celestial world was now by far the worst option. A quick re-read of the bible, a few Wikipedia searches in case there was a quiz and they were gone. Delivered from evil, for ever and ever.

Others stayed back to do some good amongst the orphans and lost souls of the growing bloodshed, the refugees caught in the rising tide of revenge attacks and lustful tourism, but eventually even they left, electing to save themselves and leave the rest of the population to whatever personal fate they had chosen.

Those left behind now were fanatical non-believers, the guilty and guilt ridden, hoarders and mercenaries, those who cowered in the face of change and those for whom pain and pleasure and death were far more attractive than infinite paradise. How strange it was, that with the promise of unqualified salvation, the cruelty and deviance within even the gentlest soul had been awakened in a counter-reaction, that quickly spilled beyond even the most extreme moral boundaries.

Marlon could still feel the butterflies that danced in his belly for that whole night and into the morning when they left. On that day, the morning was fresh and clear. The crisp night air lingered in the shade, whilst the rising sun beat down on their bare skin as they began their purposeful but apprehensive walk to the Gates.

They were both in T-shirt’s and shorts, hand in hand, enjoying what might be their last touch. Perhaps this was the last warm breeze to ruffle through the soft hairs on their arms, or the last rays of sunlight to warm their heads and shoulders.

Nisha had her phone out with Gateway open, calling out directions every once in a while as the app wound them through alleyways and parks. They passed a supermarket with every one of it’s windows broken. Apples and wine bottles lay amongst the broken glass, a burnt out SUV with a ‘Jesus loves you’ sticker sent thin trails of black smoke into the calm air as it smouldered, and bodies lay crumpled on the ground in the shadow of a tower block - an increasingly common sight. A couple holding hands over here, a child lying alone over there.

At one point they startled a dog that was scratching through rubbish, piled ten feet high against a wall in a school playground. It looked up with a start, blood dripping from the tin-can cuts on it’s jowls, before skittling off with it’s tail between it’s legs when Marlon stamped his feet.

Crossing a deserted junction, the faraway bass of the Neverending Rave, a 24 hour party that had been running non-stop since the first few appearances of the Gates, thudded gently to a lost melody before being cut off again the moment they turned the next corner.

Eventually, the familiar halo in the sky came in to view, first behind the skyline a few streets away and then rising high overhead. Nisha put her phone away and they both gazed up at the wonder that swirled overhead.

It was an awe inspiring sight. Gentle waves of colour danced about in the air and across every surface like mother of pearl, whilst a warm and constant breeze spun around and around in a huge circle of leaves and dust directly under the Gates. There was hardly any sound, a few hushed voices from the handful of other people standing around, but nothing more.

The strange calm reminded Marlon of his one and only sailing adventure. As a boy he and his father had set sail for France together, but in the dead off night the wind had failed and they spent hours bobbing vulnerable and hopeless in the dark. Hanging over the stern with his head resting on his arm and his finger tips trailing in the water, the cold black sea had slowly warmed into peach and rose ripples and eddies as the day brightened and the wind finally returned to them.

In the centre of the Gates, a bright white beam shone down like a search light and every now and then the softened silhouette of a new leaver raced up and away into the sky.

Marlon and Nisha walked in together, hearts pounding and their fingers digging tightly into each others palms. Marlon led the way and as he entered the light, he felt a roar of energy and incredible weightlessness that lifted his feet gently from the ground. He began to laugh and turned around to smile at Nisha next to him, but she wasn’t there. Her hand was stretched out as far as it would go whilst her feet remained firmly planted on grey pavement. He could barely see her face through the blinding light and had to twist his neck as far as it would go to keep her in view, as it slowly but inescapably turned him upside down. His hand gripped hers tightly now and his feet flapped wildly in the air. He held onto her as hard as he could, but he could feel her fingers wriggling and he was so stressed that his palms were sweating and he could feel her sliding out from his grip.

What’s wrong? - he yelled at her through the roaring.

Nisha! What’s wrong?

He couldn’t see her now. His eyes were streaming from the intensity of light and his inverted state made focussing almost impossible.

