Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726

Pif Magazine
1426 Harvard Ave. #451
Seattle, WA 98122-3813

PAST ZINE REVIEWS	MORE ZINES

Scarlet Letters
Edited by Heather Corinna
Reviewed by Tom Hartman

I've always thought of erotica as porn's more refined cousin, porn that's had a solid liberal arts education, if you will. It's naughty, yes, quite possibly downright filthy. But presumably it's marked by an intelligence, a certain literary flair that's absent from the more or less ham-fisted wank-fodder one encounters in the shrink-wrapped mags the local 7-11 keeps behind the counter. This stuff is supposed to appeal to our heads as well as our loins, right?

But alas, I'm getting ahead of myself. I should begin by saying that my Zine-O-Rama colleague, Ingrid Woodrow, and I decided to tag-team Scarlet Letters in order to give readers an intercontinental, male-female perspective on the goings-on here. Ingrid feels that there's an indescribable "something" about this site that largely redeems its shortcomings. On the other hand, Scarlet Letter's latest installment (the "self-loving" issue) has prompted me to rethink some of my assumptions about this genre.

First impressions first. Ingrid and I agreed that design-wise, Scarlet Letters is a bit gaudy. Worse, some bits of text are so small as to be nearly illegible. And, as Ingrid pointed out, the layout is a bit confusing, especially given the amount of content here.

Nonetheless, Ingrid liked the fact that the staff (self) portraits in

Scarlet Letter's "Gallery" "show "real" women with flabby hips and pimples on their bottoms, and she "loved the magnificent ivory layers of flesh on Features Editor Lori Selke ((the one who "got a little carried away with the hair removal project.."). Frankly (and I'll apologize first for my callousness here), I would have preferred not knowing what Selke looked like as I read her piece on fucking celebrity dildoes (that is, molded replicas of pornstar penises), in which she describes suction-cupping a plastic version of Sean Michaels' formidable tool to the bottom of her bathtub. As for the rest of the portraits, I found them tasteful and competent (interesting to see what these folks look like, yes), but hardly pulse-quickening – and that's at least partly the point, isn't it?

I was disappointed with the amateurism in SL's features: the first-person, the half-embarrassed, "aw shucks" quality some articles had about them (surprising for such a high-gloss 'zine). Of course, there is no denying the sheer curiosity value of Cameron Miles's piece on auto fellatio – yes, that's giving oneself a blowjob. Like just about anybody who's ever flipped through a Hustler, I'd read some (bad) fiction that described this most-acrobatic of all masturbatory techniques, but I'd never read, well, a blow-by-blow description by a real-life practitioner. Many readers, I dare say, will be astonished to learn that this is in fact possible. Personally, I found it difficult to chase from my head images of average guys in suits stumbling onto Miles's piece on their office PC then rushing home to try contorting themselves into an appropriate position.

But the worst of SL is to be found in its poetry section. Honestly, there is some astonishingly, spectacularly dreadful stuff here. Take this nugget from Ray Reese's "The Seduction of Halle Berry and her Sisters":

and yet I struggle valiantly
unwilling to surrender too easily
these primal secrets of my species

Personally, I think there is nothing that quite compares to the following from poetry editor Lisa Jain Thompson (thankfully these have now been banished to the password-protected SL archive):

The millenia [sic] go on as the planets still circle in Newtonian orbit.
In Los Angeles the blood lust rises, testosterone driven by messianic promises,
To slaughter innocents not blond or blue-eyed enough
To meet true American standards.
(from "Millenial [sic] Eclipse")

or

My thoughts were everywhere but history,
But mostly on the blue-eyed girl beside me
And the growing wetness between my thighs.
The lunar rail took us home
To the safety of the domes and underground complex
Where I slipped into her room beneath her parents' eyes
(from "Tranquillity in Earthlight")

Ingrid was quick to remind me Scarlet Letters does not try to pass itself off as "literary." But worse than the fact that these are bad poems is the fact that they're also bad erotica. And this is true not just with Thompson's poems but with the rest of the lot as well. It is hard to imagine that anything here would honestly un-dam the pent-up juices so many of them describe. The poetry is a particularly glaring flaw because there is some work of legitimate literary merit to be found in Scarlet Letters. I was particularly struck by Nik Flandré's story "The Blades of an Engine," which, unlike so much of the erotic fiction I've found here and elsewhere on the Web, is honestly provocative. Flandré's piece is a solid short story overall, complete with fully-developed characters, sharp dialogue and an intriguing premise and setting. As for that certain "something" Ingrid senses in Scarlet Letters, I have to say I'm still looking for it. Maybe I'm just not getting it. Or maybe my assumptions about erotica have been all wrong. Maybe erotica is not necessarily more intelligent than porn; maybe it is just more polite.

Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com

Want Pif to review your zine?
See Review Suggestions for more details.

A graduate of Columbia University and The University of Pennsylvania, life-long New Jerseyan and New York Mets fan, Tom Hartman now lives in Philadelphia where he's an Associate Poetry Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Over the years his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Photo Review, City Paper (Philadelphia), and Philadelphia Weekly. When he's not writing he spends far too much time hating the Atlanta Braves.