Erotica Cover Watch

The Mile High Club, ed. Rachel Kramer Bussel, pub. Cleis Press

Watched by: Mathilde Madden

Here at Cover Watch we have a simple wish: Men on the covers of erotic books. To keep our dreams simple (and, you know, so damn basic it kind of makes me want to cry) we don’t worry too much about which men.

Oh, sure, there are debates to be had about trashiness. There are sticky questions about using imagery that is clearly primarily for gay men. We don’t have as strict a policy on this as some of our fellow warriors for equality. Man Candies are swiped from gay sites and blogs all the time, but we do understand why it’s important to say, hey, it is not okay to tell straight women that there is no problem because they can get their jollies from gay porn. Of course we can. (Of course we do.) But that doesn’t mean we don’t want our desires acknowledged . It’s not okay to ask straight women to dress up as gay men in order to see man-flesh.

Some people like to talk about what straight women really prefer. Our main position on this is that straight women’s tastes vary as much as straight men’s – and just take a look at a little thing called the internet to see just how wide ranging those tastes can be. Upshot of this – if you’re a straight woman and you see a single image of a sexy guy, chances are, it won’t be the exact image that does it for you. And this can be hugely frustrating in a world where such images are so scarce. But for us that means we cheer for all images of men on erotica book covers – and elsewhere – even if they are not our thing. Our reasoning: there’s a woman somewhere who is being made super happy by Mr Minotaur, Mr Hairy, Mr Elfin, Mr Piercings, etc.

Not that this policy is perfect. Of course some images proliferate unduly, but, for now, we welcome any attempt to get more guy-flesh on the outside of erotic books are well as the insides.

And, we don’t mind if the women want to stay on the covers too. We want equality not the moon on a stick (again, I pause and weep for how tiny and reasonable our request really is). Men pictured with women – yay! Okay, not the covers that features a huge amount of heaving bosom and a man’s hand off in the top corner, but a het couple where both get equal billing, sure. Nice.

Which is why we like this cover and cheer for it. And, god, sometimes, we feel like we are always complaining about Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Cleis covers – she has had some stinkers! So it’s really nice to see this.

So yay and yay again for this cover. And I will, at no point in this essay, mention the phrase ‘He looks like he’s hiding the body!’

Mathilde Madden

Erotica Cover Watch: Temptations, ed. Miranda Forbes, pub. Xcite Books

Dear All,

Having a lovely wank holiday. These men are The weather is seriously fucking hot. Been doing lots of sightseeing. Violet Blue Someone said our argument hotel was very 1970s but we think maybe her sunshades are too strong because as you can see, it’s excitingly fresh and modern around here. We’re loving all the cock …

tails. Luckily for us, they are called names like ‘Three’, ‘Two’ and ‘One’ so we don’t have to struggle with the usual stuff like ‘Screaming Multiple Outrage’ and ‘God Bollocks It’s Another Naked Babe on a Book for Women’!

Our biggest problem is deciding which one we like best! We’ve done lots of taste tests and I think ‘Three’ is my favourite. It reminds me of the many Cowboy Cocktails I’ve sampled. Last night when I asked Mat for her favourite, she couldn’t actually speak! I think she’d had a bit too much!!!

Hope you are all well and aren’t missing us too much!

Lots of love,

Kristina and Mat xxx

***

The Temptations series will be launched in November in the UK, each book costing only £2.99. Xcite say ‘The cover designs break with tradition but reflect a recent Xcite customers poll which revealed that 43% wanted to see a male on the cover, 30% a female and 27% a couple. The Temptations series deliver four mixed-theme erotic stories primarily aimed at female readers which feature a semi-naked man on each cover.’

And why did Xcite initially question the predominance of female models on erotica covers? Because they read our blog and they listened, giving Erotica Cover Watch its first glorious victory earlier in the year! It’s wonderful to see Xcite are continuing to feature hot guys on their covers. I truly love these images! And wonderful, too, to have a publisher who takes note and responds so positively instead of, ah, you know … not.

