The Raunch Review: Book 23

You’ll never guess what…

I went to the snooker final. I am a big fan of ball sports that involve dickie bows and waistcoats. It really gives me the horn, all that bending over the table. All that chalking the tip. All that synthetic resin dropping like batter into hot oil. It was pretty mouth-watering. I didn’t want it to end. But, alas, as the saying goes, everything must come at the end. Otherwise no one’s allowed to finish. Violet’s weekly adult book review is streaking into 2023. A whole new year of reading. All bouncy, pink and vulnerable. As we attempt to answer that inflatable question: can a good book ever be as buoyant as a good fuck?

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Book title: Available: A Memoir of Sex and Dating After a Marriage Ends 
Author: Laura Friedman Williams
Publisher of this edition: The Borough Press, HarperCollinsPublishers
Copyright: © Laura Friedman Williams 2021
First published: 2021
Cover art: plainpicture/amanaimages/LUSH LIFE/A.collection

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis:  This is a very personal account of a woman’s plunge into sex and dating after her 22-year marriage ends. Laura, a 47-year-old mother of three, dishes the dirt on what it’s like to put an unfamiliar prick in your arse after two decades of nothing fucking. How to pluck your bean up out of the gutter and try to form some sort of identity out of the ruins. 

Title: I am AVAILABLE. A pretty horrifying statement after a lifetime of putting other people’s needs before your own. To be consumed by Mother and Wife. What a pair of cunts. What a horrifying thought, to be available. A pint of single cream sat in the fridge counter waiting to be wanted. 

Cover image: A lovely looking peach with an erotic looking crease. How delicious. Fruit is sexy, we all know that. My only beef is that maybe the crease is too straight. It makes me think that this might be a genetically modified stoned fruit. No one has a perfectly straight furry arse crevice. Not that I’ve cum across anyway (and I’ve had my fair share of A2M, according to the UK government’s National Statistics). 

Best sentence/s in the book:

I have always gagged giving blow jobs. 

More importantly, two men have now independently surveyed the state of my vagina and given it the all-clear. 

There is something that makes a man look so vulnerable when he is handling himself […]. 

I am too shy to do what I really want, which is to tell him this is my first close-up with an uncircumcised penis, and to more closely examine it, so I settle for another round of sex and then agree we can go eat dinner. 

I am scared to say no to this man – he is intense and determined, and I fear that I might have led him to this inevitable conclusion so that saying no now would brand me a tease, a blue-baller, a naïf, someone who doesn’t understand the sexual dynamics between a man and a woman. 

“Can I have you one more time before you go?”

When his finger slides inside me, my eyes dart to the side where a large group of millennials is gathered next to us. 

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Overall sexual content: I mean it’s a bit of a curve ball, it’s actually autobiographical and as such not a balls out dirty book. The writer is navigating her reawakening as a single sexual being, so there is a focus on sex, the ins and outs, and navigating the rough seas of expectation. It’s not exactly titillating, but there is an erotic aspect to the very intimate account of someone tiptoeing into the bedroom after their whole life has been dissolved by lies. Someone that is being very honest about what they see in front of them – genital warts and all – and the internal battles they are fighting. 

There is lots of detail about the sex being served up and this new frontier. I would say that it is hard to be all fired up like a wood burner when someone is being so personal about their hang-ups and surprised at how much dick someone has got.  That’s a bit of a mood killer for the one-handed reader. 

Overall conclusion: 6 out of 10.

Titillation station: It would be unfair of me to say that I thought this was erotica. It’s not. But it is taking on the erotic nevertheless. I think this is a warm load of reading that hopes to empower people and in this instance that is a much more valuable proposition than a masturbatory back-flip. 

Food for thought: It is a page-turner indeed and I did enjoy the ease in which Laura weaves her story. I think these sorts of personal books about sex are important to help people navigate the peaks and troughs of life, and find hope where seemingly there is none. 

