Celestial Reviews 140 - Dec 4, 1996

Note:  At the end of my review of Mark Aster’s “Make Love Slowly” I 
propose and set the rules for the Third Annual Celestial Writing Contest.  
Please examine the rules and consider entering.

Second Note (Question): Is it true that in Germany, the movie "White Men 
Can't Jump" was translated to "White Men Can't Get It Up"?

Third Note:  The last issue of CR was labeled incorrectly in the postings 
of a.s.s.  It was listed correctly in a.s.s.d.  The title at the top of 
the actual article was correct in both cases.  The last issue (correctly 
labeled Nov 30) was CR 139.  The current issue is CR 140.  

- Celeste

      “Giving Him What He Wants” by J. Boswell (wife watching)
            10, 9, 9
      “Moving Day” by Dulcinea (work break) 10, 8, 8
      “Make Love Slowly” by Mark Aster (Spam parody) 10, 9, 8
      “Marie” by Friar Dave (emerging adolescence) 10, 10, 10
      “July 4” by Mark Bastable (public quickie) 10, 10, 10
      “For Cheryl” by Hagen (wife watching) 9, 7, 6
      “The Widow” by Sven the Elder (menage a Noel) 8, 8, 8
      “The Bet” by John Carter (betting on bdsm) 9.5, 10, 10
      “Love Fuck” by Unknown Author (voyeurism & threesome)
            9.5, 9, 10
      “For These Gifts” by Uther Pendragon (romance) 10,10, 10

“Giving Him What He Wants” by J. Boswell.  Janice and Bill have been 
happily married for nine years.  Shortly before her 15th-year high school 
reunion, Janice discovers that Bill seems to have a secret fantasy about 
watching her have sex with several men.  She does not discuss the matter 
directly with her husband, but at the reunion she dons a cheerleader 
uniform and gangbangs with three former jocks in the boys’ locker room, 
while she suspects that her husband is watching.  After that, we are 
told, they make wife-watching a regular part of their happy married life.  

I have stated the plot simply, but this is really pretty hot stuff.  
Boswell has finally gotten to me: I am at last beginning to enjoy some 
wife-watching stories.  I don’t mean to moralize - I really don’t; but I 
truly believe that this kind of story is more likely to be a good fantasy 
than a good reality.  By that I mean that it really does sound kind of 
sexy, but I doubt that many people actually enrich the happiness of their 
marriage by having the husband hide in the wings while he watches his 
wife have indiscriminate but hot sex with whatever studs she can find.

Ratings for “Giving Him What He Wants”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 9

“Moving Day” by Dulcinea (Dulcinea97@aol.com). It’s moving day, and is it 
ever hot!  So hot that sweaty bodies don’t even feel good meshed 
together.  Except in the shower, where hot tongues and cold water blend 
nicely.  At first this seems nice - even when they return to the mattress 
in the bedroom.  But damn!  They got their clothes wet in the shower, and 
the dry ones are in the car.  They’ll just have to spend two hours or so 
naked together until their clothes dry off.

Ratings for “Moving Day”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 8
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 8
 
“Make Love Slowly” by Mark Aster (MyFrThAl).  Last week we had Delta 
satirizing Web Spam with “Make ******* Fast.”  This week Mark Aster takes 
a different approach to almost the same topic.  In his cover letter Mark 
assured me that he had written his entire story before my review of 
Delta’s story appeared in Celestial Reviews.

As often happens, two women - one a stereotypical dumb blonde and the 
other a computer nerd - are fondling each other while they work at the 
computer.  The blonde is attracted by the wonderful offer proposed under 
the heading “Make Money Fast!!” on a Usenet newsgroup, and the nerd 
explains to her the reasons why this is false advertising and a silly 
proposition.  The explanation is inserted into what I’ll refer to as soft 
porn.

