The Curious Case of the Paranormal Penises

I’ve been reading romance for a long time. Really, really long.

I’ve been reading paranormal romance for a good two or three years now – I’ve covered a lot of ground.

I’ve gone through a number of high fantasy, swords-and-sorcery, Arthurian and pseudo-arthurian fantasy phases.

And I’ve read my share of erotica, too.

Still, it seems I’ve led a sheltered reading life, because just in the last few months I’ve come to recognize a rather disturbing phenomenon.

It started out innocently enough. (OK, perhaps innocently is a poor word choice.) Christine Warren’s wolves are eyebrow-raisingly well-endowed in their human forms. OK. JR Ward’s Brothers are also well-endowed --well, that’s just proportionate, right? They’re big guys. Oh, they also have extreme staying power, multiple orgasms, and apparently large volumes of, erm, jizz. Kind of like regular guys only more so.

This makes sense to me. It works for me.

But then there was this, from Ward’s Lover Enshrined: ”Her tongue snaked out and teased the barb at the base of his erection. That barb was the part of him that she liked best, the one that locked into place when he came and kept them linked.” Erm. Barb?

I was assured by Lora Leigh fans that there was precedent for this: He slammed in deep, his body tightening as she felt an additional erection, an extension swelling from beneath the hood of his cock, locking him inside her, caressing a bundle of nerves high inside…" (From short story “The Breed Next Door.”)

More prosaically, according to about.com: "Whole male cats have barbed penises (much like a fishhook), and upon withdrawal, the female cat will often scream (whether from ecstasy or pain is questionable). It is also believed that the barbed penis stimulates ovulation."

Yikes.

Then there's Cheryl Brooks' cat… alien… dude: "…but when I washed it, it blossomed like a rose, the head putting out a wide corona with a scalloped edge…then I noticed something else, which was that he already had plenty of lubrication dripping from the star-like points of the corona.” Said lubrication is later referred to as “orgasmic cock syrup.” I couldn’t bring myself to read much further than that.

Yeah, I’m not so down with that.

Call me old-fashioned, but this kind of stuff is not sexy to me.

Keep the paranormal options package please, I’ll just stick with the basic model.

Though I might go with the, erm, expanded wheelbase.

So to speak.