Posts Tagged ‘books’
Straight Woman Loves Gay Romance
I was surprised and delighted to find Best Gay Romance 2009, ed. Richard Labonté, Cleis Press , an absolute pleasure to read, and more stimulating to me – a straight woman – than most heterosexual erotica.
Partly it’s the romance aspect – the stories and characters are gentle, sweet, and very sexy – and because the whole book is men, men, men. Each story has at least two sexy, loving men who get aroused and naked together, which for me was delicious, fantasy voyeurism. Each story even offers an interesting plot — not just a rush to the genitals — and non-stereotypical characters. Several are even our age, though most are young. The stories are tender and erotic without being the least bit raw, rough, or sleazy. I lapped it up (so to speak).
As my readers know, I lost my beloved husband last summer. I’ve been sexually hibernating since then (while continuing to think and write about sex, as you know). Believe it or not, Best Gay Romance got my sparks sparking again, at least within the cocoon of fantasy.
I wrote to Richard Labonté, editor of the series, about this, and he wrote back:
I’m so happy to hear that the collection helped get your “juices flowing.” I’m not surprised, though – in my A Different Light days (I helped open this still-extant gay bookstore in Los Angeles in 1979), I sold a lot of gay male romances, especially early Alyson titles (way before the Best Gay Romance days) to straight women. I particularly recall a group of six or so women, age range early 30s to late 40s I’m guessing, who would come into the original ADL store in Los Angeles in the ’80s every two months or so and buy everything new since their last visit, often four or five books each, not always the same titles (I’m sure they also shared). Like you, they appreciated the erotic (but not too erotic) male content.
Read more of my sex and/or aging book reviews and author interviews here.
Love Junkie: hot sex and ruinous relationships
Love Junkie by Rachel Resnick is a brave, compelling memoir/confessional of the author’s decades of seeking love and finding chaos and hot sex with damaged men within destructive, degrading, dangerous relationships. I couldn’t put this book down.
I’ve had my wild times in the past and made some bad choices, but I always loved my men caring and my sex gentle. Resnick made me hold my breath as she pummeled me verbally and emotionally with graphic tales of rough sex with damaged, controlling men — men who filled her vagina without ever filling her desperate need to be loved and valued.
Rachel Resnick grew up with a mother who was a drunk and picked up strangers in bars, her 11-year-old daughter drawing on paper placemats until mom was ready to go home, the man-of-the-night following in his own vehicle so he could make a quick escape the next morning. Her father had left when she was four.
As a child, she admitted her crush on a boy who responded by punching her in the stomach and hissing, “Don’t you ever come near me again, ever.” She took that painful contact as proof that he was destined to love her, and pursued him. So went the story of her adult dating life, too.
Resnick’s needy yearning (“a shadowy choke hold”) drove her life and relationships from one wrong man to another. She would do anything to please a man and make him love her — which of course drove him away or brought out the worst in him. She obsessively sent e-mail after e-mail to the man she craved: “If it took fifty e-mails of justifications and explanations, late-night drive-overs and I’m-sorry blow jobs, sign me up,” she writes about one such obsession.
Other reviewers have described Love Junkie as a train wreck — you know you should avert your eyes and keep going, but you can’t help staring at every bloody detail. I never felt like a voyeur reading it — I felt involved, a part of the story, wishing I could pull my friend Rachel away from her own need and the men who degraded her. I wanted to talk some sense into her, help her turn her life around, let her know that love is possible, but first she has to look inside and get help to repair the damage.
I’m relieved that she comes to this understanding herself, committing to a 12-step program for people who are out of control around sex and love. Love Junkie is riveting reading, highly recommended.
(photo of Rachel Resnick)
“I am not easily repulsed”: interview with Mary Roach
Mary Roach writes books on weird scientific research about subjects we’ve all wondered about. She is the author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and – her latest and my favorite – Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. I’ve long enjoyed Roach’s quirky style that often has me chortling as I read. Reading a whole book about my favorite topic (sex, not cadavers) was delicious.
In a separate blog post, I’ve reviewed Bonk and quoted delightful tidbits that will send you running to read the book and give it to all your friends. Here with my interview with the author, Mary Roach:
JP: As cool-headed and sharp-witted as you are, some parts of your research must have embarrassed or repulsed you. What do you wish you had never done or learned, and why? Tell the truth!
