Desire. Longing. Lust.
Lust /ləst/ A noun that describes an intense sexual hunger for another. Middle English, from Old English, desire.
Lust is defined as “any source of pleasure or delight,” also “an appetite,” and “a liking for a person,” also “fertility” (of soil). Sense of “sinful sexual desire, degrading animal passion” (now the main meaning) developed in late Old English and in other Germanic languages, the derivative words mean “pleasure.”
I am fascinated by the erotic layers of desire, passion, and lust experienced in my own sex life. They are the spices of sex that go together just like cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger in baking. As I love to cook and bake, I think of spices to explain lust, especially aphrodisiac spices. And when I think of lust, I think of moments I have desired someone beyond control. Moments so overwhelmed by lust, I become animal, lost in the heat of chemistry. Lust itself is the high note of sexual desire. It is the spark of what moves us from attraction to arousal and into action.
Reading other women’s stories about lust gives insight to the human response of sexual desire and passion. Erotica author and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel’s newest anthology Women in Lust is juicy and bursting with the passionate flavors of many voices. These stories taste as good as the musky inside of a lover’s thigh and the intoxicating mystery of an evolving kiss. Fresh and wonderfully compiled, twenty erotica authors combine their literary gifts and mix it all up into a lusty book.
I have read this book in bed. I have also read it in a cafe while having lunch, while having a pedicure, and I have taken moments to read it before meeting my lover for dinner. Erotica like this is inspirational, and musing on the subject of lust always whets my appetite for more. One of my most favorite stories from this anthology, Comfort Food by Donna George Storey, made me do a double take to the page, as the author’s voice reminded me uncannily of my own lustful fantasies (as well as a few realities) and my proclivity for combining food with lust. The featured dessert at the beginning of the story, a butterscotch pudding, was reminiscent of a recent sensual experience with my lover at a restaurant that served a butterscotch budino (an Italian pudding). Something about butterscotch pudding, I think. Its caramel flavor and satiny texture inspires lust for a taste of something just as creamy, just as delicious, if not more so. As the author describes, “Perhaps it was the creamy smoothness caressing my tongue like satin? Or the bottomless depth of flavor: caramel, tropical vanilla and an almost floral sweet cream, all mixed together with something else mysterious, alluring, even addictive? Whatever the reason for the magic, at that moment, I was very glad to be alive. When I finished my dessert, resisting the urge to lick the bowl clean, I waved over the pretty waitress.”
The story evolves from wanting the recipe to something more than a desire for ingredients from the chef.
Cherry Blossom by Kayar Silkenvoice is another story that capitvated me. The erotic tale takes place at a ryokan in Kyoto, Japan, where bathing in hot onsen waters and a massage transcends within the beautiful and sudden moment of desire. I loved the fluidity of Silkenvoice’s writing, as graceful as cherry blossoms falling upon hot spring water, illustrating the concentrated delicacy of sexual energy between two women for one another.
And lust can be so overpowering that we might feel like an animal, wanting to bite the one we desire because the feeling of lust is so strong. In Bite Me by Lucy Hughes, an exploration in pain, lust, and her lover’s request to bite him piques her curiosity and questions her indifference to this kind of fetish, pushing her beyond boundaries.
This book gives the reader a bouquet of delights, all clamoring with lust, displaying its words, paragraphs, and letters in sinuous sentences and wanton descriptives. As most of Rachel Kramer Bussel’s erotica anthologies are sexy, this one is hot off the press, and one to lust for. This delicious book would make anyone blush with lustful wonder.
Women in Lust is a sexy read. You can buy it online or visit the Women in Lust blog to discover more about the authors. I admire Rachel Kramer Bussel’s work as both an editor and author. Read about the Lusty Lady herself here on her main website.
