Once Upon a Mattress

We live in a world shaped by porn. It touches everything: from the technology we rely on and the art we consume to how we relate to one another and structure our boardrooms, and all the way to a “grab ’em by the pussy” president. Porn has pushed boundaries and taught generations of women that the only power they wield is sexual. It has altered brain chemistry and facilitated the mycotic spread of the manosphere. It has made consensual and non-consensual choking common foreplay. As Sophie Gilbert observed in The Atlantic last year, porn’s tropes and aesthetics have “filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason.”

In an erotic empire built on the male gaze and money shots, female pleasure has often come second — if at all. But a reckoning is happening in the kingdom of desire. Smut, often written by women for women, is now propping up the fiction market. With online ratings on a scale of 1 to 5 chili peppers, titles range from steamy, stick-swinging hockey romps to blockbuster romantasy epics. Intense enemies-to-lovers storylines unfold over thousands of pages, with much yearning and occasional dragon shagging. In the realms of horny escapism, consent and climaxes are plentiful. Sex continues to sell, and the message in these books, at least, is that it can be rapturous for all involved.

Somewhere around a 3 or 4 on the spiciness meter is Angélique Lalonde’s Variations on a Dream. Although not romantasy, the novel draws on fairy-tale motifs and myth to explore a marriage buckling under the weight of cultural expectation. Once upon a time, Sarah had been alive to the world, communing with the moon and roaming the forest by night in imagined badger form. Now she is too burned out to even dream. Her two young girls are all-consuming. The mom blog she started in order to curate a joyful, whimsical existence has become as much a drain as it is a delight. Her husband, Trevor, is distant and disconnected, too wrapped up in his quest for literary greatness to truly see her. What he wants is attention, for her to ease his burdens — and attend to his needs — while also taking care of the dishes. He refers to Sarah as his “quirky Domestic Goddess.” It’s part of a bit they do —“one of those marital binders that ridiculed convention while also upholding it.” Sarah clamps her jaw, clasps the wet rag, and ponders the eternal question: Should she do more yoga or increase her meditation to fifteen minutes? Surely this isn’t her happily ever after.

Variations on a Dream is part dissection of the thousand cuts of modern womanhood and part fable redux. Sarah is no damsel in distress, but she slowly realizes that she has been casting others in the role of hero of her narrative. There are no monsters to slay, only gruesome gender roles and a version of masculinity bred in a young boy who fell under the spell of his father’s hidden stash of VHS tapes — a portal to a secret world of “glistening confusion.” (Beware, all who enter here.)

Sarah and Trevor first meet at university, that otherworldly place where identities are in flux and the smallest interaction can seem steeped in magic. She rolls into class with leaves in her hair, having frolicked in the fall foliage. He spends his time gorging on Bukowski and booze and being pulled down by the gravitational force of his own discontent. They come together through Ariadne, a beacon of beauty and passion who sets Sarah’s mind and Trevor’s loins aflame.

Ariadne holds the thread that connects to Sarah’s soul. The house the two women share is a living art installation, hung with fabric structures like a womb. Sarah finds herself caught in a labyrinth of conflicting desire, as her heart flutters for the poor man who is hopelessly infatuated with her best friend while she too is drawn toward the other woman’s celestial light: “With Ariadne it was like zooming around in space together, with Trevor it was like she was in a car driving somewhere with all these sideroads she felt compelled to follow.” But the curse of heteronormativity takes hold. Sarah heads down that familiar path: girl falls for emotionally unavailable boy after mistaking his brooding for sensitivity, his reliance on her for devotion. Before long, Trevor has switched his affections and accepted her proposal. They settle down in a starter castle in Mississauga.

The Brothers Grimm don’t tell what comes next: when the kids arrive and intimacy gets put on hold, when the would‑be prince turns into a petulant ogre, complaining every time his advances are rejected. Sarah doesn’t want “bad touch,” when her husband reaches for her out of misery, wishing her to “put pleasure in its place.” She wants “good touch.” Trevor asks if she’s asexual. She explains that she doesn’t feel sensual in the place where she nurtures, cooks, cleans, soothes tempers, and invents games about woodland creatures. He storms out.

Sarah does what she always does: she puts her prodigious imagination to work. She tells herself the story of their fated love, desperately trying to summon the picture-perfect life she projects on her blog. She manifests so hard that she conjures a pretend internal version of Trevor —“also known as PIT”— to reassure her, support her, even pleasure her. Meanwhile, real-life Trevor is deep in internet searches for “kink,” “hard-core anal,” and “exotic pussy.” He’s indulging in extracurricular sessions with his prettiest students. He’s convincing himself it’s what a man needs — what he’s owed. Until one day he stumbles on a video called String Games, an artistic, myth-inspired gangbang in which a young woman tugs at red threads attached to multiple Dionysuses. And that woman is the spitting image of Ariadne.

