Five Questions With Erotica Editor Rachel Kramer Bussel

You write a blog, Lusty Lady, in which you recently wrote an entry lamenting the constant comparisons between sex columnists and Carrie Bradshaw. What do you dislike about the Carrie Bradshaw stereotype? Do you think that sex writers will be able to move beyond that comparison?
I think it's this very isolating, singular idea of what a writer, and especially a sex writer, can be. I say this as a fan of Sex and the City…as a TV show, not a way of life. I think all those old ideas
about writers being solitary, lonely, ornery creatures in a way get heightened when you're a sex columnist. You're also supposed to be incredibly slutty and want to sleep with every reader who so desires but it can easily become so focused on a given writer's persona or personality (and this is especially true when it comes to sex blogging) that we forget about the fact that we're part of a community, at least, I certainly am.

I come from a very specific world that taught me so much about sex, both how to do it and how to think about it. I read people like Susie Bright (and still do), Lisa Palac, Sallie Tisdale, Carol Queen, and I consider myself part of a group of sex writers in New York and across the country who understand the various travails we go through and support each other. Of course I think for myself but I've learned so much from reading other people's takes on sex as well. I'm a big fan of the columns of Tristan Taormino's Pucker Up column, Ashlea Halpern's Paper Doll column in the Philadelphia City Paper, Violet Blue's Open Source Sex at SFGate.com, and Judy McGuire's Dategirl column in Seattle Weekly, for a few examples.

I'm also ambitious and of course want to succeed, but I think throwing the Carrie Bradshaw label around not only implies that women are just interested in shoes, sex and shopping, but it also implies that we're so out for ourselves, both sexually and when it comes to writing, that we don't recognize our solidarity with others. I think a lot of sex writers are looking to their fellow writers for support and for ways to work together to advance ourselves rather than trying to be the next Carrie (or Candace).

Tell us a bit about your latest book, Caught Looking. As a self-described "confirmed voyeur," did you learn anything from the stories written in an exhibitionist perspective?
Caught Looking: Erotic Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists is a book I co-edited with the wonderful Alison Tyler. We'd both come up with very similar ideas so our publisher, Cleis Press, asked if we'd like to co-edit the book and it was a fabulous experience, so much so that we're working on a sequel. All the stories have a major voyeuristic and/or exhibitionistic element to them. My personal favorite is Stan Kent's "My Finest Hour," which takes its title from a Blondie song and is just so passionate, you can tell he truly is a voyeur and when he reads it aloud he'll point to his girlfriend as his inspiration.

I wrote in my introduction that I'm much more of a voyeur than an exhibitionist, but of course I'm a writer and blogger so I'm an exhibitionist in that sense. I like having my photo taken, I'll admit to being a bit of a media whore but when it comes to actual sex, I get squeamish when people are even looking at me making out in public places. I have to block out the fact that I'm around other people to even enjoy it. I'm not against PDA for other people but I always feel self-conscious and want to go somewhere private. What I learned in working on the book is how much the fetish is about the interplay between the voyeur and exhibitionist; one can't get off without the other and reading about people who complement each other in that way, who want to show off for someone who really wants to watch them, is what I find fascinating.

For the sequel I'm writing a story in a very interesting way, taking something that actually happened to me but telling it from the point of view of the other person, so it's him watching me, told in the first person, and it's been a really trippy mindfuck to imagine what he was seeing and thinking and feeling, and I'll probably show it to this person after I'm done but for now it's a fun exercise to explore and I think will hopefully make for a very hot story.

You were recently replaced as the sex columnist for The Village Voice, a move which media outlets like Gawker have commented on. Do you think you'll want to write a print sex column again? What's next on your plate?
I would love to have another platform, whether print or online, to write about sex in a broad way. I loved the freedom I had at the Voice to write about a vast array of topics, from my own adventure
with masturbation guru Betty Dodson's much-younger boyfriend followed up with an interview with her) to praising blowjobs to explorations of the sex lives of comedians, defending a topless USC professor, rape fantasies, boobiesexuals, sexy knitting, who should pay for dates, penis size and race, reproductive freedom, the Steinbuch v. Cutler case (my very favorite column, "Spanking Jessica Cutler"), sex and feminism, and more.

I think sex permeates so many aspects of our lives that there are endless ways to expound upon it. It's really too simplistic to just say "Sex sells." What sex? Whose sex? What does "sex" mean to people anyway? We're so much more complex than that and nobody's sexuality can be easily reduced to a soundbite. I think when we hear "Sex sells," we mean a certain kind of very slick, commercialized, overhyped sex, not necessarily the kind of sex that people are having (or not having) in their homes. We underestimate men's and women's erotic power when we reduce ourselves to stereotypes like, oh, "Men want sex and women want love" or "Men are into blondes" and "Women want rich guys." I like to look at the people who subvert the stereotypes, who deliberately fuck with them and challenge them and find their own paths to sexual fulfillment, which don't always look like what's marketed to us. So no matter what, I won't be shutting up about sex.

I'm not necessarily wedded to print or online, though I am partial to the latter. In fact, I would often forget to pick up paper copies of the Voice because I read almost everything online, and my column would come out several days earlier online than in print. I like the immediacy of online publishing because I'm a very impatient person. For now I'll be blogging and hopefully will find homes for some of the columns I'd been planning to write, such as ones about accent fetishes, sex with celebrities (Elvis! Dave Gahan!), cuddling and sex, sex addiction, former dykes, and more. I'll get to them all eventually, somehow or other.

So I'm talking to a few people about doing something new and pitching freelance articles on various topics. I've also just become the new Books Editor at Penthouse where I'll be editing and writing books coverage (including interviewing Dana Vachon [aka blogger D-Nasty] about his first novel Mergers and Acquisitions for our April issue). I also have a contract with Bantam, a division of Random House, for two novels. The first of which, Everything But…, about a virgin college grad's sexual coming of age once she arrives in wicked, alluring New York City, is due in May and will be coming out next summer and the second, Eye Candy, is about a woman who runs a male modeling agency and will be out in 2009. So I'm plenty busy even without the Voice but am hoping to land a new gig soon.

People always used to ask me if I had trouble coming up with column ideas, and if anything, I had too many ideas and not enough space to run them! The ideas just come to me from conversations I have with people, like one the other day about a sugarglider (a small possum) a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader had as a pet. It nestled between her breasts while she was having sex with my friend and he looked down and saw it there and freaked out, said he had to go to the bathroom, left the room and never saw her again! That's the kind of topic -- do pets and sex mix?? -- that I'll always find fascinating.

Your blog Cupcakes Take the Cake chronicles your obsession with cupcakes. Perhaps in lieu of sex writing, you could become the next Nigella Lawson?
I don't think I could ever be anywhere close to Nigella because . . . I can't cook or bake. Thankfully, I run the blog with two friends and Allison is our resident baker. I'm just a cupcake nerd and I love to look at photos of them and interview people about them. It's amazing how much I now know about cupcakes, like where you can get them in various cities like Albuquerque (Cake Fetish), Atlanta (Sweet Pockets), and Portland (Saint Cupcake). Sorry, Philly, I'm not an expert on your cupcakes but we did link to a piece in the Inquirer in 2005 that's probably outdated by now. We are, however, working on a book proposal about cupcakes which will have lots of original recipes and truly mouth-watering photos. What I've always found amusing is that the cupcake blog gets tons more traffic than my Lusty Lady blog. Maybe that phrase should be "Cupcakes Sell" instead of "Sex Sells."

Photo credit: Anya Garrett