Control Tower

Even classic stories need a reboot, and erotic BDSM literature is no exception. Hence, my spin on some golden-oldie kink novels.

Story of O, by Pauline Réage, 1954: A woman named O is taken by her lover to a mysterious house, where she begins her exploration of erotic submission and masochism. Ultimately, she plunges into a life of total consensual slavery. Once you get used to the formal French style, it’s not a bad porn read. But people who don’t understand the concept of “fiction” get ahold of this book and send me e-mails imploring me to whisk them away from their humdrum existence, train them in the submissive arts, and sell them to a secret European society of slavery, where they will live in an endless erotic bacchanalia in a French château. Thus, my retelling of this tale will be titled Story of M, about the sexy, silver-haired, ball-busting female director of an intelligence agency who introduces rookie agents to the pleasures of spanking when they don’t fill out their time sheets and expense reports correctly. Then everyone goes home at the end of the day.

Nine and a Half Weeks, by Elizabeth McNeill, 1978: The story of a beautiful, unsatisfied, and rather dim woman who meets a kinky guy, dates him for two months, realizes he’s emotionally unavailable—and seriously obsessive-compulsive about how he hangs his suits in the closet—and dumps him. Only a reader of Cosmopolitan magazine could find this story deep. My version? Nine and a Half Tweets—the tale of a woman who has a brief online flirtation with a man she knows only as RealMaster4You. Their 140-character rendezvous are steamy, but she abandons the affair midsentence when she finally realizes his icon picture is not him, but the young Mickey Rourke.

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice (under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure), 1983: Another total sex slavery story, this enjoyable novel takes place in a medieval-style fantasy world where everybody is beautiful, bisexual, and extremely horny. Here, young princes and princesses are sent to the castle of a powerful ruler as sexual tribute. They are slaves to everyone, right down to the village peasants. They resist at first, but they soon come to enjoy it. My fantasy reboot would update the setting to a different kingdom, small in size but powerful, called Washingtonia. In my version, the duly elected slaves-in-training would indeed get the shit smacked out of them if they were not perfectly obedient to the king and queen, who would look a lot like Jon Stewart and Oprah. The main character would be an uncouth female slave from a barbarian tribe, with bad manners and a loud mouth. She would be frequently and savagely disciplined. In the end, she would come to understand that she had indeed been arrogant and ignorant, and she would return, humbled, to her native land. Possible title? The Claiming of Mama Grizzly.