$14.95
ISBN 1576121690
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(10/02/02)
Don't let the title deter you if you don't happen to be into ropes or chains or handcuffs. In plenty of these 69 delightful vignettes, nobody even gets tied up. It's more like creative sex on a budget. Tyler and Davidson serve sex plus -- sex plus props, roles, fantasies, or all three. It's by no means a dry how-to, either, but a collection of fictional short-shorts guaranteed to make your shorts feel much tighter.
Bondage on a Budget takes a lust-crazed look at the plethora of pervertibles all around us -- if you're feeling hot and bothered, everything's a toy. Chop sticks, candles, frozen peas -- chances are if it's in this book, it's within grabbing distance. Far beyond toys, tricks, and techniques, Bondage on a Budget explores the entire kaleidoscope of sexual possibility: all the colors of the rainbow, all the visions in our mind's eye. The suggested scenarios are as provocative as the novel uses to which everyday objects are put.
A pair of rollerblades make up for a height disparity and give one lucky woman the ride of her life without ever leaving the garage. A cutting board is employed for some bare-bottom public discipline at an all-male black-tie dinner party. A wife dressed for painting leads her proper lawyer husband into some sexy age-play:
'I can be the girl next door, outside gardening in my overalls.' I bent forward so that he could see my naked breasts beneath the denim bib.
Pretty Things Press wisely chose to reprint this very popular 1997 Masquerade volume. It's a great book to dip into for a quickie, or to access very specifically: The stories are arranged alphabetically by accessory (from Ace Bandage to Zucchini) and labeled by preference: lesbian, gay, heterosexual, solo, and orgy.
In an interview with Rachel Kramer Bussel, (http://www.prettythingspress.com/interview.html)
prolific erotica pro Alison Tyler confesses to writing star-fucker porn for her high school classmates; to an early obsession with the dictionary definitions of "spanking, " "discipline, " and "punishment; " and to a lifelong devotion to naughty stories. Dante Davidson co-authored Great Sex After Fifty and is another frequent anthology contributor. Their writing in Bondage on a Budget is so consistently well-wrought that would-be authors should study closely its brisk exposition and rapid character-building:
The trick to the evening -- the "special theme" -- was clothespins. The women who recited, all submissives with their downcast eyes, were stripped naked at the start of their readings. Their lovers positioned them before the poems were read, creating a sort of painful performance art.
There's lot's of anal action. One overheard word: "butter," and the downstairs neighbors are doing their own Last Tango in Paris. Shy Antonia's beast roams free as she rhapsodizes about the time with the rock star and the baby oil and her virgin orifice. A subtle gift of men's cologne from husband to wife and a petite-sized sailor suit lead to some steamy strap-on action as the wife takes the role of a former shipmate her husband once fantasized about:
He claimed that the boy had looked like me, was of a slighter build than the rest of the burly sailors, with fairly feminine features and a 'divine ass.' So now I was Jake Miller, heading into our room to turn a forbidden fantasy into a reality.
After all, anal is many folks' first foray from vanilla and it deserves all the encouragement it can get: why waste a perfectly good erogenous zone? And why shouldn't guys approaching the big 5-0 do a little homework to make those upcoming sigmoidoscopies a lot less traumatic. Take some of the advice here and you'll be pleading with your proctologist, "No, no, don't stop! "
Not that bondage in the strict sense or S/M in the percussive sense are neglected. There's really no need to fork over your hard-earned dough for hand-crafted bondage gear and spanking straps when there's a good chance you're wearing something around your waist that will serve both purposes. The snicker-snack of a well-oiled strip of leather being yanked out of belt loops may never sound the same again. And hairbrushes have two sides, as a customer discovers when her stylist stops by for a private session:
'Brushes are perfect instruments,' she said, raising my short skirt, sliding my white cotton underpants down my thighs. 'They just feel so right in your hand.'
The real subject of Bondage on a Budget is neither knots nor thrift, but the wealth of our imaginations and the sexual riches that are out there for the taking if we can only manage to see each other, as well as what's around us, in a different light.
