Prophettown (introduction to a fantasy-land of universal spanking)

The Tales of Prophettown (see Emily, Ravished by Porn, for their beginning point in the books of EXPLORATIONS) began as a separate project, one which didn't have anything of an overt narrative nature that was connected to me. The kernel was two hotnesses, as I suppose I tend to think at the most basic level of the erotic narrative dynamics that get me wet. 

(If you wanted me to, I could do something elaborate and psychoanalytic on that; castration and the assumption thereof, jouissance and supplementarity, desire as opposed to need--but that stuff has an amazing ability to turn hotness into boredom. There was a time when I thought if I could outline every one of my hotnesses and analyze each of them in turn in terms of castration I would, à la Freud's dream of the talking cure, be free of them all and able to live a healthy, chaste, productive life. [I guess my plan was carefully to except vanilla sex from the hotnesses of which I was curing myself, so that I could take a little pleasure--not too much, mind you--in my eventual husband's colonization of my womb for the purpose of reproduction.] Thank God it turned out to be folly--it turned out that the best I could do was develop a set of tropes for future narrative elaboration--always of course accompanied by further, unending self-abuse.)

The two hotnesses that gave birth to Prophettown were of an innocent girl being awakened to sexuality by reluctant porn-viewing (most often, when I go back to this well for some inchoate day-dream style fantasization, it's a young wife whose husband has decided that their vanilla marriage isn't satisfying; his solution is to bring home some porn and make his innocent bride watch it, all the while telling her that she's going to have to undergo this and that of what she's seeing while she, horrified but aroused in spite of herself, protests. Spanking can be added at this point, if I haven't already come, but usually the husband telling her that he's going to fuck her ass gets me where I need to go.) and of a wedding-night in a strict religious community where the bride is both completely innocent and entirely under the authority of her new husband. Together these hotnesses yield the "training video" The Prophet's Way: the Marriage Bed, described in Emily, Ravished by Porn and Emily's Sacred Porn.

To explain the Tales of Prophettown, I should confess that in their original versions, they were the kind of thing a BDSM writer can write for her own purposes but which for ethical (and marketing) reasons she could never publish. To put it succinctly, there was no consent-structure in place: the brides of Prophettown were young and they were not given the chance to refuse their bridegrooms' demands.

Because he enjoyed the material so much, and wanted to see it elaborated further, Charles suggested that I try to integrate it with the story of fantasy-Emily and fantasy-Charles. That's how the second half of Emily, Ravished by Porn and then the entireties of Emily's Sacred Porn and Emily and the Lusts of Prophettown came about, all of which are transcriptions of action from the "training-video" interspersed mostly with "reactions" (one-handed reactions, if you know what I mean) from fantasy-me. In the course of integrating that material, I developed the idea of Prophettown being a community of consenting BDSM adults, I think mostly because I had framed the fantasy-us story as something potentially-publishable. It turned out to be a very interesting challenge to make everyone eighteen and unrelated, and to make everything they did consensual.

The result was Prophettown as you find it in EXPLORATIONS so far. The narrative is about to return there in what I hope will be an unexpected way, too, now that it's established in the world of fantasy-us that Prophettown probably exists somewhere in their "reality."

In any case, the process of writing the Tales of Prophettown that grew out of the initial idea of the D/s DD training video was interesting, and the process of transforming it into the findings of fantasy-me's research even more so. There was something about the characters and their town that made me want to know more about them. Was Chuck really that awful? Was Barbara a switch, or a top who was pretending to be a sub?

The whole thing was complicated by the fact that Prophettown had started its existence as a non-consensual sort of place, which meant that the characters' motivations had to be changed pretty severely. In the end that provided some nice insights into the meaning and operation of my own BDSM orientation, and especially into the way my fantasies relate on the one hand to the things I play out with Charles and on the other to the things I do in the real world, where rape and exploitation are real things that I fight against with every fiber of my being.