SophieC, Author at Violet Malice

5 November 2022

The Raunch Review: Book 18

Violet Malice has been hedging her bets by rubbing her balls with sandpaper and/or sweetened saliva. You can easily get your hands on some of the sweet stuff by eating loads of meringue nests and then decanting your spit into an old milk bottle. Under Law 41 of the Laws of Cricket, the ball can be polished without the use of an artificial substance, or towel dried if wet. In the event that it gets covered in shit, the ball has to be cleaned under strict supervision. Throw some balls at Violet’s crease, she likes that. She’s tampered with a few leathery ones in her time. Anyway, let’s crack on. Time is money after all (or that’s what all the pinstriped pigs want us to believe). Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that interhuman question: can a good book ever be as blindingly dystopian as a good fuck?

Book title: Now The Night Begins
Author: Alain Guiraudie
Translator: Jeffrey Zuckerman
Publisher of this edition: Semiotext(e)
Copyright: © Semiotext(e) 2018
Translation copyright: © Jeffrey Zuckerman
First published: 2014
Cover art: Paul Klee

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: The book tracks the comings and goings of a strange sexual relationship between a 90-year old patriarch (who is known as Grampa in the book) and a 40-year old family friend called Gilles. The book begins with Gilles stealing Grampa’s underwear off the washing line and masturbating into them in front of Grampa and his daughter who are dozing on the sofa. The daughter calls the police about the stolen underpants (as it’s happened three or four times now and she’s getting well pissed) and so Gilles hangs them back on the line full of cum. The police then go on a horrifying rampage when they discover the culprit. Gilles then begins a fiery sexual relationship with the police chief, who he witnesses murder another man. So pretty spicy dystopian stuff!

Title: A pretty boring title given the content of the book, which is hardcore to put it mildly. If it was mustard it would be eye-wateringly English. The blandness of the title is funny, like calling a perverse dystopian sex book Cupcakes and U-Bends or One Pretty Foggy Evening in June. I reckon Alain was having a laugh with the title. Gilles does end up going to visit Grampa at night because of the police presence and obviously ‘night’ and ‘darkness’ have connotations of suffering and the loss of humanity.

Cover image: A nice bit of cubist surrealism by Paul Klee. Very shifty and in keeping with the impending darkness that surrounds the image. This work is called Fire at Full Moon and was completed by Klee in 1933. It certainly entices us into the dystopian world under the covers.

Best sentence/s in the book:

I’m so turned on that in no time I’m spurting in Grampa’s underwear.

“It looks like ejaculate,” says the chief.

Then I see his balls dripping with shit.

I shake my head to rid myself of this shit rag, I can’t hear anything anymore, I struggle and wait until someone shoots me in the head.

After all, yes, I’m pretty sure this little bout of masturbating in her father’s underwear hasn’t made her happy.

I feel like he might bite off my dick with his teeth.

Make sure you sign-up to Violet’s mailing list HERE. And buy Violet’s chapbook if you can: she’s on her knees HERE.

Overall sexual content: Lots of very interesting sexiness. The chemistry between Grampa and Gilles is really interesting and challenging, particularly given society’s aversion to sexualising older people. This book is exciting in that it opens up a whole host of other types of sexual relationships that do not fit the rules, which go way beyond the simple ins and outs of body bits.

The sex is hot and there’s lots and lots of it. The dystopian feel to the book with its ultra-violence and its strange drives, gives a desperation to the sex and a kind of horror. Gilles ends up falling in love with the police chief who forced a baton up his arse in the opening pages, but despite the mutual attraction their intimacy is tainted by Gilles’ growing fear that the chief will kill him in the end.

Overall conclusion: 8 out of 10.

Titillation station: Horny badger in a dark dark forrest that is feeling around for some warm flesh to sigh into. That said you can’t really let yourself go when there’s all that mass horror swirling around the pages, so this one might be more for the specialist wanker.

Food for thought: An absolutely fantastic book, which has obviously received a lot of bad press given the challenging subject matter. Some critics/idiots have called it deeply offensive, which I can’t get my head around at all. It seems people really don’t like thinking about 90-year olds having any sort of feelings left. Given that Gramps is well up for it (although we’re never really sure what it is) then it’s hardly an abusive situation. And the whole point anyway is that neither of them actually want to have sex with each other, but there is this powerful desire between them that drives them both to want to lay in bed together naked talking in a dialect (Occitan) that only they share.