MR: As readers of Stiff have probably figured out, I am not easily repulsed. At least not by the physical. I am repulsed by close-mindedness, petty hatred, greed, intolerance, ignorance. But not penises or vaginas or sex. But bear in mind, I was hanging out in sex labs, not fringe sex clubs South of Market. Honestly, it’s pretty tame stuff. Embarrassment-wise, well, there was the Dr. Deng scenario. Ed and I were scanned in 4-D ultrasound in the act. That was awkward, for sure, but I knew how much fun it was going to be to write it up, and so it hardly bothered me. Mostly, I felt guilty for dragging my husband into the fray.
JP: What have you seen or learned since you finished the book that you wish you could have included?
MR: Oh, people are always emailing me or coming up to me at talks and dropping all manner of irresistible tidbits that I wish I’d known about while working on the book. One man raised his hand and said, “Are you aware of the phenomenon of surfing sperm?” Apparently they surf the secretions on the vaginal walls. Another man, a gynecologist now in his seventies, emailed to tell me a story that William Masters had told him about meeting a bishop or cardinal, I forget which. His Holiness had asked to hear about the research Masters and Johnson were doing. He listened quite intently, and when Masters had finished speaking, he said, “Very good. Your work might serve to prevent a lot of divorces. Of course, if I am asked about it in public, I will condemn you.” Would have loved to include those!
JP: My blog is directed at older readers (most are 60-80) who are interested in sex. What did you learn specific to elder sex, aside from Viagra? If little or nothing, can you talk about why you think scientific research is NOT being done on elder sex, other than taking surveys? Is it the “ick factor,” as I call it?
MR: There was a large survey that was published not long ago about frequency of sex and satisfaction levels among people over 75, I think it was. The problem, as I recall it, was that so many of the women at that age were widows. I didn’t cover this because as you know it’s a book about laboratory-based sex research — the physiological stuff: arousal and orgasm and such. Rather than the behavioral issues. I cover the two physiological old-age biggies — erectile dysfunction in men and libido issues in women. I had wanted to include a chapter specifically on sex in the upper reaches of old age, but physiologically speaking, it seemed to be a matter of degree, rather than unique issues. In other words, more ED and lower libido… I don’t think of sex researchers as people who easily succumb to the ick factor — my god, look at Marcalee Sipski and her orgasm work with quadriplegics. If they were, they wouldn’t have gotten into arousal and orgasm research in the first place. Then again, I think old age is actually more of a taboo than sex these days, so perhaps it is the ick factor that keeps researchers away.
JP: What’s the most unusual experience you had while promoting this book? I imagine people came up to you and told you all sorts of things you’d rather not know.
MR: Call-in radio shows are always entertaining. The DJs will often bill me as a therapist or a researcher, and then open up the lines and say, “We’ll be taking ALL your questions on sex!” And I’m in the studio with this panicked look, mouthing NOOOOOO! Because I’m a writer — I only know about what I wrote about in the book. I don’t know, say, whether it’s a myth that the Hoo-ha tribe in the Amazon has blue testicles or what the best natural alternative to Viagra is. People do come up after readings and confide all manner of intimate things. It doesn’t bother me. I guess I’m used to it. I just wish I had better answers for them.
JP: What’s the next book (if you’ve decided)?
MR: Yes, I’m writing about the fabulous insanity of space travel, of staying alive in a world for which we are utterly ill-equipped. Lots of fun aeromedical history stuff, field trips to Moscow and the Japanese Space Agency, etc.
[Read my review of Mary Roach’s Bonk here.]
Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation
Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation, by Jamye Waxman (Seal Press, 2007), is a jaunty, woman-to-woman guide to everything you need to know about how to “fiddle, twiddle, tug, rub, flick, circle, tap, and tease” — in other words, have “sex with the one person you have to love your whole life.”
Although much of the book reads like an instruction manual for young women just discovering how to pleasure themselves to orgasm, there is much of value for those of us who have been acquainted with our own hot spots for longer than the author has been alive. The illustrations by Molly Crabapple and Waxman’s explanations of different techniques and toys, for example, may lead even seasoned solo sex practioners to experiment with new options.
You’ll be the life of the party if you recount the history of vibrators (doctors invented them to help “cure” women of “hysteria”) or the ways parents used to be instructed to stop their children from — e.g. “Limit the amount of fluids children ingest. Urination draws too much blood — and awareness — to the genitals.” Certainly heed the advice about choosing safe sex toys and keeping them that way, and peruse the marvelous list of sex-positive websites. A good read, with plenty of enticing ideas and tips for enjoying sexy self-love!