"I would be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on abstraction! " oh boy where do i even start. it's like this this is all my own theory, nothing i've read up or studied from anyone else. so for all i know there's already a coherent theory on this stuff and i'm reinventing it. but the way i see it, as it pertains to erotic fiction, the levels of abstraction are as follows: you. literally, You. the girl reading this. you walked into the bdsm room in real life and asked to be strapped to the wall and spanked like a bad girl. you are engaging in kink. you are not literally a bad girl. the kayfabe version of yourself that inhabits the scene. she walked into the bdsm room and did not ask to be strapped to the wall and spanked like a bad girl. she is not engaging in kink. she was a bad girl. the character in the scene you're imagining. she was dragged into the dungeon and did not ask to be strapped to the wall and spanked. she is not engaging in kink. she is being punished, and may or may not have been a bad girl depending on how you play the scene. a fictional character you're reading about who walked into a bdsm room and asked to be strapped to the wall and spanked like a bad girl. she is* engaging in kink. unless the author tells us so, she is not literally a bad girl. the kayfabe version of the character in the fiction who inhabits the scene. she is not engaging in kink. the non-kink character is engaging in kink. again whether she is a bad girl depends upon the author's decision. the character the character in the fiction is imagining, who was dragged into the dungeon and did not ask to be strapped to the wall. she is not engaging in kink. you get the point.
*for whatever amount of 'is' you can apply to something fictional. you can rearrange the levels, but as you can see it gets recursive once you get past the first three. to lay it out with a clear example, the final level of abstraction is a fictional work about a fictional couple who are themselves imagining they're in a fictional dungeon. or worse, a fictional couple reading about another fictional couple. and this is just talking about abstraction between You and an Idea. it gets even more complicated when you get into ideas of consent and images, which is its own post really. when it comes to abstraction, my work is in that third level of abstraction. fiction about people Literally in the situation around which a kink is centered, who are not actively engaging in kink. vester is not engaging in a spanking fetish. chique is not engaging in an exhibitionism fetish. they're just doing things that, to us, represent kink, but are not literal depictions. so that's why vester isn't allowed to enjoy being spanked. it puts him that little bit further away from You.
a short essay on abstraction in erotic fiction
(you can also read it on tumblr
www.tumblr.com/taylor-titmo...)