As you read this story, it may occur to you that teachers could liven up 
their presentations by encasing them in sexually stimulating contexts.  
For example, 

.... Sandi’s heart beat wildly as she felt Herb’s dick push against the 
back of her throat.  She withdrew her head briefly, licked the tip of the 
cock gently, and said, “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum 
of the square of the other two sides.”  And then she plunged her hungry 
mouth back onto his engorged cock, engulfing the full 20 cm.  Herb 
couldn’t help wishing that his cock were the hypotenuse rather than a 
simple side b.  Even squared, he wasn’t sure he could satisfy her.  “Yes!  
He gasped!  I can see it in Figure 12.1 on page 242.”  His throbbing cock 
exploded in a violent eruption, sending what seemed to be a liter of cum 
into the young teacher’s waiting mouth.

While examples like that one may be enjoyable, they actually would not 
teach much about geometry.  The sexual scenario supplies what educators 
refer to as “seductive details.”  Since the enticing details are 
completely irrelevant to the educational information, they would have the 
result of distracting the learner from the Pythagorean theorem, which I 
embedded in this salacious episode.  Likewise, when you read the present 
story, you probably won’t really learn much about Ponzi schemes and such 
matters.   On the other hand, when I first learned about seductive 
details, I learned the information quite easily, because the prof 
teaching me about it used a similar example - which I have spiced up 
considerably.  My prof’s effort was appropriate, because his interesting 
details were a good example of what he was teaching about (seductive 
details), whereas in the math example the sexy story would actually draw 
attention away from the designated content.  My pastor uses jokes equally 
ineffectively in his sermons: I remember the jokes but not the sermons.  
Chances are, if your math teacher ever used an example like the one I 
cited, he was simply being a dirty old man.
 
More to the point - for the past year I have been hoping to find time to 
write a sexy story that could teach vocabulary to horny young people who 
normally resist traditional vocabulary instruction.  Really bad teachers 
tell students that they can do better on the SAT by memorizing the 
definitions of a bunch of words.  This approach rarely works.  My plan 
has been to take a subset of those words and put them into a really good 
story.  Then the students would be instructed to read the story at least 
three times before the test.  I’m willing to bet that learners reading my 
story would score better on a test administered, say, a month after the 
original test than would students who were simply told to learn the list 
of words to prepare for a test.

Since I spend so much time reading and reviewing these stories, however, 
it is obvious to me that I’ll never write my story.  So I am proposing 
the Third Annual Celestial Writing Contest.  The story can be of any 
length, but students should reasonably be able to (and eager to) read it 
three times in one week.  It should use all of the words on the following 
list.  Preferably, it should use them in creative ways that enable 
learners to see their meaning in context, and it should use the words 
more than once - in fact, as often as possible without becoming silly.  
The story should not be obviously didactic - that is, it should be a 
story about sex, not about learning these words.

If this idea catches on, I’ll be happy to supply to the authors or to 
others a vocabulary test based on these words.  When I announce the 
winners and the authors post the stories, I’ll post the vocabulary test.  
Readers can use the test before and after they read the story to see if 
they actually learn the words.

Since the Christmas holidays are coming up, I’ll give you a generous 
deadline - January 15.  However, as I tell my students, don’t put this 
assignment off until the last minute.  Your best bet is to start now and 
then come back to it many times in the coming weeks.  It IS fair to 
communicate with others and even to take advantage of my proofreading 
service.  If you send me your story early enough, I’ll even give you 
feedback myself.

Here are the words (all taken from one of those SAT study lists): 
acerbic, adept, ameliorate, apocryphal, assuage, blithe, constrict, 
credulous, dilatory, egregious, fatuous, guile, hedonism, impervious, 
incipient, irascible, lethargy, mundane, prolific, redundant.

All 20 of these are words that intelligent people use when the context 
calls for them (Quite possibly I may have used them here in Celestial 
Reviews.), but most high school students have no idea what they mean.  
They are useful words; and if you write a story with them, at the very 
least YOU will probably learn some functional vocabulary words.

Have fun!  And thanks to Mark Aster for accidentally giving me the 
stimulus to suggest this contest.

