The trouble with what literary people like to call erotica and what the rest of us know as porn is that either it's terribly hifalutin and trails off into a row of dots just before it gets good, or else it's dismally badly written. The great virtue of Macho Sluts is that Pat Califia is, apart from anything else, a damn good writer who doesn't smear Vaseline on the lens, as it were. I'm not the only person to testify that you don't have to be into S&M, or a lesbian, or even a woman, to enjoy this book. (Though if you can't imagine what it might like to be one or all of the above, then you won't find it very rewarding - like the person below who claimed that it was all sex scenes. Well, duhh.) The Calyx of Isis is one of the most extraordinarily arousing things ever written; truly, the hormones have reason, of which the stated sex on your birth certificate knows nothing. I wouldn't want to advise anybody not to read this book - but please, with a title like Macho Sluts, you should at least have some idea of what you're getting into.