The murder never gets solved and we never find out what the police chief is really playing at – whether his relationship with Gilles is some strange trap or whether he genuinely loves him. The characters are all exploding and bloated with unsaid and unanswered questions much like life. Thrashing around with shackles biting into our ankles.

Don’t miss out – sign up to V’s mailing list here: CLICK ME!

20 October 2022

The Raunch Review: Book 17

Violet Malice had this long hot bath on Tuesday that nearly melted the flesh off her bones. She had to stand up for a while to counter the light-headedness that jumped in with her. The mirror looked like a big red lobster with gangly claws all steamed up in some sort of middle-class person’s bathroom. Apparently, or so the internet claims, the scream that you hear when a lobster overheats is the expanding air rushing out of small holes in its shell, which sounds like a whistle being blown. They are not actually that bothered. If you know anything at all about lobsters, then you’ll know exactly what they get up to in the sack. The ladies like to piss in the face of the male over a few days because the urine of the female lobster has a chemical in it that disarms him and transforms the male, as if by magic, from an aggressive Hulk like meathead into a gentle lover. The Urban Dictionary defines ‘the gentleman lover’ as a man who ‘gets his pussy’ by acting as though he truly cares about the girl in order to make her want to sleep with him. What a complicated state of affairs. Now let’s get back to business. Wipe that lobster fucking stuff from your mind. As always, Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that piece of shit question: can a good book ever be as reasonably unpleasant as a good fuck?

Book title: The Fata Morgana Books
Author: Jonathan Littell
Translator: Charlotte Mandell
Publisher of this edition: Two Lines Press
Copyright: © Jonathan Littell 2007, 2009, 2010, 2012
Translation copyright: © Charlotte Mandell 2013
First published: Each of the four short stories published separately as above: 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2012
Cover photo: Matt Henry

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: A collection of four short stories from Jonathan Littell (one of my favourite writers who wrote the beautifully shocking novel The Kindly Ones), which capture unformed obsessions. The stories are vague and haunting, sexy and explicit. They avoid definition and certainty, the only solid foundations being, sensual feelings amongst a mass of contradictions and unexplained dream-like activities.

Title: The overarching title of the book attempts to unite the disconcerting dizziness that seems to dominate all the stories. The Italian term Fata Morgana means a complex mirage visible above the horizon. The term can be traced back to the name of an Arthurian sorceress Morgan le Fay, who was believed to have conjured up castles or large tracts of land to lure sexy sailors in uniform to their death. Such mirages distort the objects on which they are based, which can include almost any kind of distant objects like massive oil tankers jammed between the sea and the sky, so that the object itself appears to be something else entirely. Now I’m no meteorologist, but if I had to guess I’d say that that sort of weird looking shit faraway is probably caused by the weather or hallucinogenics. And it turns out that this particular type of mirage is indeed caused by a thermal inversion and an atmospheric duct, which occur due to rays of light bending when they pass through layers of air that are all at different temperatures. So, there you bloody go, now you know.

Cover image: A nice hand. Hands are pretty damn erotic. I’d say more erotic than lots of the other bits of the body. Dressed nails. Red nails = sex. White sheets. If I had to analyse the hand gesture, I would say that this person is probably having it off as the palm is pushing into the mattress possibly through mild elation rather than distress (as distress would be denoted by a balling of the fist). And the sheets, let’s not forget the sheets, they look pretty silky (expensive) and are getting a little trounced by all that writhing around like whipped egg whites when a fork is inserted.

Best sentence/s in the book:

I came too, in long whitish streams on her golden skin, then I lay down next to her, gathered her in my arms, slept a little; when I woke up, everything began again, without end, without conclusion, without appeasement.

I was sweating, there was shit everywhere.

Aside from the dress, she wore nothing but a pair of tiny, salmon-colored panties made of an almost transparent tulle.

When my hand tried to slip into her pants, though, she seized my wrist, with a firm and calm gesture; I kept insisting, between kisses I slipped my fingers here and there, then slowly returned to the elastic; once again, she put up a gentle but unshakable resistance.

In the end, I found myself lying on my belly, with the older doctor, who had pulled on latex gloves, delicately parting the cleft of my buttocks, and the two women stood leaning over my anus as if over a well, calmly discoursing on what they saw there.

I also liked to go out in the street like that, with this lace underwear beneath my clothes: it produced a strange sensation in me – light and floating, as if both sexes at once were strolling in my body through the city.

