My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up

From a review of Stephen Elliott’s My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up:

At the same time that he’s stripping away the romance, Elliott questions the opposite tendency in the BDSM community to go so far in pursuit of normalcy and acceptance that alternative sexuality becomes a kind of “Up With Kinky People” self-parody.

“It’s always been hard for me to imagine that there are others out there,” he writes, “healthy couples who tie each other up and beat each other and then go to the movies or something… You can judge by the size of the BDSM section on the porn store walls and all the videos and books they carry in the regular bookstores. All of those books seem to have the same message, that it’s OK. I despise that message.”

I’m not unsympathetic but I do like for my girlfriend to tie me up and beat me and, yeah, we do cuddle and watch movies.

Stephen Elliott’s story of o(uch)

Added later:

The theme of this book is the eroticization of trauma. The male protagonist in each story reflects on experiences of violence, rape and abandonment. They are the same narrator, a blend of Elliott’s real and fictional selves. We are given considerable detail of what I take to be Elliott’s early life: beatings from his father, the death of his mother, and a succession of rapes and abuse in various group homes. The stories are linked, with recurring characters and recollections. The result is a series of individual pieces that lies somewhere between a collection of short stories and a short novel.

My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up