Interview with the Author
What gave you the idea for The Nude Detective?
I drafted a story twelve years ago about a rich private detective in Vancouver. This was when personal use drones were just showing potential to be commercially viable and I thought they would be a cool slant to differentiate my story. Back then, there was a girlfriend who was a VPD officer. The PI also had the same “nudity” urge resulting from those same events on the island in his youth, that you see in the book today. In that early draft, neither of the characters had an overtly kinky side, and there was no story about BDSM. That came ten years later, when I decided to get serious about finishing the book. Drones, while not yet passé, are common, and I wanted to add in something else as a differentiator.
Is your new differentiator BDSM sex?
Yes and no. I want the story to stand on its own merits, and although there are a handful of short “kinky sex scenes,” The Nude Detective is far from a hot and steamy erotica novel. I had recently completed some research which didn’t start out to be about BDSM, but it led to a history of sexuality – and how sex influenced history - going back over 1000 years. I found it fascinating and thought it could be a compelling sub-theme (no pun intended). In particular, the emergence of the internet in the last 20 years has, in a very short time, provided data which suggests what we have thought about sex for the last 200 years could be quite wrong.
This new information led me to look at the psychology of traditionally highly-stigmatized topics, our physiology, sex laws, and even how the media has operated in the last few decades. I considered writing a novel where the main character was someone like Gwen, who gets caught up in this new sexual revolution. It challenges everything she has believed and taught for the past three decades. In the end, I chose to take my original detective story, and weave this new information in as a sub-theme. One differentiator are the numerous sexual factoids which pepper this story [as distinct from writing a sexy book].
The second, subtler differentiator, is the relationship between Ethan and Marcy. BDSM erotica, in my limited experience, has primary characters who are already experts in BDSM. If there is a novice, they are cast against, and led by, an expert within the relationship. The dominant is most often a man, or if a woman, one who has already amassed experience as a dominatrix or similar. I took two very strong and independent people, who were ignorant of kink. I cast Marcy in the more sexual dominant role as dominant female is statistically atypical. But most importantly, both protagonists are very much novices, and their awakening is unsure, fretful, and full of the many questions I think most people could have. Am I normal? Why do we like pain? Receiving and, especially inflicting pain. Isn’t it against everything we are taught? Where is the line where kink becomes abuse? With Gwen as a guide, they explore together.
What was your initial research about, that led you to BDSM?
It was a strange mix of two unrelated, rapid societal shifts. The first was watching the early days of the last US Election, as Donald Trump made his run for office. I’m not political and didn’t know much about any of the parties or candidates but based purely on what I saw in the media here in Vancouver, I couldn’t conceive why a person, let alone a party, could consider him a rationale candidate. I wasn’t thinking about his politics; it was the way he was portrayed as a flawed, angry person with a total lack of respect for the office. I initially concluded, and am probably partly right, that his supporters must be seeing very different media than we saw here in Vancouver.
The second change was how much nudity and more explicit sex we began to see on TV. I remember one Game of Thrones episode which began with a full-screen close-up of a half-erect penis, and the same happened in Shameless, too. In other shows erections were ‘popping up’, with mainstream actresses on screen with the actors. Sex toys. Shows with meaningful characters into BDSM, acted by stars such as Maggie Sith and Paul Giamatti. A light came on for me that, to a person with strong, socially conservative values, this might seem like society was on the verge of breaking down.
Then it hit me. Vancouver is very, very progressive. Openly supportive of liberalisation: Gay marriage; cannabis; pro-choice; racial and gender equality. Everything that in my youth in England I was taught – in the home, the church, school and at work – was wrong, and a sure path to trouble. Back then, my values were conservative by my current standards. But that was 30-40 years ago, so why the big values gap today? Well, I concluded, the population - spread over an extensive western world - of over 1 billion people, simply don’t all change at the same pace, and the internet has factored in as an extreme accelerator in some senses, and a polarizing agent in others. Change at a steady pace is one thing, but a country where at one end we change the laws to admit homosexuality, and at the other we can’t own a sex toy, is a lot of pressure on collective values over a couple of decades.
I don’t want to suggest that the GOP and their supporters are old fashioned, that is not my intent so please don’t assume that it is. What I do know, to someone like me back in the 1970’s, Obama might have seemed like the devil. Today I’m positively drawn to the Obamas because they’re are so respectful, eloquent, educated, progressively minded, anti-violence and confrontation, and representative of equity – people of colour in the White House – and so calm and rational. So compelling when they speak. Now, the Obamas promote what some people with strong conservative values genuinely fear. Imagine having the Obamas fighting to dismantle what you strongly believe in. Backed by Oprah, Ellen and other ‘reasonable’ and successful leaders. That could be truly frightening. I could see people voting for a very strong alternative, even if that person has some ‘issues.’
How did this get you to research sexuality?
It was while considering this gap in liberal vs conservative values, spearheaded by increased sex on TV, I wondered how liberalisation actually worked. In my own experience, its been a one-way journey towards increasing liberalisation. So, I wondered, were we super up-tight 2000 years ago and have we been slowly ‘relaxing’ ever since? Or is it more like a pendulum, swinging back and forth? I could have chosen other points of reference, but I chose sexuality to study as it seemed to be on a liberalizing tear on TV, and I looked back in history in search of patterns.
What did you discover?
Well, much of it is reflected and discussed in the novel, so I won’t repeat it here. I would encourage everyone to do their own research. Look at the emerging information with an open mind. Fact based education typically reduces stigma, and the minimum I would hope for is, that if people retain conservative social values after looking at the new data, at least they might be more understanding and tolerant of the other points of view.
I discovered that there is, or at least was, some sound rationale against sex which is non- procreational (i.e. not in pursuit of children), in the sense that historically sex has been very disruptive to progress. At one end of the scale it might cause fights and disrupted alliances due to infidelity, while at the other extreme, nearly 30% of Europe’s population being wiped out from syphilis in the 1400’s. In the 1500’s England could barely operate a navel flotilla due to the impact of sexual practices, and were it not for Henry VIII, we may never have had an Empire (some would say that would have been a good thing of course).
As fun and compelling as sex can be, it can be a trouble maker. I can see why religions and empire builders alike have tried to temper, and even ban it. But at the end of the day, it is fundamental to how we are wired, and it comes in many flavours. We are roughly 1400 years into trying sexual suppression tactics, and rarely, if ever, have they worked.
Our science and connectedness today is enabling us to collect meaningful data on how humans really tick, and better define what is natural, normal, and healthy for our species. Freud, Ebbing and the others whose wisdom we embraced in the late 1800’s didn’t have any ability to gather enough information to round out their conclusions, and those dead genius still strongly influence us today. But then again, just because something is physiologically normal doesn’t mean we want that to be our societal norm of course. Men are typically physically stronger and more aggressive than women, but they should not, just because of that, be in charge.
I think we are getting many of the distractions out of the way:
- “Don’t have sex because it spreads disease or you get pregnant”
- “If you vary from a very narrow, heterosexual – vanilla – sex, you have a mental illness”
- “BDSM leads to abuse, and all people who are not ‘normal’ come from abusive or broken homes”