Make sure you sign-up to Violet’s mailing list HERE. And buy Violet’s chapbook if you can: she’s on her knees HERE.

Overall sexual content: The sex bits are top drawer. The content of most of the stories is very soupy, so when the sex comes into sharp focus it is very very erotic. Littell seems to be trying to capture the undulation of life and then the contrasting shock of those moments that shiver our timbers and hack through the crapping mundaneness of everyday life.

In one of the four stories, Story About Nothing, a man who experiences transgenderism is given a porn video by a stranger. His detailed description of seeming to embody both genders and the three-some that takes place on screen is exquisitely written as well as titillating. He watches the tape with an objectivity that is incredibly sexy, eventually discussing his role as the fifth and most important participant in the porno (after the three bodies on screen and let’s not forget the faceless camera operator).

Overall conclusion: 7 out of 10.

Titillation station: Big bang for your bucks. I was well deep even before I got under the covers. Although I’m biased (the momentousness of The Kindly Ones, which includes an SS officer having graphic sex with a tree branch, means that I was bound to like anything Littell turns his hand to), I can genuinely say that this is a great book. I certainly distracted myself for a couple of hours. Spit poured out of my trumpet if you know what I mean. The horn. It gives you the horn.

Food for thought: This book is well dirty. The pages smell like sweaty bodies and the text runs off each sheet. I’d really like to bump into Jonathan in the home fragrances aisle of John Lewis. I’d like to think I’d be brave enough to touch his shopping. Maybe I’d tell him about my favourite sentence that he’s written, but then that’s hardly fair on his translator.

The first book Littell published – a wedge of cyberpunk called Bad Voltage – and which Littell calls “a very bad science-fiction novel” – sounds like it needs devouring too, with sausages and gravy.

I particularly like the bit in one of the short stories – you will have to read them all to find out which one – where the narrator says basically that he has found the woman that he adores most in the world, out of all the women that exist. And then in the very next sentence he says except for this other woman who is just fucking incredibly edible. (I’m just paraphrasing he obviously said it way more poetically than my attempt at writing, which is the equivalent of having some sort of unexpected enema at a BBQ.)

Don’t miss out – sign up to V’s mailing list here: CLICK ME!

16 October 2022

The Raunch Review: Book 16

Violet Malice has been preoccupied with painted ladies and crotch flies this week. Wondering why buttons are sometimes used instead of zips. Is it a class thing? Does the skin get between the teeth? So, you’re down there, wahey, and you suddenly feel some really hard buttons when you weren’t expecting them to be there, and you’ve got to style it out. It’s hard to undo buttons with your teeth, right? Violet has been out of touch recently. Squirreled away in the South looking like Mona Lisa during a hurried 69. She has been wide awake staring at her mons veneris and trying to complete it. This week’s pulp paperback is a pocket rocket of a read. All skirt and no knickers. A book with a mission to make us all a little bit more dilated. Violet’s weekly adult book review – without frills – attempts to answer that disarming question: can a good book ever be as mouthy and uneducated as a good fuck?

Book title: Orality ’70
Author: Richard E. Geis
Publisher of this edition: Barclay House
Copyright: © Barclay House 1969
First published: 1969

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: The book is made up of a series of interviews with supposedly real people about their sex lives and experiences, with a particular focus on oral sex: the mouth. The book is described on the cover as a psycho-sex study and is very reminiscent of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in its honesty, however there is one big difference in that the author does enter (literally) some of the stories. It is because of this and the author’s notoriety as a cult writer that I suspect that this is a work of fiction posing as non-fiction. I Googled it and nothing on the book is out there, not even a spunky review or synopsis. All I know for sure is that this book is a follow-up to Geis’ other book Orality ’69, written the year prior, and which also presents supposed first-hand experiences of sex. I have not been able to get hold of a second- or even third-hand copy of Orality ’69, so we will have to make do with the sequel on its own (ideally, I would have reviewed both books together, like the overbearing CEfuckingO that I am).

Title: Does what it says on the tin. The book came out in 1970 and was a follow-up to Orality ’69 so I presume ’70 refers to the year. Orality is a good word for the job, as it means both the act of verbally communicating (so the interview style of content) and the act of focusing one’s sexual energy on the mouth. So, open wide and swallow it.

