All the perversions imaginable
Charlotte Raven
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS by Alina Reyes Weidenfeld, £12.99, pp. 334 Wen my best friend lent me her copy of Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden, she warned me it was going to be hot stuff. An erotic connoisseur of some 14 summers, she passed on this particular ark with a sin- gle cautionary note. 'Wait till you read the one about the alsatian. It's bloody disgust- ing.' Full of excitement, I got the home, waited until my mother went out and single-handedly set about uncovering the mysteries of Female Desire.
Very interesting it was too. Much of this `study' of the feminine sexual psyche was taken up with perfectly efficient descrip- tions of rapacious and insatiable dark strangers, randy handymen and a whole host of other familiar friends. Only very seldom did any woman confess to having fantasies of a more exotic kind. The alsatian, bless his darling tongue, was the aberration which proved the rule I've stuck by ever since. Most girls, like most boys need nothing more elaborate to finish the job than a quick rendition of a few quite basic frames; not so much a secret garden as a pile of dog-eared flash-cards suggest- ing such epic scenarios as 'Favourite pop star lets you have it' and 'Boy you fancy gives it to you straight.' Boring it may be but at least it bloody works.
Which is more than you can say for the exertions of Miss Reyes. Behind Closed Doors is breathlessly billed as 'a catalogue of all the sexualities and perversions imag- inable' — which is difficult to imagine so, to save you the trouble of trying: first you've got your common porno-staples domination, submission, orgies, threesomes (all permutations), voyeurism, rape (gang as well as one-on-one), sodomy, coprophil- ia and, of course, dyke action. All of which, you might have thought, would be quite enough to be going on with. Not, it would seem, for Reyes who, we must remember, is no base pornographer but rather the lit- tle erotic artiste. She therefore treats us to a choice selection of 'fantasy' scenarios dragged out of the back room of her mind.
Enter the unimaginable. The book con- tains a series of erotic episodes, some of which are merely silly, others really sick. One thing, however, unites them; they are all about as sexy as a sock. On the silly side, we have a jolly romp with Batman, the original urban swinger, which ends up down the Batcave for some hot wall-scaling fun.
When I reached the level of the black bat- pants, my heart began to beat 20 to the dozen. I gingerly reached out my hands, wait- ing apprehensively to see how Batman would react — he doesn't come across as a ladies man.
Happily the tatbulge' (no, I'm not joking) helps her out.
A few more scenes like this and you find yourself looking back fondly on the simpler pleasures of domination, submission, orgies and threesomes. But Reyes won't let you linger there for long — that would be to concede the case that one candid account of a sexual act is worth 100 pointless fan- tasies. Instead, she sends in the clowns and the blind men, the wizened old sorcer- ess, a bevy of hermaphrodite angels, sleep- ing beauty, an amputee, a chimney sweep and some weird animal called a Marsupila- mi who knows what to do with his tail.
Doubtless aware that this wretched collection of tosh would require both a sell- ing point and an excuse, Reyes needs a gimmick with which to court pseudo- respectable cred. Behind Closed Doors can safely be mentioned at dinner parties because it is no wank-fest but an 'inter- active adult game-book' — a grown-up version of the kind of things kids have played at for years. (The favourite hero, in the children's ones, is Sonic the Hedgehog; given Reyes' unusual taste in sex gods, it's a pleasant surprise not to find the Fast Blue One staked out with Tails the Fox in some squalid scenario.) The reader 'choos- es' which 'door' to 'open', but as he or she is never given any information about what's behind any of them, this really is a non- starter.
One option seldom appears; that familiar little bedtime story called 'Not Tonight, I've Got a Headache'. When it does, it's as an early escape route in the man's version of the 'quest'; men and women are instruct- ed to start from different ends of the book, rather creepily. But dare to choose Door 4 (`Get out of here while there's still time') and you'll feel the whole heat of Reyes' indignation. You are a sensual failure, a useless wuss who fell at the first hurdle and now can expect no comfort when you fail to find the strength to learn of joy.
Interestingly, the female player never gets the opt-out clause at all. Any woman reader is therefore doomed to undergo the whole variety of intellectual and physical torments the book has in store. And after a while, you begin to notice something very strange indeed. Ever since we started hav- ing hormones, it was as natural as breath- ing to skip the story in our frantic search for the dirty bits. For the first time, here is a book in which we plod through the dirty bits, desperately seeking the story.
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