Magic Bleeds by Ilona andrews

[lightreads]

Magic Bleeds by Ilona Andrews

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Okay, so I didn’t laugh quite as hard as I did when Kim Harrison helpfully informed us that witches have extra vaginal muscles that clamp down more the better the orgasm (still funny!). But props where props are due, I did giggle when the heroine of this book momentarily worried that a condom wouldn’t fit. And I LOLed repeatedly and often through the intricacies of werelion sex – he has a refractory period of two minutes! Because he’s a lion!



I laugh, but the more paranormal/urban fantasy I read, the more I dislike this brand of paranormal sex. The literal out of this world stuff – magically synchronous orgasms, supernatural staying power, extra special werelion big dicks. I think it’s this decade’s version of hilariously impossible pulp romance sex. You know those girls who can get off if a pirate/duke/rogue so much as brushes his fingers up her petticoat. I can’t really figure out why it bugs me when plenty of other absurd things don’t. Maybe because the audience for these books is women, and god forbid women believe that their pleasure is something their partner can and should have to work for. Not quite. Maybe, as my roommate astutely points out, because it implies that sex with an ordinary partner instead of a vampire just isn’t good sex – not good enough, anyway. Maybe because we’re already so bombarded with sex misinformation, and now we’re teaching our teen girls to construct their sexual identities around vampirically chilled penises (do not do a Google product search, trust me) and impossibly prolonged orgasms. It’s not like I don’t get the value of fantasy, but . . .



Mostly, though, it just isn’t sexy to me. It’s the paraphernalia problem you get in a lot of BDSM erotica, where it’s all about the equipment. I don’t really care how long his vampire fangs are, I care about the psychology of the thing, the sweat, the lizardbrain responses. And most paranormal is all about the equipment.





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