Best Sex Writing 2010: Sex Writing Is Sexy, And Reading Sex Writing Is Pretty Sexy, Too

I am going to admit something that I find personally quite embarrassing: until recently, I had not been able to make it through an entire book in well over a year. There. I said it.

So, when I was sent a copy of Best Sex Writing 2010 for review, it was a tall order, given my recent inability to finish a book, but I thought that whether or not I was able to read the whole thing would stand as a barometer for its ability to engage me.

Guess what: sexual content is engaging, and I READ THE WHOLE THING.

Phew. Now I can avoid remedial literacy training with my 30-plus year old copy of Are You My Mother?

Best Sex Writing 2010 is an annual anthology that covers everything from your basic vanilla sex to multi-flavour sundaes with three kinds of sprinkles and enough sparklers to warrant a call from the fire department. To be more succinct, I have spent the last week reading about sluttiness, the evolutionary marvel that is the human penis, designer vaginas, questionable sex laws, what really turns men on, a bizarre tale of gay male prostitution, race play in the BDSM community, pubic hair nostalgia, coming out of sexual starvation, the battle for the thinnest condoms, sexual surrogacy, sexting, cheating, fisting, the erotic qualities of Twilight, swinging, a straight male who fetishized lesbians, Tijuana bibles, safe sex in the gay community, a dissatisfying threesome, sexual education in schools, the lacking intimacy in present sexual language, sex and breastfeeding, a performance versus a commodity model of sex, and voyeurism.

It's been a steamy week.

 
(A man re-lighting his smoke on the streets of Helsinki, which I've only put here because, hot damn, I like 'em kind of grubby and mean looking)

Not that the entire book reads as pornography. It doesn't. Its essays roam from biological evaluations of our genitalia to personal ruminations on past sexual behaviours to motherhood to detailed BDSM scenes to feminist essays about rape culture. It reads fast and well — I read several of the essays out loud to the Palinode — despite the fact that a small handful of them were noticeably weaker works, specifically the essays "Bite Me! (Or Don't)", which is a sloppier piece about the eroticism in Twilight, and "A Cunning Linguist", which, although it is about the language surrounding sexual delights, left me flaccid.

That is the strength of an anthology, though. If some of the works are weaker, you can always flip ahead to a stronger piece, and this particular anthology is primarily built of good stuff, by which I mean to say, you wouldn't kick this book out of bed for eating crackers. I didn't.

Comments

[Washington "I Know There's A Point Here Somewhere" Cube]

I hope that's a man. In Finland and those other gender loose Scandanavian countries, ya never know. I had put aside a piece I wanted to write about desire. I just mentioned it in passing in my most recent blog entry. I was reading about case histories and how psychologists handle (through therapy and drugs) some of their more severe cases, oh...like someone who likes to roast people on spits, but also those with lesser fetishes like...oh....feet.

Which raises the issue that if you explode over say Kim Novak's bare arches in Bell, Book and Candle, who's to say that's bad if it works for you. One thing I learned...are ya still with me MamaPop peeps? Is that there ia a diminished reporting of rubber fetishism because an aging population that may have become fixated on rubber during their formative years and rubber pants wearing is no longer valid as there are other choices and rubber pants have gone the way of the Dodo. My feeling, however, is that the fetishist who formed his passion through the exposure to rubber pants, may be about to come full circle as it were when they return to wearing diapers again. It's the wheel of life, folks...or a Catherine Wheel...if you're into that.

Where was I? Oh. There are websites with pornographic writing, some good, some drek, but the most interesting thing is, you can go and click off, like eHarmony all of the things you want to see in a story: puppies, red shoes, whips, MMF, MMM, FMF, jello (grape) whatever...and click "enter" and there ya go.