Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Thanks to Bitchery reader KS Augustin for the following link, which was all over the new Urban Baby alternative, YouBeMom discussion boards this weekend: according to Scientific American, which is examining the intricacies of that heavenly moment, that little death, women are emotionless during orgasm. No, seriously. Beginning with a discussion of what women find arousing as compared to men, the article reveals research findings regarding what goes on in women’s brains during orgasm. We’ve talked about the language romance novels use to describe that Big O - and I’m still, for the record, not over the whole “burst like a ripe melon” bit because omg, ew and yuck. There’s no shortage of purple prose describing orgasms: the waves, the stars, the peaks, the flying away, the exploding, the shattering, the inflation like a hot air balloon, that sound you hear when you pull a fruit roll-up from its plastic cellophane.

But according to the neuroscientists quoted in the article, orgasm from a brain scan perspective looks like complete cessation of brain function:

The votes are in, the clicks have been tallied, I’m forever grateful to the creators of our poll software who have saved me from a lot of pencil and paper tallying, and the results are unmistakably clear. Until votes from Michigan and Florida are included (just kidding!) the winner is:

Entry #1: Taint Bottomwell! Because if ‘tain’t bottomwell, it taint awesome. The voting, as you’ll see below, was a veritable mudslide, sorry, landslide in favor of the “co-written masterpiece of buggery from Anna J. Evans and December Quinn.” If you are looking for some hot booty calls, perhaps these are authors you may do well to check out. Below, the results in full. Congratulations to our winners, and a big, fat, “What what!” to our other entrants.

Because our winning entry in the Smart Bitch Silver Anus Purple Prose Contest was co-authored, we have two new inductees to the Smart Bitch Peerage™.

Anna J. Evans, please kneel and arise with your new title:

And, December Quinn, you’re next. Don’t mind the sword. It’s long and beefy for compensatory reasons.

Crystal Jordan sent me a very interesting link - an interactive ad demonstrating how the Mini Cooper can whipslap winter, using a pleather-clad woman whipping, stroking, and otherwise dominating a very sport blue Mini.

So: those in the BDSM world - is her whipping technique at all accurate? Or is she faking it?

DeeCee wrote and asked me to help her find a book, but in doing so made me ponder the presence of piercings in romance novels:

I read an erotic book awhile back (1-3 years, I think) that featured a hero with a tongue piercing. I remember absolutely nothing about it, but that and that it was contemporary. On a side note, do you know of many romance books featuring tongue piercings? I can’t find many when I do an amazon or a google search.

Aside from the erotica novel DeeCee is looking for, with the dude who has a tongue piercing, there aren’t many novels that I can recall which specifically mention piercings. In Gleason’s Gardella series, the source of all the Venator’s power is a piercing ring with a cross made of silver which women wear in their navels and the dudes wear in their nipples (ow) and I remember thinking, “Whoa, that’s interestingly risky. Nipple rings in an historical novel? Dude.”

But contemporaries? I haven’t read any contemporary novels that mentioned piercings outright, erotica or otherwise. Tattoos are becoming more common in romance novels, but piercings aside from ears? That’s somewhat rare. I wonder why that is, because in my own experience, I know plenty of people who have tiny nose studs, lip rings, belly rings, and multiple ear piercings as well. Anyone got any books they’d recommend which feature piercings?