I am really
pleased and proud of my latest novella, “Rich Bitch, Prison Bitch.”
I hope readers will feel the same way about it.
It’s full-on
taboo erotica this time. Rape is the taboo that is being violated
here, and it’s being thoroughly violated indeed. There’s M/f
rape. There’s F/f rape. And there’s FFFFFFF/f rape. At no point
does consensuality raise its ugly head.
But it’s not
simple porn, of course. It’s another shot at the effects capitalism
has on human beings, particularly in its worst manifestation, the
American prison system. I use the form of a standard erotica trope:
the fall from grace. My protagonist, Kim Halstead is beautiful young
woman from a family worth millions. She comes from “good New
England stock,” i.e., her parents are well-to-do Protestants who’ve
been around since the earliest days of the New England colonies.
In college
(University of Connecticut, majoring in Finance) she joins a sorority
filled with wealthy elite women like herself and mocks the ‘losers’
who aren’t part of her sorority. She dates wealthy elite frat bros
and has a generally wonderful time of it.
When she graduates
from college, she gets a job offer from a prestigious Wall Street
firm, Bluestone Investment Group (aka BIG money) and happily
continues dating a lot of wealthy, handsome men in search of the one
with the right moves and the right money.
But there’s a
snake in the verdant garden that is Kim’s life, and what makes her
vulnerable to it is the values she has unknowingly picked up from her
elite family and friends. For her the world is made up of winners and
losers, and most are losers, and Kim’s goal in life is to continue
to be a winner. And having lots of money is a key to being a winner,
and it doesn’t really matter how you get it.
And when you are
an elite winner, you’re practically invulnerable, no bad
consequences will happen to you, no matter what you do.
All this is subtly
ingrained in Kim’s worldview, she isn’t even aware of it, and
would probably renounce such views if they were stated so baldly to
her.
Thus when she is
accused of defrauding her clients via a pump-and-dump scheme (which
she is definitely doing, but so is everyone at her bank) she’s
totally unprepared when she winds up convicted and imprisoned.
The media fall all
over themselves to find salacious pictures of the beautiful blond
banker with the very curvy body during the trial, and thanks to Kim’s
frequent clubbing and beach partying, there are plenty to find
online.
But when she goes
to prison, she discovers that the beauty that made her golden path
through life even more golden, now makes her a target for prison
rapists. She’s raped by guards, other prisoners, prison gangs and
always while tied up and often while gagged, sometimes while hooded.
She’s raped inside her cell and outside her cell. She is brutalized
until she fears for her very life, and as a result she becomes the
lowest of the low in prison, everyone’s sex toy, a prison bitch.
Never a fighter,
more of a lover, she becomes prey in prison, where you’re either a
predator or prey and the predators are expert at sniffing out prey.
The guards in
prison are the worst predators. They’ve built a hidden playroom
where they can rape the inmates in comfort and privacy with plenty of
toys.
Now I tried to
keep this story within the bounds of what’s reasonable. But I did
want to provide the rape fantasies readers enjoy, and I know they
like them hardcore. I had thought this might requires me to greatly
stretch the limits of the prison genre, surely this sort of thing
never happens.
But
noooooooo… it happens a lot. Not just the sexual abuse of prisoners
which is rampant and happens at the hands of guards more often than
other inmates.
Here’s
a Wikipedia summary on the topic. I did not have to go outside
the bounds of the real world at all here, unfortunately.
Even the sexual
playroom, while there are no known equivalents in the prison system,
does have a non-sexual equivalent in the
secret luxury lounge that prison staff built at Riker’s Island.
If such a lounge
had been built at a place like FCI Dublin federal women’s prison in
California, where because of the rampant sexual abuse, inmates and
staff had named it “The
Rape Club,” I think there would have been an exact equivalent.
I personally would
be a LOT happier my story were a LOT more fictional. Like, dinosaurs
chasing cavemen around fictional. Something that never happens in
real life. But no, our crap-ass excuse for prison system has made my
story all too realistic.
The crime aspects
of my story are not all that fictional, either. There are a LOT of
parallels between what happened to Martha Stewart amid the Wall
Street insider trading scandal and what happens to Kim. It’s not
exactly the same, but if I wanted to describe my story as “ripped
from the headlines!” for a promo piece, I could do it with a clear
conscience.
The “fixers”
in my story who get nefarious things done for the wealthy and
powerful, whether they’re wealthy oligarchs or political bigwigs,
are kind of made up, but not really. Fixers are a fairly common
phenomenon in politics, but they tend to operate mostly in the realm
of legally gray spaces, doing things like conducting oppo research
via sleazy means and initiating sleazy campaigns against political
opponents, like Karl Rove, who’s probably the prime example.
And whoever killed
Jeffrey Epstein was undoubtedly given the assignment by a more
illegal sort of fixer, the sort that shows up in my story.
I also
experimented with a different approach to the narrative in my story.
In most of my stories the narrative is simple and straightforward,
with the timeline being a simple unbroken arrow. In this story we
start about two thirds into the story with a prolonged lesbian rape
scene that’s punctuated by flashbacks to her earlier life that help
us learn who she is and how she wound up in prison. The result is a
sort of parallel progression in the story, with the nonstop raping of
Kim by people and groups of people, occurring alongside our discovery
of Kim’s backstory. The idea is that readers are never far from a
rape scene as they read.
Otherwise, the
story would have long sections of non-rape content early on with the
rape content mostly in the last half of the story.
I think the
fractured storyline worked out very well, but then, I’m the author
so I may have a wee bit of bias. See what you think for yourself.