As pornography, these letters are pretty uniform.  The main theme is wives who become sluts, and the husbands who watch them having sex with other men. The husbands enjoy this. Sometimes they enjoy seeing their wives with men whose penises are gigantic compared to their own. Sometimes there’s a little male-male sex, and a little female-female sex.  There’s some masturbating.  The letters are written from male and female perspective in roughly equal proportions.  Most of the time this all improves the sex life of the married couple, but sometimes it leads to divorce. There’s a little humiliation for the men, and empowerment for the women, in that they love all the sex they are getting.  The words for body parts and sex acts are all pretty similar and predictable.  One you have heard one of the stories, you know what to expect.

It’s hard to tell whether they were all written by the same person, but they could have been.  The writing style is uniform. They all appeal to basically the same preferences, and they follow a very familiar pattern. Although there is more variation in acts that you might have read in this kind of writing 40 years ago, this is still very mainstream as fantasy. These days it is very easy to find a lot of written pornography on the internet, with a much greater variety than in this book. So it’s a puzzle why anyone would pay money for a book like this.  It is available in unabridged audiobook, performed with gusto by Holden Still and Emily Caldwell, and that version might have more to offer, since such performances are not so easily available on the internet.  But then there are copious amounts of sex videos and pictures available for free.  So there must be some particular demand for this kind of porn, to make it worthwhile for one of the big publishers to keep on putting out this material.

It’s all pretty silly.  When was the last time you heard the phrase “love canal”? There’s a lot of emphasis on penis size, breast size, vagina size, ejaculation amounts and pressure, in addition to the narrative of the cuckolded husband. It’s curious that there’s enough demand for this genre for it to be profitable.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York