*This review is for adult readers only*

Passion (published in 2006) is a touching love story between a penis and a vagina, with a secondary romance between Mark Hawkmore, the Earl of Langley, architect and hater of class distinctions, and Passion Elizabeth Dare, quiet country widow with a big … well, I’ll let Larry David explain it. Penis and Vagina are being led around the Crystal Palace in 1851 by Mark and Passion, when they meet behind a facade of a medieval castle in the Gothic furniture room. Penis, at 10.5 inches in length, has had woman trouble all his life. Oh, sure, he still holds the record for being the largest of his genital kind at Oxford, where he also graduated with distinction in Production of Ejaculate, but since then, he has had a devil of a time, er, fitting in.  As he puts it, “though [women] all claimed to worship his penis, none had opened their bodies to it.” When Penis first spies Vagina, he weeps, knowing he has at last found The One.

As luck would have it, Vagina’s problem is the exact inverse of Penis’s: she has always felt empty and quite literally unfulfilled, her name the cruelest irony of her life. Hungry, ravenous, and sick unto death of men saying sex with her is like throwing a hot dog down a hallway, (ok, I’m kidding about that last one), Vagina began her quest for nonemptiness with her sister’s fingers, eventually graduating to cucumbers, but nothing worked. She wept when she saw Penis for the first time, knowing that finally, she had found her purpose in life.

By the time we get lines like “I don’t want to feel anything but cunt” and “If I could offer my whole body as a sheath for your cock I would do it”,  we know that Mark and Passion serve mainly as genital transport systems. While Mark and Passion do very little in this book, Penis and Vagina are supremely gymnastical throughout. Penis swells, stirs, lifts, strains, pulses, jerks, thrusts, thumps, throbs, pumps, pummels, erupts, and, when complimented, nods in agreement. Like any superhero worth his semen, Penis has a couple of sidekicks, known colloquially in the text as “Cods”, who don’t do much but hang around. Vagina is, typical for a female, slightly more complex a character than Penis, as her sidekick, Clitoris is always popping out to do things like “throb in acknowledgment, as if to say, yes, isn’t it magnificent!” (poor Clitoris never went to punctuation school. Too busy pulsing, swelling and burning to concentrate, I guess). Lines like, “I think my cock is in love with you” and “Christ! His prick was so big; it looked frightening even to him.” confirm that Mark, at least, is well aware of his secondary status in this story.

It’s a very explicit, erotic book, which is fine, but the weight placed on the sex act is all out of proportion to the relationship, especially in the early stages. I know other readers found the development of Mark and Passion’s relationship compelling, but I found too much of the work being done via shortcuts, as in, “Though a stranger, he was somehow a part of her”, and “Was she as false as most women? No she didn’t seem anything like most women.” Other telltale signs of unpersuasive writing, such as overuse of the word “amazing”, abound (“amazingly handsome”, “amazing breasts”, etc). There is a cardboard baddie in the form of Mark’s mother, who says things like “You’re my son’s latest fuck” and tries to force him to marry some random woman for her own gain. If you ever saw an episode of Dynasty or Falcon Crest, you have a sense of how deft the plotting and subtle the characterization is.  At any rate, I kept picturing Mark’s mother with a deep tan and shoulder pads and Passion with feathered hair.

The most interesting aspect of this book, to me, is how phallocentric it is. Mark’s goal in life is to “get my whole prick, once and for all, into a woman” (everything about this guy screams “adolescent”) and when he finally does, the imagery is militaristic, violent, and very unpleasant. His “invading prick … sent three body-jolting attacks against her womb”, and “He battered the door to her womb with unrelenting ferocity”. This sort of thing goes on and on until Mark rearranges Passion’s internal organs. Rather than screaming in pain, she loves it. While the author claimed to have done “research“, and while I am aware that the uterus and cervix can ascend, lengthening the vaginal canal during arousal, I seriously doubt penile penetration of the uterus is possible or pleasurable (and yes, I know Masters and Johnson reported something about a “vaginal tent”, but that was a long time ago. You know how they “measured” it? External palpation, which sex researchers today think was not a very reliable method to find out how big an internal organ is. In fact, they were probably feeling the full bladders of their research subjects. Today, researchers use noninvasive imaging techniques and find no such tenting, or at least not much that enlarges the vagina beyond the usual size.). But the more interesting question to me is why this violent, painful, protracted, dislocating episode is a fantasy to the writer or to readers. Some things I will never understand.

The sequel, Patience, about Mark’s brother and Passion’s sister, was published earlier this year. I believe it does for the esophagus what Passion did for the uterus, but as I have no plans to read it, I will never know for sure.

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