Cornelia Quick

I have a regular — reader? heckler? correspondent? — on Medium who seems to have mixed feelings about my stories vis a vis fidelity, particularly where the women are concerned. He seems to dislike stories where there’s an unequal balance of power and the women are getting more action outside their marriages than the men are, and yet he dutifully reads everything I write that features noted philanderess Dorothy Warren. He recently asked if the men in my stories ever stray from their vows, so I put together a little spreadsheet and have created a page that breaks down the variations on cheating, swinging, and polyamory explored in my stories.

When I ran the numbers, I found that of 66 stories, 30 feature married characters, with 63 of them featuring relationships outside the marriage (only Callie and Luca of Callie’s Costume Closet remain faithful for their entire series). In 25 of the stories, the women stray (ranging from the carefree swinging in the Fox Run series to some “soft” infidelity in Della Takes a Dip to the unrepentant nymphomaniacal binges that Dorothy goes on. In contrast, there are just 14 stories with straying husbands, ranging from the swingers to Phil’s clear infidelity in A Dip in the Lake. It would appear that the average Cornelia Quick story will contain a cheating wife, but probably won’t involve a cheating husband unless he’s explicitly invited into it by his wife.

Why the imbalance? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I tend to write female point of view stories (48 of the 66 are from the female point of view, and 8 have alternating female and male point of view), and the unfaithful character is almost always going to be driving the narrative. Dorothy’s Domestic Bliss told from Calvin’s point of view would be a lot shorter, and a lot less filthy.

There’s also the audience expectation in erotica, or at least the erotica I tend to read. I gravitate to the cuckold and hotwife stories in my own erotica reading, where the unfaithful wife is a necessary component. While I really enjoyed writing the Callie’s Costume Closet stories, they’re definitely outside the erotica mainstream as currently found on Amazon, Smashwords, and other retailers. Indeed, many of the classics — for example, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” “Belle de Jour,” the “Emmanuelle” stories, and most of Anaïs Nin’s work — revolve around unfaithful wives.

And a lot of that, I think, comes from the frisson of playing against type. In the patriarchal Western tradition, at least, the faithful wife is one of the cornerstones of civilization. While men are expected to sow their wild oats, and perhaps get a little action on the side, women are put in the role of loving, yielding, self-sacrificing helpmeets. Indeed, for much of history, wives were de facto (and often de jure) property of their husbands. To have a story feature a rebellious wife, who seizes on her own pleasure as strongly as we would expect a man to, opens up many more possibilities for conflict and intrigue than having a similarly unfaithful husband in the lead role. There’s also a little thrill in having the wife get away with it (as most of the unfaithful wives in my stories manage to do), whereas we (or I, at least) like to see the unfaithful husband get his comeuppance.

The important thing to remember, of course, is that these are just stories meant for entertainment. They’re not didactic, and they’re certainly not documentary. In my personal life, I’ve been happily monogamous for 25 years, and expect to be so for another 25 or more. And I have friends who are in various sorts of ethical non-monogamous relationships with which they’re very happy (seems like a whole lot of work to me, but you do you …). I’ve also known people devastated by infidelity, and in my personal life I take a hard line against unethical non-monogamy in all its guises.

But in a story? I’m fully on board with bawdy, naughty, sneaky, sexy, wily wives (and husbands) who push the limits of their relationships and act outside the strict lines of expectation. You should certainly expect more such tales from me; just don’t take any of my favorite characters as role models!