Please, Ma'am - book discontinued by Cleis Press Inc. - review by Jul!a

Please Ma'am has been edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel and features the following 18 authors: Teresa Noelle Roberts, Charlotte Stein, Isabelle Gray, Elizabeth Coldwell, Remittance Girl, Craig J. Sorensen, Madeline Elayne, A.D.R Forte, Sommer Marsden, Dominic Santi, Michael Hemmingson, Heidi Champa, Giselle Renarde, Ariel Graham, D.L. King, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Lee Ash, and Graydancer.

At the end of the book is a section with a little paragraph about each of the authors and a half page or so about the editor. While some of these authors have been featured in quite a number of Cleis Press books, a few of them are fairly new.

The stories in Please Ma'am aren't just about a woman being the dominating creature, they're about the men who beg to be dominated. With 18 different stories that all have women in control and men begging, at least on some level, to be controlled, you get quite a great group of stories.

We get to experience more "normal" fetishes like crossdressing in Dressing For Dinner, where this couple's Wednesday night ritual is to dine in. The husband takes his time selecting his gown and doing his make-up and by the end of the night his wife may have him bent over the dining room table with a strap-on.

Paypig is just as much educational as it can be erotic. If you've never heard of a "paypig" before, you might recognize it as "money slave," "cashcow," "financial pig," or any of a whole bunch of similar names. In this particular story, we find our character making exchanges with the Mistress who gives him his sexual pleasure by taking his money from him.

Pick a Color is another great fetish story, focusing on a young man with a foot fetish who takes up doing pedicures in local nail salon. He's so great at it that a woman who uses his services contracts him to be her private pedicurist at her home, complete with other sexy orders.

There are of course more vanilla stories like Mr. February, where Mark has spent his whole life being a guy's guy and all around macho and manly, but finally admits to his wife that he wants, no, needs to be controlled by her. He's worried how she'll take it, but it wouldn't be an erotic story if he confessed and she left him now would it.

Pretty much your standard paperback; fits easily on shelves and in large purses and the like. The cover features a dominatrix decked out in a sexy cincher and fishnets with a crop and ballet point boots. Not exactly explicit, but not exactly subtle either. This is a book probably best left for reading in private.

This one I managed to keep away from my husband until I had had a chance to read it, and I'm glad I did. While I don't feel as strongly as I do about She's on Top, I did enjoy reading all of these stories. I really enjoyed Pick a Color. I'm not sure what keeps drawing me back into that one, but it just seemed so honest and heartfelt, I couldn't ignore it. Mr. February is another of my favorites because I can sort of put myself in the wife's shoes. My husband has always had a thing for being dominated by women, and while it wasn't a secret between us for long it was something that I still had to figure out what to do with. Seeing how "Mrs. February" did it gave me a few ideas of my own. If you're not interested in reading about men being dominated and loving it, you should go elsewhere. But if this is what you're looking for, it does it very well.