F
Title: Reckless Pleasures
Author: Tori Carrington
Publication Info: Harlequin 2011
ISBN: 978-0373796212
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Every now and again I get irate email from readers who are absolutely hair-pulling livid about a book they just read. We romance readers take our book reading very personally, and if a book doesn’t live up to the expectations of a reader in the most basic of ways, there is fury like furies have never furied before. This is especially true when there’s infidelity, moral weakness, or a completely unhappy ending. Nina is PISSED about this book. She is IRATE. And she has a LOT to say about it. Behold: A Guest Rant Review.
Nina writes: Warning: This review is chock full of spoilers.
This book made me sick. And not only because the heroine of the story cheats on the hero, but because she’s cheating on a man who’s risking his life in a dangerous, scary place thousands of miles from home.
Don’t get me wrong— I’m not saying that infidelity can’t be addressed in an entertaining and intelligent way. Unfortunately, that’s not how it’s treated in Tori Carrington’s Reckless Pleasures.
Now this isn’t the first Harlequin Blaze I’ve read that featured a woman who cheats on her boyfriend. It’s not even the first time Tori Carrington has dealt with this—see Reckless.
In Reckless an engaged woman sexes up her fiance’s best friend—because their sexual attraction is so strong, you see. But really it’s not so bad because her fiancé was actually cheating on her before she started cheating on him (she doesn’t find this out until the end of the book, though the best friend knew all along).
In some ways Reckless Pleasures is a rehash of plain ol’ Reckless. We have the woman (Megan), the man she loves (Darius or Dari), and his best friend (Jason). But this story kicks it up a notch. All three are Marines, though Megan and Jason have retired. Jason, Megan and some fellow ex-servicemen have formed Lazarus Security and soon become involved in searching for a missing child in Florida. This is the backdrop and non-romance subplot to the story, but frankly I was too distracted by the horrible behavior of two of the main characters to much care.
Dari is a reservist who has been called up to serve eighteen months in Waziristan. Jason, being the good buddy he is, promises to look after Megan while her guy is away. Trouble is, he’s attracted to Megan and perhaps secretly a bit in love with her (you saw that coming, right?). Oh, did I forget to mention he’s survived a terrible childhood? We’re not given much detail about this, but we’re sure to find out in an upcoming installment of the “Pleasure Seekers” series. Looks like Jason is sizing up to become the “hero” of another book.
In addition to being something of a replay of “Reckless”, this book has elements of Carrington’s “Shameless” as well. Jason, like Gauge, had a shitty childhood and can’t connect emotionally. He doesn’t let much—even bad orthodontia—get in the way when he wants some sexin’. Megan is like ditzy Nina. She can’t deal honestly with the fact that she has the hots for two men and has to invent excuses why it’s okay to sleep with both of them. And Darius, well, I won’t say he’s like Kevin. He’s not the passive-aggressive wimp that Kevin was. In “Shameless” Kevin imagined he was the wronged party, even though he never had the guts to admit his feelings to Nina. In “Reckless Pleasures”, Dari really is the wronged party.
So, even though Darius is his best (possibly only) friend, and Jason’s so hot he can have any woman he wants, he has to fixate on his buddy’s girl. And Megan is not completely unaware of Jason’s charms, either. After all, her guy has been gone four months and even though they’ve been talking and sexting, hey, she’s only human. It’s been a week or so since she’s received any calls or texts, so you’d think she’d be scared shitless for her man’s safety instead of thinking “me so horny”, but what do I know?
Now I do not mean to make light of women and men missing their loved ones serving overseas. And I can certainly sympathize with someone being lonely and horny due to such a separation, but come on. The guy’s been gone four months, not four years. Why not just break out the vibrator? But that’s not good enough for our heroine, so here’s what happens next: Jason proposes he and Megan have “just sex” and she agrees! You see, it makes perfect sense—since they’re not in love, it’s not a threat to Megan and Dari’s relationship. And since Jason is Dari’s best friend, it’s like he’s helping them out, see? Yeah. Whatever.
“No one needs to know,” he said quietly. “Just you and me. And it will only be once.”
Unless…
The unsaid word hung there.
Yep. Jason won’t mind going again if the chance arises. And since Megan is not exactly a fortress, you have to wonder how often they’ll comfort each other if Dari is gone the entire eighteen months.
Anyway, to make it less intimate, they agree no kissing. In fact, they won’t even face each other while they do the nasty.
This is the point where the reader might ask herself “This is a romance I’m reading?” It’s also the point where she might decide to stuff the book in the shredder. Not only are these people cheating on a man who is risking his life for his country, they have convinced themselves it’s okay because they’re using each other like fucktoys.
