GUEST SHOT

An Essay by M. J. Rose

Women, Erotica & Self-Publishing

IN THE 1980'S I WAS WORKING as a copywriter for a big New York advertising agency. Most of my accounts were interesting, but one was fascinating.

I was the chief copywriter for Harlequin Books. As part of my job I attended focus groups and over a two-year period I met with thousands of women to discuss their reading habits. These groups usually included twelve to eighteen women, married, single and divorced, from 20 to 50 years-old, both working and not. They fell into two groups: those who read romance novels and those who read commercial or literary fiction.

Listening to women talk about why they read and what they liked and what fiction meant to them opened my eyes. I had been an avid reader of literature for years. I'd also started writing a novel. But nothing I imagined prepared me for what I discovered.

While women read for all the reasons one would expect -- entertainment, new knowledge, escape -- they also read for sexual excitement.

Women described how they used the fantasies to supplement their lives:

"We grow up on a diet of fairy tales that graduate into romantic movies. We think life is going to be like that. And then we get married. And just about the time the white dress is starting to go stale in the closet we realize the romance is over. Our husbands are drinking beer instead of gazing into our eyes or they are playing golf instead of paying attention."

The woman who said that was thirty-five and had two kids and read eight Harlequin novels a month. One forty one year old woman told me:

"The way life is supposed to be and the way it turns out are two different things. At least when I read, I can imagine the way it should've been."

These women also talked about how the books they read erotically energized them. One thirty-eight year old nurse told me:

"I imagine I am the heroine. The hero is my lover and for a few hours I disappear into a fantasy world totally different from my reality."

A mother of four said:

"When I think my husband is going to want sex, I read one of my romances and get myself in the mood."

The more I listened to the women in these groups the more I discovered they were erotically deprived. Their husbands had Playboy and Penthouse and X-rated videos to stimulate them, but the women were living in a erotically barren world. There were no multi-million-dollar industries catering to their needs, no way for them to find erotically stimulating outlets. Books, at best, were mildly titillating; nothing was downright erotic.

I began to do research with a psychologist in New York City, who specialized in women's issues.

"Unfortunately," said Dr. Mara Gleckel, "women's erotic lives is not an area that has been studied as much as men's erotic lives." But, she said, "there are certain psychological things that we do know. Women are as sexual as men. Their capacity for enjoyment is even greater than a man's. It's simply their erotic triggers that are different."

My research continued and I began to understand that survival of the fittest insured that a certain type of man became stereotypical: he was stimulated by the visual and wanted variety in his sex life. He fathered more children than the other guy. He is the ancestor of the man who reads Playboy, has phone sex, watches X-rated videos and is more aroused by the idea of a new sex partner than by the idea of his wife, no matter how much he loves her.

Women who survived, on the other hand, were the ones who were the most nurturing, the most faithful and the most fertile. This woman didn't crave multiple partners. She was satisfied being a mother and a partner. Today, she is the one who doesn't have sexual interests unless she also have love, isn't stimulated visually, and prefers one partner.

And so we have a major disparity in what the two sexes want. No one likes it. Feminists have tried to fight it. But we seem to be genetically programmed one way and it is going to take time to change that.

In the meantime time, we adapt.

Passion in a long marriage is, for the most part, an oxymoron. As I learned more about the erotic state of women in our country and the general state of marriage, I began really looking around me and noticing that among the people I knew these rules seemed generally to hold up.

One couple I knew well had one of these passionless marriages, and yet neither of them seemed to be disturbed by it. I imagined their life together and their conversations and an idea for a novel started to emerge, a sexy but literate novel that those women I had heard and talked to in those focus groups would want to read.

Thus Lip Service was born.

I got an agent without any trouble. And she got the book to the big twelve New York publishing houses. Within six weeks we had two offers. Editors who were women loved the book and wanted to publish it. But once the marketing departments got hold of the book, the deals were dropped.

With the advent of the big chain stores, there is no way to market a book that is erotic, the marketers told us. The chains don't have erotica sections and to put Lip Service on the shelf with general fiction would be to ignore one of its main selling advantages.

We were told by several houses that a few years earlier there would have been no problem. When there were enough independents, there would have been a way to sell the novel. But in order for a publishing house to take on a new work of fiction they had to feel certain they could sell 25,000 copies, and it seemed to the big marketing gurus that they could sell only 5,000 to 10,000 copies of Lip Service.

But this was 1997 and the Internet's economic publishing realities offered a different solution. It seemed to me that writers who are good enough to get published but don't have big names or fab contacts might just do well on the 'Net.

Besides the obvious choice to sell independently published copies, there is now the chance to have people download the book directly to their computers. Who knows: downloading e-books may be the future of publishing. Mid-list fiction can now be sold via download and many more writers can be made available to the reading public who.

To write my novel I researched the lives of phone-sex operators, sex therapists and an ex-New York public defender. To market it I researched all kinds of selling techniques on the web. I even sold my wedding ring and some other jewelry in order to publish Lip Service on the web.

It was worth it. Hundreds of people have downloaded the book or ordered a hard copy, proving (at least to my satisfaction) that there is quite an audience for good erotic prose targeted to women's sensibilities.

M. J. Rose is the tireless author and self-publisher of Lip Service. (But you'd guessed that, hadn't you?) Read the first three chapters of her novel at the author's website.

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