OMG, I found it: Ladies' Own Erotica!

I talked about this book in my post about Bigfoot erotica, but it took quite a while to find it in my massive and dusty collection of paperbacks. The cover is baby pink, with an elaborate scrollwork heart in which the title curls in Harlequinesque script: Ladies' Own Erotica (formerly titled Ladies' Home Erotica).

I bought this because, well. It came out in 1984, and at the time was considered extremely daring. As far as I knew, it was the only book of women's erotica, at least written by women, that existed at the time. It was written by a lace-doily-and-teacup group called the Kensington Ladies' Erotica Society.
In the introduction, they claim to be (gasp, taboo-shattering sound) OVER FORTY, but still interested in, well, you know, or at least writing about it. Sort of.

I don't know where to start, honestly. The coy little line drawings look a bit like New Yorker cartoons without captions. I'm hard-pressed (and hard-pressed, and hard-pressed) to find anything the least bit sexually explicit in this book. Only tender longings, kisses that go on a little too long, women who have the hots for the doctor, and fancy underwear bought for a clandestine weekend with a fantasy lover.

OK, let us plunge in: this is a wistful poem called It's Always Summer.

It's always summer when you're around

isn't that funny?

Even when it's raining outside,

and we lie on our bed shivering

Your hands are warm

your body toasts me,

your lips are warm rivers

I drift down the Mississippi.

Your skin is golden

it shines all over me,

Your eyes are rays of sunshine

that sparkle in the dark.

Your arms are branches of tall trees

that enfold me.

Green leaves and honey bees.

Buzz around me loverboy,

I need more summer.

OH KAY then. No Bigfeets here, none whatsoever, though the verse is so chaste it could refer to a handsome golden retriever.

Here's another:

Prince Charming

They tell me

there is no

Prince Charming,

He is a fantasy

of the unliberated

masses.

Then why do I stroke

your silky skin

with such pleasure

and caress your

lean back with

trembling fingers?

If you aren't Prince Charming

who are you?

Keep in mind that the cover of this thing calls it "The Irresistible Bestseller!". So back in '84, women must've been pretty desperate for this stuff.

There is, yes, a recipe for chocolate fondue that involves fingering fruit to make sure it is ripe enough: "When no one is looking, I reach out and fondle the fruit. I like the flesh to feel firm with just a hint of resistance, and I secretly thrill to the touch of peach down or the unblemished smoothness of a ripe plum. . . "

Another chapter is about, oh dear, Bernadette's Warthog Pie ("Turn your attention to the savoy cabbage"). There is nothing sexual in this recipe whatsoever, nor anything more sensual than you'd find in Rachael Ray's latest cookbook.

OMG, and here's another one: Rose's Spring Lamb! I guess all the ladies in the collective submitted a favorite recipe for this book of erotica. It's completely weird, and reveals the level of profound inhibition and taboo around women's sexuality a few decades ago. It all had to be carefully sublimated into love of food.

Listen, I can't do much more of this browned, page-spewing old thing, with that punky smell of decaying ink and crumbling pages.. It seems all I can find are food references. But I'll leave you with one that jumped (I almost said humped) out at me. This is one of the more torrid love scenes:

"Then he proceeded to caress each toe, one by one. Lilah leaned back and closed her eyes. The tenderness that Alan lavished on each worn callus made her feel totally adored. Suddenly a velvety warm wetness engulfed her big toe, sending an electrifying jolt straight to her inner core. Lilah opened her eyes and gasped. Alan was sucking her toe.

'Oh don't!' she moaned. 'That's too much.""

Yes. Indeed. Calling Bigfoot!  Please. But one more chocolate lust scene, please (and by the way, this was book was NEVER advertised as food porn):

"Then, very slowly, she lowered both hands into the remaining fondue, raised them up, and watched the chocolate glaze ooze, She sucked each finger, dipped them in again, and delicately pressed a pattern of perfect handprints upon the table top."

