Book Review: New Erotica for Feminists by Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor and Carrie Wittmer

I get catcalled on the street by a construction worker. He says that he can see that I’m smart because I have enormous books.

FINALLY – someone understands what women *really* want!

This brilliant tongue-in-cheek collection of women’s “fantasies” is marvelous – wry, clever, biting, and unfortunately all too close to home… The authors are the brains behind The Belladonna, a brilliant blog/collection of essays and articles self-described as “comedy and satire by women, for everyone.” If you haven’t visited it, you should – the writing is excellent, the humor ascerbic, and the voice clarion-clear in its indictment of any- and everything that has been going wrong with and in the world for some time now. The book started out as a series of ironic and silly riffs on what women would write as their own erotica – fantasies of a world with equal pay, respect, and responsibility. It turned serious and poignant (as such things often do, unfortunately, when they realized the disconnect that so often exists between what we want (deserve?) and what we get… The book was born out of all of those realizations, and is a marvel as a result.

Subtitled “Satirical fantasies of love, lust, & equal pay”, the slim volume packs a library’s worth of punches, with not a single one pulled… They are written as fantasy blurbs, organized by topic (including workplace, sex and dating, parents, and literary – a retelling/reframing of classic and pop-lit fiction scenes and one of my FAVORITE parts). The book is a quick read, but you’ll find yourself reading some of them out loud just to hear how marvelous and pointed the “jokes” actually are. Many made me laugh right out loud – doubly so when I read them into the otherwise silent room rather than just enjoying them in the semi-quiet that is my head – but reading or retelling them to my husband never seemed to generate the same laughs.

And he’s one of the good guys.

“Tell that to me again,” I whisper into her ear. “It made me soooo excited.”
“You don’t have to pack lunch today.” She toys with a strand of my hair. “In fact, you won’t have to ever again…”

That’s where the beautiful tragicomedy of a book like this comes home for me EVERY TIME. I’m married to a good guy. I know he respects me. He has a daughter in college who is damn impressive at taking care of herself and we have a daughter in Kindergarten who is a spitfire and never met a barrier she didn’t want to crash through just for the joy of proving she could do so. I’m pretty vocal about how I feel about, well, everything. And he STILL doesn’t often get it, because the things that resonate for me (see the lunch quote, for a perfect example) just don’t resonate for him because his experience is so totally different than mine. Just because of an accident of biology. I think books like this one are a fantastic way to try to bridge that gap while simultaneously offering women an outlet for the frustration, fear, and aggravation that have so long been part and parcel of our routine life experience simply because of a chromosomal differentiation.

Writing about it helps. So does talking and, I think, laughing (even if just to keep from crying, some days). We have a LONG way to go, but pointing out the issues will help get us there, if anything will… So check this one out – it is most definitely worth your time.

My review copy was provided by the publisher. And thanks to The Belladonna women for helping the rest of us get through our days!