I guess we all, at some point in our lives, have come across an erotic fiction. Books with sizzling sex scenes and sexy gorgeous characters, making our blood, run faster through our veins. At times so realistic, we might have felt as if we were the actual characters being obsessed with the sexual acts.
We take our erotica books with us on the plane, the train, on our daily walk or on the bus to work, with its cover hidden under a newspaper, right behind the brown paper bag of our morning croissant and Starbucks coffee cup. As readers of such books, we are cautious of society’s negative judgement about us, and as writers, we sometimes use pseudonyms to escape such judgments.
A fan of erotic novels, myself, I, like many others, have always been curious about women behind the books. The writers, the creators of my favorite characters. Are they conservative or liberal in real life? Do they dress differently? How do they want to be perceived? What do they look like? Would I see a Lady Gaga at my door if I invited one of them over, or would a classy princess Diana come to my house? Or would she be an ordinary everyday woman next door, just like you and me, taking long walks and soaking in hot tub, after a long day’s work?
An artist and professional Photographer from London, David Woolfall, has taken his curiosity and turned it into his next photography project called: Kinky Books: Female Erotica Writers. “Easy to imagine they would be foxy, leather-clad mistresses, whip in one hand, the other hand the keyboard. I knew the reality would be very different. I wanted to see behind their pseudonyms and secret lives.” Says Woolfall, about what got him motivated to start the project.
Kay Jaybee, one of the featured women in Woolfall’s project, in her interview with the Independent, talks about how she was ” wary of being assumed to be a slut. Sadly, many people can’t separate the art from the subject matter-but if I wrote murder mysteries, no one would assume I went around shooting people. ” With his project, David Woolfall, has been able, to candidly, bring out the real ordinary, everyday women, behind the erotically charged books, living everyday lives.
They will go on writing, and we will go on reading, and living through the passionate sexual moments, created in a cafe, under a pseudonym, by a woman who loves nothing more, than to sit in her favorite coffee shop, and write in her notebook, the wildest, most erotic sexual scenes for her next novel. And who knows, maybe one day she’ll be sitting next to us in a cafe, at the church or on the bus to work…
The Secret Lives of Erotica Writers – By Jordan G. Teicher
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2013/08
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