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Oh, Mary! This is your underwear speaking

Oh, poor Mary. She smells so bad that not only does her dress talk to her, her undies and even her THERMOMETER talks to her, and they ALL say she stinks!

The most terrifying video I've ever seen

Back when this first came out, in 1968, nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. It was just some kind of nonsensical sci-fi vision of something we knew would never happen.

And it's all coming true.

Bigfoot porn: the modern-day fuck book

I have something to say about all this, but I'm not sure what.

About a zillion years ago, I blushingly bought a book called something like "Ladies' Home Delight: Women's Erotica". Never did it mention genitals, breasts, or anything except dishy gamekeepers and chocolate fondue. No kidding, one of the only stories I remember involved a woman sneaking into an empty banquet room and messing about in the fondue pot, sticking her hands in it and rubbing it all over her face and body. In an especially steamy scene, she licks the palms of her hands.  In another entry, a woman describes in ludicrous detail biting into a large, steamy sausage.

And now this!

There's a whole new genre out there geared specifically towards women (I think). What age and station they are, I do not know. This is loosely called paranormal erotica, though that title encompasses unlikely historical romps and bestiality (especially in the form of wolves) and - well - dinosaurs, who aren't quite paranormal but who haven't been around in a while, except in museum form.

I stumbled across references to Bigfoot porn quite some time ago, but shook my head and moved on. Quickly. There were claims these authors sold millions of Kindle copies and became multi-bestsellers spewing out stuff that would have given women heart attacks a couple of decades ago.

Even Harlequins have turned dirty, but I don't even want to find out HOW dirty. Women now masturbate to these things the way men used to masturbate to the old-fashioned fuck book. I don't know exactly why this is done, but an incredible number of them feature nude male torsos (never with a head) with washboard abs you could play like a xylophone. All the covers look like tkey were designed by one artist, maybe someone who was put out of business when Fabio got too old to pose. These books never exist singly, but multiply into many-volumed series in the author's secret lab in the basement (or something). 

Which is OK, I guess. I have nothing against masturbation, but have always chosen to invent my own fantasies, which are pretty damn tame compared to this stuff. What sort of a dirty mind would even go there? As the authors of the Bored of the Rings parody wrote, "It's us, buddy. CHING!"

(P. S. I can't help but notice the mass-produced-sounding names of these authors, obviously invented for legal protection as well as uniformity. Like those covers, perhaps these are all cranked out by one person, like Harlequins used to be before they became too dull to give anyone an orgasm. My personal favorite pseudonym is Dixie Swallers, and I won't go into why.)

Meet The Stay-At-Home Mom Who Makes $30K Per Month From Her Bigfoot Porn Novels

BY ROBO PANDA / 01.16.14
#AMAZON

“From within the tufts of matted hair, the creature released a huge pale c*ck that defied logic.” That purple-headed prose sprang from the mind of Virginia Wade [not her real name], a stay-at-home mom from Parker, Colorado, who stumbled upon a way to make huge sums of money from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. The quote is from Cum For Bigfoot, a bestseller in the subgenre of cryptozoological erotica (AKA “monster porn” or “monsterotica”).

Wade has published sixteen short novels about messin’ with Sasquatch, in addition to less successful erotica about pirates and dark lords. She told Business Insider that she makes up to $30K per month in Amazon sales alone from her Cum for Bigfoot series. It still pulls in $6K per month during slower times. Why the hell am I still typing this when I could be writing dinosaur porn?

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing pays 70% royalties for books priced at $2.99 or more, and it pays 35% royalties for books under $2.99. Meanwhile, authors for mainstream publishers receive only 8% to 15% royalties. Wade’s first Bigfoot porn novel (only 12,000 words long) was priced under a dollar, but it sold over 100,000 copies on Amazon in 2012. The book was also selling on iTunes and other stores.

Wade tells Business Insider that her Bigfoot porn was her most profitable series.