However, if you’re sick like me, you keep reading because you have to find out what happens next. Is it possible that Jason and Megan will end up together?
That’s part of the problem with the story. Just who the hell is the hero, anyway? Ostensibly, it’s Darius, but he’s absent the first seven chapters of the book. Asswipe Jason gets as much or more attention. I’m not even sure which guy is getting his shirt pulled on the cover. Is it Dari or Jason? It’s pretty sad if the hero can’t even make the cover of his own book.
So Jason and Megan do the deed and all is well until later that day when they both get the message that Dari is returning home. Megan starts getting the guilts and Jason tries to tell her no big thing.
But very big thing, because Dari returns with his leg in a cast after being injured by an IED—improvised explosive device. He’s in physical pain and dealing with horrible memories of what he experienced. Megan gets a double dose of the guilts.
If you haven’t shredded the book yet, this is where you’re again tempted to do so. Why were the characters okay with cheating when they thought Dari would be gone longer? Did they think the episode would just fade away and they’d forget about it?
And of course there’s the whole conundrum created by infidelity: to confess or keep your big mouth shut? If you say nothing, it’s a lie of omission and there’s always that secret between you and your partner. But spill your guts and you’re just unloading the guilt at someone else’s expense. Not to mention you risk getting your ass dumped.
She pushed from the table and paced. “This…You and I just talking like this feels like a betrayal.”
“We didn’t betray him.”
“How can you say that? Of course we betrayed him!”
“Now you’re just talking stupid.”
She’d never seen Jason so upset before. At least not with her.
…
“It was sex, nothing more.”
“Well, when you put it that way…” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell him. I have no other choice. Not now that he knows something’s wrong.”
Well, Dari’s not stupid. He knows something’s up, considering Megan can’t look him in the eye. But Jason starts to lose it:
“Damn it! Don’t I have a say in the matter?”
He paced across the room and then back again, looking like a caged animal desperate to escape.
When Megan starts to leave the room, Jason grabs her arm.
He took a deep breath and released her. “Sorry.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I just don’t understand how telling him is going to make anything better.”
“It will clear my conscience.”
“And rip his heart clean out of his chest.”
She winced at that.
The last thing she wanted to do was hurt Dari. But she couldn’t keep this from him any longer.
“Look,” Jason said quietly, “he’s the best friend I’ve ever had. My only true friend, if you want to know the truth. If you tell him…”
Arghh! God, how I hate these people! They’re only thinking about themselves. But that’s why cheating sucks so royally. Once it’s done, you’re an asshole, and there’s no way out of it without becoming an even bigger asshole.
Of course, Dari learns the truth and it all goes to hell. Here are his choices: dump Megan’s ass and look like a hard-hearted SOB or take her back and look like a wimp. Another reason why cheating sucks. Not only does it turn the participants into assholes, it places the injured party in a no-win situation. (Think Silda Spitzer and the wives of all those other politicians who got caught with their pants down.)
The fallout: Megan is sorry and still loves Dari. She and Jason, both guilt-ridden, studiously avoid each other until we reach this cringe-inducing scene where Jason apologizes:
Megan ultimately shook her head. “Apology not accepted.”
She turned to walk away and he lightly grasped her arm.
“I’ve already lost one goddamn friend over this. I don’t want to lose another.”
She smiled. “You’re not. Losing a second friend, that is. I don’t accept your apology because you have nothing to be sorry for.”
He stared at her as if unsure she was telling the truth.
“Seriously,” she added.
“So what you’re telling me is that this is the first time I’ve apologized to a woman in my life, and there was no reason to…”
How sweet, they’re still friends. Though Jason is no more responsible for the affair than Megan, this whole scene makes me want to puke.
Just when you think Jason can’t be any more of a creep, there’s this scene, when he shows up at Dari’s apartment:
Jason advanced on him. Only this time, he was clear-eyed and determined, whereas in Florida, he’d been suffering a hangover. “Will you climb down off the cross already? We need the freakin’ wood.”
Dari wanted to hit him so badly his knuckles itched.
“What happened was unfortunate. It wasn’t a purposeful crime against you or anyone else.” His onetime friend seemed to have a death wish. “God, are you so stupid you can’t see how much the woman loves you?”
Dari opened his mouth to respond.
“I know what happened was wrong. Hell, we all do. But we can’t take it back. But we can move forward.”
Jesus, I can’t stand this guy! He won’t even let his friend grieve—no, he has to make stupid remarks and hound him so that everything can be the way it was.