The stories and their authors:
Naughty Thoughts by Portia Da Costa
Guess by Charlotte Stein
Her, Him, and Them by Aimee Pearl
Bayou by Clancy Nacht
Smoke by Elizabeth Coldwell
Bite Me by Lucy Hughes
Ride a Cowboy by Del Carmen
Queen of Sheba by Jen Cross
Hot for Teacher by Rachel Kramer Bussel
Unbidden by Brandy Fox
Something to Ruin by Amelia Thornton
Guitar Hero by Kin Fallon
Ode to a Masturbator by Aimee Herman
Orchid by Jacqueline Applebee
Cherry Blossom by Kayar Silkenvoice
Rain by Olivia Archer
The Hard Way by Justine Elyot
Strapped by K D Grace
Beneath My Skin by Shanna Germain
Comfort Food by Donna George Storey
It was forbidden, that street. When I was a girl, I was not allowed to go down that road. My mother had made it clear that I could only go as far as the end of our street when I went out on my bicycle, never to wander. The forbidden street was at the bottom of the hill, just to the left, at the end. The entrance was shaded with trees, sloping down into the park. At the end, the road turned into hiking trails, eucalyptus trees, mystery.
I wanted him to drive me through the neighborhood where I grew up, where I skinned my knees from bicycle falls, where I played and drew in colored chalk on the sidewalk. We drove around and up and through the hills, my memory as a girl following along the asphalt. “Where can we go?” he asks. I give him a look, wanting. We kiss quickly. He leans close to me as he curves the moving car through the narrow roads, guiding the steering wheel through my childhood memories. I nestle my head into the scoop of his shoulder, planting little kisses lightly along his neck, nuzzling my nose to smell his skin. I trail my fingers along the edge of his ear, the curving shell roundness of it. Just then, at the bottom of the hill, was the forbidden street I wasn’t supposed to go down.
“Let’s go down that street. Turn here.”
The street is quiet. There are houses on one side. The other side is hidden by the densely wooded brush and trees. The tires crackle slowly along the road. We look for a spot to park. I have butterflies in my stomach and a melancholy ache in my bones. He turns the car around at the end, finding a place. We kiss for a moment. It’s dark, headlights off, streetlights buzzing in their orange glow. We can hear someone’s television in the distance. Like teenagers on a date, we cannot wait to kiss. I clasp his face lightly with my hands. The natural scent of him, his warm mouth melting against mine, I’m intoxicated by his kiss. He leans across the center and unbuckles his seatbelt. The click of his seatbelt undone, the sound, opens a place in my body. My blouse, my wide leather belt, my jeans, the seatbelt—confining me. I want to remove everything, remove the things in my life that keep me from him. I want undoing. I unbuckle my heeled sandals. I undo the seatbelt. His hands tuck up underneath my hair. He pulls my face deeper into our kiss.
His mouth and mine, his mouth, mine.
I look out the window into the nigh, and see myself as a girl, running down toward the end where the dirt path begins. I see myself looking back at the older me in the car. She knows— that little girl— where I am going. Whatever she knows, it’s discovered here, this secret place at the end of this street. She sees me, thirty years later, in a minivan full of my children’s things– a baby seat, a baseball bag, the sand toys for the beach all cluttered in the trunk, kissing a man I am having an affair with, a man I am falling in love with, in the dark, stealing a moment away. Secret. It seems that my life has come to this secret and hidden end of a street, to rediscover something forgotten within me.
We climb into the back of the van, my jeans pulled off, removing my belt, my pussy wet, his hard sex in my hand. “You are so hard,” I marvel, as the length and swell of his cock is warm and heavy with thick arousal. I caress his sex with one hand. I cup his balls with the other. He is sitting on the seat, half dressed, still wearing his shirt. I lean up and into him, kissing him deeply. Holding his body to mine, my blouse is sticking from sweat and desire, the fabric coming between the smoothness of our bodies. I want to feel him naked and breathing upon me. I pull the fabric away to feel his belly and chest against mine. He pulls his shirt away, too. We want our skin touching. I want to dissolve into him where the world is golden-yellow and soft like sunlight in summertime memories. I want to melt away into the light as he plunges his body into mine. No barriers, nothing between us, not even the years we lived so close to one another, never knowing that all this time, we were already close in parallel existence. I want his hunger, his sadness, his memories, all of his colors inside of me, blending both of our shadows, touching, like watercolors all bleeding together until the paper is saturated with imperfect beauty.
