Of Writing, Sex Tapes and Elections

 Twitter was atwitter with this news: 400 s*xtapes of an Equatorial Guinea business man released

 Every man on there was quite admiring of Baltasar and his ability to sleep with everyone from his brother's wife to the president's sister. (Do you notice how the women are referenced by whatever man they're adjacent to?)

Anyways it got me thinking about sex tapes and sex in general. 

I write romance for a living and so, I know how boring it can be...to write about. You have the same things happening. Lots of canting hips, moaning, groaning, the occasional kissing, flesh slapping together...by the third book you've seen it all.

As a writer, I know that what jazzes up the sex scene is the emotion behind it. Is it angry sex? They're scratching and biting, he's telling her how he wants to split her in two, she's digging her nails into his shoulders while thinking about him going so deep inside of her that she can taste him in her mouth...Is it tender sex? Do they cry as the hold each other, softly, warmly, gently. Their kisses painful in intensity, their hearts, beating in sync...

You get my drift right?

But watching a sex tape  has none of that. It's just sitting there watching a man stick his dick continuously into a woman. They might not even be that attractive to you. If you're the man or woman in question, you were there, why do you need to watch the playback?

So, my question is, what is the point of a sex tape? 

Is it like when an athlete records themselves at work so they can go home, re-watch and see what they did wrong? Or is it like a memory you get to relive? Your idea of home videos or such.

Also, if this guy and his various sex mates were not ready for the tapes to be made public - so much so that one of the women killed herself - why consent to be taped in the first place? This man was a government official, slept with the wives, sisters, daughters and girlfriends of basically his whole family and fellow government officials. 

And put it on tape. 

Why?

What was the reason?

I sometimes wonder if people subconsciously wish to embarrass themselves because that's the only thing that makes sense.

Anyway, y'all be crazy. 

It's difficult to write fiction these days because competing with reality is just hard.

In other news, Presidential election this week in the US. These last four years have been eye opening on who people really are and these last two years have been especially illuminating about who is valued and who is not by imperialism.

It started with Ukraine. No actually it started with the politicizing of COVID and the proliferation of misinformation. People who I assumed knew how to reason like adults turned out to be...disappointing. Then the war in Ukraine happened and Africans fleeing that same war were STILL discriminated against. We were forced to fund raise to get them out and even then, a simple thing like getting on a train or across a border was harder for Africans than the Caucasians. 

It boggled my mind that even in extreme duress, white people always have time and space for racism. But not as much as it boggles my mind today that there are African supporters of Imperialism. We truly are colonized. 

Anyway, Ukraine happened and they were afforded all and any kind of help available from Westerners. Then October 7th 2023 happened and Palestine was back in the news - as the villains of course. Even when Israeli lies were debunked, Palestinians remained the villains. Even when Palestinian babies died, the babies were blamed for providing 'human shields' for khhhamas. 

Even the darkest cloud has a silver lining. The eyes of the world were opened to what constitutes a "terrorist". 

American propaganda came crashing down.

So, as people go into voting for the next US president, for me, as the grass underneath which elephants are fighting, I don't care which elephant wins, we'll still continue to be crushed. 

Whoever wins, I only know one thing: Ruto Must Go.

Annemarie lives in Nairobi Kenya. Find out more on her work here. And visit her author page here.

NC-17

How do you find books? Personally once +Stephen King's Dark Tower Series let me down and +Anne Rice dashed my hopes that she'd write a good book again where Louis and Lestat resolve their issues finally and live happily ever after...well; I just usually read the first three lines and see if the book will snag me and make me want to read more. Three lines. It's not much to go on but it works for me. It's how I found +Maria Doria Russell's Children of God, and then The Sparrow. I read them backwards because the Sparrow is the first book but hey...excellent pieces of work. Made me want to become a jesuit.

And now, in this time of grief when I'm grappling with how God works, it's also a source of great comfort. If Emilio Sandoz could finally find some answers, well maybe so will I. And if I don't, well, there's always someone to blame.
It's the first anniversary of my father's death in two months. I don't know where the time went.I haven't even really started grieving yet. Still very much dealing with anger. The advantage of being angry I find, is that one cannot hold anger and sadness in one's breast. It's one or the other. And it's so much easier to sleep at night with anger as your bed mate. Sadness blows.
This wasn't meant to be a maudlin post.

Promise.
I was actually going to tell you about this girl I met online. She's English, lives in England; and we got to talking because of our mutual +Supernatural obsession. She was very intelligent, articulate and mature and I figured she was some late twenties chick with minimal responsibilities judging by the fact that I could find her online any time my day or night. Well anyway, quite by accident I discovered she was actually sixteen....
Lucky for her I'm not some fat, sleazy paedo looking for sex online.
I'm sure she'd have stopped talking to me if I was.
I hope.

So I tell my (then) fifteen year old son that I'm friends with this sixteen year old and would he like an introduction. He turned me down. Quite unequivocally. I don't know why. Maybe coz she was my friend. Or her blog was a bit too intelligent for him. I don't know.
So anyway, she writes fanfic.
And I'm reading this fanfic and it's tagged NC-17..
So by rights, the writer of the fanfic is not old enough to even read the fanfic.
And it was explicit.
And hot.
And explored aspects of BDSM that seventeen year olds really shouldn't know about.
At least, that's what I tell myself.
Of course this chick is a year older than my son.
So probably he has intricate knowledge of sex acts I haven't even heard about too.
It's very stressful for a mother to think such things about her child.
I'd rather stick this in the 'ain't broke' column and 'don't go looking for trouble' philosophy.
Of course it made me think about all the other fanfic out there.
And the average age of writers.
Yeah I remember making up "love stories" in my head when I was young. They were also loosely based on television shows; but most TV shows I saw at the time tended to show kissing which gently faded to black as the couple slid down away from the camera. It didn't give too much away in terms of What Really Happens.  but now teenagers are writing gay sex and BDSM and alpha/omega/beta dynamics and hooker!fic...and the more explicit and the more humiliating, the better.

I don't know what to think about all this.
When I was writing Child of Destiny, my editor was aghast at the amount of sex I was writing about. But it's soo tame compared to what I've seen on live journal. I feel I should be worried but I don't know about what. Do "young people" have too much knowledge or do I have too little?
Most importantly what the fuck happened to sex being about connection? communion? love?