Erotica Cover Watch: Best of Best Women’s Erotica 2, ed. Violet Blue, pub. Cleis Press

Watched by Kristina Lloyd

Erotica Cover Watch is officially en vacances but clearly I’m a workaholic heading for a heart attack because there we were, Mat and I, sipping pina coladas by the pool, when I was struck by an overwhelming urge to call the office and yell, ‘What is it with all the women’s arses? Seriously, what the fucking fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you do anything right? I left a memo saying: HETEROSEXUAL WOMEN FIND MEN ATTRACTIVE. And what do you give those bitches to look at? More women’s butts! You’re FIRED!’

Best Women’s Erotica is, to quote the publishers ‘a legendary and groundbreaking yearly series, and is the best-selling women’s erotica collection, period. Every year BWE raises the bar for explicit erotica written by and for women.’

OK, now remember that part, ‘by and FOR women.’

Here’s more from the call for submissions: ‘The desired orientation within the main sexual element of the stories is primarily heterosexual.’

You got that? It’s het. So here we have an anthology aimed at women; its stories are primarily heterosexual, meaning its main target audience must be primarily het women too. In case you missed the memo: straight women fancy men. Seriously, they do! So what are you going to put on the cover of this book? An elephant, yes, that’s right! Or … or a car. What about a large pile of phone directories? Excellent! You’re hired. The important thing is, if you want to market erotica to women, choose an image which completely bypasses their desire; try to forget the fact they even have desire. Here’s two we made earlier:

These images are both for BWE 2010. The first image was a result of a regular marketing meeting; on the agenda: ‘another book of het erotica from Cleis. Cover suggestions?’ And everyone shrugged and said, ‘Woman’s arse, the usual.’ A few weeks later, management thought a BWE cover ought to be a bit different so they put a naked women in some trendy shoes on a chair and told her to look at the camera. This is a clever trick to fool people into thinking this represents an empowered woman expressing her sexuality. Cos she’s not just being looked at, she is looking right back. Cool! Equality! Also, add some hip consumer desirables to the pic of the chick and people can’t help thinking it’s a little bit more feminist cos, look, she has agency! She’s been shopping!

Cleis Press have been featured on ECW several times. We’ve written to Cleis’s editors. No reply. Nothing much has changed – although, hang on, the recently released The Mile High Club does include a guy so may be somebody is paying attention. It’s a little too early to tell.

I have a story in the forthcoming BWE 2010 which was then selected from the last five+ years of the series to be included in Best of Best. This was the first time I’d ever subbed a story to Violet Blue so I was thrilled with the double hit. And not so thrilled when I saw the covers. If you’re an author you may know how horrible it feels when work you’re proud of gets packaged in a cover which insults your writing.

Here’s two more of the latest images from Cleis Press, Best Lesbian Erotica and Best Gay Erotica.

Doesn’t that break your heart? Or make you hopping mad? Or both? Those are two gorgeous covers accurately representing the content and the sexualities of the books’ target readers. They feature couples expressing desire, affection, sexiness, lust, love. Kissing! There is some very beautiful kissing going on!

I want kissing too! Why, oh why, can’t BWE incorporate images of men to feature heterosexual couples on their covers? Just picture that image on Best Gay Erotica with a woman below the guy with the extraordinarily lovely arm. Sexy, no? But instead, Cleis Press are selling us yet another book in which a lone woman is objectified on the cover. Does that look like female heterosexual desire to you? No, me neither. Small wonder that last year’s Best Women’s Erotica is usually riding high in Amazon’s Gay and Lesbian charts. It is confusing.

It’s particularly baffling when these covers are coming from a progressive, liberal publishing house which prides itself on championing marginalised groups. It looks as if straight female sexuality is just a tad too radical for Cleis whose het erotica covers are peddling the same old sexist shit, perpetuating the notion that straight female desire is insignificant; that straight women are happy to identify with images of women and to be the ones who are looked at, never the ones who are looking and actively desiring.

Cleis Press describe the BWE series as ‘groundbreaking’. The content may well be but the claim is starting to look increasingly dubious and dated when the ideology underpinning Cleis’s marketing to women comes straight from mainstream culture’s sexism.