The jarring aspect for me was the sharp self-doubt about the aging female body. It is understandable that a woman that has never explored her sexuality outside of her fucking boring marriage would be unsure of how desirable she is in the brave new Tinder filled world. But I didn’t like the fact that Laura had to be constantly reassured about the state of her tits and her fanny by a host of gym-addicted dicks on sticks. I was disappointed that she needed that reassurance even after she has blazed her own sexy path through the low hanging fruits of the forest.

I think that if women internalise a dislike for their own aging bodies because they think that men won’t find them sexy, that’s a massive part of the problem. What is it with women and aging? Surely, it’s something to be celebrated. I think this book made me feel more conscious of my body as a commodity – as something that degrades and decays. Women need to be kind. The alternative is an expensive smile and tits with no give. 

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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. 

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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. 

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New Writing: Private and Confidential

Violet Malice on the beach
Violet Malice
Fire doors and dressing gowns

Violet Malice has some hot smut cooking on the tarmac off the A-road by the Happy Shopper. Here is some writing. She has written. With you in mind. FYI the Raunch Review will return next week. Violet has been up in Edinburgh this week (hence the silence) watching the fringe pant. 

They sleep together. All over the place. The two of them.

In her living room. On the kitchen table.

Inside the duvet cover like ghosts. All over his bed. And then spilled on the carpet.

Against the wash basin. One leg bristling. Under the shower.

On tip toes behind an old English Master. Constable.

In the cold glow of the fridge. By the pre-tossed salad. In his living room.

Up against frosted glass. Under a bare bulb that flickers and teases moths mouths most nights. In the rain. In the driving rain.

In the middle of 12 Angry Men.

Between the mast and the rigging. Shrimper. Mainsail. And Boom!

Underwater.

Following two hardly dressed hamburgers topped with glassy tomatoes sliced and extruding. Tickling the ivories. The back teeth and all 206 bones. The sternum and the stapes. Intermediate phalanges.

Driving through the rain. The driving rain.

Starting in Times New Roman and being found face down in TNT Battenberg. Bold. Italics. Tits underlined.

On the corner of Christopher Street and Howard’s End. Trails.

In the mirror. In the mind’s eye. This way and that. Tossed. The other way around. Bouncing off iris. Lids closed shut for the weekend.

At their house. On their pressed sheets. It will happen. Tea sandwiches and finger rings.

And then. In the afternoon sun. Twenty-days on. Rises one towering Dracula. Hot bloodied and sex eyed. Desperate for a crisp IPA in the shade of their exhaustion.

Watch Violet’s poem about icecream

The Raunch Review: Book 8

Violet Malice has been lounging full bollock in the sunshine, during the hottest parts of the day, cracking one off every hour or so: it’s the ruddy bloody holidays, yeah! This week she has been cherry picking a short story or two, lapping up all that delicious mind tapas. Committed to finding a bedtime read that gets those glands producing in excess of the average 1500ml of saliva per day, metaphorical legs wrapped right round your mandibular ramus. Violet’s weekly adult book review attempts to answer that chocolate flavoured question: can a good book ever be as Herman Count Van Rompuy as a good fuck?

Front cover of Granta: Sex

Magazine title: Sex
Publisher: Granta
Copyright: © 2010 Granta Publications
Magazine issue: 110
Short story title: THIS IS FOR YOU
Author: Emmanuel Carrère
Translator:
Linda Coverdale

THE RAUNCH REVIEW: Violet’s Verdict

Quick synopsis: Some sort of raging sex pervert has published a short story in a French newspaper and tells his girlfriend to buy a copy and read it on the train going from Paris to La Rochelle. The story – which is also being read by other people on the train – instructs her to reach orgasm between Niort and Surgères because presumably she’s bored of Slaughterhouse-Five. I know the feeling. Dishonourable discharge in a moving toilet.

