Elara Stone's Blog - Posts Tagged "publicexecutions-dominantwomen"
It's not moral, it's not nice - and yet, why descriptions of public executions are so erotic?
Writing Queen Grace
As I work on my upcoming novel Queen Grace, I’ve been venturing into territory that both excites me and raises questions. In Chapter 7, the Queen presides over mass executions, and the scene is deliberately written as both political spectacle and erotic display.
My beta reader surprised me when I first told him of the idea. Before I even wrote it, he exclaimed: “Oh I love Grace Ma’am!!! She will be having an orgasm as they are executed Ma’am!” Later, after reading the execution sequence, he admitted: “I am so aroused except for the execution part… but these males fully deserve this fate.”
This dual reaction—arousal intertwined with moral hesitation—is exactly what fascinates me as a writer. Why is it that extreme power, helplessness, and death can be eroticized in fiction?
The Santos–Eros Connection
Sigmund Freud described two primal drives: Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death drive. He argued that human beings are propelled not only by the urge to create and love, but also by a compulsion toward destruction—even annihilation ([1], [2]). When the death drive meets sexuality, we enter the territory of cruelty, sadism, and fantasies of total domination.
Executions, when fictionalized, heighten this fusion. The condemned are utterly helpless, stripped of all agency. The sovereign—in my novel, Queen Grace—wields not only political power but erotic sovereignty, with her arousal climaxing at the moment life is extinguished.
This is not new. Saddam Hussein was known to attend executions, reportedly experiencing vicarious satisfaction through them. During the French Revolution, Parisian crowds flocked to the guillotine with almost festive anticipation. And in Ancient Rome, death in the arena was staged as both entertainment and spectacle of power. In each case, death and desire were entangled in ways that scandalized moralists yet captivated the masses.
The Guillotine as Theater
In Revolutionary France, the guillotine became more than an instrument of death—it was theater. Crowds gathered in Paris not only to witness justice, but to thrill in the spectacle. Women in particular were noted in memoirs of the time to show heightened emotional and even erotic reactions to executions. The condemned stood helpless, the blade gleamed in the sun, and the finality of the act electrified the masses. Here, death was consumed as both punishment and entertainment, its cruelty stirring emotions far beyond politics.
The Roman Arena
The Colosseum functioned on a similar principle centuries earlier. Gladiatorial combat and public executions of criminals or prisoners of war combined violence, sexuality, and spectacle in one vast performance. Ancient accounts describe the sensuality of the crowd’s reactions—cheers, sighs, and sometimes open arousal at the sight of bodies laid bare, stripped of dignity, and destroyed for public enjoyment. It was a ritual of power, reminding all that Rome itself was dominant, while simultaneously feeding the crowd’s appetite for blood, beauty, and fear.
Fear, Arousal, and Misattribution
Decades of psychology research show that fear can heighten sexual arousal. I’ve already written about this in another Goodreads essay: How I Use Fear to Induce Arousal Followed by Total Enslavement .
One of the most famous studies is by Dutton and Aron (1974), who placed men on a shaky suspension bridge and found that they later misattributed their fear-induced arousal to sexual attraction toward a female experimenter ([3]). Their work launched the theory of “misattribution of arousal”—that adrenaline from fear can be confused for sexual desire.
Executions in fiction can work the same way. The tension of looming death, the pounding heart, the collective hysteria—all of this physiological arousal can be reframed erotically. In Queen Grace, the Queen’s climax during executions embodies this excitation-transfer, a dark alchemy where death’s terror becomes sexual intensity.
A Niche, But Not Alone
So am I alone in writing this? Clearly not. My beta reader’s reaction shows how this material both attracts and unsettles. For some readers—especially those drawn to femdom, humiliation, and absolute power fantasies—the combination of sex and death creates an intensification of arousal they cannot find elsewhere.
Of course, this belongs to the realm of consensual fiction. In real life, such brutality is unacceptable. But within fantasy, executions become the most extreme theater of domination, where submission is not just total—it is terminal.
