Posts Tagged ‘books’
Best Sex Writing 2012: book review
I love Best Sex Writing 2012, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel with guest judge Susie Bright, from Cleis Press. I always look forward to this annual series because it compiles the best non-fiction writing about sex published the previous year in magazines, newspapers, online sites, and books.
This is writing on the topic of sex — it’s not erotica. As
Rachel Kramer Bussel says in her introduction, “This is not a one-handed read, but it is a book that will stimulate your largest sex organ: your brain.”
Rich with diversity of topics, points of view, writer backgrounds and styles, this is a book you’ll read hungrily and carefully. As
Rachel Kramer Bussel says,
What you are about to read are stories, all true, some reported on the streets and some recorded from lived experience, from the front lines of sexuality. They deal with topics you read about in the headlines, and some topics you may never have considered.
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| Rachel Kramer Bussel |
In fact, I often found myself stopping to ponder an essay, halting the whirlwind of my brain absorbing new facts, new views, often new topics that had never been presented to me with such passion and insight before.
For example, in “Losing the Meatpacking District: A Queer History of Leather Culture,” Abby Tallmer takes us back to the Meatpacking District of New York City’s West Village from the 1960s through the mid-80s, when a “select group of queer and kinky people” roamed the streets where gay SM and sex clubs thrived. Categorizing herself as a femme lesbian, Tallmer let her boy buddies disguise her, complete with a sock in her pants and a fake five o’clock shadow, so she could get into the Mineshaft. She describes the scene:
I remember seeing a sea of nude, half-nude, harnessed and chained male bodies (the bottoms) and muscular men in full leather (the tops)… I remember all sorts of sounds: from the bottoms, cries and whimpers and gasps and moans and shrill but insincere pleas of “Stop!,” tops barking orders at their slaves sternly or angrily or calmly… All the collective words and sighs were punctuated by the unmistakable sounds of flagellation — wooden paddles striking flesh, the snapping of bullwhips slicing through the air and landing sharply on human targets… I stood there transfixed, thinking, This is what men do when women aren’t around.”
In “Why Lying about Monogamy Matters,” Susie Bright slams op-ed columnist Ross Douthat who wants us to believe that abstinence from premarital sex makes us (and him) really happy. She conveys his viewpoint as this: “There are Four Big Kinds of Sex: casual, promiscuous, premature, and ill-considered.” In contrast to this “shaming, stunted fair tale,” Bright fought her upbringing that “Sex is so wrong, there’s, like, a million ways to do it wrong and burn in hell forever”) and now she thanks all the lovers she’s ever had.
In “Dating with an STD,” Lynn Harris points out that “Statistically, your date is more likely to carry a sexually transmitted infection than to share your astrological sign.” She quotes medical sociologist Adina Nack, PhD:
You should go out into the dating world assuming that the person you’re with has already contracted something, even though they may not know it. Even if someone says, ‘I’m clean–I’ve been tested for everything,’ they’re either ignorant or lying, because we don’t even have definitive tests for everything.
I’m happy that senior sex is included this year! I’m proud that this year’s anthology includes a piece I wrote: “Grief, Resilience, and My 66th Birthday Gift.” This is an expanded version of an excerpt from Naked at Our Age about reaffirming my sexuality with a gentle stranger after the throes of grief left me unable to imagine pleasure, sexual or otherwise. I’ve been told it’s a powerful piece of writing. I hope you agree.
I’ve just scratched the surface of what Best Sex Writing 2012 has to offer. I hope you’ll read it and share your favorite parts in your comments here.
Read what other reviewers have to say about Best Sex Writing 2012 by clicking here.
Thank you, Rae
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| Rae Padilla Francoeur |
“It takes intention to keep movement and sexuality in our lives,” Rae Padilla Francoeur quotes me as saying in her insightful, sensitive, and generous profile, which she titles “Life lessons from a senior sexpert.”
Thank you, Rae, for the most amazing birthday present.
I love how Rae combines three parts of me that define who I am: my commitments to senior sex education, physical fitness, and endless learning. She captured my drive when she wrote about my recent trip to New York City, when I had the pleasure of staying with her and her love Jim,
The only time you weren’t working or making connections with others throughout the city was when I was talking or when you were sleeping.
Rae’s profile is such a heartfelt tribute that I want it read at my memorial service (not soon, please) and printed on a t-shirt.