Who knew that an auteur porno would be the mirror that reveals the truth and sets the protagonists on their intended course? It’s a testament to Lalonde’s sumptuous writing that the winding plot, which coils intimately around Sarah’s and, to a lesser extent, Trevor’s emotional centres, never unspools into the ridiculous. Even when Trevor is writing his cringey erotic autofiction, in which he calls his wife “Sara” and Ariadne “Troy.” Even with the occasional use of such phrases as “the lull after intellectual orgasm.” Sarah also discovers String Games, watching it with a “twin impulse to recoil and surge.” A knot inside her begins to loosen. The blurred line between herself and her fantasy comes back into focus. When Masha, the woman from the film, turns up in Trevor’s classroom, it seems as if life is coming full circle. But this time there is a chance for all of them to find their way out of the maze.

Intent is what interests Lalonde in Variations of a Dream: what influences a person to make certain choices, the hidden meaning behind action or inaction, good touch and bad. Trevor sees porn as freedom — no uncertainty or judgment, only confidence and submission. He binges on videos without shame, because someone else has dreamed up those fantasies first. Responsibility lies elsewhere. He locks away his fear of intimacy and vulnerability inside a tall tower of avoidance.

Sarah, on the other hand, is consumed by responsibility. After uncoupling from PIT and the alluring String Games, she immerses herself in pornography criticism and commentary from women who are working in the industry and threading the line between exploitation and agency. She reads the feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan on how “porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains.” She worries about impressionable young boys who are taught to conquer and dissociate, wondering if this was what happened to Trevor.

Two books — which Sarah would no doubt find informative and alarming — add to this conversation. In Mainstreaming Porn, Elaine Craig takes up a similar line of questioning over sexual integrity and the impact of free-flowing streaming services on attitudes toward consent and violence against women. “Pornography is mass culture,” the Dalhousie University law professor argues. We live in a platform society, after all, and sites like Pornhub (with over 100 million visits a day) play as much of a role in our algorithmic, data-driven existence as other tech giants.

With interactive user interfaces of likes, tags, and comment threads, porn platforms are in constant “digital dialogue” with consumers. It’s not just that content is available anywhere, any time. Advertising-based business models rely on shock value to keep eyeballs glued and clicks coming. Craig takes aim not at sexual preferences but at the corporate and capitalist interests behind the curtain of this free, twenty-four-hour picture show. It’s no surprise that she finds a wide gap between the marketed safety standards of companies that position themselves alternately as “mere intermediaries” and as “global leaders” in freedom of expression and the reality of videos titled Snuck Condom Off and Accidently Rammed It up Her Ass or Daddy Dominates Stepdaughter While She Is Resting. The questions raised are uncomfortable: Can we really say that eroticizing sexual assault doesn’t contribute to normalizing the behaviour? Do judges view porn? Are workplace dynamics affected by colleagues who watch multiple men ejaculating on a woman’s face before going into the office?

Lauren Kirshner’s Sex Work in Popular Culture examines the industry from another perspective, compiling interviews with professionals from Canada, the United States, and Europe while probing movie and TV representations. In doing so, she rejects the simple characterization of erotic dancers, webcam models, and call girls as criminals or victims or even Cinderella stories in waiting. Over the past decade or so, during a period of intense social and political change, sex work has been increasingly recognized as real work. “Far from the glamourama lady in red,” Kirshner writes, “she is an ordinary woman with bills to pay.” This ordinary woman is smashing stereotypes while also becoming ensnared in the pitfalls of neo-liberal hustle culture and the precarity of the gig economy. Although more nuanced onscreen depictions — consider the ensemble cast of The Deuce, starring James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal — might not directly change laws, they do help shift public opinion. As always, more conversations, more education, more legal protections are the answer. Both Kirshner’s and Craig’s texts were released before the recent surge of AI‑synthesized sexual imagery, but one can imagine their thoughts on this latest development.

With pole dancing classes a popular form of workout and porn star memoirs making bestseller lists, interest in sex and sex work continues to be met with a steady supply of material. But as the Pandora’s box that is the Epstein files releases one evil after another, as Grok and other bots revolutionize on‑demand customizable partners and deepfake nude imaging apps, women’s bodies remain the battleground where wars between fantasy and reality rage. No one is denying that sex is a messy endeavour. Just don’t use it as a weapon.