Dari, who’s always had a grudge against his mother because of her infidelities, has a talk with his father and learns a family secret. He also learns that “Love isn’t about who you can live with, it’s about who you can’t live without.” (That must rank up there with “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”) In any event, this enables him to forgive Megan, though he knows it will be a long time before he can forget.
This would all be some long-ago, faded memory, a wound that had healed but left a scar behind as substantial as the one on his leg. But just as he would push forward and not let his physical injuries impede his progress, he didn’t intend to let this emotional one keep him down.
Makes me want to cry. Darius has to soldier on, wounded physically and emotionally, while the other two merely have to wrestle with a few icky feelings.
In the end even Jason the jerk is accepted back into the fold. This is your “happy ending,” folks.
Oh, by the way, there’s a bit of a twist in the subplot, but it didn’t ring true to me. In a community where a child has vanished, wouldn’t people be hyper-vigilant and suspicious of that “harmless” guy who attracts kids like the Pied Piper?
But the book was not a total loss. It really got me thinking. How do people in the military and their partners deal with such long and difficult separations? (Better than Megan did, I’m sure.) They have my utmost respect.
And I was inspired to look up Waziristan on the internet. So I learned something.
But maybe I’m too hard on the characters. Am I just a judgmental bitch? After all, people get lonely. They make mistakes. Isn’t forgiveness possible? Well, of course. And so is growth, maturity and taking responsibility for one’s actions. Otherwise, you’re just another guest on Jerry Springer.
Megan for the most part is sorry for the affair (although the orgasm Jason gave her was “exactly what she needed at the time.”) So all right, I guess I could accept Dari forgiving her. I don’t expect her to follow in the footsteps of other famous heroines and wear a scarlet letter or take poison or throw herself in front of a train.
But no way can I accept Dari forgiving Jason.
We’re told over and over how tough Jason is, how smart and sexy. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a total fucking coward and a great big pussy. He was only sorry he got caught and after he got caught he behaved like a complete ass. I hated his guts.
In fact, I’d like to throw him in front of a train.
This book is available from Amazon | Kindle | Book Depository | Powells | eHarlequin.com
Are vampires considered “dead”? I thought that would be a zombie. I thought vampires were undead. I find reality based novels confusing at times. This is too much for me. I didn’t read that Twilight series but when I heard Bella had a half and half baby I started wondering what that was going to do to the DNA databank.
Well, you’re right – they are undead. But lots of vampire books and movies have mentioned how they have no heartbeats, no pulse. Offhand I’m thinking of Buffy, True Blood (and the Sookie books) and the Anita Blake series. All those vamps shag like crazy sans blood flow.
Kinsey, I don’t want to upset or offend anyone who writes or reads shapeshifter stories (or vampire stories, come to that, which also disgust me). It all depends on how one’s mind works, and the mysterious and often hazy borderline that all of us place between reality and fantasy.
Human/animal copulation is, of course, common enough in ancient mythology, but when I read about Leda or Pasiphaë I am in ‘work’ mode rather than ‘fiction-reading’ mode, so I can take it. Even Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, though indubitably a novel (probably the first true ‘shape-shifter’ novel) is too imbued with the worship of Isis for me to think literally about the protagonist’s sexual conduct when in donkey form. The same applies when I am studying or describing ancient art and artefacts that depict cross-species copulation. I apply scholarly detachment as a matter of course. Personal feelings would be inappropriate to the process of research.
But in something that is written as a modern fictional love-story, then I’m afraid that I visualise in a different, and very literal way; personal response is normal and expected when reading stories for entertainment. It’s part of the point of the exercise. Bestiality, or zoophilia, does exist in real life, as I’m sure you know, not only in the form of the male peasant who makes use of a ewe when his wife is indisposed, but in the form of women who seem like you and me, but whose love for their male dogs goes well beyond what is seemly or biologically sensible.
Maybe years of reading (and writing) about ancient sexuality and about erotic art has made it more difficult for me to avoid literal visualisation when characters are presented as people with whom we are expected to identify to some degree.
I cannot identify with a character who copulates with even a part-time wolf or dog, any more than I wish to associate with a creature, dead or ‘undead’, that sucks my blood.
The whole subject is one that deserves fuller study, because the growth of the fairy tale for adults, which may include sexual themes, is comparatively recent (last 20/25 years, though started, I suppose, by the ghastly Tolkien), and it must be saying things about our society, I don’t know what things, but they are certainly foreign to my thinking.
