Free Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression by Susie Bright

words, because that makes people upset, and it’s so embarrassing.
    What does this have to do with her erotic life? Well, as I’ve said on many sour occasions, a woman dieting is a woman not having orgasms. A woman gnashing her teeth over her plastic surgery and her thankless children is a woman who is prompted to use Prozac instead of Pussy Power. A woman with a closet full of shoes and dresses that she can’t wear anymore, even though the debt is still sitting on her credit card, is a woman who didn’t make an investment in her erotic potential. A woman who feels like a used-up whore is someone who never treated her own sexual satisfaction as a virtue.

    The most curious breakthrough of my career editing middle-class- looking books of erotic literature—the women-authored Herotica series, and The Best American Erotica annual—was that they attracted so many women readers. Because of the appearance and location of these pretty books, women felt that they could approach the sales counter with them.
    The first Herotica cover was based on a dream I had in which the title appeared in a hot pink oval-shaped bubble. Round, pink, no illustration of bodies at all. My publisher was not all that impressed with it and gave the next printing a different cover, this time baby blue with labialike silver wisps behind the title. I’ve always thought that one looked like a tampon box. I’m embarrassed to describe these attempts, but the effect we were clumsily aiming at was something that would symbolize the sensuality of women’s genitalia but wouldn’t frighten anyone with an outright beaver shot. We also didn’t want to put an actual woman on the cover, because we didn’t want any single figure or face to define what feminine eroticism was.
    The next two Herotica collections I edited were printed by a large publisher, Penguin, who was not as nervous as we had been about putting a woman on the cover. The publisher chose illustrations of women from the mannerist artist Tamara de Lempicka—the sort of painter you read about being displayed in Madonna’s mansion, breathlessly reported by Architectural Digest. Yes, her work is erotic and presents female nudes, but it is undeniably fine art, not cheese-cake, fashion, or porn. The female figures shown are attractive, but they have pensive faces, dark hair, serious hips, and modest-sized breasts. No Playmates or Supermodels, in other words. The back-grounds were magenta and violet, the lettering rather delicate and playful.

    What’s interesting about these designs is that although they are unquestionably “girly,” a slim majority of the buyers for these books are men—men buying for their lovers, men hoping that their women friends will give erotica a chance if it’s got a feminine or feminist point of view—and also men who just find they like the story and character quality of these collections better than the average erotica in the plain brown wrapper. After all, when Herotica began, the male tradition of erotic writing was dead in the water—it had been decades since Henry Miller or D. H. Lawrence—and even the edgier writers of the time were writing about sex only as tragedy and farce, not to arouse. I had thought of Herotica as a way to inspire women; but as it turned out, it sparked a renaissance of contemporary erotic literature from all quarters.
    With Best American Erotica, I finally had men’s as well as women’s stories in one volume, and I wanted covers that had a little more bite to them. I knew that the days of softly seducing readers into erotica with fleurs-de-lis and Victorian-era figures were way behind us, as was the pedantic use of feminist symbols like pomegranates and seashells. I wanted male and female bodies on the cover this time. I wanted bold titles and a design that implied a little risk. I wanted the audience to understand that this book was ready for anyone, that I would dare you to turn yourself on.
    In retrospect, I’m amazed that so many