I expect it would have to be in small print to fit on a t-shirt, especially my petite size, so I’m picturing grey-haired gents putting on their reading glasses and getting close to peer at my chest–a pretty nice fantasy for my 68th birthday today!
Speaking of t-shirts and chests, Rae and Jim gave me this “Naked at Our Age” t-shirt. At the time I took this photo, I was sitting outside a coffee shop in Ventura, CA, where I was visiting to present two workshops. I discovered that three men were staring at me. Flattered, I smiled and they looked away. Later I realized they were probably just trying to figure out what I meant by the message on my shirt.
If you’re not familiar with Rae’s work, I encourage you to read her erotic memoir, Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair. I reviewed Free Fall in 2010 before I knew Rae personally. Our admiration of each other’s work led to a strong friendship.
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| Rae, Joan, and Jim Hicks |
House of Holes: A Book of Raunch
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| Nicholson Baker |
House of Holes: A Book of Raunch by Nicholson Baker is crude, rude, erotic, and utterly hilarious!
In this joyful and irreverent novel, Baker offers a pleasure resort where guests can experience every manner of sexual titillation and fulfillment, including many that they (and we) never could have imagined.
Entry is by gazing into some hole – it might be looking through a straw, a dryer door, or a male urethra. If you’re lucky, you’re sucked through to the House of Holes, where any orifice or penetrator that you could desire is awaiting your delight.
If you’ve got a fantasy, describe it and it’s yours. If you don’t, or you stammer trying to communicate it, the House of Holes opens up to show you sex acts, partners (including a tree and a lake), and an overflow of erotic possibilities.
It’s not free! Guests pay dearly, and sometimes sacrifice limbs and clitorises in the pursuit of pleasure. But everything gets reattached in the end.
The plot is outrageous, and almost every page leads to an orgasm or more for someone or many. The characters and plot twists had me laughing out loud. Dave lets HoH detach his arm for a week in return for a bigger penis, and that arm – which fortunately has a working hand and fingers – provides many orgasms to the woman who adopts it.
I loved this book, especially Baker’s inventive language. How many ways can he say penis, vulva, testicles, or clitoris, or describe a sex act? Try these:
- “Chuck’s thundertube of dickmeat started sliding in. It pushed her frilly doilies of labia flesh aside….”
- “Do you want this ham steak of a Dr. Dick that’s so stuffed with spunk that I’m ready to blow this swollen sackload all over you?”
- “Cold drops [from a Magic Kentucky Lime] fell on Marcele’s little thumper bean.”
- [Man describing his enjoyment of his “proud, nasty cock”:] “Hard as a ship’s biscuit, but fresher.”
Baker is brilliant writer and a master of invention. Sometimes his novel becomes a parody of itself. I can sense the wink-wink when he seems to deliberately insert a phrase that is so god-awful that I’m convinced he wants it entered in the Worst Sex Writing of the Year contest. For example:
- “She threw her legs open and he slowly socketed himself deep in her famished slutslot.”
- “I wish I was a man who had a store where he made custom sequin pasties for exotic dancers and you were an exotic dancer and came into the store and ordered a set of spiral pasties and so I had to measure your aureoles for fit.”
- “She held his head and moved her cuntal hand in slow connoisseurial ovals, and then, making her fingers rigid, she DJ’d herself, as if her clit was a scratch record.”
- “I want your bosoms naked as jaybirds. Big, honking jaybirds.”
- “Betsy, no, I can’t come on your coffee table! Those are your husband’s hiking magazines.”
Can you tell this book is fabulous fun? Amid the frivolity, Baker drives home some light-hearted commentary about sex, relationships, and porn. (Oh, and crocheting.) For example:
- The House of Holes sends out “pornsucker ships”: “It’s an airplane that flies around sucking up bad porn from cities… because bad porn is depressing and drowns out good porn.”
- We learn that when a woman wears a dress at a coffee shop on Saturday afternoon, it means she wants to meet somebody.
- Pubic hairlessness “is a way of hiding… Hair is your true nakedness.”
- In the Hall of Penises, “toadlike things hanging out from holes in the wall” respond sexually to visitors, but “those penises had no clue what Polly, Donna, and Saucie were all about as women – what they believed in, what their plans were.”
- “It was, in fact, quite a nice-looking penis. Not intelligent looking – few penises were – but the testicles did somehow have the air of being attached to a man of substance.”
