May 26, 2012

A Femdom Library

One of the problems I find with Femdom is that it can be pretty difficult to find anything to read, never mind finding stuff that I want to read, a frustration which I wrote about here. In response, a kind, anonymous person left a stackload of F/m reading recommendations for me via the comments form and my TBR pile has increased substantially.

What a great resource right? So then I thought - why keep this all to myself? I could use this list as the start of a list of books, some reviewed, some not, some with plot summaries or explanations as to why I have never or never will read them and notes on important aspects of the story. That would help everyone from having to trawl through extracts and search through endless M/f BDSM stories to find what they want.

So here it is - a work in progress - a list of femdom books and free stories. Most of these I haven't read. I will go through and fill in more details when I have time.

Please feel free to comment about these books, or send me titles to add to this list via the comments form. 

May 19, 2012

Review: The Wicked Sex by Lance Porter

Wicked is a bit of an understatement. The women in this book of short stories are mean and without compassion. They are wicked in the real sense of the word: evil, or intended hurt someone.

There are six 30 odd page stories in this book. Some are quite contemporary / realistic, others are fantasy / magical. 

I'm not sure what to think about the fact that one or two of these stories have stayed with me, even though I didn't like them very much. I read this book a while ago and The Land of Giant Supermodels and Mistress of the Hunt I remembered, though the others I had to remind myself of to write this review. That is testament really to how well Porter writes, that I found myself compelled despite myself.

Bound by a Woman
Bee, a mail order bride, turns out to be rather less biddable than her purchaser Gunther expected. She ties him up and steals his money. The scenario is designed for me to feel sympathy for Bee because Gunther has unpleasant expectations of her. But she's such a bitch I don't feel a lot of empathy for Bee, so I feel rather sorry for Gunther.

Teen Tease
 A spoilt, bratty teenage girl teases all the older men in the vicinity. Including her Stepdaddy. And her Mother is complicit. This sort of thing squicks me a lot, especially written in the first person as this is.

The Land of Giant Supermodels
Gullible men end up magically shrunk and slaves to normal sized supermodels. The women use them up like disposable tissues.

Heartless
Detective Angel falls in with women who tease and torture men while investigating a murder from a hotel. Well, sort of. This story again is rather twisted.


Mistress of the Hunt 
An idealistic young man joins a riding stable run by gorgeous posh women who have their stable hands lick their boots clean. But there's a surreal fantastical twist.

Imperatrix
Two dommes in competition - which one can make the most men come from strap-on sex? Fun, and even more fun when they get distracted by each other. I enjoyed this.

I think the problem that I have with these stories is the total disrespect shown for the men. The women are domineering but awful and I don't empathize much with them. The frequency of death of the men in the stories is also an issue. They are powerful stories, but I found them quite unpleasant.

C-

May 5, 2012

Review: Serving my Mistress and Her Friends by Denise Smith

There are some books that I don't finish, but there are a lot more that I don't even start, (if you're into acronyms, it would be DNS, to complement DNF).  I decided early on not to post reviews of DNS books on the blog, because I think it would be tedious for all concerned. There are lots of reasons that I don't get past the synopsis or the sample of a book, the two most common being that either the heroine begins to fantasize about being submissive, or the writing is so bad I can't bear it.

For Serving my Mistress, the sample was okay, but really very short, which generally suggests that the whole book is short, so it went into a sort of, meh, maybe of the price came down category, for me. When it was offered free for a short time, I thought 'why not?'.

So it isn't a DNS. And because it was very short, just an estimated 7 pages / 107 kindle locations, it isn't a DNF. It is femdom. And I think that readers would benefit from a review of it. I should review it. The problem is that I don't take pleasure in ripping apart someones hard work. I appreciate the effort that goes into writing and publishing and I don't want to disrespect that. On the other hand, readers put their hard earned money, time and emotional investment into books, and deserve pay off. So if you're likely to be offended by this review, please look away now.

This vignette is written in malesub first person pov and it really suffers from that. Everything is described and there is no dialogue which uses quotes. This makes it really hard work to follow who is saying what, because there is so much, I was told...... This has the secondary consequence of lots of very long paragraphs, which again, are difficult to read. I'm not going to continue listing the grammatical errors of this vignette, because the list would be longer than the piece itself.

Anyhow, the story. The protagonist (he doesn't seem to have a name) is sub to Mistress Laura and is ordered to his Mistress' house to show her friends what an obedient submissive he is. There follows a sort of 'domme off', where the Mistresses seek to outdo each other in front of a male audience. Then the male 'audience' take over and anally and orally rape him. This scene finishes with the other domme admitting that Mistress Laura has more control over her slave - presumably because she allowed the men in the room to take over. (Side note - is that really the sign of a great domme? That her malesub will accept other men taking over from his domme and raping him? WTF?!)

The last third of the vignette describes a separate scene, where the protagonist is again fucked in the ass, this time by and in front of several other male and female doms.

There were some amusing moments - the protagonist almost sneezing come out of his nose made me smile. But basically this was a ten minute stream-of-consciousness describing the protagonist receiving abuse from cardboard cut-out characters. There is no character development at all, no emotion and no relationship between any of the characters, meaningful or otherwise. To be honest, I didn't even find it hot because it was all rather: 'and then he did this, and then I did that'. For me to enjoy a description of degrading acts, I want to know not only what is done, but how the characters feel about it. Not just that it hurts, but how it hurts and how and why that feels good. Suffice to say, I didn't get any of that here.

If the writing had been better, I think I could have dealt with the lack of plot. If the plot and emotion had been stronger, I might have forgiven the awkward writing. If it was longer, I might forgive its current price on Amazon (just over half a dollar a page). I always aim for a balanced review, so I guess I'd better say something that I like about this 'book'. I like the woman on the cover. I also like the fact that Smith is a prolific femdom writer, because let's face it, there aren't very many of those. Unfortunately, though, this story is an F.