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.