Train travel: I am a big fan of the railway and masturbation (mutually exclusive, of course). The word train derives from the Latin trahere meaning “to pull, to draw”. A big engine relentlessly pulling off loads of carriages at speed through the countryside is a pretty sexy way to get from A(vignon) to B(rest). Plus the karzies are quite exciting – much like something from Jackson Pollock’s drip and shit period. There is some debate as to the origin of the intransitive verb masturbate. Some say it derives from some old shit meaning to “make yourself stupid” and/or “to disturb with the hand”. Following the invention of more or less everything, the hand has been made redundant.

I would also like to take issue with the making oneself stupid train of thought – I think our little friends serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin have tampered with the ball. You can’t make it taste that good if you don’t want us to eat it. And I certainly don’t come out of the other end stupid. The exact opposite. I find myself much better at exponentiation and domestic science (although I’m out of practice).

So, this short story piqued my interest. Mainly, because it’s very rare to find any sort of narrative written in the second person (you did this and you did that, you mother)! Sometimes (let me be clear, only in very limited sexual scenarios) we all like being told what to do. Obviously, I had to tie up the feminist in me beforehand and lock her in the room with the yellow wallpaper with some hard-backed political tomb to upset herself with. It’s a thrilling concept, to open up the daily newspaper and become part of somebody’s elaborate fantasy. Just like phone sex – there’s something desperately dirty about touching someone without touching them. A meeting in the dark recesses of the mind.

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Overall sexual content: It is massively titillating. In some ways, probably one of the most genuinely erotic pieces of writing I’ve ever read. The voyeurism element is nicely done but a bit annoying. The narrator refers to the fact that he wants to make the object of the story wet (his girlfriend), but also that the other women reading the newspaper at the same time should also be getting off. I suppose it’s a nice idea – some sort of train based wank party – but in reality my taste would be more along the lines of nobody else being in on the fantasy. But that’s probably because, contrary to popular belief, I am massively frigid and my internal organs contract even when just furtively beginning to think about logistics.

He says early on, “From this moment on, you will do everything I tell you to do”. What a lovely snuggly thing. I just hope she’s not on an off day or they haven’t broken-up from final edit to publication. He waxes lyrical about her having a good cum face. He says that most women have no sense of obvious abandonment, but that she – the woman he loves – betrays her cum face all the time during everyday non-sexual activities, such as looking around, eating penne and mountain biking.

Eventually he tells her and everyone else reading Le Monde to go to the bar car and buy a drink (either coffee or mineral water) and look around. This is supposed to be crackingly good bonk material, because obviously loads of people will be looking at each other wondering who SHE actually is, imagining the scores of knickers doing the breaststroke and all those hard-ons knock knock knocking against nylon.

Finally, he describes another woman who goes to the nearest toilet to masturbate. He describes her watching her own fingers disappear into her pussy in the mirror as she steadies herself (train movements as opposed to the thrashes of orgasm). The final few paragraphs I find terribly boring – he doesn’t describe the state of the toilet – which I think is a crucial detail. His description of this other woman wanking is so bloody boring that it near on shuts off the whole grid.

He climaxes with her almost crying out in ecstasy – desperate to shout YES, but afraid that the other people waiting for a shit and/or wank might hear. This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. I can barely type: disappointment. This is definitely not sexual fantasy material. I’m just spit balling here, but if this was my fantasy I would at least have her flooding the cubicle and then being plunged by the guard before you can say “look before you alight”.

Overall conclusion: 8 out of 10.

Titillation station: It did buckle my tracks for a bit. Mainly the first few station stops. Gets really boring towards the end, basically because the train slows down rather than speeds up. So I just got up and cleaned my oven, which I had been meaning to do for ages.

Food for thought: I think this dude might have been so worried about careering over that fine line between misogyny and fantasy, perineum and anus, that he fucking bottled it. It’s a real shame as it could have been the erotic equivalent of the Lake District (around number twelve of the seven wonders of the world). It’s also a shame that he more of less ignores everyone else on the train except the hot women. He’s waiting for her on the platform at the end – 100% confident that she has already gotten off.

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Violet Malice

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