Bring Me Another Book, Slave

Noth­ing like some good smart smut. It’s nice to know that there are some authors out there writ­ing sexy books that don’t insult our intel­li­gence. What can I say? This book was refresh­ing like a cool drink of water. While explic­it, it was nev­er cheap and nev­er stupid.

Car­rie’s Sto­ry is billed as “An Erot­ic S/M Nov­el” and as such there was a lot that I got to read that I have no desire to try. The whole pony-train­ing thing? About as sexy as watch­ing paint dry. Heck, some­one some­where is prob­a­bly into watch­ing paint dry so I don’t quite know what to write.

But there’s some­thing inter­est­ing beneath all of the alien trap­pings, sil­ly games, and cos­tumes. It’s like part­ner-danc­ing. Not the danc­ing the kids do today (and have been since before I was born), but the old kinds, where there’s a leader and a fol­low­er and actu­al steps and moves. Although all danc­ing is about sex, the mod­ern club danc­ing, while some­times much more demon­stra­tive about the gyra­tions and such, has most­ly abstract­ed itself from hav­ing any sex­u­al dynam­ic. There are no roles, no pair­ing off, it’s a bunch of jump­ing around and indi­vid­u­al­is­tic show­ing off of moves. I’m not say­ing it’s not fun — to the con­trary it can be a blast. But part­ner-danc­ing is where the men get to be men and the women get to be women. Or throw away the gen­der ref­er­ence: I live in San Fran­cis­co, so of course I’ve seen women lead and men fol­low. In part­ner-danc­ing, the doms get to be doms and the subs get to be subs.

There’s no bru­tal­i­ty to swing­danc­ing, but the leader has to learn to lead in order to be a good dancer. Is there a les­son here for all rela­tion­ships? Per­haps, but I mean only to relate this back to this book. Ms Weath­er­field por­trayed a world of sex­u­al pow­er exchange in a way that made as much sense and seemed as nat­ur­al as lead­ing my dance part­ner across the floor.

Except, you know, with freaky props.