Since we started this campaign, the growth in support has been astronomical. We’ve caused a leading UK erotica publisher to rethink its covers; have had articles published in one of the UK’s top newspapers; and have been one of the driving forces behind Filament magazine’s successful bid to print erections for the female consumer. (We also have an exciting top sekrit project in the erotica publishing pipeline – sshh!). Meanwhile, across the pond, Cleis Press are simply looking the other way, acting as if we are not here, as if our voices – ours and yours – don’t count.

But we are here and our voices matter. And we are staying and we are fighting for change.

Pass the pina colada, Mat. Same book, same time next year?

Fleshbot, ed. Lux Alptraum, pub. Gawker Media

Watched by Mathilde Madden

(This is a bit of a departure, but bear with me.)

Recently Cover Watch have been involved in Filament’s erection campaign.* (See our post about it here.)

We have been following the coverage of Filament’s attempt to get it up as it has swept the net. It’s had a lot of support which has been great and very well deserved. I was delighted to see the campaign mentioned on Jezebel - a softly feminist women’s issues type blog which I am a big fan of. Jezebel is run by Gawker media who have a number of blogs that follow a very similar template. Io9 is another Gawker blog I love and there are a whole bunch more. All these blogs collect news from around the web that relate to whatever their particular thing is and run it with commentary. Sometimes, if an item is of interest to more than one Gawker blog the mini write up on the front page of one will link directly to the article on another. Which makes perfect sense. Which is why, when I saw the Filament campaign on Jezebel’s front page the link to read the whole story told me it would take me directly to Fleshbot Gay.

Fleshbot is another Gawker blog that collects news on all things sexy and porny. I don’t read Fleshbot but I knew about it. But, huh? Filament was on Fleshbot Gay?

I did some digging and it turns out that Fleshbot has two filters Straight and Gay. If you go to the home page here and click those tabs you can see how they work. Click Straight and all the guys vanish. Click Gay and all the girls are gone.

Wait. What?

Click Straight to get girls and Gay to get guys?

Hands up if you can spot the sexism.

Which of course explains why Filament – a magazine for straight women – was filed under Gay. All the readers of this blog are assumed to be men. Penises are of interest to which kind of men? Oh, yes. Gay ones.

So, because I am a fearless warrior for equality, I then had this email conversation.

First I emailed Jezebel

To: Jezebel
From: Mathilde Madden
Re: Filament Mag and Fleshbot

I seriously hope this is not the only email you get about this. Yesterday you linked to a piece about Filament magazine’s struggle to be the first UK magazine to show erections in a mag aimed at women. It was covered on fellow Gawker media site Fleshbot. IN THE GAY SECTION!

This is outrageous. Filament magazine (and my own blog Erotica Cover Watch – which has covered a lot of Filament’s campaign) are precisely about the fact that women are never allowed to be the consumers of sexualised imagery. That all ’straight’ imagery is of women and all ‘gay’ imagery is of men. I cannot believe such blatant sexism passed without comment on Jezebel and am seriously considering my position as a regular reader.

Mat

Jezebel passed my complaint to Fleshbot editor Lux Alptraum

To: Mathilde Madden
From: Lux Alptraum
Re: Filament Mag and Fleshbot

Dear Mathilde

Fleshbot.com is a website that covers all sorts of erotica, for all sorts of people. Because we recognize that our readership appreciates the ability to filter out content that’s not to their liking, we offer the option to separate the site into two sections: one that primarily focuses on naked women, and one that primarily focuses on naked men. In the parlance of the larger porn industry, these distinctions are referred to as “straight” and “gay”–though we don’t always agree with that, we’ve adopted that parlance for the ease of our readers. However, it’s worth noting that many people–particularly straight women who look at the site–browse it in its entirety, without the filter.

