Best Women's Erotica 2011

Table of Contents

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION: MELTED

This 2011 edition of
Best Women’s Erotica
is stylish, coy, slick with gloss and stiletto sharp: desirous, dangerous; ice cream in the heat; love lost and found again; filthy with laughter. This year, something changed.

Whether shy or brazen, we all seem to be seeking our melting point more than ever before. I’m watching it happen faster than culture can deal with it. That we still hear messages about women not liking any one kind of sex until we really examine it for ourselves, implies a world of dizzying contradictions we’d just as soon burn down as bend over for. Tell us we don’t like explicit sexual fantasy, and we’ll booby-trap your pedestal of female desire with nitroglycerin.

Our fantasies are indeed about fucking, not shopping. No passive accessories for another person’s sex life, we’ve become erotically ambitious, down to the last woman. This globally sourced collection of stories from top female erotic writers takes this point of view for granted. As the editor, I had to bow to this iconoclastic trend. Writers are pulse points for culture; women have moved away from what we are “supposed” to get turned
on by, to seek (and demonstrate) what we really want.

What happened? We grew accustomed to erotic anthologies that almost apologized for women having the temerity to say they had fantasies that gave them hard-ons. Mainstream publishers still crank out tepid oatmeal erotica thinking that aiming for the middle—looking away from the real female gaze—is the way to stay safe. Meanwhile indies like Cleis Press, run by women, have fostered a powerfully quiet revolution, upending the marketplace by the simple act of giving women what they want.

When did we first reject the notions that our vaginas are dirty and we should not speak out of turn? It actually happened very gradually, as one generation grew into another, and as girls realized we could be anyone we wanted to online, look at anything we wanted to. Men have a free pass to jerk off to porn outside the relationship; women suddenly wanted to know, why don’t we? We discovered that sexual fantasy wasn’t just a thing to try once or twice; it was something that was
necessary
. The stories I got sent every year started to change. They became more direct.

Stories sent to me when I post a call for submissions arrive in the hundreds from all over the world, and in my ten years of editing erotica, these stories always tell me what’s going on out there in people’s heads about sex, specifically, women’s heads. Culture bleeds themes into the stories, and I’ll often get multiple takes on any given pop culture topic or timely sex act, the authors each having no idea that their stories are part of a trend. This year, for instance, it was looking at pornography. Women owning the right to look. At the same time, suddenly this year every single story is layered top to toe with explicit sex, hard and wet and mean and sweet, flowing around love, and fused with characters who finally feel like us, with no apologies.

This collection is ice cream at its best moment: melting in the heat.

Sure, these authors and their sexual heroines have some cool sweets. But the negligee they’re wearing for seduction is soaked in gasoline, and like a sexily perverse scene out of
Mad Men,
these women all want a light.

In Louisa Harte’s “Changing My Tune” we begin with a warm breeze by the seaside, where a girl squeezed into a tight uniform has her first day on the job serving ice cream to workmen—with no small amount of irony about her presentation. That is, until she sees a way to capitalize on her situation to get off in two tense encounters that merge the thrill of getting caught with being romanced by one of the hard-bodied boys. The next show is in Chrissie Bentley’s “Pictures of Lilly,” where a group of girls finally dare to see what it’s like in the male-only arena of a triple-X movie theater. Sneaking into the dark enclave mixes the girls’ erotic fright with sexual wonder. The hard-core visuals and arousal become so acute that one of the girls steps through the looking glass in a way that surprises, but feels like it must be based on a true story.

Upon reading “Two for One,” by Alyssa Turner, I felt a deep envy and a burning wish that this could happen to me, too, and make those times spent traveling to conventions and hotels as filled with sexual possibility as it must be for men. In it, a businesswoman splurges on spa service in her hotel room, only to be confronted by two masseurs who compete to see which can give her the most physical pleasure to win the payment, and tip.

“I, Anita,” by Lana Fox is striking fare—a fantasy so delicious, vivid, debauched and ripe, it could easily be adapted to film. Anita is a sleek, corseted burlesque dancer whose act includes conjuring male orgasms onstage, saving her sexual release only for herself—until she meets the Baron, and all bets are off as bodice-ripping becomes nail-raking orgasms. Amelia Thornton’s “Chlorine” echoes a similar mood of timelessness and evokes
languid afternoon perversions á la Nabokov’s
Lolita,
when a wealthy benefactress’s mysterious young companion steps out of line at an elite hotel poolside.

It’s possible you may have heard of “rainbow parties,” but in “Rainbow Night,” by Giselle Renarde, a group of high-class couples at a dinner party not only discuss the ritual of a man collecting as many colors of lipstick as he can on his willing member, but in a scene of high erotic tension, devise a way to try it for dessert. Speaking of leaving no one out, erotica luminary Donna George Storey cranks up the taboo and the heat when a powerful businesswoman uses social media to create a multipartner sex scene where she is the “Fresh Canvas” for men who come for
her
pleasure.

