Imagine this!
You are a woman who grew up in a society in which sex is seen as filthy, forbidden, and illegal for girls. You have been taught about your sexual worth and marriage since age 6. You’ve been encouraged and forced to keep your virginity until a man knocks on the door of your father’s house and asks if he can marry you. Before that invisible man is sent to your house, if you lose that precious virginity, you lose your dignity and you’re nothing but a whore! You have an option to accept this title or go secretly sew yourself up by a specially designated surgeon and pretend you’ve never been penetrated! That costs a lot both financially and spiritually!
Now. Let’s say the invisible man is talking to your father. If your father accepts then a transaction happens. Your virginity is sold officially in return for honor and in some cases real money! There and then you will have to have sex with a man who you’ve married by your father’s choice. There… sex is angelic, free, and legal. There and then you can experiment with whatever position possible in the whole sexual history of humankind. You want it or not. I grew up in such a society and everyone around me had the same mentality. As a writer, especially as a woman who writes about taboos, it’s a curse! Because I find it difficult to finally accept to put down words about a story I’ve been dying to tell. Not an autobiography but a transgressive erotic. I’ve written and published short stories and novels that were categorized under transgressive fiction with some sexual elements in them. But writing this new novel is a constant battle me vs a demonic embedded subconscious sense of self-censorship.
I gave up religion a long time ago but if you grow up in a society in which you’ve been brainwashed with theological gibberish from the time of your conception until death and following you even after you would understand what I’m saying. This brings me to my novel. I first like to define what is Transgressive Erotic which I can’t find anywhere on Google or any academic paper. It has never been defined and here I am to coin this term. Transgressive fiction is a genre focusing highly on characters. These characters feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways. The erotic fiction genre is about the sexual aspects of love front and center. Blunt description of very typical awkward sex. Mixing these two genres makes a deeper version of the latter one. The difference between erotic fiction and transgressive erotic is the depth of the story and the development of the characters. Their backstories, who they are, what do they think about, what is their thought process, who they evolve to become. It’s about how they step in self-improvement or self-destruction, sometimes it’s a mix of both. Erotica is focusing highly on sexual tension and romance between two people who are normally a dominant male who is a rich entrepreneur or a CEO and a weak naïve girl who is, generally, a virgin. That’s not what we’re talking about in my novel.
In my novel, we have a woman who is brainwashed just like me. Since childhood. However, unlike me, she was a believer and a type of woman who believe in sin and grew up in a stricter Islamic environment. A woman who carries guilt and self-doubt. A woman who apart from all such beliefs marries a non-Muslim and leaves everything behind. That is her first transgression against who she thought she is. But still having faith in a failed marriage, bad circumstances, and believing in being weak, she falls into the trap of earning easy money for luxury and from there learning gradually about the forbidden fruit of sexual adventure and fetishism. Hence, Transgressive eroticism is not only the rejection of taboos or merely a blunt description of sex and pleasure.
Sure, I will describe the deepest darkest desires as I always do. But it goes way beyond that and completes it. Transgressive erotic is scoffing at, slandering, or savoring every gruesome detail of a shock value in a transgressive art or fiction from a perspective of the sexual adventure of women with will and power. And maybe diving into fetishism, the darkest untouched aspects of it. Here, we don’t talk about little virgin girls who are into older hairy guys who only know the top position. Here we are talking about dark desires, humans with depth, with history, with real needs and flaws. So, transgressive eroticism is characterized by eroticism that destroys the self-contained character as they are in their normal lives. Here mental prohibition and transgression form an ensemble that defines the character’s social life and identity. It forms characters that are not the victims of circumstances as they assume or seem to be, not the clowns they imagine themselves as, but they are the whole circus. They are the whole show!
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