Cover image: N/A. Obviously, scientific books need to look serious. It goes without saying that you can’t whack a big cock on the front of some journal about the metabolic system, it’s just not on. The warning: ADULTS ONLY, is a nice touch. Makes me want to read it. Like when I’m tempted to drink apricot shampoo because it says not for human consumption. Puts the idea straight into my silly little head.

Best sentence/s in the book:

My wife is a cocksucker!

Her boss commented, “She’s built like the old brick shithouse.”

I could see the wet pink peanut that was her clitoris between folds of parted flesh.

Donny and Sammy blew dried peas at her cunt with plastic straws.

He fumbled her blouse open, got her bra off and “went sort of ape”.

While she licked Sammy’s prick clean of her husband’s shit, Donny stuck a finger in her ass, pulled it out and made her lick that clean, too.

“With ass it’s mostly tight right at the opening, that’s where you get the feeling from, except if the girl has a load of shit – if she has to take a crap when you plug in – then you get an extra feeling.”

Make sure you sign-up to Violet’s mailing list HERE. And buy Violet’s chapbook if you can: she’s on her knees HERE.

Overall sexual content: An incredible book. It’s a riot of heady but poignant sex like those trashy magazines that suck you in with outrageous headlines. The mix of people featured is spot on: the boss and his secretary who is also his sex slave; the alcoholic nympho who has never had an orgasm (which feels like it should be an oxymoron to me); the guy who got half his cock shot off and as such has rerouted his pleasure so successfully that he is an undisputed Olympian of eating pussy; a lesbian couple who are obsessed with 69; a senior hetero couple who manage to overcome their sheepishness and go down on each other for the first time after decades of marriage; and the woman hater who is exploding with bile and projected guilt.

The personal accounts – which could be true – are really touching as well as incredibly erotic. They cover current sexual preferences as well as the person’s sexual history. Any sort of psychoanalysis feels like a bit of a stretch – especially as in a few instances the author ends up being sucked off by the person he is interviewing, which makes a mockery of any sort of authority. But still, I think there is value in trying to understand where inhibitions or preferences might come from, and through sharing personal experiences understand our shared humanity and that we are not alone in our desires.

Geis is pushing for a more liberal and tolerant society. He is sex positive and calls out the laws in the United States at that time, the government bodies and the church groups that stood in the way of sexual self-expression and freedom. He tells people to think about it. To decide for themselves whether the people presented in this book should be punished (legally and therefore not for pleasure) for their behaviour.

Overall conclusion: 7 out of 10.

Titillation station: Hot as a chip pan fire in Tenerife. Shortness of breath. Fireworks with loud bangs. Animated before quickly becoming irrational. This is a keeper. To be placed in an accessible position on the under the bed bookshelf right next to the trunk of sex toys.

Food for thought: Everyone always thinks it’s about sticking it in. Penetration this, penetration that, but in truth it’s not about that stuff at all. Sexy sex and intimacy and pleasure are so much more than nuts and bolts. It is refreshing to read a good book arguing the corner for something different. For something exposing, gloriously open, and generous. To be the giver of pleasure and to receive pleasure from giving is a beautiful thing.

I particularly like the bit where the married couple in their 50s decide one evening out-of-the-blue (pun intended) to have oral sex for the first time. He says to her: “I’m going to eat you tonight,” and she replies delightfully “It’s about time.” The detailed description of them giving each other head is exquisite, especially when he locates her clit and gets turned on by her thrashing about in the pillows. She then returns the favour and manages to stop herself from vomiting all over his stomach. Now that’s true love, surely.

Don’t miss out – sign up to V’s mailing list here: CLICK ME!

7 October 202216 October 2022

The Raunch Review: Book 15

Violet Malice has been trying not to bite her tongue off when she thinks about you at night with her legs open. Dwelling on the look in your eyes when she knows you’re lying about not fancying that woman that works in the pizza place with the nice trousers (I mean tits). The one who talks to you with her eyes. The polite bitterness on your tongue in the morning when you want the intruder in your bed to love you and then fuck right off. She has been sitting in aluminium soaked coffee shops, looking at the floor tiles and contemplating the uncontemplatable. If only there was a way to turn the hands back and live life again knowing what she knows now. This week’s work of art is a book weak at the knees because of a meat truck collapsed on the great straining organ. A chest cavity hot and slick with slow roasted sex organs. It is a magnificent slip into romance. Violet’s weekly adult book review – as always – attempts to answer that padded envelope of a question: can a good book ever be as narcissistic and self-absorbed as a good fuck?