When I received the request from Filament magazine about their fundraiser, I had to decide where to put it. After some debate, I opted for the gay section, knowing that a) the article would still appear on the front page of Fleshbot.com, and be viewable by any women who wanted to see it and b) gay men, who might be equally interested in providing funding to this noble cause, would be more likely to filter out straight posts, and thus less likely to see the post if I put it there. Frankly, I was merely trying to maximize the post’s audience–which, for the record, was also why I asked to splice it to Jezebel, where I felt it would reach even more people who might be interested in helping out.

That said, the post on Jezebel should have had [Fleshbot]. not [Fleshbot Gay] as the tag at the end–that’s a bug I’ve asked to have fixed.

However: had this not been the train of events that led to the post, one of my gay writers could very well have picked up the story, and decided to write about it themselves–and frankly, I fail to see how someone expressing an interest in helping women to see the kind of erotica they desire could be labeled “sexist.”

I appreciate your concerns, and hope that my explanation helps sort things out. As a woman who’s interested in creating a world where everyone has access to the type of erotic media that titillates them, Filament’s cause is important to me. It was not my intention to offend anyone by publicizing it the way I did, and I’m sorry to know that my actions gave you offense.

Best,
Lux

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that being featured on Fleshbot – a very hight traffic blog – was a great thing for Filament. I really appreciate Lux writing about it and believe that she is committed to featuring material that engages with female desire. Sadly I think having something so basic and nuts and bolts as the filters on the site so explicitly erasing women as potential viewers of erotic material undermines what she’s doing.

Anyway, I wrote back.

To: Lux Alptraum
From: Mathilde Madden
Re: Filament Mag and Fleshbot

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I hope this email will provoke some interesting conversations. I write erotica and am a huge supporter of erotic materials for women. I would love to see Fleshbot embrace women as consumers of erotica. Some women will find their way to sites like yours and be happy to ignore obvious exclusion. But others won’t.

If you don’t agree with the larger porn industry (you are a part of that industry, btw) labeling naked women as ’straight’ and naked men as ‘gay’ why on earth do you reinforce it? Would it be so hard to call your sections something like ‘men’ and ‘women’. Where do you file the lesbian porn? (Don’t answer that). Perhaps straight women use your site without filters it is because you ask them to mindfuckeringly call themselves ‘gay’ in order to see naked men.

Support for Filament aside, what you are doing is sexist as you are erasing women as viewers, whilst no doubt being more than happy for them to be the viewed, by basing your categories only on the orientation of a perceived male viewer. If it’s about erections file it under GAY! If you are truly for everyone perhaps you should reconsider how you present your erotica rather than simply asking Jezebel to hide the problem by changing the tag – maybe it runs a little deeper.

Thanks again for listening. I don’t mean to bug the hell out of you – but I feel very strongly about this subject.

Mat

This is Lux’s reply (last email, promise).

The straight/gay divide long predates me (Fleshbot is almost six years old, I’ve been writing for the site for two years, and have served as an editor less than one). Whatever issues I may have with it, it is not within my power to remove or replace it–that is a decision made at a much higher level than the one that I work at. What is within my power, however, is the ability to promote good content that’s feminist and appeals to women–which I do on a regular basis (much of which is not marked gay: http://fleshbot.com/5034452/you-asked-for-it-hot-straight-men–and-the-women-who-fuck-them).

Frankly, any attempt to filter/divide content would offend someone. If I labeled posts “men” and “women,” I would run into issues with trans and genderqueer performers. I would prefer to eliminate any distinction at all, and just force everyone to wade skim through every post, but that would likely alienate even more of my readership.

Just an aside but I looked at the post mentioned above and it does feature men under the straight section. But every one of them is pictured with a woman and the introduction to the post features a bit of ‘calm down guys, there are women here too’ phrasing along with the charming detail for female viewers that the women need to be in these pictures or how else could we tell these guys were straight. Um, what?

To me it seems clear that the problem here is exactly the same as the one we write about over and over on Cover Watch. Straight Men must be saved from the peen! I don’t know how I missed it but straight men are made of damp tissue paper. So of course they need a special filter, as do gay guys, to keep them safe from sexy images of their non-preferred gender. Women don’t get a filter. They probably don’t ask for one. Hey, we’re still struggling to be allowed to look at a picture of a man who’s pleased to see us. And, sure, women do look at sites like these without any filter, but, really, what choice do they have?

