Research In A Latex Dress

Merge “The Big Short” & “50 Shades” by way of “Billions,” but give the women the whips and make the men submit, and you get Jane Boon’s new novel “EDGE PLAY.”

Jane tells us all about her inspiration and research!

There was no class called “The Novel” at the engineering school I attended in the ‘80s. In fact, the humanities were viewed with suspicion. It wasn’t so bad that I had to read or write on the sly, but most people who pursue engineering don’t do so because they love words.

Words began as a hobby, but they got an upgrade when I went to MIT to study technology and policy. There, I got to pursue the “whys” of technology, in addition to the “hows.” This let me indulge my fascination in how people relate to one another and to the technological world surrounding them.

I couldn’t bring myself to quit math, with its structure and logic, so I earned a Ph.D. in industrial engineering at night, while working in the software industry by day. It was helpful being one of those rare engineers who wasn’t afraid of writing because it gave me an edge over colleagues, as I could shape the discussion and the understanding of the problems at hand.

I graduated from writing narrow technical articles with scores of footnotes for corporations and academic journals, to writing pieces for broad audiences in consumer publications, ranging from The Wall Street Journal, to TIME and Travel and Leisure. And yet there were other kinds of writing I wanted to try. Fiction beckoned. Industrial engineering is about managing constraints, fiction is about exploring them.

About ten years ago, I had the idea of writing a novel about a female professional who faced a shocking career setback, and who wound up working as an accidental dominatrix. In my 20s, after I graduated from MIT, I had a lot of fun. In the process, I met people who were in “the scene” (as the BDSM demi-monde is often called). While indulging my voyeurism, I had the opportunity to observe and help a dominatrix and I was fascinated by her exercise of raw power. But I was also intrigued by the gratitude I witnessed from her submissive playmates, who were all very accomplished men.

My premise was a “fish out of water” story, set in the dungeon, involving a top-tier professional who experiences some kind of career setback, and who then can’t get another job fast enough to satisfy her grad school debts. I toyed with making her an engineer like me.

Write what you know, right? There’s a strong “bro” culture in engineering that can make it painful for some women to tolerate. As a young engineer, I had to deal with some very forward and impossible men. Condoms were left in my desk, the odd executive sleazed at me, and as a nineteen year old intern, after a corporate dinner I was propositioned by the 54 year old CEO. These power plays seemed ripe for fiction, but I worried that engineering lacked sizzle.

Donning my scientist’s hat, I began a methodical hunt for possible jobs for my protagonist. Wall Street resonated because people throw around a lot of money, the stakes are high, and the men can be pigs. There are so many stories about Wall Street excesses, that it would be ripe to put my ambitious career woman next to one of the worst misogynists on The Street.

Only he’d be the kind of guy who’s just smart enough to have one woman in his group to act as a human shield, deflecting allegations of sexism. Oh, and he’d have the kind of woman who’d hide his affairs, do all his work and clean up all his messes. That woman became my protagonist, and any similarities she had to myself or other women I’d seen suffering in technology were deliberate. I devoured the New York Post, with its Page 6 stories on bankers gone wild, for ideas. For once, diligent research became delicious research.

The dungeon posed different puzzles. I’d witnessed a lot, certainly, but that was ages ago. I took up cultural anthropology and interviewed sex workers and clients about their frustrations and delights. I bought a latex dress and attended fetish events from Vancouver to Paris, to better understand pervy relationships and all those kinks (and perhaps to dance with half-naked men half my age). YouTube was shockingly helpful, and so was my background in physics.

This fictional dungeon, since it catered to an elite clientele, had to be top-tier. It would contain elaborate equipment for bondage and discipline. Here, my technical expertise was useful for visualizing the mechanics of bondage, and the specifics of different kinds of play. It was important to me that as I was describing the various BDSM scenes, they should be neither physically impossible nor patently unsafe. Fortunately, there are apps for that.

While I can’t say my studies as an engineer helped me with story structure, being a scientist gave me the tools to inquire about my imagined dungeon, and the framework to be creative. And having been immersed in toxic corporate cultures, I delivered a revenge fantasy. I would channel those nasty experiences into a vivid and fraught Wall Street workplace, one that makes the dungeon seem like a civilized refuge.

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ABOUT JANE

Jane Boon lives in New York City and Los Angeles. She studied technology and policy at MIT and later received a Ph.D. in industrial engineering. Jane has written for publications like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, http://time.com/ and https://www.mcsweeneys.net/

Jane enjoys improv and dress up, including the time she wore a corset, garters and thigh-high stockings as a dominatrix in the Fox series, Gotham.

EDGE PLAY is her first novel.

Twitter: @JaneEBoon

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing