Erotica from Penthouse
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1990 by Penthouse International, Inc.All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
First eBook Edition: January, 1990
The Warner Books name and logo is a trademark of Hachette book Group
ISBN: 978-0-446-55122-9
Contents
Not Just Your Average Relationship
Sexy Stories To Keep You Up All Night
Vibrations of love … Dial “S” for phone sex … The video revolution meets the sexual revolution … The joys of mental sex … The new bisexual frontier … The Professor of Desire … Sex in exotic climates … The sexual voyages of a sailor …
and so much more!
EROTICA FROM PENTHOUSE
Today, more people enjoy a sex life than ever before in history. And erotica both reflects and contributes to this newfound freedom. In EROTICA FROM
PENTHOUSE
, ordinary people describe their most intimate moments in their own uncompromising terms. It's liberated. Literary. And wonderfully sexy.
Also edited by John Heindenry
THE PENTHOUSE LETTERS MORE LETTERS FROM PENTHOUSE
Published byWARNER BOOKS
It is a little sobering to realize that the dark ages of erotica extended to within only a quarter-century or so of our considerably more enlightened times. In 1960, D. H. Lawrence's 1928 masterpiece,
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
was finally declared to be not obscene by the British courts. That was the opening shot of what later came to be called the Sex Revolution. In another five years' time, other landmark works like Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
and
My Secret Life
by the anonymous Victorian businessman who called himself “Walter” were being enjoyed by an appreciative American and British public. Today the erotica of the average man and woman is commonplace.
This phenomenon—ordinary people describing their most intimate moments in whatever terms they choose—is peculiar to the twentieth century. Lawrence, no doubt, would have denounced this democratization of bawdy literature—his own rather pedantic version being primarily a vehicle for high-minded moralism. But Miller, Anais Nin, and other pioneers of American erotica would likely have found this trend something to cheer about. After all, they used to write about the pleasures of the flesh mainly for money and for the fun of it.
As such, they were much more in the tradition of Francois Rabelais, whose own works were the high-water mark of the last great sex revolution in Western civilization. That all too brief undraping of the European libido occurred in the early 1500s and came to an abrupt end when an outbreak of syphilis swept across the continent, helping to usher in the Counter Reformation and Inquisition.
In our AIDS-plagued time there is no guarantee that the tradition of unrestricted erotica will continue. But, science has caught up with the Rabelaisian temperament. Discoveries like the Pill and penicillin, as well as the work of theorists and researchers like Freud, Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson, have made it possible for more people to enjoy a better sex life than ever before in history. Erotica reflects and contributes to this freedom, and is also a bulwark against anal-retentive reactionaries who continue to confuse a deadly virus with the wrath of God.
The tradition of erotica in
Penthouse
is a long one, dating back to its founding by Bob Guccione in 1965. Like the reader letters, the erotic stories published in
Penthouse
and its sister publications are all guaranteed true and they offer a peek into the bedrooms of people from all works of life. Most of the stories collected in this volume were not written by professional writers (though writers have interesting sex lives, too), but by secretaries, policemen, lawyers, cartoonists, teachers and even a stonemason.
As editor of
Penthouse Forum,
I buy and assign such stories every month, and I am always amazed at the extraordinary variety of erotic life that exists beneath the conventional facade of so many people. It is as if I were a collector of orchids who continues to find new species after species, each one as rare as the last.
The only restriction I impose on contributors, other than the assurance of authenticity, is that an erotic story tell a tale between consenting adults. Erotica has outgrown its morbid Victorian preoccupation with cruelty, the exploitation of children, or for that matter with the mere cataloguing of copulation after copulation. It has even outgrown moralism—which is not to say that many of these stories do not contain a moral. Today's erotica is staking new ground—trying to be judged not on high-minded” redeeming literary, artistic, or social values”. Whatever those are, they are the invention of blue-nosed courts; and literature—erotic literature included—has an obligation to tear them down.
Rather the erotica of today and tomorrow should be judged for its erotic value. If it's bad erotica, ignore it. But if it celebrates the joys of the flesh in a way that entertains, then we should celebrate it, pass it along to friends, and maybe even try to write some ourselves.
For obvious reasons, the names of the writers of these stories have been changed to protect their privacy and that of others described in their tales. But that is the sole concession made.
The groupings are only loosely thematic. But I have tried to represent the male and female points of view as equally as possible. Alter finishing the book the reader may find that modern erotica has another trait differentiating it from the pornography of the past—feminism. Good sex is mutual sex, and by extension good erotica is mutual erotica. Perhaps in some future court, sexually explicit literature will be judged by that salubrious criterion alone.
—John Heidenry
ARE WOMEN TOO EASY?
By Bruce Travis
Women go to bed with me much too easily. In fact, women generally give in too easily. I know this assessment is provocative. Women, if they read no further, will think this is some kind of arrogant boast. Men will probably misinterpret my conclusion—a call on women to put up more resistance to seduction. And both sexes will assume that I'm advocating a return to repression and Moral Majority rule.
No. All wrong. What I'm talking about here is a
tactical shift
in the ground rules of the seduction game to make the play more exciting. For example, some of the most intense erotic pleasures occur before the decision is made to go to bed. And those suspenseful, anticipatory, teasing, toying, breathtaking, heartstopping moments of escalating arousal and resistance are too often lost in the accelerated art of modern romance.