I think it’s interesting that Lux says that the Gay/Straight filters long predate her and are something that are porn industry wide. Because, the thing is, erotica and porn and sexy stuff used to be exclusively for the boys. Stuff like these filters used to make sense – but they don’t anymore. Or, they don’t if sites like Fleshbot want to welcome female viewers.

And it’s the same with erotica book covers.The endless girlie covers used to make sense when only men bought them. But now women are part of the target market (and the authors are often actual women – not men using female pseudonyms), it’s unfair, dated and sexist to keep on marketing as if all readers are men. Especially when you get a parade of cheesecake every year on the cover of Best Women’s Erotica.

Some people only like one gender. I’m one of them. It’s great to be able to filter a site like Fleshbot and get what I want. It’s horrible that to use a site like this I would have to do some kind of reverse engineering insanity. I like men. If I were a man who liked men I’d be gay. Therefore I click gay. Seriously, filters like this tell female viewers they need to imagine their preferences from the point of view of a man to enjoy the site. That’s fucked up.

Really, I do not see why these filters couldn’t be renamed ‘men’ and ‘women’. Because I still can’t figure out what they do with the lesbian porn.

Things like this (and the erotica book cover situation) make me feel like, as a woman, I am allowed through the door of the erotica and porn industry to have a look around and even get turned on, but only because straight men like the idea of me being there and being turned on. Not because anyone cares about me as a human being with desires. Because when acknowledging me as a viewer means making even the tiniest concession that might affect the default male viewer there’s no budging.

~~~

*NEWSFLASH! We have a piece about Filament’s battle in today’s Guardian: check it out! Join in comments!

Erotica Cover Watch: Young Studs, ed. Cecilia Tan, pub. Ravenous Romance

Okay, so we’re in a recession and you can only afford to buy one of these two books. I know, life sucks. But which one will you go for? Think carefully! Money’s tight, remember. And this is a tough call. On the one hand, you’ve got …

Oh, so you all just bought Young Studs and a copy for your friend. I see.

But here’s a thing: there was no need to choose. I fooled ya! MILF Fantasies and Young Studs are the exact same book – well, on the inside at least. Now, this isn’t a publisher trying to trick you into buying the same thing twice; this is a publisher responding to its readers.

Cecilia Tan, editor of the anthology, got in touch with Erotica Cover Watch to tell about this ‘victory for the female gaze’. When MILF Fantasies was first released as an ebook early in 2009, it barely sold. Cecilia was informed it was one of Ravenous Romance’s worst selling anthologies. Then the book was repackaged, the pretty woman on the cover vanished and along came three young dudes baring their rock hard abs – result! Within days, the book shot into RR’s top ten.

Ravenous Romance are primarily an erotic romance publisher. As we know, there’s beefcake aplenty on romance covers because, in catering explicitly to women, the genre doesn’t have to worry about deterring male consumers. But RR are also publishing straight erotica such as Young Studs (contributors include names familiar to anyone who reads smut: Rachel Kramer Bussel, Elizabeth Coldwell, Andrea Dale, Sage Vivant) and, because these are ebooks, again the publisher needn’t fret about passing guys going all weird at the sight of another guy with his kit off. As Cecilia wrote: ‘What [RR] have found is that the ebook audience is so overwhelmingly female that the “normal” rules of erotica publishing (you know the ones, the ones that say a woman has to be on the cover) Do Not Apply.‘

I think this is progress. Sure, we want to see men and couples on covers that exist in spaces other than those reserved for women. We want men to be sexualised in the way women are sexualised. We want het erotica for men and women to be represented by men and women on the covers. It’s called equality. And if ebooks can nudge erotica publishing in that direction, I’m happy.

I’m currently working with Alison Tyler and Pretty Things Press and had my first epublication a couple of weeks ago. Yay me! One of the great joys has been discussing covers with Alison who’s more than happy to experiment with a range of styles. And I can promise you, in anthologies to come, there will be smokin’ hot guys on our e-covers!