- “A soul mate is when you really think someone is great. You really like her a lot. You like when she explains things to you. You love her. That’s a soul mate.”
Although Baker is 54, only one of his characters – Lila, the director of House of Holes, “large and pretty in bifocals” – is over 50. When I asked Baker in an email about why he only had one older character, given his own age, and whether there’s a place for senior erotica, he replied,
The characters just popped out of my head–I made Lila, the director, middle aged because I’m middle aged, and aside from that I probably didn’t give it nearly as much thought as I should have. Yes of course there’s a place for senior erotica–heck, maybe I’ll give it a go in time. I hope you write some.
In fact, I am planning an anthology of senior sex erotica by writers over 50 and featuring characters who are sexy seniors and elders.If you’re a writer who’d like to contribute (and I hope Nicholson Baker will!), or a reader who wants to be notified when this book happens, please email me.
I’m often asked how to spice up a long-term relationship where the sex has become ho-hum. Here’s an idea: Read excerpts from House of Holes to each other!
I can’t wait to read more of Nicholson Baker’s books, especially Vox and The Fermata, his other erotic novels! Thank you, Mr. Baker, for such fine fun. And do consider writing senior erotica!
Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex: book review
Oh, my goodness – I started reading Sugar in My Bowl and I couldn’t stop. I loved this book.
Sugar in My Bowl: : Real Women Write About Real Sex, edited by. Erica Jong, is a remarkable anthology of personal essays and a few short stories, all with the theme of what women think about sex and how they remember and think back on pivotal sexual experiences.
As older women, we’re often ignored and made to feel invisible, especially our sexuality. I love it when books celebrate us, take us seriously, and convey our true experiences and attitudes.
That’s what happens in this anthology. At least half of the writers are age 50+. You can tell from some of the photos and dates or era references in their essays. Some of the younger writers talk about their parents, so we get plenty of sex after midlife in this book.
In “Peekaboo I See You,” Anne Roiphe describes playing doctor with a pal at age 5, while World War II was part of the adult world. “Jimmy puts his hand on my wee wee and he leans down to examine it carefully.” Later they reverse roles, and she wonders, “What do you do with those things below your penis?” “Nothing, he says, “they’re just there for decoration.” Of course they get caught. We always got caught.
In “Worst Sex,” Gail Collins, who came of age in the early 1960s, writes about her religious upbringing, when even starting to get aroused was a sin: “My friends and I were part of the last batch of American women to spend their adolescence being constantly lectured about sex by women who had never had any.”
In “My Best Friend’s Boyfriend,” Fay Weldon describes losing her virginity at age 18 in 1949, when “sex was a dangerous thing, far more interesting and erotic than it is now.”
In “Sex with a Stranger,” Susan Cheever heard the same warnings as I did growing up in the 1950s: “They won’t buy the cow if they get the milk for free.” That didn’t stop her from picking up men at parties. “The real danger of a one-night stand [isn’t that] it will lead to nothing, but that it will lead to everything…Those who are not ready to have their life changed should probably abstain.”
In “Going All the Way,” Liz Smith writes about losing her virginity to her first cousin at 16 in 1939 in an “A plus” experience. “I don’t remember if I had an orgasm,” she writes, “I was so ecstatically having ‘something’ special happen that I didn’t know if I was missing something else.”
In “Herman and Margot,” a short story about an 87-year-old woman and a 92-year-old man, Karen Abbott writes, “In the beginning they take things slowly, reveling in the irony of teasing time when they have so little of it left.”
Sometimes the sex is good, often it’s unsatisfying, bewildering, even “labia-shrivelling” (Jann Turner). It’s always fascinating, the kinds of conversations we wish we could have with other women, but brilliantly written by top-notch writers.
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| Erica Jong |
I kept noticing that the older women’s essays had the coloring of decades-later perspective, and this was often the take-home message of the essay. We women not only enjoy having sex — we also contemplate it afterwards as well as before! Even when the experience is less than fulfilling — and many of them are! — we learn from them and struggle to make better choices next time.
Jong writes that Anais Nin told her in 1971, “Women who write about sex are never taken seriously as writers.”
“But that’s why we must do it, Miss Nin,” Jong countered. I agree!
Thank you, Erica Jong and all the writers in this anthology for taking on this mission with such purpose and craft. Exceptional book, highly recommended.
Sugar in My Bowl (the title is from a Bessie Smith blues song) has its own website here.