Ratings for “Make Love Slowly”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 8

 “Marie” by Friar Dave.  When she was a little under 11 years old and had 
a body that was a bit advanced for her age, Marie made an important 
discovery.  She could become close to and even have sex with nice men, 
and she could turn them on and still have them treat her right, and it 
could be fun and sweet and pleasurable and not hateful or hurtful or 
scary.

The problem was that soon she loved sex, and she was used to getting it 
pretty much when she wanted it. And she was often horny as hell.  To use 
Marie’s own expression, she was making Lolita look like a nun.

Marie’s initial sexual contacts were with boys near her own age.  She 
quickly graduated to more mature boys and to adult men.  Once she had 
experienced the more mature partners, she lost interest in younger boys.  
She progresses to numerous hot, sexy adventures.

If we accept this as fiction - a nice story - then we’re OK.  If we look 
at it as a case study - which is the format the author uses - then our 
choices are to regard this story as either (1) a very unusual set of 
circumstances or (2) a far-fetched fantasy.  The FACT is that there is an 
overwhelming tendency for girls who become sexually active this young to 
have adult lives that are at best far below their potential at and worst 
just plain miserable.  I have worked with kids who have been sexually 
active.  I am not talking about “kids” who get married and start a family 
when they are 17.  I am talking about kids who start having constant sex 
when they are under 12 years old.  In general, when they become adults, 
they have no idea what real love is about.  They’ve lost their childhood.  
They almost invariably either drop out of school or just sit in a desk 
until the law permits them to leave.  They enter into a series of shallow 
sexual relationships as adults, and they almost never have what a 
sensible person would call a stable family.  My guess is that by their 
fiftieth birthday half of the kids I have known like this will be dead 
after an unhappy life.

I also serve as an informal counselor to a large number of well-adjusted 
teenagers (by being the sponsor of various organizations), and my 
impression is that the sexual experiences of these kids begin much later 
in life.  Articles and case studies published in scientific journals 
confirm my perception.

It’s possible that I’m getting a biased sample in my real life contacts.  
I work with kids who are dysfunctional, and so maybe I just don’t see the 
well-adjusted kids who have been having frequent sex since they were 11 
years old.  It’s POSSIBLE that the world is full of wonderful children 
like Marie who become sexually active before they turn 11, who are never 
sexually exploited, and whose lives are not permanently screwed up 
because of their early sexual experiences.  These kids would not come to 
my attention, because they look like normal kids and don’t advertise the 
fact that they’re fucking one another’s brains out when I’m not looking.  
It’s also important to note that even with the dysfunctional kids it may 
be the problems in the rest of their lives that lead to early sexual 
behavior rather than vice versa.  

What I most emphatically want to say is that I do NOT believe that any of 
you readers who started your sexual careers at a really early age are 
necessarily scarred for life because of this.  On the other hand, I hope 
you have the honesty to admit that maybe life would be better were it not 
for some early problems and mistakes.

Marie discovered early in this story that sex could be fun and sweet and 
pleasurable and not hateful or hurtful or scary.  I learned the same 
thing from my mother and from the happy environment in which I grew up.  
Mom didn’t let me look at porn magazines when I was really young, because 
they would “give me a wrong impression of sex and love.” My father and 
mother were very affectionate in front of us, and I knew that someday I 
might get lucky and have a similar relationship.  She knew what kinds of 
movies I watched and casually offered me advice, including the 
encouragement to “save myself” for somebody I truly loved.  I had a full 
childhood and a happy athletic career in high school; and I cannot 
imagine my sex life being much better than it is right now - except when 
I get interesting ideas from these stories.  My advice to my own 
daughters has been similar; and had I ever suspected that one of them was 
engaging in precocious sexual behavior I would have done what I could 
have done to lead her to a more adaptive lifestyle.

