a dirty girl on Dirty Girls

Ok, true confession time: I don’t really like much erotica. I find it rather boring. All that insert-tab-A-into-slot-B interlocking of body parts. All those ubiquitous, predictably long-legged, ruby-lipped, tumescently membered, achingly pussied, roseately nippled clichés invariably cause me to grow a big, rubbery one, which is quite at cross purposes to the whole point of erotica.

Erotica—like comedy, like political speeches, like advertisements—has just one over-arching aim; it, like those other genres of writing, is supposed to elicit a single very strong reaction. Just as comedy that makes you laugh is successful, and comedy that doesn’t isn’t, erotica that makes you frisky is, and that which doesn’t isn’t. But just like comedy that makes you think—or political speeches, or advertisements, or any other genre that supercedes its generical limits—when erotica can make you feel something in addition to frisky, that is when it’s transcendent.

Dirty Girls, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and recently published by Seal Press, does that, at least once, and even when it’s just down-and-dirty, terrestrial erotica, it’s still pretty sublime.

The abstract concept of Dirty Girls is a pretty swell premise for an erotica collection. Historically, girls who are openly sexual have often been both castigated and paradoxically elevated because of their sexuality. As a culture, we are preoccupied with dirty girls; we are like William Faulkner to Caddy’s muddy drawers, forever staring up at some girl’s dirty panties and finding inspiration and excitation twinned with fascination and revulsion. Because a bunch of women writers writing a bunch of naughty prose is never just a bunch of women writing, the title Dirty Girls has inherent in it a sly recognition of its own significance. You kind of have to respect that knowingness, and you kind of have to respect the design of the book, replete with fingerprints, like we readers are already complicit in touching it, ourselves, and the dirty act therein.

It’s quite clever, really.

Beyond the simple premise, the book is a great, big heaving mass of prose that, like the best of burlesque shows, comes in a wide array of shapes, sizes, sexual proclivities and aesthetic styles. It’s like an erotic smorgasbord; there’s going to be some dish that will appeal to you, whether it’s the earthiness of Tsaurah Litzky’s coke-sniffing, bathroom-humping waitresses; the biliotaphic, ecdysiast fantasies of Carol Queens’ virgin girl’s day out to the Lusty Lady; the oneiric poetry of an older artist and a younger man of Suki Bishop; or Allison Tyler’s sly exploration of the pleasure of being a putative “good girl.”

My favorite piece is Shanna Germain’s “Until It’s Gone.” I like my erotica to work in many senses—and Germaine’s story evokes the garlicky sizzle of cooking, the cow-shit scent of leather, the salty somatic push and pull of sexual release, and the bittersweet twang of lost love. It’s just a pretty-ass piece of writing; it’s also terribly hott-making.

I think I can speak for any woman who has ever been called a “dirty girl” that it’s nice to see us getting our just deserts, our pleasurable amuse-gueules. And whether these nods take the form of an literary paean to cocksucking (Melissa Gira), opera-house fingering (Maddy-Stuart) or anonymous sex (too many to name) or a literal one somehow seems to matter less and less.

Dirty Girls is available at Amazon.com and wherever fine fucking fiction is sold.

Comments

[ilya]

While in college, I used to read female confessionals such as 'My Secret Garden' by Nancy Friday. I thought they would allow me to infiltrate the female psyche and thus help me get laid. I hadn't quite infiltrated the female mind but I did end up with excellent material for conversation.

[Shanna Germain]

Yowza, many thanks for the huge compliment on my story...rocked my world to hear you say that!

Best, s.