My lover’s face in the shadows is luminous and delicate. There is something within him that is intangible, revealing itself to me. His face is like moonlight through a raincloud. I put my hand to his cheek, making sure he is there. Here in the dark, the blueness of the evening, illuminated by the amber street lamps lighting the shadows within ourselves, the forgotten places within us can no longer stay hidden. I open my eyes to see him in the dark. He cannot see me entirely. We can only see each other in the half-light. We are shadows of each other. We are radiant with desire, opening and tasting what is true, kissing him, kissing him. By this desire, he is awakening my soul. His fingers and hands light along my body, undoing me, releasing me, bringing me back to life.
I feel released from everything when we kiss. Nothing is binding me to the gravity of my existence. I am a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis. I am returning to myself within his embrace, by his kiss. We move around in the back, trying to find the right position. We kiss, and I laugh like a teenage girl. My legs are up, bare and dangling over his shoulder. He can’t see my face at all now. What he can see he finds with his hands. He discovers me in the slip of my wanting. My skin against his, my pussy is flowering with ripeness, and, as he touches me there, as he slides his fingers inside, he has me, he possesses me— all of me— the girl running down the street and the woman in the back seat of the car.
We kiss. I press my body into his. My hands are slipping all around his shoulders, feeling the fabric of his shirt, flattening my palms, smoothing and stroking his chest, squeezing his arms, and pulling him against me. I want him inside of me. My hands caress up along the back of his neck. My fingernails claw into his black hair. I have this erotic need to kiss him in the back of the car, half naked like this. It brings moments from girlhood into womanhood colliding within me like a surreal dream. I pretend it is him that I first gave myself to in the back of a car. I pretend, all this time, it was he, this man I see in the half-light, the blue shadows curving along his handsome face, his smile, his sighs. I suckle his lower lip, and he says something, pulling away, mystified, searching for my face. He says something beautiful. He is beatific in that moment. I suck his lip in a kiss again, and the same reaction comes. He is searching for my face. The kissing is making us dizzy with the feeling we have. We are in this dream together, looking out the windows at the broken indigo and granite colors, just shapes now, the houses, the street. We are dreaming each other. What we cannot see with our eyes, we can see with our hands, with our kisses. We can see everything about each other and all the years that paralleled themselves, bringing us to this moment, all the secrets once so elusive, now illuminated.
Thirty years before, I ran down that street, not supposed to go there, not allowed. Danger. My mother worried about someone kidnapping me, taking me away. Now, I want to be taken, I want someone to kidnap me. “Take me,” I whisper.
We are in the back of the van. My body is longing for him to be deep inside of me. I am sucking him as he straddles the farthest back seat, slinking into a position so I can take his cock into my mouth. My face nuzzles into his belly, making my way down. I inhale his musky scent, petting the soft nest of hair there with my palm, pressing down upon where his pubic bone meets the base of his sex. Tenderly I open my mouth to take him in, my mouth wet, longing to suck him, licking the head, savoring the length of his erect cock. He is hard. So hard, I have never felt him harder than that. I want him to kidnap me, just take me and take me. I don’t want to go back. I want to run away. I want him so much I can’t imagine how it’s happened. It consumes me, this want, and there’s no stopping it.
Outside the car windows, it’s deep night. We can only hear our breath and our sighing, our desire for one another climbing over the velour car seats, reaching the branches of the trees outside, shaking. I am shaking with orgasms. He gives them to me, over and over until everything blurs together and I don’t know who I am anymore.
The gray concrete of the street softly encompasses us. There is no time, only our breath, our hands, our kisses. My body sinks upon him, I climb upon him, slide him within me. When I am like this, on top of him, I am his. I belong to him, and that is what I need. It doesn’t really matter what we do, or how we do it.
He moves us down onto the carpeted floor of the back of the van. My leg is cramped against the side of the car interior. I cannot see his face now, but he can see mine by the dim light of the window. I feel him watching me as I ride him, moaning a little, feeling the marvelous way his cock slides in and half out of my cunt, my wet and juicy place where he is entering me. He grasps the sides of my hips, holding me upon him. He holds, squeezes me, and shakes my fleshy hips with yearning. I feel like a woman. When he holds my hips like that, I feel him possess me. The softest place of me, not just the inside of my body, but the most secret place, he finds, he uncovers. I am naked inside. I am his. I am myself again.