“I started cranking them out,” she says. “If there was a market there for monster sex, I was gonna give it to them.” She even brought in her family to help with the workload. “My dad, who’s an English instructor, was my editor,” Wade says. “My mom did the German translations” — including the equally popular “Komm für Bigfoot.”

[...] “I was putting my daughter through college with the profits,” Wade says. “I used to joke with her, ‘Bigfoot smut is paying for your school.'”

So many things about those quotes. Referring to a writing career as “cranking them out”. Asking your parents to edit and translate your Bigfoot porn. Telling your daughter that Bigfoot porn pays her tuition. This is mesmerizing.

Wade ran into some trouble last year when more than half of her ebooks disappeared from Amazon after The Kernel published a story about businesses allowing the sale of ebooks with “rape fantasies, incest porn and graphic descriptions of bestiality and child abuse.” The Kernel’s article triggered a kerfuffle in the UK, and many stores (Amazon among them) pulled several titles, including some featuring mythological creatures.

Wade got around the ban by renaming and re-submitting some titles (Cum For Bigfoot became Moan For Bigfoot). Giving tamer titles to erotic ebooks takes a toll on sales, however. If you want to make the big money on self-published erotica, you’ll need to have an especially on-the-nose title.

Current titles on Amazon — most of which were not written by Wade — include Ravaged by the Hydra, Mounted by the Gryphon, Frankenstein’s B*tch, Taken By Pirates, Taken by the Tentacle Monsters, Fertilized in Space, Sex With My Husband’s Anatomically Correct Robot, and the conversely vague yet direct Gang Banged by Mysterious Monsters in the Woods.

Those are all real and we’re not linking to any of them.

Monster Breeding titles:

Bred by the Centaurs
Bred by the Demon
Bred by the Sasquatch
Bred by the Yeti
Breeding with the Beast
Breeding with the Beast II
Outer Space Tentacle Gangbang

P. S. There's a reason I'm not including an excerpt from one of these things. I can't find more than a single sentence, and they all have "cock" and "balls" in them. You can't find a "look inside" feature for these on Amazon, maybe because they cost a buck and are something like 49 pages long. But don't worry - like a streetcar, there'll be another one along any minute.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The Taekwondo Kid: Ryan breaks a board!

The worst kind of secret

The more I read this kind of stuff, the more I laugh, or groan. It's the kind of "meme" I see on Facebook all the time.

Look at it. I mean, line by line. "So strong that nothing can disturb my peace of mind." A tornado wrecking your house? Losing your child in a car accident?

"To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person I meet." The thug down the street with the handgun? The rapist, or the terrorist disguised as a street punk?

"To look at the sunny side of everything, and make my optimism come true" - You're sure this isn't a 1930s production number by Busby Berkeley?

"To wear a cheerful expression at all times (as they did in Nazi Germany, no doubt, or Stepfordville) and give a smile to every living creature (squirrel? Earthworm?) I meet."

And etc,. etc., etc. After the post, there was the usual riot of gushing comments about how WONDERFUL this philosophy is, without anyone giving the first thought as to how impossible it may be to undertake, let alone how stupid it all is. It's doubtful that any one of them are practicing even the smallest part of it, nor will they in the future.

Then I saw, at the top of the meme-y thing, a red seal with the words "The Secret" on it, and realized: hmmmm, this was something I'd seen before. On Dateline NBC, perhaps. There was a name associated with it, wasn't there? Some sort of . . . bizarre guru?



FELICIA FONSECA

updated 6/22/2011 11:40:32 PM ET CAMP VERDE, Ariz. —

A jury has convicted a self-help author who led a sweat lodge ceremony in Arizona that left three people dead.

Jurors in Camp Verde, Ariz., reached their verdict Wednesday after a four-month trial.

James Arthur Ray was found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide.

More than 50 people participated in the October 2009 sweat lodge that was meant to be the highlight of Ray's five-day "Spiritual Warrior" seminar near Sedona.