Book title: A Sport And A Pastime
Author: James Salter
Publisher of this edition: Picador
Copyright: © James Salter 1967
First published: 1967
Cover image: John Stezaker

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: An anonymous male narrator tells the story of a love affair between a handsome American man and a young French girl. The narrator watches them obsessively – seemingly wanting to be him and be balls deep in her – describing and fantasising about their rather magnolia day-to-day activities (eating out in nice restaurants) and their frequent unbridled sexual activities (eating out on pussy and cock burgers).

Title: A forgettable title really given that the book is considered a great American novel and received critical acclaim. The author should probably have gone with something more tangible like The College Drop-Out and The Cock Hungry Waitress or Sowing Wild Strawberries In Some Beautiful Wasteland. Given the intensity of the book – the title somewhat undermines the sentiment, which is obviously the point. Love and lust are just a sport and a pastime. What at first seems to be the best thing in the world, is actually a repeatable fantasy that explodes into nothingness as you move closer and closer together. It seems that as the fucking becomes more and more meaningful – lust and hunger transform into fear and the loss of self.

Cover image: The book focuses on the love affair between the two characters to the exclusion of all else – so the cover image works well. A good snog in the dark. A snog one leans into. A snog where you suddenly lose your trousers and your dignity. It could be all of our faces on that cover. A kiss frozen in time that mixes two separate beings into one moving mass of limbs.

Best sentence/s in the book:

She undoes his clothing and brings forth his prick, erect, pale as a heron in the dusk, both of them looking ahead at the road like any couple.

His sperm swims slowly inside her, oozing out between her legs.

Her cunt tastes sweet as fruit.

He comes like a bull.

Make sure you sign-up to Violet’s mailing list HERE. And buy Violet’s chapbook if you can as she is on her knees HERE.

Overall sexual content: The book is beautiful. Like poetry. Full of poignant observations about the journey from lust to love and back again. The fear and failure that comes with falling in love. Poetry is perfect for this purpose as such enormous all-consuming feelings have evaded description since 1992. That’s what poetry and great literature are there for: to try and capture the total horse shit that is a life well lived.

There is lots and lots of sensual sex. Slow and wordless. Like the Sunday morning sun creeping across the covers. It is a very erotic book. The rhythm and backdrop of winter in France makes for a dizzy randy romance. The restless energy of youth and beauty. The coffee in condensation adorned cafes and the decadence of being hungry and then eating.

The dialogue between them is excruciating. He has bad French and she has bad English. They fumble along. Obsessed with each other’s bodies and how they feel inside each other. There is a very beautiful moment when they try to talk about anal, without actually naming it (because maybe naming it is too crass and might shatter the romance), and she asks whether it will hurt. He obviously says the equivalent of “No, up the arse is well pleasurable like eating semolina.” When eventually they do put it in the shit shute, it is breathtaking.

I did want more. A lot more. There is certainly lots of sex and it is described beautifully, but the sex itself is drawn very quickly as if half-asleep. I wanted protracted descriptions of their fucking. I wanted more trash in the poetry to make my eyes water. Pin pricks and teeth marks. I wanted a clearer view of their pleasure. For me there was a few too many roses and not enough gut bacteria. Turn the knob up to incinerate – that’s the book I want to read.

Overall conclusion: 8 out of 10.

Titillation station: A hot one handed read if you’re into a perfectly rounded turn of phrase and a plump glottal stop. A swell bit of writing porn. But not a head banger if you catch my drift.

Food for thought: The narrator is a nicely drawn voyeur. How much of their romance is his imagination is debatable, I’d say most of it. He obviously fancies the pants off the French girl, but is unable to act on his desires. If you stunt a pipe usually the fluids find their way out of another hole. I reckon this guy has a pretty vivid wank bank.

The French girl is described as poor, simple and working-class. She has bad breath and farts by accident. She is sexy and beautiful and insatiable. She does not fight against her love for him, but he fights against hers. He eventually gets killed in a motorcycle accident, so all ends well! She gets married and presumably has children because obviously that’s the only possible ending to a romance. The woman either pines away to nothing or she stays on the MOTHER fucking conveyor belt of privet hedged suburbia.

