Desires edited by Adrienne Benedicks and Shivaji Sengupta

$12.95
ISBN 0967397804

Reviewed by Debra Boxer
(5/3/00)

Critic, Roland Barthes, wrote, “the pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas — for my body does not have the same ideas I do.”

Such irrefutable pleasure abounds in this 24-story anthology compiled by Adrienne Benedicks, founder of the Erotica Readers’ Association and Shivaji Sengupta, a Professor of English in a liberal arts college and a regular contributor to ERA’s “Stories Gallery.”

It’s important to note here that, with the ERA, Benedicks has been promoting erotica for men and women since 1996 in an online forum and has sustained a loyal and growing following. With this anthology Benedicks and Sengupta want to “raise erotic writing to the level of literature” and eradicate its prejudicial status as a “second class citizen.”

This collection, as intelligent as it is titillating, is right on target.

The contributors, both male and female, hail from the United States, Canada, England, and India. They consist of both well-known and lesser-known authors of erotica but none of the stories lack for quality, style, originality and complexity.

We find characters who are passionate, scared, sexy, lonely, curious, loving, spilling milk, riding elevators, taking baths, contemplating mortality, nipping at each other’s crotches and charging at each other’s imaginations.

Yes, of course this includes lusty, pantyless women with shaved pussies who want it by a stranger up the ass and feral men with big cocks who want to give it to them, but we also find mood, motive, and emotion.

The most exciting aspect of this collection are the female characters. They are strong, even when showing their vulnerable sides, and never stronger than when naked and fulfilling their sexual desires.

Maxim Jakubowski’s “Bottomless in Bourbon” is a ‘no-holes-barred’ romp as a man, pining for his lost love, follows a new lover through the seedy streets of New Orleans. He watches her live out her wildest fantasies and more often than not participates himself. She is the quintessential insatiable woman, a Molotov cocktail of desire. “She let him go and he watched her tasting his come before she finally swallowed it.”

Monika Elaine’s “Got Milk?” finds robust eroticism lurking in a most prosaic ingredient. A woman who considers herself not sexually forward ends up in a hot and hilarious threesome brought on by that television commercial tagline. The borrowing-a-cup-of-something-from-a-neighbor scenario is infused with new meaning. “The milk hit the linoleum with a soft thud…Scrambling gracelessly for a moment, I landed at his feet, my robe wide open, naked body exposed and legs splayed open.”

A wide array of scenarios are covered: infidelity, marital lust, S&M, voyeurism, threesomes, exhibitionism, funky positions, phone sex, elevator sex, sex with strangers, new lovers, and old. From guilt-ridden to guiltless, from foreplay to role playing from whose on top to bottoms up, the uncensored lust and carnal acrobatics is tempered by fun, romance, and playfulness.

The collection does not, however, cover a wide range of sexual sensibilities. There are a few homoerotic and S&M tales but for the most part it is man/woman oriented. (The editors do address this in their afterward and say they are considering future anthologies of a more varied nature.)

Another sensual surprise is that the most erotic exchanges happen in the most unexpected of circumstances.

There is the heady flirtation in Nina Rowan’s “Shaping Lust,” where two lonely strangers- a man and a woman — meet in a coffee shop on a snowy night over steaming joe and her worn copy of “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.” Their insistent lovemaking that night, after she brings him home, is as gentle as it is feverish. They exchange glances and graze each other’s skin until he runs a finger over her eyebrow, stares at her and asks simply, “May I kiss you?” The comfort she finds in his arms is all the more tender for its futility to dissolve her loneliness.

In Debra Hyde’s “Weigh Station” we see beauty redefined. When two high school sweethearts are reunited we see bodies age but not the fire once between them. “His warmth and the feel of his now plentiful, now salt-and-peppered chest hair were familiarity renewed.” She’s wild in mid-life, complete with labia rings, a shaved pussy, and a bruised rear from a penchant for spanking, while he is widowed. When he doesn’t respond to her masochistic plea of, “Ruin me,” she says to herself, “Ruin me, I guess, only works on a sadist.” She knows that although their lovemaking is thrilling, you can come but you can’t go home again.

The Count of Shadows brings us “The Valentine” easily the most startlingly beautiful story in the collection. We see the inherent horror and hopelessness of a Nazi concentration camp exploded by the tenderness between two people resigned to their impending execution. Exhausted, filthy, and starving, they flail and grope at each other trying to get beneath each other’s clothes for one last meal of human affection. “Strange. After being so long denied making love, neither of them hurried, but savored each stolen moment of undressing. Of stopping to kiss or touch, like reverent blind people before a religious icon that promised sight again.” In the midst of desolation and in the dry, cracked skin of his lips she finds not only beauty and desire, but hope as well.

“Johnny’s Story” by Mary Anne Mohanraj is an electric vignette of playful teenage awakening between a boy the summer before he leaves for college and his stepsister, who is “[l]ittle like a bird, a little chocolate stick of a thing.” When he comes across her and she is dressed only in a towel, the slightest contact incites arousal. It is the unabashed playfulness of their teasing that makes it all the more intoxicating. “The laughter just bursts, sunshine across her face and we laugh and laugh until we’ve got sore stomachs and damp eyes and when we’re done laughing there’s such a good feeling, such a warm fellow-feeling in that room, like nothing I’ve known, like this is gonna be a friend for life smiling at me with her eyes.

“The Lady and the Chauffer” by Shivaji Sengupta is surely one of the more intense tales. An unhappy wife and mother finds her feral side fulfilled in the arms and in between the legs of her driver. “I felt him go, slippery, in and out, in and out. Every time he withdrew, taking the length of his hard muscle almost to the rim of my soft, wetly open vagina”I rocked him as a sea rocks a boat, the mother her child.”

All the stories in this provocative compilation are clearly about language. Language that soothes, surprises, and arouses.

The anthology concludes with a thought-provoking dialogue between the editors on the question of what is erotica and a call for literary erotica to be accepted as a valid genre by the mainstream. Says Shivaji, “Erotica is legal but not legitimate.”

Serious literature consists of characters who have feelings — feelings that fuel and interfere with their desires causing contradiction, conflict, and resolution. Adhering to that definition, Desires proves that the desire to be fucked hard does not preclude sophistication of plot or depth of character. Protagonists expressing passion through their bodies can be just as fresh, honest, and courageous as those who aren’t. Taking all of this into consideration, Desires is a convincing testimony for literary erotica to be taken as serious literature.

©2000 by Debra Boxer