Three people died following the sauna-like ceremony meant to provide spiritual cleansing. Eighteen were hospitalized, while several others were given water to cool down at the scene. Prosecutors and defense attorneys disagreed over whether the deaths and illnesses were caused by heat or toxins.

Ray's attorneys have maintained the deaths were a tragic accident. Prosecutors argued Ray recklessly caused the fatalities.

Ray used the sweat lodge as a way for participants to break through whatever was holding them back in life. He warned participants in a recording of the event played during the trial that the sweat lodge would be "hellacious" and that participants were guaranteed to feel like they were dying but would do so only metaphorically.

"The true spiritual warrior has conquered death and therefore has no fear or enemies in this lifetime or the next, because the greatest fear you'll ever experience is the fear of what? Death," Ray said in the recording. "You will have to get a point to where you surrender and it's OK to die."

Witnesses have described the scene following the two-hour ceremony as alarming and chaotic, with people dragging "lifeless" and "barely breathing" participants outside and volunteers performing CPR.

Two participants — Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, N.Y., and James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee — died upon arrival at a hospital. Liz Neuman, 49, of Prior Lake, Minn., slipped into a coma and died more than a week later at a Flagstaff hospital.

Ray's attorneys maintained the deaths were nothing but a tragic accident, and said Ray took all the necessary precautions to ensure participants' safety. They contend authorities botched the investigation and failed to consider that toxins or poisons contributed to the deaths and called two witnesses to support that argument.

Prosecutors relied heavily on Ray's own words to try to convince the jury that he was responsible for the deaths. They said a reasonable person would have stopped the "abomination of a sweat lodge" when participants began exhibiting signs of distress about halfway through the ceremony.

Sweat lodges typically are used by American Indians to rid the body of toxins by pouring water over heated rocks in the structure.

Ray became a self-help superstar by using his charismatic personality and convincing people his words would lead them to spiritual and financial wealth. He used free talks to recruit people to expensive seminars like the Sedona retreat that led to the sweat lodge tragedy. Participants paid up to $10,000 for the five-day program intended to push people beyond their physical and emotional limits.

Ray's popularity soared after appearing in the 2006 Rhonda Byrne documentary "The Secret," and Ray promoted it on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and "Larry King Live."

But his multimillion-dollar self-help empire was thrown into turmoil with the sweat lodge deaths. Ray ended his seminars shortly after but has continued to offer advice throughout his trial via the Internet and social networking sites.

(Emphasis mine.)

So I was right, this "secret" stuff is tied to some very dangerous and toxic events. But wait! There's more! Wikipedia tells me this whole mess started with a wildly popular self-help book called (what else?) The Secret. In a "nut"shell, here is its basic philosophy:

The Secret highlights gratitude and visualization as the two most powerful processes to help manifest one's desires. It asserts that being grateful both lifts your frequency higher and affirms that you believe you will receive your desire. Visualization is said to help focus the mind to send out the clearest message to the universe. Several techniques are given for the visualization process, as well as examples of people claimed to have used it successfully to manifest their dreams.

As an example, if a person wanted a new car, by thinking about the new car, having positive and thankful feelings about the car as if it were already attained and opening one's life in tangible ways for a new car to be acquired (for example, test driving the new car, or making sure no one parks in the space where the new car would arrive); the law of attraction would rearrange events to make it possible for the car to manifest in the person's life.

I haven't figured out yet how you can test drive a car that doesn't exist, but never mind. It's beyond silly: most of us outgrew this kind of magical thinking in the third grade. It places us at the centre of the universe, for one thing, and assumes we have some sort of mystical influence over events that are, at best, random. Perhaps this helps assuage people's powerlessness in the face of a reality that is pretty much oblivious to our existence.

