Monday, June 20, 2005

Research Findings



After the interesting discussion on women as consumers of porn on the comments thread of this blog I went to the library and got out a few books mentioned in those threads as containing soft porn or erotica for women. Think of what I do in order to serve the gods and goddesses of research.

Yesterday I slaved over these books. Here is an excerpt from Laurell K. Hamilton's A Caress of Twilight:

His hands found my body, spilling my breasts bare to the wind. He drew his lips back from mine and lowered his face to my breasts, taking first one and then the other into his mouth, rolling the nipples in the warmth, spilling power.

It gets considerably more heated and more explicit. The heroine of the book is a half-elf who has to mate with as many elves as possible! She has an alphabetical rotation of lovers, sometimes more than one during the night. She also appears to have an insatiable appetite for sex and no menstrual cycle but such details are understandable in the heat and spilling warmth stuff.

Things do get a little repetitive. How many different ways can you combine six or seven elves and one half-elf? This is a problem in permutations but let's not go there.

I'm not sure if this book would qualify as soft porn for women, or erotica, or neither. It has other things happening in addition to sex though not many. I'm also not sure what the meaning of books like this is, except that there indeed seems to be a thriving market for the description of sex from the woman's point of view.