Annabel Joseph is re-reading The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty.
This got me to thinking about conversations I’ve had with other women about the books they read for the sex scenes when they were younger. You know–back before the internet could answer all the questions you had, and some you didn’t even want to know about.
Anne Rice is probably the second most frequently-mentioned name in discussions on the subject. I knew girls that were fairly obsessed with the Beauty series, when I was a teenager. The Witching Hour, has a number of scenes with a demon lover that I know I returned to.
I also hear about Jean Auel–in particular The Mammoth Hunters. I haven’t actually read the book, but what I know is this: Jondular’s member does a lot of throbbing.
I’ve heard more than one woman refer to this book as “The Mammoth Humpers.”
But, by a pretty large margin, in grown-up-lady conversations about wank material they enjoyed as teen-aged girls, you hear about V. C. Andrews.
I don’t know what the hell was happened to V. C. Andrews when she was a young, but I’d bet it was pretty awful. By all accounts, she was a Very Nice Southern Lady (that being an official-ish sort of thing) who spent a lot of time in pain in a wheelchair, due to an injury as a teenager. She died from breast cancer in 1986, and the books were so popular, her estate just kept slapping her name on softcore trauma-porn. They’re still pumping out V. C. Andrews ™ material 25 years after the woman died.
The Dollanganger series could be purchased new for a dollar a title by the time I was in 8th grade. I assume there’s still a giant warehouse full of them out there somewhere.
If you’re, say, male?
Flowers in the Attic is absolutely perfect smut. It’s like… everything you ever wanted in a pulp novel. Scary mansions, murderous mothers, incest in captivity, creepy children of the corn, wills, dead fathers, creepy grandfathers, iron ladies, and poison. And, swan beds. And, more incest. Just… dude.
It’s something else.
Young Kristy Swanson played the blonde in the awful, awful, AWFUL movie version in 1987.
So, she started off with a bang, and the six or seven other books she finished were pretty much the same thing: forced sex, indentured sex, inappropriate sex with authority figures, incestuous sex, traumatically blocked sex, and occasional consensual sex.
Lots and lots and lots of sex.
I think it’s really entertaining that parents worried about Meyer’s eventual off-stage deflowering of Bella Swan Cullen or Judy Blume’s Forever, when we were all reading about pregnant teenagers shuttled off to decrepit Southern mansions and vampires eating out chicks on their periods and mammoth humpers.
Am I missing any big ones?
2 Comments
When I was a teenager, I discovered Gor and although I had serious problems with how they treated women, it was my decadent thrill. Which is really funny considering how little actual sex there is in the books.
You know, I read a ton of fantasy books, but I didn’t run across Gor until I was 21 or 22. And, that only happened because there were Goreans at a bar-b-que I went to, so I was properly confused and a little creeped out.