It's obvious that Ray took this all a little bit beyond the new car phase and into self-proclaimed Godhood, where he finally ran aground. According to Dateline, however, and even in spite of his having killed three people and maimed and burned over a dozen others, he still has his loyal followers. My impression is that Ray is a reptile with no higher brain function than a crocodile, though with somewhat less insight and compassion. But there are ALWAYS followers for such demons in human skin, people who sit with fixed smiles on their faces, sopping up all the evil swill their leader bilges out at them. It's Third Reich syndrome all over again. Any leader is better than no leader, right? Am I making sense?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Not the worst toy ever made, but prettinear

  


This doll was eventually yanked off the shelves when it was discovered that in addition to those long gumlike strips that spewed out the doll's back (back??), it also "ate" clothing, fingers and hair. There was no "off" switch and no release mechanism: it was tripped off by sticking the gum in its creepy little mouth, so little girls were soon attached (screaming) to the doll's face while it continued to pull and pull and pull.  Presumably, a big hank of hair would have to be cut off to get her free.  I don't know why they didn't test this doll before putting it on the market. But what about the Easy Bake oven? It still exists, and no doubt still has the capacity to cause third degree burns on children's skin.

The other thing is, I think the voiceover at the end of the ad was done by voice actress Yeardley Smith, who plays Lisa Simpson and sometimes shows up in movies and on TV (most recently, on The Big Bang Theory).

Plastic Jesus

ARTIST: Trad and Anon
TITLE: Plastic Jesus


Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

{Refrain}
Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

I don't care if it rains or freezes
As long as I've got my Plastic Jesus
Glued to the dashboard of my car,
You can buy Him phosphorescent
Glows in the dark, He's Pink and Pleasant,
Take Him with you when you're travelling far

{Refrain}

I don't care if it's dark or scary
Long as I have magnetic Mary
Ridin' on the dashboard of my car
I feel I'm protected amply
I've got the whole damn Holy Family
Riding on the dashboard of my car

{Refrain}

You can buy a Sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Goin' ninety, I'm not wary
'Cause I've got my Virgin Mary
Guaranteeing I won't go to Hell

{Refrain}

I don't care if it bumps or jostles
Long as I got the Twelve Apostles
Bolted to the dashboard of my car
Don't I have a pious mess
Such a crowd of holiness
Strung across the dashboard of my car

{Refrain}

No, I don't care if it rains or freezes
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
But I think he'll have to go
His magnet ruins my radio
And if we have a wreck he'll leave a scar

{Refrain}

Riding through the thoroughfare
With his nose up in the air
A wreck may be ahead, but he don't mind
Trouble coming, he don't see
He just keeps his eyes on me
And any other thing that lies behind

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Though the sun shines on his back
Makes him peel, chip, and crack
A little patching keeps him up to par

When pedestrians try to cross
I let them know who's boss
I never blow my horn or give them warning
I ride all over town
Trying to run them down
And it's seldom that they live to see the morning

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
His halo fits just right
And I use it as a sight
And they'll scatter or they'll splatter near and far

When I'm in a traffic jam
He don't care if I say Damn
I can let all sorts of curses roll
Plastic Jesus doesn't hear
For he has a plastic ear
The man who invented plastic saved my soul

Plastic Jesus, Plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Once his robe was snowy white
Now it isn't quite so bright
Stained by the smoke of my cigar

God made Christ a Holy Jew
God made Him a Christian too
Paradoxes populate my car
Joseph beams with a feigned elan
From the shaggy dash of my furlined van
Famous cuckold in the master plan

Naughty Mary, smug and smiling
Jesus dainty and beguiling
Knee-deep in the piling of my van
His message clear by night or day
My phosphorescent plastic Gay
Simpering from the dashboard of my van

When I'm goin' fornicatin
I got my ceramic Satan
Sinnin' on the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
The women know I'm on the level
Thanks to the wild-eyed stoneware devil
Ridin' on the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
Sneerin' from the dashboard of my Winnebago Motor Home
Leering from the dashboard of my van