🙂
Just to add to my point above about ‘dividing lines’. Readers can and do prattle away happily about were-creatures, discussing different shape-shifter characters without a cringe, but if someone who is not carried away by the fantasy were to ask one of them about her own physical relationship with her dog/horse/wombat or whatever, she would be (understandably) extremely upset and offended. Just different dividing lines. Those who can read and enjoy fantasy can set it beyond the boundaries of real life in a way that we more literal souls can not.
I can’t help thinking about mechanical problems, not only the blood-flow one that affects vampires, but in the case of shape-shifters, the problems about different types of genitalia and sexual behaviour. Does a were-feline still have a barbed penis when in semi-human form? Ouch! Does a werewolf’s penis develop the tie while mating (20 minutes just waiting for him to disengage… Boring.) Does a were-bovine (all right, I don’t suppose there are any in modern fantasy) get the mating over in 3 seconds? What sort of equipment does a dragon have? Any intromittent organ at all? (Heraldry is not consistent on the subject, naturally).
I know this is not the way readers of fantasy think, but for those of us with a more than passing interest in zoology and in sexual behaviour, including deviant behaviour, in all species, it just intrudes.
🙂
I am loving this thread. It’s like a good conversation in a pub, the longer it goes on, the wilder and more varied it gets. Unless we get someone who insists on getting back to the point. That person also reads dictionaries.
Vampires – you see vampires are so pervasive because the myths are so varied. You can pick the bits you want, or you can make up your own shit.
I’m currently writing a vampire book. I don’t do many, but I enjoy the hell out of the ones I do. My vampires are merely a different “type” of human. I mean, you get hyenas, coyotes and wolves and they’re all dogs, so why not different kinds of humans? So my vampires breathe, they have beating hearts, they just possess a special organ that processes fresh, human blood. It’s a dreadful inconvenience to them, to have to take blood every so often so they can survive, but it means that between sundown and sunup, they have the superspeshulness of vampireness. As well as retractable fangs.
See what I mean? Not all vampires are dead. They’re not all undead, either.
And my shapeshifters are mythical beasts. No dogs in my world, only barghests. Though I haven’t done one of those yet. I like dragons.
Ag: I took no offense at all, and may I add how much I enjoy reading your comments. Your erudition is intimidating, I always learn something, and you’re freaking hilarious.
Oh yeah – I’m familiar with zoophilia – I live in Texas. 😉 In fact, to this day I’ve never read a Larry McMurtry book because at age 11, I picked up The Last Picture Show, which opens with a discussion of frustrated country boys and the heifers who love them. [It’s been over 30 years so I can’t recall the exact material, but it did a number on my 11 year old brain, I can tell you.]
As for bovine shifter romances – Jane Litte’s #romfail last Friday featured Scarlett Rose and the Seven Longhorns – 7 shapeshifting Texas longhorn brothers. I can’t bring myself to read it because all the men in my family are Aggies.
Also: tentacle sex.
Lynne: I’m going to check out your vamps. Living, breathing vamps don’t bother me. In fact, I’m a Vishous fangirl.
A memorable quote, that!
Seven Texas Longhorns: even Pasiphaë would be impressed. Though I think that Zeus’s Bull from the Sea was almost certainly an aurochs in the early phases of the myth, rather than a mere domestic bull, and therefore even bigger (and certainly badder) than a Texas Longhorn.
I must say that even in genuine, namely ancient, myth, I like the sexual conjugations to be with mammals rather than birds, reptiles, amphibians and cephalopods. The Japanese erotica featuring octopuses (or octopodes, if you want to be pedantic) seem extremely unattractive to me. I don’t fancy the Zeus-swan, either, even though swans do have an intromittent male organ.
Lynne: the idea of vampires as a separate hominid species would work much better, in my view, than the traditional concept of somehow altered humans. No doubt someone has already written fiction featuring the poor Neanderthalers, who probably did hybridise with H. sapiens on occasion. There could be some real pathos there, though I doubt whether most of us would find our Palaeolithic ancestors, human or near-human, all that much more appealing than an octopus as sex partners.
I just looked up Scarlett Rose and the Seven Longhorns on Amazon UK, and found this genre summary:
The sheer comprehensiveness of it takes my breath away!
They do those “guide” type books for following Harry Potter and others. A guide to paranormal sex practices and equipment might be a good seller. At exactly what point in the fang and fur (or scale or feather) emerging process do the other changes emerge? We would need to be sure to include that guy that came out of that egg.
@Kinsey—Oh, I loved that! Thanks for the chuckle! (No offense to your Mom intended.)
