Book Review: Cleis Press’ Coming Soon: Women’s Orgasm Erotica

A great new anthology of smut where women cum a lot is out now! Woohoo!

Cleis Press’s latest short story anthology, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel is centered on women’s orgasms. This is a very broad topic with how many types of orgasms there are and what orgasms mean to different women. There are still some very misled people in the world who think women don’t actually have orgasms, which is a damn shame. Maybe they should read this book? There’s clitoral and vaginal orgasms of course, and ejaculatory orgasms, and mental orgasms. Lots of hippies even teach people to have chakra/energy orgasms. Lest I sound like I’m that shrimp guy in Forrest Gump, I will just say, bodies are all different, and respond differently, and it is everyone’s right to explore what does it for them. For example, most vagina-owners can squirt as the squirt mechanism is easily hackable, but does that mean you have to? Nope! Do what feels good and don’t do what doesn’t. Maybe you don’t want that much cleanup in your life and I respect that. There’s a wide range of representation of women in terms of ages and orientations in this volume. There’s 20 stories but I’m not going to spoil them all. I’ll tell you a bit about my five favorites from the short stories just as a little tease and sample, just to keep you on the edge and finally make reading the whole book, no matter your gender, even more intense, perhaps?

I loved “Read To Me” by CC Bridges, because it was about books and reading and being read to in an erotic way which is a pleasure I love but don’t often have indulged. I should change that. I think I have a couple lovers that would be amenable. Failing that I should invest in a few smutty audiobooks.
“Tracing the Edge” by Louise Kane is about a submissive woman and her non-binary dominant that makes her edge herself all day and report in about how she’s doing via text, and eventually being allowed to cum. I kinda wish someone would do this to me. I really got terribly frustrated right along with the protagonist in this story! I really enjoyed that an older woman was featured in Claire Cupp’s “Love And Porn In A Retirement Home” because sexual pleasure is a lifelong journey and people whose earlier sex lives were boring, repressed, or non-existent should totally have the chance to drink in the pleasures of the flesh. I eschew this sort of talk from my 73 year-old mother because, well, boundaries, but reading about this fictional grandma discovering the fun of porn and catching her some young cock made me say “you go, Granny!” Being a sci-fi fan I super enjoyed “The Voice In Your Head” by Victoria Diane where lonely Hitomi, aboard a spaceship, is sexually frustrated AF and an AI named ELI helps her out with a super cool sci-fi way of getting off.  Gives new meaning to the word "cybersex". I loved that characters of color were represented in “Multiple Gifts” by Pamela Varghese, which tells the sexy details of the first meeting of a pair of long distance lovers. This is a fantasy I relate to a lot, having become involved with several long distance people during plague times and thinking a lot about our potential first meetings and how incredibly hot they will be.

There are 15 more stories just waiting for you to discover here. Cleis and Bussel are a winning combination for erotic anthologies and they’ve produced another fabulous volume.

You can pick up this book at Cleis Press, your friendly independent bookstore, or at Amazon.