So I bought Die Praktikantin Wird Gepierct: Eine Geschichte Ć¼ber Piercings, Permanenz und Dominanz (VerƤnderung und Selbstaufgabe)
The Intern Gets Pierced: A Story of Piercings, Permanence and Dominance (Change and Self-Surrender)
Translated it into English using time, effort and tech.
TLDR: Hard to like protagonist gets railroaded into a series of very serious permanent piercings, by hard to like characters, with no sex whatsoever and no eroticism other than the being done-to part. The piercings are not put to use or exploited in any erotic or sexual way.
I thought the subject and set up held great promise. The plot was intriguing, but there was for me, a huge deficit and even more if the authors intent was eroticism. The eroticism of non-consensual or reluctant, coerced body modification was there to a certain degree, but it had so much more potential that was entirely missed and not exploited.
The protagonist gets some hefty, 'permanent' nipple, genital and septum piercings, without consent. Do the dominant, long time, personnel of the shop do anything fun, amusing or creative with these, like attach a long chain to them so the protagonist has to work encumbered, chained to her work place - a literal wage slave - incapable of going to lunch or home without the intervention of a superior? Nope, not even as a one-off prank.
The glaring flaw that lets it down badly is that there is no sex whatsoever. Nothing; not a single caress, not one rub and not a even a tentative on-ramp to an orgasm, just a bemused might-as-well-be-a-robot getting done-to repeatedly by other robots, whose only motivation is the cold mean spirited doing itself. To more fully exploit the considerable erotic potential, the hapless victims suffering could have had a purpose, a higher reason - such as dominance and control for sexual exploitation or gratification - nope. It's cold, clinical subdued eroticism - there's no warmth, humour, and certainly no hot. The genital piercings are philosophical; perhaps; maybe they are political, they certainly aren't sexual.
Another thing that was annoying was the protagonist launching into politically correct public defences of her metalwork and declaring them to be her own statements, her own life choices, part of her own independent norm-rejecting rad character, when in all other situations she thought of herself as a hapless victim with significant concerns and worries about what was being done to her. This dichotomy doesn't lend itself to admiration or liking of the character. None of the characters are likeable, really. The sexy Domme potential was there, but absent in reality. The protagonists emotional reactions were also ludicrously devoid of intensity. She's mildly annoyed instead of verging on a mental breakdown
Another thing that annoyed me somewhat were technical imprecisions. Titanium is repeatedly referred to as being heavy and exerting a weighty presence, when it's a very light non-massy material. Multiple times titanium hardware is referred to as being steel. Aftercare and adverse consequences of serious piercings is completely absent.
In fairness to the author, it's imaginative and quite well written,'their' reason for writing it is probably very well met and it's likely a superb vehicle for what they envisioned and wanted to express. Others might be more in sync with the author than I am and might get a lot more from it. I don't feel cheated of my purchase. My not 'getting it', wanting more and different, is my problem, not necessarily the authors.
I was considering purchasing: Bound In Love: Collared and Cuffed in Steel - A Lesbian BDSM Love Story - but the one Amazon review suggests there's little to no sex in that as well.
As an aside: Amazons restrictions on reviews is somewhat justification for sharing. One title I looked at had several reviews but only one visible, with an invitation to log in to view the others. Login and you find you have to make a request for access to the other reviews you were coerced into logging in for. WTF! Fuck off Beezos!
