Review: Cuckoldry <> submission.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 29, 2011
Zoe M. Bates, <strong>Sloppy Seconds</strong> (Zoe M. Bates, 2011)Warning: there's going to be some possibly-uncomfortable explicit discussion of kink in this review. I assume that if you actually landed on this page (assuming you're reading this at Amazon or what have you), you know what you're getting into. But just in case you're not, we're going to be discussing cuckoldry. If that makes you squeamish, you'll want to stop reading now. If you don't even know what that word means, you not only want to stop reading now, you want to go find a different website and hang out there for a while before returning to wherever you found this.It sucks to find a whole passel of literature that seems to cater to one (or more) of your particular kinks, so much so that it seems like the authors jacked straight into your brain, and then find out that you've got something else entirely. Now, perhaps I should be shouldering the blame for this in not keeping up with trends in kink, but when I think cuckoldry, I think the definition that pops up in the second paragraph of the cuckold page on wikipedia: "In modern usage, a cuckold can also mean a male fetishist who gains sexual gratification from his partner having intercourse with other people." Short, simple, and to the point, right? So you do a search for "cuckold" in the Kindle Store and... barrage! I mean, we're talking kid in a candy store time, y'know? I loaded up the e-reader and away I went, a seemingly happy boy.See, the problem is I hadn't read far enough in the wikipedia article, I guess. When you get down to the "cuckoldry as a fetish" section, they start off by repeating, in slightly different terms, that second paragraph: "A cuckold fetishist is aware of the spouse's activity and derives sexual pleasure from it." Yes, we're still on safe ground. But you keep reading, and you get to: "In the fetish cuckolding subculture, the female is typically sexually dominant, while the man takes on a submissive role...." And therein lies the problem, at least for me. I am a believer in the concept of equivalent exchange (apologies for being so geeky as to use a Fullmetal Alchemist reference in a Kindle porn review). The quickest way to turn me off in porn is BDSM, especially nonconsensual BDSM. And as I started reading the cuckold stories, I started seeing a whole lot of that sort of thing. Not necessarily stories about men deriving sexual pleasure from watching their wives playing with others, but about women using open playing with others to punish their partners.(Before I leave this part of the topic, I'd like to mention one thing I'd call an inaccuracy in that wikipedia article: I have yet to encounter any of the punishment angle in the hotwife subculture of cuckoldry; I now assume that's the reason the hotwife subculture has a separate name, in fact.)It should be obvious that I'm bringing all this up in this particular review because this is the most blatant example of this particular shade of the genre I've seen to date. Here's the scenario: a woman refuses her husband sex unless she has sex with someone just before him, and since she's feeling horny on the night the story takes place, they're out driving around looking for random men for her to have sex with. Which they do, and which she does, letting loose a stream of comments throughout aimed at belittling and humiliating her husband, who may or may not get to have sex with her at the end.Okay, yes, given what I read on cuckoldry at wikipedia and reported on at the beginning of this review, that does seem to qualify, though to me that seems to go well beyond the pale of dominance. But if you're looking for stories involving happily-married couples, you're very much in the wrong place here. (I do realize that there are some folks who are very content being submissives, but Bates goes well out of her way to let us know that Gerald, the husband here, is absolutely not one of them.) Because of this, needless to say, I am incapabale of giving this an unbiased review; it's almost as if it were specifically designed to rub me the wrong way. And that's why I just ended up typing a review that may be longer than the work I'm reviewing; this is one you should be going into with absolute knowledge of what you're getting. So I'm going to give this one the gentleman's C and move on. **