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“Tired of bein’ lonely, tired of bein’ blue,
I wished I had some good man, to tell my troubles to
Seem like the whole world’s wrong, since my man’s been gone
I need a little sugar in my bowl,
I need a little hot dog, on my roll
I can stand a bit of lovin’, oh so bad,
I feel so funny, I feel so sad”
~ “I NEED A LITTLE SUGAR IN MY BOWL” BESSIE SMITH 1931
Where to begin? This is a phenomenal read. The stories, personal essays, and confessions of sex, love, sexuality, and all that connect, by women, are real, timeless, and full of life. Real life.
This anthology of “Real Women Writing About Real Sex” is a treasure of experiences and stories by women. These women speak about their lives, They tell us about sex in all its many forms: marriage struggles, love and getting pregnant while abroad in Spain (“A Fucking Miracle” by Elisa Albert), stories about childhood sexuality: caught kissing and playing doctor in the closet (“Peekaboo I See You” by Anne Roiphe) and hilarious motherhood observations, parenting dilemmas, and marital-bed sex (“The Diddler” by J.A.K. Andres). There are internal contradictions, secret erotica publishings and prudish thoughts of a sex novelist (“Prude” by Jean Hanff Korelitz) and love discovered during one-night stands (“Sex With a Stranger” by Susan Cheever). Longing, first time sex, losing virginity, and a bottle of Cointreau (“My Best Friend’s Boyfriend” by Fay Weldon). Take a wild ride with hot sex (“Love Rollercoaster 1975″ by Susie Bright) and fall back into an ex-boyfriend’s arms for a one-night fling in a luxury hotel to indulge before a double mastectomy (“Everything Must Go” by Jennifer Weiner). There are so many touching, moving, and brilliant stories by a myriad of amazing women writers, telling their tales of sex and everything that goes with it. There is also, to our delight, a short, short story by Erica Jong titled “Kiss” about her encounter with “a kiss that moistened oceans, grew the universe, swirled through the cosmos.”
Erica Jong begins in her introduction: “Why are we so fascinated with sex? Probably because such intense feelings are involved—- above all, the loss of control. Anything that causes us to lose control intrigues and enthralls. So sex is both alluring and terrifying.”
Elegantly, poetically, Erica Jong introduces the book by exploring the subject of women writing about sex, her process in handling the emotions of contributors, and her observations on what has changed much, and what has changed little, in the realms of women writing about sex. She comes to a conclusion that “writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.”
Erica Jong, the author: award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist best known for her eight bestselling novels, including the international bestseller Fear of Flying. She is also the author of seven award-winning collections of poetry.
Her contributors, all marvelous real voices of women writers, telling us about their experiences, ranging from fiction to non-fiction. A well-crafted crazy quilt of sexual patches, making up a whole of fabric, many colors and stories of sex. The innocent curiosity of childhood sexuality, losing virginity, sex and illness, pregnancy, urgency of lust, desire, the best sex, the worst sex,— all aspects, facets, and layers of sex and sexuality in the experiences of women.
“Sex is life— no more, no less. As many of these stories demonstrate, it is the life force.” Sex is about being human.
Contributors:
Karen Abbott, Elisa Albert, J.A.K. Andres, Susie Bright, Susan Cheever, Gail Collins, Rosemary Daniell, Eve Ensler, Molly Jong-Fast, Susan Kinsolving, Julie Klam, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Min Jin Lee, Ariel Levy, Margot Magowan, Marisa Acocella Marchetto, Daphne Merkin, Honor Moore, Meghan O’Rourke, Anne Roiphe, Linda Gray Sexton, Liz Smith, Jann Turner, Barbara Victor, Rebecca Walker, Jennifer Weiner, Fay Weldon, Jessica Winter, Erica Jong
**I have worked very hard to find all the links above, but cannot find J. A. K. Andres mentioned anywhere except for Erica Jong’s Sugar in my Bowl mention. Please authors: if you are linked (or unlinked) and need to update me, please contact me at [email protected] or twitter: @butterflydujour
I’m so excited about my mailbox today, because I’ve received a wonderful gift:
SUGAR IN MY BOWL : Real Women Write About Real Sex
I’ve opened the galley up like an excited child that cannot wait— tearing off the wrapper, ripping the taped areas off in my imagination, and delving into the electronic pages. Of course, I must admit that previous to this act of hurriedly scanning the writings of women in this new book, I was scolding my eleven year old son for reading on his laptop under his bed covers. Mommy says turn off the laptop now. It’s like telling your kids not to eat cookies, and then eating them while whisking the cookies away from their hands. Well. I know I’m guilty.
