For my twenty-first birthday a good friend gave me a copy of Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus. It was the first and the last erotica I read for more than thirty years. I remember thinking the writing was very beautiful and finding it interesting to read about sex from a woman’s point of view, as that was that same year I saw my first porno flick: Debbie Does Dallas, which I thought incredibly insipid. Several years later I saw about four minutes of Deep Throat, which happened to be playing at party I was attending; the party turned out to be as boring as the film. It seemed that neither prettified erotica nor mainstream pornography had much to offer me.
Over the past few years, it seemed that my interests in those subjects was more academic than anything; by that I mean that an article by Sallie Tisdale in Harper’s, on women and pornography later led me to her excellent book on the subject Talk Dirty to Me, which I found fascinating. I was also intrigued by Daphne Merkin’s essay in the New Yorker on spanking, but equally as intrigued by the uproar it caused. A few years ago nonfiction memoirs about sexuality by Toni Bentley (The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir) and Catherine Millet’s (The Sexual Life of Catherine M.) as well as Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman were all interesting in their own way, although Juska’s was by far the most inventive. But I wouldn’t call them erotica, per se.
Yet, I am aware that there is a huge erotica market, to which both men and women contribute. And when I was editing my own book, Desire: Women Write About Wanting, and the writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel was suggested to me as a possible contributor, I went to her website. I found out that Bussel is huge in the erotica market, she wrote a wonderful essay for my book; and so, when her book came with an offer to review, I simply could not resist. (Full disclosure: I also know another of the writers in the book, Simon Sheppard, another notable contributor to the erotic market, whom I met, on a cruise ship, of all places. He was traveling with his aged mother, I with my two sisters; he was grateful for our company, we were grateful for his font of wisdom: he helped the three of us win several trivia contests.)
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