How Can You Read That Stuff?

Ghost lovers
Seductive Vampires
Lustful Daemons
Passion-ridden Shifters
Fiery-blooded Fey

The paranormal by its very nature seems to illicit the erotic in us. The idea of ghostly hands gliding over our bodies, or nocturnal lovers kissing along a vein, now induces shivers and longing, the way it once brought terror and recoil.

We once feared the monsters just as we once feared sex. Is it any coincidence that as we began to embrace our sexuality and sexual fantasies, so too did we embrace the legendary monsters?

As we began to accept our desires and the otherness represented within them, we also began to accept the archetypes that we once foisted those repressed feelings upon. Thus, in truth, when we opened the door to the Vampire, it was ourselves we were inviting into the light. It was our beasts we set free beneath the shifting moon and our own lust we raised in graven circles. It was the ghost of our desires denied that we summoned to us in the night, and with whom we danced on the solstice to pan pipes beneath darkened skies.

Our wants and impulses ceased to be monstrous and became the heroes of our stories. Often alone or misunderstood, they are just as often unashamed and unmoved by anything save love, and we refuse to let them go no matter how many variations we see. (Or how many times we see the same one).

I believe that the paranormal found its way into romance and then further into romantic erotica because we hungered and in turn we called to the creatures that had always hungered. We stripped from them the façade of evil and gave them hopes and dreams and fears, because as always, we needed them to carry what we could only partially claim. We own our sexuality, but we still falter at our taboos.

When we flay away the humanity of a hero, (male and female alike), we leave them bare to the things that rarely survive the crush of social conditioning in our mundane lives. We open them to everything we must turn from and protect against in order to be accepted by those around us. Whether submission or dominance, forbidden passion with one, or multi-partnered lovemaking for days, be it top, bottom, side or diagonal, we can have it all. We can have everything that even standard contemporary romance would pale to touch.

We embrace the paranormal because within us live desires and yearnings that are more than normal, that are beyond the normal of those who do not understand. We pair it with romance because as we love those characters, so too do we get to love the deepest parts of ourselves. We pull in the erotic because we wish that love freed to be explored in unapologetic bliss and unashamed splendor.

I ask you…What could be better?

So the next time someone judgmentally confronts you with, how can you read that stuff, smile sadly and shake your head in sympathy as you ask, How can you, not?.

I’m Xakara, it was a pleasure to meet you all for a short ramble through the gothic mansion of my mind.

Erotic Paranormal Romance Ramble Done

~X