Sorry! - he heard her shout out through the wind, just once, before her hand finally slipped out from his and he flew up and away from her, tumbling like street litter in a storm.

And so, that was how this came to be. Another day of longing and anger and sadness, in this place that was meant to give the opposite of all those things.

Marlon felt uneasy about this contradiction. Had he done something wrong? There had been no pep talk when he arrived, no one to greet him or induct him into this new world. Had he missed it somehow? He’d gone back to where he arrived to check, but there didn’t seem to be anything special about the place. No door or desk, no greeters or receptionists or whatever you might expect to find on the other side of the Gates. It was much like every other place up here, a meadow on a warm day with a few people hanging around.

He felt guilty, disappointed even, that he seemed to have messed this up somehow. He spent his days with as good an impression of bliss on his face as he could conjure, whilst constantly thinking about Nisha, When he was sure he was alone, he would relax his face and guiltily watch her through the clouds, yawning his mouth to relieve the cramp of endless smirking.

He had no idea how he was meant to behave or feel. He slept on the ground, as that’s what everyone else seemed to do. He ate fruit from the trees and drank water from the pools that seemed to be everywhere. Too many, he had thought. All around him people strolled peacefully about or lay around in a state of bliss. They exchanged smiles but never spoke, they embraced but never kissed. They ate and drank and slept and he wondered enviously how they knew what they were supposed to be doing.

Every now and then he would hear the unmistakable sound of an angel flying overhead and hurriedly begin admiring a branch, or dreamily wafting his fingers in a nearby pool of water. He hadn’t met an angel yet, but their dark silhouettes soared overhead regularly, casting long shadows which cooled the ground and flattened the ripples on the water. Once, one had hovered overhead, it’s wing feathers twitching rapidly as it hung in the air almost motionless, before diving down with terrifying speed on the other side of an orchard. Marlon couldn’t see what happened, but he heard the most terrible shrieks and decided that it might be better if he never met one.

Nisha was sleeping now. He liked to watch her as she slept. He ignored the fact that she was partially clothed, that she was surrounded by empty bottles and detritus, that her phone had rung about a dozen times and she still hadn’t heard it. Instead he watched her face. It made small twitches and ticks as she slept, sometimes with the hint of a smile. Sometimes her lips moved almost imperceptibly as if she was whispering a secret. She had always done this and it told Marlon that, no matter what was happening now, the old Nisha was still there and she would come to him eventually.

A noise behind him made him start from his daydream and turn around abruptly. It was so instinctive that for a moment he forgot entirely where he was, or to imprint the bliss back onto his face.

There was a girl standing just a few feet from him. A young girl, maybe late teens or early twenties, in a blue pinafore dress with a buttercup hem that fluttered about her knees in the breeze. She had mud on her shoes and her hands picked at each other nervously.

He had no idea how long she’d been there. She stared expressionless directly at him, not in bliss, not in horror, just staring into his eyes, frozen in the moment. A moment which seemed to stretch on forever and made Marlon blink inexplicably several times. He kept expecting her to speak, but she never did and several moments passed when he wished he’d thought of the right thing to say and said it already.

As he decided that he simply must say something, anything, he noticed a tear had appeared like a pearl in her eye. It dropped out and ran fast down her cheek, etching a pale streak in her blushed skin. It was swiftly followed by another, and another, and before long her face and neck were wet with tears as they stared at each other in silence. Marlon felt sick as an understanding grew from nothing into everything inside of him, and the truth exploded out of both of them and crawled it’s way across the wilting grass and putrifying water.

***

Nisha woke to the sound of her phone buzzing on the coffee table next to her. Her eyelids peeled apart and the sunlight burst in to sting the surface of her eyes and cause a sharp pain in the nerves that tied them to her head. She was sweating. As she sat up her head pounded even more and she cradled it in her hands to soothe the pain and resist the sudden urge to throw up.

She swiped her phone awake and saw she had dozens of missed calls, all from Nick. She called him back.

Hey - she said, her voice still asleep.

