The Spinster's Exploits

Not sure if I’ve already mentioned this – I am seventy-one you know! Anyway – it’s something I realised and often reflect on. I’m sure it was always there, but I blame a particular charming ex for awakening my awareness and unleashing the availability of material to feed my predilections – and he so does not share them!

My realisation started with him saying that  he was taking his teenage daughter to the cinema, and he’d be on his phone to get through the ordeal. I was intrigued! It seems the film was “Violet Evergarden” and it was based on an anime that became a TV series. According to IMDb, Violet is a young female ex-soldier who gets a job at a writer’s agency and goes on assignments to create letters that can connect people. Of course, my curiosity was piqued, and I found the original series and a special and was hooked. All damaged people and thwarted love in a post-war setting – very dark! Violet seemed to have been an actual weapon of war and owned by a powerful family and now in her frozen state, she was living a nun-like existence while enabling others to connect with her beautifully worded letters. I loved it!

So Netflix (other purveyors of couch potato fodder available) decided I needed more anime, Japanese and Korean series, general death and darkness, ghosts, supernatural beings and general weirdness! I also learnt about Korean culture, their obsession with toilet humour and the distress of social immobility. I got hooked on soapy arranged marriage series played for both laughs and heartbreak. And got lots of gothic melodrama – I loved it!

Can’t remember when I finally discovered Buffy, but I came late to the party less than ten years ago… And yes I do find vampires sexy in theory – one of my best reads was “Daughters of Darkness – Lesbian Vampire Stories”. I’ve read “Dracula” several times but it was more hard work than erotic, although vampire films and series are often a great source of pent-up sexuality.

And of course – you can’t beat “Wuthering Heights” for gothic sexual oppression, trauma and revenge! I remember enjoying the book as a teenage virgin and finding the repressed sexuality and impossible Heathcliff all very exciting – but I’m pretty sure I never fell for him, unlike so many others who apparently do. I’ve reread for fun and for study and remember how complicated the plot was. And annoyingly I can’t remember why Nelly Dean was locked up in the house for three days, but I’m pretty sure she was! A friend in her fifties attempted her first reading before going to see the film and found it difficult – I’m not surprised!

I’d heard a review of the film and was very amused, so warned that it was moist and squelchy – and had the same Director as Saltburn, also famous for a moist scene…

Well! The noise you can hear is Ms Bronte spinning in her grave! Liberties taken with her work would be an understatement – perhaps a very sophisticated goth/BDSMer teenage girl’s fevered fan fiction based on Wuthering Heights? It gave me the giggles rather than the hots – It was so much more than I expected, even after the review. So – for those in the know – there is pony play and pet play and an abusive relationship is shown as a Domme/sub one! The mesmerised future Mrs Heathcliff is asked for her consent before every stage of her degradation… And no sexuality is repressed – it’s all there and how – I am so glad that when I studied the book in my twenties, we didn’t have to discuss Heathcliff finding Katherine having a wank and licking the evidence!

So the recent confession of my arrested development was made to my delicious Established-lover-etc… I’d requested the boxset of “Trueblood” for my birthday and he delivered. I’d watched the series when it was first streamed here but not since, although I’ve read the novels twice since then. Interestingly, the sex does not seem to be repressed at all! I remembered it as sexy in a steamy Southern American way with lots of repressed desire as well as a reasonable amount of actual sexual activity – ummm… no… Folks were at it like knives! And sex tapes, rough sex and bondage was pretty central and graphic from the start – well graphic to me – but I don’t watch actual porn, so don’t take this as a recommendation if you watch the real stuff. But a 20-something virgin falling for a vampire and bonkers supernatural stuff are what I remember and enjoy and I’m sure there are repressed desires somewhere.

And the amazingly weird montage accompanied by “I Wanna Do Bad Things To You” is very steamy and sexy as well as weird! Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” is on my “Hot” song list!

My indulgent Established-lover-etc… watched the first episode with me, and was quite taken aback as his then-teenage niece had also been into it. Proof positive of my teenage goth soul!