If I weave around at night
And the police think I'm tight
They'll never find my bottle, though they ask
Plastic Jesus shelters me
For His head comes off, you see
He's hollow, and I use Him for a flask

Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Ride with me and have a dram
Of the blood of the Lamb
Plastic Jesus is a holy bar

I did not write any part of this song. I remembered Paul Newman singing it in Cool Hand Luke, and wondered if I could find a video anywhere (which I could), then looked up the lyrics. Most versions had one or two verses, but this one went on forever, apparently written by that celebrated lyricist, Arthur Unknown (sometimes known by his pen name, Anon).

It's a strange thing, obviously a sour parody of What a Friend We Have in Jesus. The thing is, it was not so very long ago that I was a churchgoing Christian and even a lay minister, a preacher. Seems like a lifetime ago. So I can't quite join in wholeheartedly. But when I saw what was happening to "my" church, its slickness and desperate attempts at hipness to attract a "younger" crowd (i. e. people under 80 with more disposable income), I felt sickened. All of it was done in the name of finance. In all the time I was with that church, the main thing I heard about was not the gospels, but a desperate lack of money and the need to give, give, give.

This wasn't about hungry people overseas or Christian education, but (mostly) paying a mortgage 

which always seemed to be shockingly in arrears. If we as individuals had conducted our finances that way, the bank would have put us in foreclosure. As it was, the larger church carried us as perpetual deadbeats.

Guilt trips abounded if you didn't or couldn't raise the amount of your offerings annually, because after all, the church's expenses kept going up, and it was up to us to take up the shortfall. Don't you want to support your church? Tell us, then, just what are your priorities? Didn't we hear you went on a vacation last year? (WHAT, you went to Vegas?) Once a year, incredibly, someone came to each person's house to ask them how much they were giving, and gently but firmly pressured them into giving more. I hated this and felt it was a violation of privacy and completely unfair, but I never said anything because you just didn't say anything.  I knew if I did, I would likely be gently pressured back into the beliefs and policies of the fold (with a vague but palpable ostracism as the penalty
if I didn't), or perhaps genteelly labelled "mentally ill" (well, dear, she can't help it, you know). 

As a symptom of a structure that had been rotten for years , leadership finally caved in, and no one had the first idea why it happened, or how. It's like my "do husbands fall from the sky?" post. Jobs don't fall from the sky. Husbands don't, friends don't. WE PICK THEM. We vote our leaders in, then bitch about them endlessly, even demonize them. We were snowjobbed by a shallow huckster, fell for him hook, line and sinker, then turned him into some sort of Satanic figure who had destroyed our innocent little lamb of a church.

Bullshit!

So I walked away, even tried a few other churches and was suffocated and frankly bored. The wheezy hymns, the lack of life, the lacklustre attempts to inject some enthusiasm and relevance into the services, all of it fell flat for me. More than once, when I tried to sit down, someone put their hand out to cover the spot on the pew and said, "My family sits here." No hello, not even a "sorry", just a "go away".

It left a hole, because for some fifteen years I was deeply involved, but the last several years were just hell for me, because there was absolutely NO ONE I could talk to about it all. It would be seen as "disloyal".

But I could no longer adhere to a church with such shallow values, a church which would not or could not or just didn't want to take responsibility for all its bad decisions.

Plastic Jesus, indeed.

(CODA. As usual , while I work on these things, or after I post them, more comes to me. In this case, it startles me that I wrote the words I just wrote. I had no idea I was going to. Not that I've never written about church disillusionment before. I have, and I will again. But in this case, I merely came across a YouTube clip from Cool Hand Luke, then thought of the song, then Googled the lyrics. Funny stuff, and strange, too. And that, I thought to myself, would be that. But in the world of exploration through writing, "that" is NEVER "that" - and I thank whatever God I still have for the process.)

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

MOOG: The Electric Eclectics Of Dick Hyman (1969)