Punchinello’s Inspiration

by: Punchinello, May/17/05

It's interesting to me (and, hopefully, to you) to think about how my taste in sex fantasies have changed over the 20-plus years that I've had them.

When I first began writing sex stories, at about the age of 17, I wrote mostly about teenage girl-girl encounters of the most innocent sort. Originally, these even used the names of girls I knew at school, allowing me to fantasize about about them in detail in a way that I could revisit again and again. I still can, in fact, since, not only have I kept those stories, I've published most of them on Pulp Erotica, altho I've changed them significantly (including the names—sorry, girls).

Discovery Beach, Driven to Distraction, and Mandy Wants Candy are some of my very earliest stories, altho they've been tweaked to make them more at home on Pulp Erotica. I was into fantasy and sci fi and wrote stories in those genres, but never as porn.

As I got a little older, I became more interested in erotic stories from reading Penthouse's Forum. I liked Forum and Penthouse Letters because they described sex itself, whereas the pictorials in Playboy and Penthouse (at the time) merely showed naked women. I didn't care for the group sex and occasional gay encounter, but the stories of lesbian encounters and discipline were very exciting.

All Kinds of Trouble is based directly on a Penthouse Letters lesbian-discipline story from that period and even includes an element of incest (altho not technically).

At about the same time, I began to buy the erotic books I could find in mainstream bookstores. Oddly, these were pretty much limited to Victorian (or Victorian-style) erotica with lots of strap- and cane-based discipline, which I had little interest in. I was turned on by the lesbian and even incest elements of the discipline, tho, and eventually bought several books, but they were never quite what I was looking for.

The Performance, while it doesn't have an element of discipline, is a story from that time, inspired by Victorian erotica. War Prize was my first real attempt at incest, altho still not technically.

During college, I took more inspiration from movies and did my own X-rated versions of the R-rated Black Widow as the rather innocent Kiss of Life. Oddly, while I eliminated the noir murder plot in my translation of Black Widow, I added one for Passion in the Rue de Lune, which was inspired by sexy vampire flick The Hunger.

I also wrote sex stories that branched out into pulp fantasy. The Lost Maiden's Ring was an eroticization of the folktales I studied in class, and The Slave Girl and Her Mistress did the same for classical poetry. But these were fleeting flights of fancy.

After college, I got (back) into sci fi and fantasy and then onto the Internet where found that I had a taste for bondage that I'd never known before. That sort of thing wasn't readily available before, and I collected a lot of it. I wrote my own X-rated Bound as Bound Together. It didn't really last long, tho, and only after starting Pulp Erotica did I revisit the bondage kink.

Instead, I got interested in classic movies, especially noir, and was turned on by how racy some of them could be. In particular, The Big Sleep featured Humphrey Bogart getting hit on by several women, including both daughters of his client, a bookstore clerk, and a lady cabbie. And I've already written about how kinky Hitchcock could be.

A Song for the Liar was first as a kind of generic private eye story, and later The Big Bang and The Jumper were based more closely on The Big Sleep and Vertigo respectively.

More stories were based on my fantasies before I started Pulp Erotica, which focused my efforts more tightly on pulp and exploitation. The Sweet Life, Deirde's Strange Desires, and Sisters of Mercy were all written for my own entertainment before Pulp Erotica was a twinkle in my eye, altho they were all goosed to make them more pulpy (Sisters of Mercy in particular—the whole evil nun ending came much later).

It was at this time that I got interested not just in noir movies but in pulp fiction and pulp art from the 30s and 40s, that steamy mix of sex and violence that makes for fantasies that are deliciously dirty and shameful. In this era of anything-goes sexuality, where homosexuality and light bondage and discipline are accepted forms of entertainment in mainstream movies (think Basic Instinct), it's fun to look back to an earlier time and find eroticism that still hasn't become acceptable. If anything, rape fantasies, teen tramps, and incest have become arguably more taboo since the pulp era. They've left the magazine racks and been relegated to the back rooms of video stores... and Internet websites.

My first real attempt at pulp adventure was The Virgin Sacrifice, which kicked off Pulp Erotica. Since then, I've explored more of my fantasies of bondage, incest, rape, gang rape, pregnancy, exhibitionism, snuff, and other kinky kicks.

Oddly, my interest in pulp may actually have been hidden beneath the surface since I was a kid. I recall quite distinctly a couple of occasions in the early 80s when I noticed true-crime magazines left out on the coffee table at a friend's house when I was about 13. I remember leafing thru the pages and seeing the lurid images of crime scenes. But the topper was always the cover, a recreation of the prelude to some rape and probable murder with a beautiful girl getting her blouse torn open by some skank with a knife. What intrigues me to this day is that the magazines belonged to my friend's mother, suggesting that she might have had more than a Lifetime TV-movie interest in female victimization herself....

I've been surprised at my taste for rape, teen, and incest stories, fetishes I never really had until recently. I've never been turned on by pre-teen sex stories or real brutality, and I'm not the kind of guy to act on any violent or illegal fantasies. I've explained before that Americans fantasize about a lot of things (and romanticize them in the movies) that are dangerous, illegal, and hurtful in real life, like jewel heists, vigilante justice, high-speed car chases, and casual sex.

Pulp Erotica doesn't suggest that rape, incest, and teenage sex—or jewel heists and car chases—are acceptable. It celebrates the fact that they're not. But fantasizing about taboo subjects is normal... if naughty.

So, for now, go spank yourself, you naughty little thing.

Punch Editor-in-chief

All Pulp Erotica Editorials:

On Forced Entry (Sep/17/03)

One Year and Counting (Oct/18/03)

Hitch's Cock (Dec/13/03)

Too Helpful (Feb/06/05)

Year Two in Review (Mar/01/05)

Punchinello's Inspiration (May/17/05)

Year Three: Holy Shit Time Flies (Jan/04/06)

Noir and Pulp (May/07/06)

Also check out How to Write Pulp Erotica.