Bibliography:
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Wikipedia: Death Drive Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 510–517. How I Use Fear to Induce Arousal Followed by Total Enslavement – Goodreads essay by Elara Stone
As I work on my upcoming novel Queen Grace, I’ve been venturing into territory that both excites me and raises questions. In Chapter 7, the Queen presides over mass executions, and the scene is deliberately written as both political spectacle and erotic display.
My beta reader surprised me when I first told him of the idea. Before I even wrote it, he exclaimed: “Oh I love Grace Ma’am!!! She will be having an orgasm as they are executed Ma’am!” Later, after reading the execution sequence, he admitted: “I am so aroused except for the execution part… but these males fully deserve this fate.”
This dual reaction—arousal intertwined with moral hesitation—is exactly what fascinates me as a writer. Why is it that extreme power, helplessness, and death can be eroticized in fiction?
The Santos–Eros Connection
Sigmund Freud described two primal drives: Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death drive. He argued that human beings are propelled not only by the urge to create and love, but also by a compulsion toward destruction—even annihilation ([1], [2]). When the death drive meets sexuality, we enter the territory of cruelty, sadism, and fantasies of total domination.
Executions, when fictionalized, heighten this fusion. The condemned are utterly helpless, stripped of all agency. The sovereign—in my novel, Queen Grace—wields not only political power but erotic sovereignty, with her arousal climaxing at the moment life is extinguished.
This is not new. Saddam Hussein was known to attend executions, reportedly experiencing vicarious satisfaction through them. During the French Revolution, Parisian crowds flocked to the guillotine with almost festive anticipation. And in Ancient Rome, death in the arena was staged as both entertainment and spectacle of power. In each case, death and desire were entangled in ways that scandalized moralists yet captivated the masses.
The Guillotine as Theater
In Revolutionary France, the guillotine became more than an instrument of death—it was theater. Crowds gathered in Paris not only to witness justice, but to thrill in the spectacle. Women in particular were noted in memoirs of the time to show heightened emotional and even erotic reactions to executions. The condemned stood helpless, the blade gleamed in the sun, and the finality of the act electrified the masses. Here, death was consumed as both punishment and entertainment, its cruelty stirring emotions far beyond politics.
The Roman Arena
The Colosseum functioned on a similar principle centuries earlier. Gladiatorial combat and public executions of criminals or prisoners of war combined violence, sexuality, and spectacle in one vast performance. Ancient accounts describe the sensuality of the crowd’s reactions—cheers, sighs, and sometimes open arousal at the sight of bodies laid bare, stripped of dignity, and destroyed for public enjoyment. It was a ritual of power, reminding all that Rome itself was dominant, while simultaneously feeding the crowd’s appetite for blood, beauty, and fear.
Fear, Arousal, and Misattribution
Decades of psychology research show that fear can heighten sexual arousal. I’ve already written about this in another Goodreads essay: How I Use Fear to Induce Arousal Followed by Total Enslavement .
One of the most famous studies is by Dutton and Aron (1974), who placed men on a shaky suspension bridge and found that they later misattributed their fear-induced arousal to sexual attraction toward a female experimenter ([3]). Their work launched the theory of “misattribution of arousal”—that adrenaline from fear can be confused for sexual desire.
Executions in fiction can work the same way. The tension of looming death, the pounding heart, the collective hysteria—all of this physiological arousal can be reframed erotically. In Queen Grace, the Queen’s climax during executions embodies this excitation-transfer, a dark alchemy where death’s terror becomes sexual intensity.
A Niche, But Not Alone
So am I alone in writing this? Clearly not. My beta reader’s reaction shows how this material both attracts and unsettles. For some readers—especially those drawn to femdom, humiliation, and absolute power fantasies—the combination of sex and death creates an intensification of arousal they cannot find elsewhere.
Of course, this belongs to the realm of consensual fiction. In real life, such brutality is unacceptable. But within fantasy, executions become the most extreme theater of domination, where submission is not just total—it is terminal.
Now be good boys for me, and let me know your thoughts and opinions.
Cheers, Elara
Bibliography:
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Wikipedia: Death Drive Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 510–517. How I Use Fear to Induce Arousal Followed by Total Enslavement – Goodreads essay by Elara Stone