Yesterday, I received the most exciting notification in my Twitter account:
Erica Jong is now following you on Twitter! Really? Erica Jong?
My childhood memory suddenly flashed back to the visual of Jong’s book Fear of Flying which decorated our living room coffee table. I see the book in my mind’s eye, there. My prepubescent body, a young girl— and the book, Fear of Flying, on the coffee table where, on the corner, I used to press my pubic area on, to get that funny tingling feeling that felt so good. I pressed and leaned against the edge of that table, unaware that Fear of Flying was about a woman’s liberation, sex, and full of all the things my own life experience would come to know. Leaning on the edge of the table, staring at the cover of that book. It was stacked there, among other books. I hadn’t read Fear of Flying yet, because I was only seven or so. I had, however, flipped through The Joy of Sex and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, secretly. Can’t remember when exactly, but it was in that same living room, where Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying lay, imprinted in my childhood memory, in the sunny yellow-walled living room, on the coffee table. One day, when practicing piano, I noticed it had moved to the bookshelf. Then I noticed the book in various other places in our house; my mother’s nightstand by her bed, on her pool lounge next to her large tortoiseshell sunglasses, by the reading chair with her glass of chardonnay. A woman’s story. Like lingerie and lipstick, it carried within it, a deeper message to my soul— becoming a woman is more than the surface of a book cover, or lacy fabric, or a slick of color to the lips. It was another world that I was yet to know. Not even Rainier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet or Kahlil Gibran’s poetry could assuage my longing to know the complexities of {a woman’s} life experience. No, it had to come from the mouths, from the hearts and souls of women writers. Instinctively I knew that as a young girl.
After lecturing my son about the importance of sleep and how reading an actual book in print was better for him than staring at a laptop screen, I shut his bedroom door and scrolled through this book, SUGAR IN MY BOWL, on my own laptop. There is so much rich, wonderful content, I don’t know where to start. Even though I have this galley, I will buy the book in print. I love handling books, the feel of the bound pages. Even the introduction by Erica Jong is marvelous. She begins:
“Why are we so fascinated with sex? Probably because such intense feelings are involved—- above all, the loss of control. Anything that causes us to lose control intrigues and enthralls. So sex is both alluring and terrifying.”
Elegantly, poetically, Erica Jong introduces the book by exploring the subject of women writing about sex, her process in handling the emotions of contributors, and her observations on what has changed much, and what has changed little, in the realms of women writing about sex. She comes to a conclusion that “writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.”
Her contributors, all marvelous real voices of women writers, telling us about their experiences, ranging from fiction to non-fiction. A well-crafted crazy quilt of sexual patches, making up a whole of fabric, many colors and stories of sex. The innocent curiosity of childhood sexuality, losing virginity, sex and illness, pregnancy, urgency of lust, desire, the best sex, the worst sex,— all aspects, facets, and layers of sex and sexuality in the experiences of women.
I cannot wait to read everything. “Sex is life— no more, no less. As many of these stories demonstrate, it is the life force.” Sex is about being human.
SUGAR IN MY BOWL
AUTHOR:
EDITED by ERICA JONG , With Contributions from: KAREN ABBOTT, SUSIE BRIGHT, HONOR MOORE, ELISA ALBERT, SUSAN CHEEVER, GAIL COLLINS, EVE ENSLER, JULIE KLAM, ARIEL LEVY, DAPHNE MERKIN, MEGHAN O’ROURKE, ANNE ROIPHE, LIZ SMITH, REBECCA WALKER, JENNIFER WEINER, FAY WELDON, JESSICA WINTER, MOLLY JONG-FAST, JEAN HANFF KORELITZ,LINDA GRAY SEXTON, ROSEMARY DANIELL, J.A.K. ANDRES, JANN TURNER, BARBARA VICTOR, MARISA ACOCELLA MARCHETTO, SUSAN KINSOLVING, MIN JIN LEE, MARGOT MAGOWAN & ERICA JONG
PUBLISHER: ECCO/Harper Collins
DATE OF RELEASE: June 14, 2011
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