Why are you calling, aren’t you here?

No, I left hours ago - he said - Have you just woken up?

No - she lied - why, what’s up?

Have you not seen Gateway? - he sounded freaked out.

Why, what’s up? - she said again, holding the phone at arms length and refocusing her eyes.

She swiped up and clicked on the Gateway icon as she searched around for a nearby glass of water. She found champagne.

When Gateway opened the map was going crazy. Little blue markers were all over the screen, so many that the route finder clearly wasn’t sure what to do and was conspicuously empty.

Wow - she said more quietly than she expected - We’ll have to fix that route finder bug later. How many are there?

Too many to count, - said Nick - but that’s not it.

Oh?

There was a pause.

They go down Nisha. Down.

Another pause.

What do we do?

#shortstories #shortstory #fiction #technology #tech #religion #speculative fiction

1 note · View note

mastcomm · 4 years

Text

When Art Begins at the Scene of a Crime

The Walmart on Gateway Boulevard in El Paso is where a 21-year-old man from across the state, driven by his anger at a “Hispanic invasion,” showed up last Aug. 3 on a murder mission. Firing an assault rifle, he killed 22 people and injured another 24.

Last month, the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles made a pilgrimage to the scene. Ms. Margolles’s work focuses on violent death and its aftermath, which she expresses in tough photographs and installations that often involve material residue from murder sites. She knew the Walmart for having often shopped there: Though based in Madrid, Spain, she has worked for many years in Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, and much of her art responds to the borderland’s cartel wars, trafficking and gender violence.

Walmart stopped selling certain classes of ammunition after the massacre, but not all, so Ms. Margolles purchased a box of Winchester 12-gauge shells. Her large-format photograph of the shells is part of her spare but powerful new exhibition, “El asesinato cambia el mundo / Assassination changes the world,” at James Cohan gallery, in TriBeCa. Bright red with shiny metal ends, they are jumbled on a black surface in a pile that reminded me of a human heart with its valves and sinews. This ability to make visceral the ordinary tools and circumstances of murder is a hallmark of Ms. Margolles’s work.

The box of 25 shells cost $5.48, plus tax. Ms. Margolles paid cash. The original receipt is on view next to the image. It will fade during the show’s run, as receipts do, but you can take away your own reproduction, enlarged to poster size, from a stack at the gallery entrance. (When I photographed the stack, my phone invited me to scan the QR code for Walmart coupons.)

Ms. Margolles, 56, is one of Mexico’s most prominent artists. Her installations, photographs and performances have been widely presented around the world, but less so in the United States. (She had a solo exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., in 2015, and this is her second solo gallery show in New York.)

One of her contributions to last year’s Venice Biennale, reprising a wrenching piece she developed in 2014, was a knockout. Set up in a darkened room, “La búsqueda (The Search)” employed vertical wood frames that held glass plates scavenged from closed businesses in Juárez. Still stuck to these panes were torn and faded search notices for young women gone missing in the city’s nearly three-decade epidemic of sexual violence and femicide.

Periodically, a low rumble traversed the room, shaking the glass. It was a conversion of sound recordings of the trains that run through the center of Juárez, a key element in the border’s economic infrastructure. Many of the women killed in Juárez came to work in factories serving the United States market.

Ms. Margolles’s art used to be more graphic. At the Mexican pavilion at the Biennale in 2009, she invited people from Juárez, relatives of victims, to mop the floor of the palazzo with water into which she had dipped a cloth carrying blood from murder sites. Outside the pavilion, in lieu of the Mexican flag, she flew fabric reddened by a similar infusion.

And in her early career, in the 1990s, she worked directly with dead bodies — at the morgue in Mexico City, where she earned a certificate in forensic medicine after her degree in social sciences, and as a member of the art collective Semefo, which took its name from the acronym for the city’s coroner’s service. She photographed incisions, stitches, bodies being washed; she smuggled out blood and grease from autopsy trays and used them in sculptures. One mother gave her a stillborn fetus, which she entombed in a block of cement, leaving no trace of its tragic content.

