In All Tied Up, the first novella in Cathryn Fox’s Pleasure Inn series (reviewed by WHACK! Magazine last month), we are introduced to three lovely bffs who are giving up dick.  Apparently, since dicks are attached to men, sex just stopped being worth all the deceit and tears.  However, when the ladies are introduced to Pamina, a love and sex goddess who hires them to design sex rooms in a “pleasure inn,” they find that they’re hornier than they thought.  This is a timeless moral that spans the ages, telling the reader… don’t even try to be celibate, you pre-emptively bitter bitch, because it can’t last anyway.  This is an important moral that should be told time and time again to each generation, reminding all us women that cock feels great, and once in a while it will not come with tears.  Just man up, and hop on.  In the Pleasure Inn series Cathryn Fox affirms this wise lesson while simultaneously inducing orgasms on every page.  Seriously, my copies of these books look like they were dropped in the bath.  There are wet fingerprints on every other page.

When we last left the girls, Lindsay was falling in love with a sensitive yet manly handyman.  Together they tried out her BDSM room and eventually fell in love. Oh yeah, and he’s going to be a doctor.  So it ends happily for everybody. Luckily for us, Candace and Anna have handymen to fuck and rooms to try out too.

The second novella, All Worked Up, follows the story of Candace.  Candace Steele.  Immediately, in my imagination, I was reading the story of Lexington Steele’s long-lost sister.  Candace is a great girl, but her Dad is super famous (maybe her Dad is Lexington Steele!), and everyone wants something from her.  And she loves to work out.  That’s why the room she’s designing for the Pleasure Inn combines athletics with sex.  Every morning Candace goes for a brisk jog to pump up her muscled gams.  One day, presumably under the magical love spell of Pamina, Candace catches “sight of a stripper – a paint stripper, that is—who nearly turned said legs to mush.”  For a second, I really thought he was a stripper, and I was momentarily inspired to start exercising.  I was like – wait, if I go running early in the AM, will I see male strippers in their natural morning environment?  I better stretch these calves and hit the cement!  But, no, he’s a painter.  And I gotta say, a painter is bad news.  They’re either the guys who holler at you on the street while doing construction on the building that’s replacing your beloved locally owned coffee shop, or they’re wanna-be Picassos running around all over town with twinkies and whores.  Poor Candace, I thought.

But oh my god he’s not a painter.  He’s actually a secret bodyguard, hired to protect Candace, because Candace is in danger!  Apparently, Candace’s famous and somewhat sketchy father is getting threatening letters and he’s worried someone could hurt Candace.  So Candace wants to fuck her undercover bodyguard, who she thinks is a strip painter, and holy Christ, the twists just keep on coming. By the middle of the book, both my clit and my heart were palpitating, and I thought – take that, James Patterson, you fuck.  This is real mystery pleasure-reading.  This book’s mystery has me both intrigued AND aroused, but I know that in the end, instead of women getting maimed and tortured by nerdy serial killers singing nursery rhymes, love and sex are going to triumph over eerie evil.  Patterson should hire Cathryn Fox to be one of the writers who writes all his books for him.  Fox certainly knows how to keep the pages turning, and also Patterson would get a lot more readers if he threw in some of the magical cunnilingus that Fox has perfected in All Worked Up.

Turns out, this bodyguard loves to suck pussy.  I only wish that in the film The Bodyguard Kevin Costner had been even half as passionate about it.  He wants her “sweet cunt milking his cock” but first he wants her to feel the pleasure that he worries she’s never fully known.  When I reached this titillating oral sex scene, I realized what is so great about erotica.  The male characters are allowed, and encouraged, to be sensual.  Not just fuck-able.  Even if at first they are represented as sexual objects, they become more than just the pumping feeling between a girl’s legs.  In mainstream porn, too often the man is just a body moving back and forth, anonymous and uninteresting.  Yet in The Pleasure Inn series, we as female readers are thoroughly seduced.  For example, the bodyguard calls Candace adorable, and Fox writes, “…inexplicably, something in the way he’d said ‘adorable’ brought warmth to her face, not to mention one other part of her body.  He thinks I’m adorable…” Every woman has been there, and every woman has felt the simplicity of well-executed man-charm give her a chick boner.  He is also described as “trustworthy” and “fiercely protective.”  And, get this, he’s a “skilled laborer.”  Also, he wants to “find and pummel every guy who had hurt” Candace.  Plus he muff dives like a champ.  I’m in love.  Are you?  Embracing my natural female sexual desires toward big, strong men who will look after my den of babies by day and fuck me hard by night, my loins were straight up pulsing over this character.  He is the dream of the gatherer in the hunter-gatherer equation.  In erotica, this fantasy gets realized for women, because it involves so much internal feeling and often allows for more seducing build-up than we see in the average porno flick.  In mainstream porn, they could take some cues from All Worked Up and find the sensual charm in men and not just their practical sexual purpose.

In All Lit Up, which I hoped was about a pyromaniac but was really about a romantic old love re-kindled, we spend time with the sweet and vulnerable Anna.  Anna is described as the “romantic” of the three girls, but by the way Ann talks about her love interest’s sweet ass, she seems to me to be the Blanche to Lindsay’s Dorothy and Candace’s Rose.  She’s just as raunchy as that randy old ginger hobag:  “Now that had to be the most scrumptious ass Anna Deveau had ever set eyes on.  Tight.  Defined.  And downright squeezeable.”  This ass belongs to her old high school crush, who hurt her deeply.  But it turns out, she hurt him too.  And after you read about these two making up and going at it like a couple of tragic-romance-addicted hipsters, you will go on Facebook and friend all those people in high school you wanted to fuck but didn’t.  Because it’s straight up inspiring.

Simply put, Pleasure Inn has left me excited to read loads more erotica.  With my heart pounding the whole time, it was like reading a thriller that ends in an orgasm.  The sensation of reading is different from watching a porn because it takes longer to digest, but the build-up and the details makes the experience linger in the body for much longer.  The men and women make you remember why you love to fuck men and women.  So my friends, let’s all go out and purchase books like those by Cathryn Fox, and kick people like James Patterson down a notch.  Beach reading could be a whole lot more sensual.

—Lolly Gagger