What’s particularly interesting in the redesign of Tan’s book is the title change and shift in emphasis from the woman who is fantasising to what she’s fantasising about. Erotica, still lingering in the wake of being a male-aimed genre, frequently focuses on women. It’s preference is not just for women on its covers but also for the female voice; the female revelation and confession; the authentic female experience. Erotica (like porno) often wants evidence of women having a good time and could be accused of prioritising that rather than actually offering them a good time.

It’s well known that lots of women are hot for M/M but in, for example, Violet Blue’s Best Women’s Erotica series, the writers’ call for submissions state:

The desired orientation within the main sexual element of the stories is primarily heterosexual, yet bisexuality and lesbian encounters are also encouraged. The primary focus of sexual activity must be on the female experience; female pleasure is the main element.

MILF Fantasies seems to be following in that tradition as do numerous other erotica books with titles such as Dirty Girls, Kinky Girls, Hot Women’s Erotica, Ultimate Curves etc. Women aren’t just looked at on the covers; they’re looked at in the titles and the text. And what women are looking at (in their heads, in their fantasies) is downplayed or discounted.

As MILF to Young Studs illustrates, the content of a book can stay the same but how it’s marketed and who it’s aimed at can differ greatly. And Ravenous Romance are boldly targeting their erotica at women – and the strategy is clearly successful.

Look what’s riding high in their charts right now: The DILF Anthology.

I mean, no one would dream of designing a book like that to market to straight men, would they?

Kristina
xx

Instant gratification: go here to download Cecilia Tan’s The MILF Anthology Young Studs.

Sex Fantasies by Women for Women, ed. Lisa Sussman, pub. Thorsons

Watched by Mathilde Madden

When Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden hit the shelves in 1973 it was breaking a lot of exciting (if obvious to us in our brave new liberated world) news to the world:

The fact that women masturbated and enjoyed sexual fantasy and the diverse nature of female sexual fantasy.

Nowadays, whilst female sexual fantasy, masturbation and orgasm are firm facts of our sexual landscape (and new frontiers like female ejaculation and G-spot orgasms are being conquered and claimed), volumes of female sexual fantasy crowd the shelves.

My Secret Garden has begat a hundred daughters. What are they here for? Who are they here for?

Surely they are aimed at women. I mean, could anything, any subject, be more about female desire than female sexual fantasy?

But take a look at this cover here. I don’t feel like this book is aimed at me.

Strange. I dug out a couple more.

Who are these books for? Are female sexual fantasies now like so much once authentic expressions of female desire now just another feminised sex product aimed at men?

Sometimes it seems like every time another stride is taken towards the liberation and acceptance of female desire, it gets gobbled up and made part of the male desire servicing machine as a pure commodity. These book covers make it look like in thirty five years female sex fantasy has transformed from a groundbreaking admission of women having sexual desire too into Hey guys, come look at these horny bitches. Or is that just me?

In fact this taps right into the issues we raised in an earlier post  about the idea of books of sexual ‘confessions’ and the reasons why these books are always positioned as confessions made by women (and usually to men). Isn’t this endless commoditisation of female desire into a product for male consumption insulting and also really out of place in an industry that presents itself as egalitarian, welcoming of all kinds of sexual desire? (Which I think is the image erotica publishing likes to present.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, male fantasies seem to be far less of a thing. Maybe men don’t want to read other men’s fantasies. Scary. I found this ancient looking tome. I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised about the cover. And I also found this (below left), which is a big favourite with us at Cover Watch, for the title alone.

In other book cover news, friend of Cover Watch, Alison Tyler, has a great post about the lack of man candy covers in her own prolific library. And she invites writers to pen some erotica inspired by images of men. I also hear the wonderful Charlotte Stein has just such a story in Black Lace’s Sexy Little Numbers so it’s well worth pre-ordering a copy of that if you haven’t yet.

And finally, Xcite books are running a poll about what readers want to see on book covers. You know we want you to go vote (bottom left).