Look at it this way. If exquisitely prolonged foreplay before actual penetration is desirable, if exquisitely prolonged intercourse before orgasm is desirable, it stands to reason that exquisitely prolonged seduction is likewise desirable.
Yet the 70s systematically destroyed seduction. It wasn't just the instant lovelock of LSD-eye contact or the instant intimacy of encounter ecstasies or even sexual sophistication that destroyed it. Or maybe it was. Sophistication, that is. I have the feeling that after casual sex became common, not to say commonplace, most intelligent men and women grew adept at sizing up the opposite sex.
From the first mutual glance, from the very quality of initial eye contact, they knew just whether they'd eventually sleep together. This development removed a lot of suspense, or a lot of romance and, I suppose, a lot of frustration in some cases. But there are those who believe romance is more than sublimated sexual frustration.
It may be a problem of communication. Women don't realize that many, many men appreciate the subtle gradations of a slow but intense and
smoky
seduction. They believe that men still want what they used to want—the selfish ego satisfaction of instant seduction success.
But now that men tend to sense, or scent, success from the beginning, the symbolic value of an instant consummation is diminished. And if men don't display eagerness for instant sex, that is, going from first kiss to first fuck without an intervening candlelit dinner, women feel they are being rejected. However, as I learned recently, women don't always have to be sweet-talked out of a first-night fuck.
I was at the party of a friend when I spotted Delilah (not her real name) leaning against the refrigerator and smiling at me as I looked for an opener.
“I'm looking for an opener,” I said, as I rifted my friend's kitchen drawers.
“Men always are,” she said, winking at me.
That was Delilah, full of teasing, sexual insinuation in her eyes and her smile. She had glossy auburn hair and a fresh-scrubbed Irish face sprinkled with freckles. I was completely charmed. But I couldn't tell whether the come-hither wit was a put-on or a come-on. There was the same mystery about her clothes—a starched white-lace, high-collar blouse and Brooks Brothers ladies-floor cardigan. She was prim and ladylike, befitting her position as a securities analyst of a Wall Street investment banking house.
She said her job was to analyze computer-generated performance charts in search of erotic stocks.
“Erotic stocks?” I asked. “What are they like?”
“The ones that have been building a base for some time and are already rising in volume and velocity. I have to get a feel for what I call their ‘hot plateaus.’ ”
I liked the way she touched me for emphasis. I liked her so much I was nervous asking for her number.
“Uh, would I be remiss asking for your phone number?” I said as we parted.
“Remiss?” she said. “You'd be a fool not to.” On the way home I felt that I was falling in love.
A week later we had dinner out together for the first time. Our knees touched under the table. It provided a genuine erotic subtext of innuendo to even the driest discussion of commodities, futures and leveraged options. We skipped dessert and went back to her place.
We sat on her bed drinking wine and listening to Neil Young records. I savored each moment of anticipation. And then, just as I could suppress it no longer, she said, “Would you like to sleep with me?”
Let me interrupt this story for a moment to cite some ancient wisdom on the central question of contemporary seduction that Delilah's question raised. I found this gem in a book called
Miss Rona,
the autobiography of Rona Barrett. It's not a piece of Miss Rona's wisdom, but rather a proverb from one of the ancient elders of Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, on the relationship between the frustration of desire and the theory of narrative form. According to the mystical mogul Mayer, “There's only one good plot and that's a delayed fuck.”
Yes. The delayed fuck. In my opinion this is a neglected source of erotic
intensity.
It doesn't have to be the prudish and narrow-minded slow-down that gave delay a bad name when we were teenagers. So much of recent erotic literature has been a misguided or simple-minded reaction against
this
kind of delay. For instance, Erica Jong's “zipless fuck” in
Fear of Flying
and the fully clothed stranger-fuck of
Last Tango in Paris.
Do you remember that scene in
Last Tango in Paris
when Brando and Maria Schneider are lying naked together a few weeks after their introductory fuck-at-first-sight? Schneider playfully asks Brando to see if they can “come without touching each other.” Brando waits a few seconds, then jokingly asks her, “Did you come yet?” But it seems to me that with an artfully delayed fuck two people
can
get so horny for each other that they practically can both come just by looking into each other's eyes. I know it can happen.
The full sexual potential, the often thrilling sexuality of love locked gazes, is almost never realized. Erotic eye contact or “grokking” (to use the term from
Stranger in a Strange Land,
popular in the psychedelic era) used to lead to instant psychedelic seductions. In an artfully delayed fuck, eye contact can almost become “like giving head with the eyes,” as one woman I know put it.
But let me get back to the woman on the bed who asked me if I wanted to sleep with her. Well, sure I did, but I had noticed lately that the less time I spent with someone before we slept together, the less time I wanted to sleep with her afterwards. In fact, with some women I couldn't bear to spend the night afterwards. I didn't mind fucking a stranger. But
sleeping
with one was different.
Somehow, deprived of the
longueurs
of a prolonged seduction, I never built up the romantic illusions that are so often the sublime products of sublimated sexual frustration. I never got to endow a woman with the magic—or to savor the magic already there within. I talked about this matter with a friend who was really popular with women—so popular that he had a hard time finding any who would put up serious resistance, or allow him to enjoy a teased-out seduction. He told me how he'd given this problem a piquant erotic twist.