This exhibition is compact, with just eight works, and contained, emphasizing texture and form in all save the pieces prompted by the Walmart shooting. It feels like a placeholder for the major museum retrospective that her career warrants.

Still, these pieces strikingly convey her methods. Past an industrial curtain of plastic flaps, the first room contains three black garments on mannequins — one a full-length dress, the other two other chest-pieces — lit so as to highlight the shimmer of the ornaments in their stitching. These include sequins, paillettes and hundreds of glass shards sewn in with 24-karat gold thread. The glass comes from car windows exploded by shootings in three locations: El Paso, Juárez, and Culiacán, Ms. Margolles’s hometown, capital of Sinaloa state and center of its notorious cartel.

A long wall is devoted to 2,300 earthwork tiles in tones of dark brown to black, buffed to a gentle shine and precisely aligned. Ms. Margolles had them manufactured in Mata Ortiz, a village of potters in Chihuahua State whose livelihood has suffered from all the violence. The earth is local, and so is the technique, the color achieved through smoke from burning cow manure. It is a mourning piece, for those known and unknown. (Near the end of production, the lethal ambush of a fundamentalist Mormon family took place nearby.)

One can contemplate this piece from a pair of cement benches. They are, as one might suspect, made by Ms. Margolles’s infusion technique, blending dirt and residue from a murder site in northern Mexico with New York City water.

Wherever Ms. Margolles exhibits, she involves local materials, ideas, and people — often from groups threatened by violence, like sex workers or trans people. For a public art program in Los Angeles in 2016, she built a huge concrete stele using matter from 100 shooting sites in the city, and made with local artists.

New York plays a distinct, and not entirely positive, role in Ms. Margolles’s social geography. It is the financial center, where money invested on Wall Street or laundered into real estate is far removed from the border economy and from the United States-driven flow of drugs and weapons that accounts for so much pain. It is also the hub of the art industry, and one gets the sense that the openings and parties are not Ms. Margolles’s favorite event.

She has nodded instead toward New York the fashion capital, hiring local designers to imagine and confection the show’s couture-like dresses. They invite us to consider how much violence is embedded in luxury and status, even as the death toll mounts, implacably, out of view.

Teresa Margolles: El asesinato cambia el mundo / Assassination changes the world

Through March 1 at James Cohan, 48 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-714-9500, jamescohan.com.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/when-art-begins-at-the-scene-of-a-crime/

#Event

0 notes

ouraidengray4 · 6 years

Text

Why Erotic Fan Fiction Might Be the Key to a Better Sex Life

Where I come from, sex is taboo. I never learned how to use a condom, I never learned anything about birth control, and abstinence was preached above all else. I was even given a fake plastic credit card as a symbol of my pledge to remain abstinent, a tiny golden card that told us of the "importance of abstinence" that we could carry around in our wallets, intended as something that would remind us of the gift and value of our virginity, along with our commitment to not have sex—and yes, I attended public school.

At the private Christian university I attended, it got worse instead of better. Professors gave talks about how masturbation was evil and addicting, not to mention the sins of pornography. We were told that pornography was basically a gateway drug to sexual promiscuity and broken relationships. Pornography was whispered about in church like it was heroin, making it one of the worst things in which you could possibly indulge. Sex and everything related to sexuality quickly became terrifying, although of course, I was still curious, but clueless. TV and movies were all I had to learn about sex, but I soon discovered that the library scene in Atonement doesn’t quite count as a proper sexual education.

I’ve recently started coming to terms with sexuality, however. I’ve realized that there are issues with my limited knowledge of sex that aren’t just dangerous (hello, condoms) but severely limiting in terms of my relationship with my husband—yup, I’m married now.

So what options are left? My conservative upbringing made it uncomfortable (and embarrassing) to talk to a professional about sex, and I could never dream of mentioning my burgeoning sex life with my friends. Hell, even writing an article about sex is enough to make me blush. Like right now.

Weirdly enough, fan fiction saved my sex life. It’s strange to admit, especially to countless strangers on the internet, but it taught me that sexuality isn’t just OK, it’s a part of life and something to be embraced.