IF YOU LIKE IT – sign up to V’s mailing list: https://eepurl.com/hTKdsr

1 October 2022

The Raunch Review: Book 14

Violet Malice has been digging out the knitwear and gently handling moth balls. The weather has taken a turn this week, from mild to nippy. It seems that September has burnt itself out and everyone’s legs and bottom cheeks have gone into hibernation. Violet has taken to reading late into the morning, under the covers with a steaming cup of tea and some nice biscuits (describing word rather than nice biscuits themselves which are not actually very nice). Sometimes staying in bed is the best we can do. This week’s reading material has been a bitter lid to lick. Like one of those massive tubs of yogurt with a handle that you buy because it makes sense fiscally, but which turns out to taste like absolute fucking shit. Not all books should be easy and soft, some books are better read pushed up against a load-bearing wall. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that overpowering question: can a good book ever be as lip suckingly horrifying as a good fuck?

Book title: The Sluts
Author: Dennis Cooper
Publisher of this edition: Carroll & Graf Publishers
Copyright: © Dennis Cooper 2004
First published: Sections first appeared in various literary magazines
Cover photo: David Sprigle

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: The book is made up of a mishmash of reviews from the pages of a website for gay male escorts, message boards and emails. It focuses on the goings on of one particular escort and his sugar daddy, which escalates into a huge steaming paella of horrendously explicit sex practices, lies, fantasies and online posturing.

Title: The Sluts is a pretty wet nosed title, if you ask me, given the absolute depravity in the book. It probably should have been much more hardcore given that most of the activity in the book focuses on extreme S&M and online sex people obsessing over the thought of young twinks being bred and killed.

Cover image: Well lit! Gritty and raw, full frontal, exactly like the insides.

Best sentence/s in the book:

I would have sold my mother into slavery to bury my face in that ass and feel my tongue inside that warm, perfect body.

His years as a heavy bottom have damaged it beyond repair, but you could say the same thing about the Grand Canyon.

I recommend doing him with the lights on because you can stretch the elastic and look all the way into his beautiful, pulsing guts.

He had a reputation among the regulars at the bar as an arrogant creep who charged a ridiculously large fee ($350) to sit on men’s faces and masturbate.

Make sure you sign-up to Violet’s mailing list HERE. And buy Violet’s chapbook if you can as she is on her knees HERE.

Overall sexual content: The book is full of extreme sex so it is very harrowing indeed. I had to have a breather on a number of occasions – particularly when towards the end, the young escort that is the focus of the book is castrated and raped, whilst been made to eat his own testicles.

The format and writing style captures the unrestrained and frightening depths of the online world – dark, unaccountable and anonymous. The narrator and every voice in the book is contradicted or exposed to be lying or withholding information, so the book begins to take on a fantasy of its own. Just when you feel as though something might be certain, everything is turned on its head and truth begins to dribble down your inside leg. Is anything true? Is anyone being serious? Is all this just a big collective wank fantasy?

Much like the incel forums of today, which advocate sexual violence against women, there is a monstrously real quality to the sentiments expressed in the book. And even if these individuals are just fantasising about murdering beautiful young escorts and getting off on it – is that in itself OK? What about free speech? If every response is an escalation, if we need harder and harder stimulus, where will it end? Death and destruction? The final curtain. La petite mort pulls itself back together and then snuffs out for good.

The online world has blown up the hornet’s nest of sex and debauchery and our ability to take on new identities and express extreme views to get a reaction. It has enabled us to get unrestricted access to anything we want. Enter conversations and be part of communities that we may not have had access to previously – but this can be positive and negative. Certainly, the book showcases the dangerous quicksand of message boards and online forums, which suck people in and pump violently until all that is left is bleached bones and a bucket of cum.

Overall conclusion: 6 out of 10.

Titillation station: Sawdust and celibacy.

Food for thought: Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a place for S&M and serious kink. What a beautiful flinching portmanteau of sadism (the pleasure from inflicting pain) and masochism (the pleasure from receiving it). First spewed from those two great fucking writers: sadism comes from the French sadisme named after the Marquis de Sade and masochism from that old bastard English named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The crucial thing about power and submission is the line really. Between perineum and arsehole. The space between the collar. The perspiration between pleasure and pain. Life and death. Fantasy and reality. Art and literature. Anticipation and… At what point do the seams come open and the doors fall off.

We are all shaped by power dynamics. Sex is about power. Sometimes the powerful want to get on their carpet burned fucking knees and dine out on shit and vice versa. But I would suggest that pain and abuse without trust becomes a whole different beast when it makes that leap into the real world.

Push it – sign up to V’s mailing list: https://eepurl.com/hTKdsr