Best Bondage Erotica 2012
Edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel
2011, Cleis Press
Long before the internet streamed hardcore pornography and American Apparel ads made softcore redundant, readers earned their sexual stripes by reading steamy online stories. Erotica often suffers the same strain of cheesiness that infects pornos starring pizza delivery men – the word “manhood” comes up a lot – but well-written erotic literature is the perfect blend of fantasy and voyeurism, an invention that straddles the line between filmed porn’s fleshy displays and a masturbatory story built from scratch.
Best Bondage Erotica 2012 is a showcase of the year’s best bondage-themed erotic literature. Editor Rachel Kramer Bussel has assembled a uniformly excellent team of contributors. As she puts it in her introduction, “You’ll find a range of stories from playful to perverse that I hope will give you some new ideas to try out — in your mind and beyond.” Gender, sexual orientation, and dominance style are all fair game – some feature characters who are subdued by plenty of ropes or chains, while others can be silenced with a word or a look. Some are queer, others straight. Some – many – feature women topping men. Bondage is diverse as the people who practice it, and Bussel tries to offer something for nearly everyone.
“A Night at the Opera” is Elizabeth Coldwell’s love note to both opera singing and opera bondage gloves, which allow Francesca to restrain her husband in a public display of domination, much to his delight. Kathleen Tudor’s “Knot Alone” is one woman’s refusal to despair over her lack of dom – she simply takes matters into her own hands, tying herself in a thorough display of self-bondage. In Elizabeth Silver’s “Laced,” Kevin asks his roommate Stefan to help him into his work-required “goth bartender” corset, a simple request that’s complicated by a sudden surge in feelings. “It should scare the hell out me, and it does, but at the same time, it feels so goddamn good to let go of it all,” Kevin thinks as Stefan laces him tighter into the corset, and the two men are electrified by the laces, the hug of the corset and the warmth of the other’s breath.
There are unusual and creative bondage predicaments, like in Bussel’s “The Weight:” a petite woman is immobilized as her much larger lover lies on top of her, and Helen Sedgwick’s “Cumana,” in which a wedding guest is hooded by the fabric of her own voluminous dress. Each of the 21 stories in the collection aims for the swirl of fear, arousal and curiosity about one’s own limits that makes BDSM so thrilling and sexy. The writing is also great – it’s snappy, descriptive and direct. Bussel clearly has no use for the flowery prose that weakens much of erotic literature, and the stories are full of delightfully human characters who talk, think, and have sex like real people.
Best Bondage Erotica 2012 is a terrific showcase of some of the better erotica currently on offer. Cleis Press has a solid back catalog, and readers can find more specific kinks in titles like Please, Sir, which explores female submission, and Bottoms Up, a collection about spanking. For kinksters who are new to erotica, Best Bondage Erotica 2012 is a gateway drug – use it to explore fantasy and sexuality through literature. Let your mind paint a picture of submission, one sketched by the writers in this collection and fleshed out fully by the reader – you.