I stuck with fan fiction about fictional characters, mainly because I was (and am) uncomfortable with reading fan fiction about real people—especially sexual scenarios—but also because it allowed me to explore without any secondhand embarrassment. I didn’t want to watch porn or hear about real people having sex because, truthfully, I couldn’t handle it. Sticking with the fictional, however, lowered the barrier of entry (pun intended).

I’d spent so much time worrying about how to do sex ‘right’ that I forgot the importance of enjoying myself throughout the process.

By reading about characters with whom I already identified, fan fiction taught me that I’m not a light switch to be turned on and off when convenient. I knew that arousal was different for men and women, but I assumed that I was defective if I couldn’t get "into the mood" without proper, erm, stimulation. Even then, there were times that sex still wasn’t on my agenda, but I had no guidelines for how to deal with that except TV shows where the woman would feign a headache (and be portrayed as a frigid b*tch for doing so).

Fan fiction provided me with a safe space to explore my sexuality. With only one sexual partner in my life, I’d never had the opportunity to discover what I liked in bed. Sex, as I soon discovered, isn’t something to be ashamed of—and it shouldn’t be.

Not knowing anything about the different types of foreplay, role-playing, different positions, masturbation, and more, I came into my marriage relationship as a virtual tabula rasa. And while that could be viewed as a good thing depending on your personal beliefs, it definitely made sex awkward. I had a vague idea of things I thought I should be doing, but I had no idea how to do them. I didn’t know how to take an active role in pleasing my husband, and I had even less of an inkling on how to enjoy myself in the process. Sure, I could talk to my spouse about these issues—and did—but it often left me feeling deficient.

Fan fiction, however, let me read about healthy sexual relationships without feeling embarrassed or overwhelmed. I could delve into different sexual scenarios on a whim, and I was in control of the process. It allowed me to explore (or avoid) whatever I wanted, which I could then take back to the bedroom thanks to the support of my husband.

Given that women are more often stimulated by the written word than men, fan fiction helped cultivate a healthy sexual appetite within my relationship that had been previously inaccessible to me. Fanfic is often more female-friendly than porn in that it often gives women a more dominant role, especially one in which the female orgasm is just as important (if not more so) than the male’s, along with the ability to choose a story that has a plot (not just sex), making it more immersive in the process. Not only that, this makes erotic fan fiction more approachable—and beneficial—to people like me, who are interested in learning but are often uncomfortable with blatant displays of sexuality.

Honestly, I’m beyond grateful for erotic fan fiction. It’s free. It’s safe. It’s empowering. Why shouldn’t women—and men—be free to imagine themselves having kick-ass sex? And instead of taking away from my relationship, reading about sex this way has enriched our sex life in ways that I definitely didn’t expect. I learned that sex is normal, it’s healthy, and it’s whatever the f*ck I want it to be, because it’s mine (and my husband’s). The concept of "should" doesn’t belong in the bedroom.

Fan fiction doesn’t just offer readers the opportunity to escape, it also reminds us that sexuality— whatever form that may take for you—is perfectly normal. It’s OK to have experience, and it’s OK not to. Sometimes we feel like we need to be having sex (and lots of it), but we’re also expected to be the perfect blend of sexy and innocent, knowing exactly how to drive our partners wild, all while feeling incredibly confident in the bedroom and seeming like eternal virgins. The challenge for women can seem insurmountable, especially when the pressure to perform sexually can absolutely kill the mood.

I’d spent so much time worrying about how to do sex "right" that I forgot the importance of enjoying myself throughout the process. Yes, I want to please my partner, but my own pleasure should be of primary concern, as well. Over the course of our lives, women are subtly taught to view themselves as objects, and sexual objectification is no different. We exist as more than objects to fulfill our partners’ sexual desires, and in my experience, fan fiction can help teach that. As more and more women see and experience relationships—even fictional ones—in which a woman’s sexual enjoyment is just as valuable as a man’s, she can see her own pleasure as increasingly important.