No stranger to transgression is star author Cecilia Tan, whose story shows from sentence number one why she’s a luminary—while making us laugh and turning us on at the same time. In “Two Cocks, One Girl,” a woman with good-natured snark explores her boyfriend’s emerging interest in cock. This interest handily matches her own and culminates in fresh sexual encounters and a creative cure for joblessness.

An increasingly favored author brings her talent to the collection: the imitable Jacqueline Applebee. In “Skinheads,” the gifted UK author blends life as a young black woman raised in a London ghetto with a cultivated fetish for a certain kind of boy who wears Doc Martens. It’s a gritty and unsettlingly arousing encounter that she orchestrates like a sexed-up conductor, wringing delicious domination with a strap-on. Another force to reckon with, writer Valerie Alexander takes us into “
King Slut,”
the imaginary porno world of a woman whose fantasies—like many of ours—play better as the porno movie in her mind than the stuff everyone around her wants to watch. Meanwhile, her crush object finally ends the guessing game of whether or
not he’s interested, shockingly becoming the masked star of her pornographic dreams.

If you’ve ever been on New York streets and felt the pull of a hot chance encounter, then Louise Lagris’s “I Wish You Were Braille” won’t leave your mind anytime soon after you’ve read it. Even if you’re not familiar with the city, when the heroine finally connects with a certain tattooed boy in a bar and then enjoys strangely powerful sex tempered by impossible longing, like me, you may find it difficult to forget. “Picture Me Naked,” by Velvet Moore, is another outstanding piece of writing based in a bustling city, where a woman turns the humiliation of an ex-boyfriend exposing a naked picture of her to the world into her own private game; leaving a masturbatory trail of dirty self-portraits across the cityscape—with unintended results.

Unintended results are exactly what the jealous roommate in celebrity author Alison Tyler’s “Want” has on her hands. The problem is, her annoying roommate’s boyfriend makes her an offer she can’t refuse—erotic punishment of the roommate, but only in exchange for something very filthy that she herself has never tried, but always wanted. Cascading into the edge of filthy fantasy and just beyond is “Tricks,” by Lola Olson, which offers up one of the most intense tales of the collection. In it, a woman acts out her fantasy of dressing up as a street hooker for a sexual takedown by beat cops, the twist coming (as does she) when he “calls for backup.”

Far from the gritty city is a tale so iconic and compelling that it blurs the line of contemporary explicit erotica and mythology: “Sealskin,” by Kirsty Logan, unfolds on a quiet Isle of Skye nighttime beach. Sirens? Quite possibly, of the female lesbian kind for sure, though this story ultimately feels like an arousing fever dream. Also dreamlike but packed with erotic thrill, Cynthia Hamilton’s “Opportunity” depicts a lesbian protagonist who is
presented with a blindfolded surprise for her birthday: her girlfriend gifting her sex with a man—for her very first time.

This collection is not short on famous names in the erotica genre, and Sommer Marsden shines in a slightly dark female sexual fantasy, “Laps.” In this story a female athlete has more than a sexual relationship with her trainer, finding absolution in moments when she will literally do anything to please him, including sex in public.

Not only famous in erotic writing, Rachel Kramer Bussel is an online media sensation. In one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read, “Espionage” seems to pull from a very deep place to create a story I’ve returned to more than once. Here, we are the girl at the party who’s been having a torrid affair with the man of the house, seeing his wife for the first time as guests float in and out and finally mustering up the force to do something that dares him to be ours, even if just for that one intense moment that rips our fishnets.

Closing the curtain is a legendary name I swooned over in my first forays into erotica: Janine Ashbless showed me that erotica can be literature, and in “Abigail’s Ice Cream” we get another helping of the sublime, slippery dessert we started out with. As you sink into the world of a gourmet ice-cream maker, you’ll also get a taste of the endless possibilities presented to a single woman running her own business—dishing up treats at a festival alongside hunky paramedics who tease and play with both sweets and the sweet life. A sweet life that happens to include delicious multipartner (multiflavor?) trysts, that is.

Now, find something that melts, and turn up the heat.

 

Violet Blue
San Francisco, California

CHANGING MY TUNE

Louisa Harte

 

 

“Two large cones, please, love.”

I glance over the counter at the sweaty builder. He points up at the menu on the side of the van, but his eyes are fixed on my tits, barely concealed within my ridiculously tight uniform.

“Sure, coming right up,” I say sweetly, giving him my best professional smile. It’d be funny if I hadn’t already heard that joke about ten times today. Still, I’m easy pickings—whoever designed these uniforms must be having a laugh. With their tight zipper-front top and barely there skirt, they wouldn’t look out of place in a kinky costume shop. But it’s not my place to argue. I pick up the scoop and start preparing the ice creams.

This job sure isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. When I signed up, I thought I’d be cruising about in a flash ice-cream van serving up goodies and treats to crowds of eager customers. Instead, while others in the fleet get to go to big gigs and fancy festivals, I end up here, on a beach in the middle of nowhere, next to a building site.