Reviews

Here Be Porn…

In an attempt to find both good value and something new to report on here, I picked up a couple of short erotica works on Fictionwise. Really, I did it for you. The two I chose were “Virgin Voyeur” by T. G. Darcy and “The Concubine of the Temple” by Nyki Blatchley.

I don’t read erotica much, and when I do, I like a story. Yes, I’m that stereotypical woman who likes her porn with a plot. In both cases, there was indeed plot, and yet, I was still dissatisfied.

In “Virgin Voyeur,” a contemporary short of just 4,300 words, Julie goes to a friend’s house to borrow a dress. Her friend, Lisa, who was adamant about the time Julie should arrive, wasn’t at home, so she lets herself in with the key she’d been given and eventually finds the dress, only to find that it had been altered and was far too large. Standing almost naked in her friend’s bedroom, she hears her friend come in with someone and decides to hide in the closet.

And that’s where it all falls apart. Lisa comes in with a new friend, Amy, and together these two ladies have mad, passionate sex all over the bed. Julie, hiding in the closet, sees every exciting moment and eventually masturbates to orgasm. Amy, who had never had a lesbian sexual experience before, is sent to the kitchen to get bottled water for Lisa, and while she’s gone, Lisa checks on Julie. Oh noes! Yes, she knew Julie was there the whole time. In fact, she planned it so that Julie would be there, naked, at just the right time and in just the right closet. She had two, but it is at least implied that she broke the door of one so that Julie wouldn’t hide in the wrong place.

After she ascertains that Julie, mostly naked and still dewy from her recent orgasm, is fine, Amy comes in, Lisa mostly closes the closet door (”Oh no, nothing to see here.”) and they get back to business. This time, Lisa arranges things so that Julie can see all the way to her diaphragm, if she’s wearing one, so that Amy is conveniently placed to give Julie crazy great oral sex (even though she’s never done it to a woman before–I guess she just did what she likes), and they 69 to heights of incredible passion.

Julie can see every bit of activity and has another orgasm.

I got stuck here. Let’s consider Lisa as a standard stick figure. Julie is situated between her legs, but some ways away in a closet, peeking through a crack. Amy is on top of Lisa and facing her upside down, with her head down. I have attempted to recreate this with my daughter’s dolls in order to make it work, but it doesn’t. It’s unlikely Julie saw anything but feet and hair. Of course she orgasms again.

If I wanted to get crazy nitpicky I would further discuss why Julie had a key when Lisa had led her to expect someone would be home; or why, hearing that there were two women coming in, Julie didn’t just stick her head out the door and say, “Oops, I’ll just be a minute!”, get dressed, and leave, or how uncomfortable it would be to find oneself sitting naked in the closet after all the excitement wears off; or we could move on to wondering if they know what they’re doing to the environment using bottled water?–but I won’t.

Instead, let’s consider trapping someone in a sexual situation without giving them an option to refuse. Then we could move on to setting someone up to be watched in a brand new sexual experience without her knowledge or consent. Finally, let’s take a moment to think about a character who is giddily pleased at having done all of these things, including seducing someone it doesn’t sound like she wants, so that the person she does want will see how very nifty keen having sex with her is and will jump at the next opportunity, which she shows every sign of intending to do.

If you’re in to reading about women playing with one another’s nipples, frottage, mutual cunnilingus, or voyeurism, and don’t care that there are serious plot holes in a story peopled with unlikeable characters, this is definitely your story. If those things don’t interest you, I’d move along to the next. Rating: F.

Beat Me, Beat Me!

The next wasn’t much better. In “The Concubine of the Temple”, our heroine, Melia, is a large-breasted woman (which make all the others jealous), who is in love with flat-chested, boyish Zefra. She and Zefra live in the temple with many other women, all being taught how to please a man so they can be chosen as a bride for their god. The author loses, in my opinion, a lot of opportunity to have fun with that education.

Zefra almost drowns a bully in the baths before Melia gets her to calm down. They go to bed that evening and have crazy great sex while talking about whether or not they’d ever want a man’s penis touching them since the only one they’ve seen is the marble statue of their god, fully erect, and it doesn’t look–or feel–very comfortable (which they know because they’re required to kiss it every day). Melia’s all for the experience, being so girly; Zefra, who isn’t at all girly, says “hell no.”

Melia is awakened in the night to find that Zefra’s been taken away, accused of killing the bully. Melia confesses to the crime to save her lover and we never see Zefra again. I found myself wondering why the firebrand wasn’t taking the temple apart stone by stone to find Melia, or if she’d just disappeared like a good little pseudo-boy plot device.

Melia is then taken underground and discovers a brand new world. Here she is first tortured with various devices and then forced to perform sexual favors for the priestesses. It wasn’t clear that anyone believed Melia had committed the murder, of if there had even been a murder, so it seemed they were just having a bit of fun with her (and in fact Melia discovers that they’ve taken in a lot of girls who never see the light of the temple, but who are instead tortured and then sold into sexual slavery).

After various and sundry sexual tortures and performances over the course of time, Melia finds herself abandoned in a room where she’s been tied to a bed. A man comes in. Wonder of wonders, he’s built just like the statue of the god (she’d wondered if a penis was a divine accoutrement, a nice touch to underscore Melia’s naivete). They have amazingly great sex. She convinces herself that this man really is her god. He asks Melia if she wants all the mean girls killed, and she agrees, but then changes her mind and asks that they just be punished instead (because a bent for sexual sadism is cured through divine punishment). He agrees and tells her that her amazing capacity for love has made her his ideal bride. Then they have sex again, because punishing murders and sexual sadists, or finding out if Zefra is still alive can wait.

I was most bothered by the stereotypical representation of Zefra as flat-chested and boyish, with short hair, as the representation of the woman who doesn’t want to be touched by a penis, and by the very not-sexy brutalization of Melia coupled with her wide-eyed, dewy acceptance of male-as-saviour, with whom she goes on to have cosmic sex without a hint of any kind of trauma. I’d have been happier if Zefra had done a Sampson and left the whole mess in a ruin. This one receives a D.

Reviews continue with Jane Lindskold’s Through Wolf’s Eyes on Page 34