Having stated my personal philosophy in the previous paragraphs, now I’ll 
say that this is still an excellent story.  It’s “realistic” in the sense 
that these events COULD happen to a person that would grow up to be a 
normal, functioning adult.  And if you read the whole story, I think 
you’ll discover that Marie’s eventual opinion of her life story is not 
all that different from my own.

The story is also just plain enjoyable - even to a person like myself who 
would discourage such behavior in real life.  I have close friends and 
relatives who adamantly insist that anything that’s immoral, unwise, or 
unrealistic cannot be enjoyable.  That’s just plain stupid.  When I watch 
Star Wars, I don’t worry about the impact on their families of killing 
the storm troopers of the Evil Empire.  When I watch a movie about a 
clever bank robbery, I don’t worry about the fact that such activity 
would ultimately influence how banks would operate and probably cause 
hardship for families with marginal incomes.  Get real!  It would be fun 
to rob a bank and get away with it (although I would never do it and it 
couldn’t really be harmless in real life), and it would also be fun for a 
12-year-old to pull a train with a bunch of friendly 16-year-olds.  Not 
wise, perhaps, but certainly fun.

Some people cite this as Friar Dave’s best story.  I liked “Inger” 
better, but this one is still an excellent story.

Ratings for “Marie”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

“July 4” by Mark Bastable (markb@aboy.demon.co.uk).  The British are 
civilized people.  If you ever visit a Civil War battlefield in the 
United States, you have to be careful how you use the words “enemy,” 
“loser,” and “bad guys.”  You see, the South lost the Civil War, but 
they’re still pissed about it; and almost all the battlefields are in the 
South.  The British, on the other hand, lost the Revolutionary War; and 
what do they do?  They have fireworks on the 4th of July.

When I was in the eighth grade, a hormonally imbalanced boy who was 
considered sexy, sat down next to me at lunch and asked me, “Do they have 
a 4th of July in England?”  Sexy boys did not usually talk to me, and so 
I was taken aback.  I tried to think quickly, but all I could manage was 
the notion that since the British had LOST the war that the 4th of July 
seemed to have started, then they’d have to be damned fools to celebrate 
it; and I told him so.  “Well what do they do, then?” he answered.  “Go 
straight from the 3rd to the 5th?”  He laughed uproariously.  Still 
thinking that this joke had to have something to do with sex, I was 
thoroughly confused.

This review may seem disjointed, but that’s because so is this story. All 
that matters is light and sound. The rest is just details.  That’s the 
conclusion the narrator drew when he acted as a beard for his lesbian 
friend at a 4th of July party at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square 
and an unknown assailant from behind pulled his dick out of his pants 
while he fondled her clit and the fireworks exploded overhead.  

The important thing to remember is when a Brit says he’s pissed, it means 
he’s drunk.  When an American is pissed, he’s mad.  Thus, the saying, 
“‘Tis better to be pissed off than pissed on” is more likely to be 
meaningful to an American than to our friends across the Pond.

Ratings for “July 4”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

“For Cheryl” by Hagen (hagen@bickdick.com).  A guy comes to his friend’s 
house and fucks the wife, who has been eagerly awaiting him and his 
wonderful cock.  Then the husband comes home, cheers them on, and joins 
them.

This is a new author.  I always worry that I’ll hurt the feelings of a 
new writer by saying something that seems harsh.  I have decided to just 
go ahead and be honest and to repeat this reminder once in a while.  This 
is a decent story, but if the author wants to improve it, he should work 
on his timing and his word choice.  In addition, the tone is too matter-
of-fact.  These may sound like serious problems, but the best way to 
overcome them is to read some of the stories by the other excellent 
authors and to try to imitate their style.  In this case I would 
prescribe reading some stories by Mark Aster, Tom Trinity, and Ann 
Douglas and then writing another story in the morning.  I think the 
author himself would improve this story simply by waiting three days and 
then rereading and revising it before posting it.  It seems to be 
needlessly rushed to press without polishing it.  

