Yes, Ma'am - bdsm toy by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Buttercup McGee

I just finished reading Yes Ma'am: Stories of Male Submission, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Before my review, I want to include a couple caveats, so you can understand my review in it's context:

1. I'm not much of a domme. I identify as a switch who mostly bottoms, but I thought to myself "meh, bottoming is bottoming, kink is kink, I'm sure it will be HOT!

2. what I am looking for in porn can be summed up with the following formula: Good writing plus kink = hand in pants.

I found only two stories in the collection, "Secretary's Day" and "Taming the Unruly", to be sexy. I was disappointed by the remainder of it. While the writing itself was typical of porn anthologies (a couple that weren't very good, most of them mediocre, one or two that were sexy), I found it hard to relate to the scenes described.

The stories feature situations involving bondage, humilitation, ass play, forced exhibitionism, group sex, and control/denial of the submissive's orgasm. The situations themselves were not hard to relate to--I've performed or fantasied about almost all the acts mentioned. It was more the way the material was handled by the various writers. I like writing that contains details on the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures of the character's world. In the context of porn, it's those details that arouse me. This collection had very little of that.

I haven't been able to determine if I disliked this collection because of:

*some idiosyncracy of mine, that I cannot seem to enter the world of the story because the sub is a man, or

*my sensibility, having been fed a diet of highly literary porn, just didn't like the work of less established writers, or

*what I focus on as a sub in a scene or as a reader immersed in a story just wasn't present in most of the collection.

To reality-check my experience, I gave the book to my husband Rod to get his perspective. Rod is a switch who is primarily a dominant, and a general all-around pervert. He reported that he liked the same two stories that I did. Overall he told me he found that some of the stories seemed too short, or were boring, badly written, or otherwise lacking in sexiness.