As I said, this is a decent story - typical of the first efforts of many 
writers.  My suggestions might help the author have more fun by trying to 
express the nuances of his story a little better.  Why write just another 
fuck story with different people’s names, when you can create something 
truly unique - that says just what you want it to say?

The most educationally illuminating sentence in the story was this one: 
“You grimassed as you let my cock enter your pussy for the second time 
today.”  The first mistake is “grimassed” instead of “grimaced.”  The 
author could claim to be using a creative metaphor - I guess if one can 
“bad mouth” one can also “grim ass”; but I think it was just a mistake.  
The actual word has a facial rather than anal connotation.  The second 
mistake is “today.”  That word works only when the action being described 
takes place on the same day that the author is telling the story.  The 
author should replace it with “that day” or “that night.”

Ratings for “For Cheryl”
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 7
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 6

“The Widow” by Sven the Elder (100255.351@CompuServe.COM).  At the 
Christmas party the widowed neighbor asks the narrator to come to her 
house to help her with something.  The help she needs requires getting 
naked and involves gushing liquids.  This quickly becomes a Christmas 
tradition; and after ten years of one-on-one activity, the wife catches 
them in the act and joins in.  Deck the halls!

Ratings for “The Widow”
Athena (technical quality): 8
Venus (plot & character): 8
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 8

“The Bet” by John Carter (jvogel@DGS.dgsys.com). The story begins with 
the woman bound in the bed with her legs apart.  Near the bed is a chest 
with a combination lock.  The bet is that the husband cannot get her to 
tell him the combination to the lock.  The husband is allowed to do 
anything that won’t leave a mark, with the understanding that whatever he 
does can’t have as it's basic purpose causing pain.  He can swat her ass, 
but only as part of something else, not to cause her to disclose the 
combination because of the pain.  His theory is that he can make her come 
so much that she'll do anything to get him to stop.

This is my kind of bondage!

Ratings for “The Bet”
Athena (technical quality): 9.5
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

“Love Fuck” by Unknown Author (KlubKelli@KlubKelli.com).  This story is 
posted as a sort of ad for the Klub Kelli Erotic Stories Mailing List, 
which can be reached at the address cited here or at its website: 
http://www.klubkelli.com/erotica.

Kristen’s boyfriend has unexpectedly canceled, and so she is the third 
member of a party spending a few days at a rustic retreat.  First she 
gets really turned on watching Janet and Jerry make exciting love on two 
occasions.  Next she finds out that Jerry would really like to do it with 
her, and then she finds herself making love to Janet in the shower.  Soon 
the three are banging away together.  This is really hot stuff.

Ratings for “Love Fuck”
Athena (technical quality): 9.5
Venus (plot & character): 9
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

“For These Gifts” by Uther Pendragon (dustman@athensnet.com).  It’s 
Thanksgiving break at Bob and Jeanette Brennan’s house, and it’s time for 
games.  These “games” are choices of sexual behavior, new positions on 
the days when he chooses, mostly old ones when she makes the choice. In 
fact, she called her first game "Missionary."  Tonight she has a genuine 
need for Bob to “be gentle”; and so they play Cherish, which is actually 
a variation of Missionary.  Compared to some of the scenarios we see in 
this newsgroup, this sexual activity is no big thing - but a very nice no 
big thing.

For Bob’s turn they make love sitting down - and standing up.

Between the two games, this story even includes a prayer - in fact, the 
title refers to the prayer that people often say on Thanksgiving, when 
they give thanks for the gifts they have received during the past year.

What I like about this series of stories is that the lovers are 
intelligent but ordinary people.  Bob is going to school (majoring in 
history) and Jeanette is working full time to make Bob’s academic career 
possible.  They are looking forward to a happy future, but they are also 
trying to enjoy a happy present.  They sometimes have riotous sex, but 
it’s in the perspective of a full life. 

Another way to say this is that a typical episode in this series is like 
three or four Dulcinea stories cohesively joined together.

Ratings for “For These Gifts”
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10