I think you’re right. It can’t be easy, keeping up. And putting together the real, ancient mythology and the modern inventions, some derivative and others quite new, that have burgeoned over the last couple of decades would be fascinating.
Which guy that came out of what egg? In some versions of the Mithraic creation myth, the god Mithras was born from an egg. And of course some of Leda’s offspring by the Zeus-swan were hatched from eggs, but as the stories are a bit vague about which amongst Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, Pollux and others whose names escape me were engendered by the god and which by Leda’s husband Tyndareus, it’s a bit of a muddle. I think in most versions Castor and Pollux hatched from one egg, evidently a double-yolker. History does not record whether poor Leda had to sit on the egg(s) for months to incubate them. That’s obviously a less entertaining subject for art than the huge swan grabbing her violently with its beak and claws.
Some rather entertaining academic discussion has taken place about the detailed internal and external anatomy of creatures such as Centaurs (horse+human), griffins (lion+eagle) and various winged entities. Six-limbed monsters were commonplace (four legs plus two human arms), but it becomes even more fun when they have wings as well. How do you attach them all to the skeleton? What happens to the spine? The earliest Greek centaurs had human genitals as well as equine ones. Just thought you’d all like to know that. And yes, there are centauresses, who must, I suppose, have a mare’s udder as well as a woman’s breasts.
Yep, plenty of scope for a guide here, just with the Classical material…
🙂
@AgTigress. In a previous rant I was a little hurt that a women had published a book about a girl who operated an interplanetary salvage ship and once the cargo was eggs containing genetically engineered male sex slaves with two penii. One hatched early and bonded with her. She had such problems.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote “Women who Run with the Wolves”, and she deconstructs fairy tales. But not on the level of actual anatomy. She talks about the symbolism, etc. in the old children’s stories like Red Riding Hood. My idea would have to be completely tongue in cheek and hers is quiet serious, kind of a Golden Bough approach. I found it hard going and never finished it, but glance at it every now and then.
The symbolism in traditional folk-tales is usually linked with or based upon pagan religion, and is really fairly straightforward in broad terms. What I find most interesting is the religious and psychological basis of the pagan tales as ways of explaining the world, and this is one of the reasons why I can’t easily cope with modern fictional recreations, because they lack the essential context that gave the ancient mythology meaning. But that’s my problem.
I love the challenge of working out things like the physiology of an impossible hybrid.
Some animals, such as some snake species, actually do have paired penises (or penes). I can’t offhand remember why. I know more about mammals than reptiles.
😉 🙂
Yeah. The croc I know has a hemi-penis which I think is one that ends in two. Never looked but it might explain the crocodile’s smile.
Maybe, though I suspect it just makes things more complicated…
🙂
I’m with AgTigress on the subject of cross-class copulation. Mammals shouldn’t be getting it on with reptiles or birds or amphibians.
Are there any centaur romances? I recall on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, there were some hunky centaurs married to women. (We’re watching Percy Jackson: The Lightening Thief). My daughter just alerted me to the fact that mammals can’t have more than four limbs. I did not know this.
Nor can birds and reptiles: that’s why birds have only two legs; their other limbs are their wings. In the natural world, it is only when one gets into the realms of insects, spiders, crustacea and the like that limbs start to proliferate.
Centaurs: although some legendary centaurs were wise and scholarly individuals, notably Chiron, the teacher of Achilles, their general reputation in Classical myth was of wild, savage beasts, given to heavy drinking and the rape of passing (human) females. By about the 4th century BC, they are always shown with a human torso down to the waist or belly, but not as far as the crotch, attached to a very robust, powerful horse’s body, so they have only equine genitals (unlike the 6thC BC types which sometimes had a complete male human body with the horse torso attached at the small of the back, so those had human and equine genitals). How many stomachs, hearts, lungs? If there’s a horse stomach and gut, it needs grass and hay, which cannot be masticated by the creature’s human dentition. You see how complex it all gets!
Mating with a centaur would be like being mounted by a small cart-horse stallion, and if that is anyone’s dearest fantasy, it is certainly not mine. Apart from being squashed flat unless some very inventive position were adopted, it would be quite difficult for a human female to accommodate any equine male organ without sustaining some internal damage. But at least it wouldn’t last long. Ancient representations of horse/woman sex always show quite small ponies, and of course we can assume that Lucius, Apuleius’s ‘golden ass’, was quite a little beast, like modern North African donkeys. Even so…
As you see, I can’t help getting literal about it all, and being far more interested in the physiological contradictions than in symbolic, fantasy whatsits, let alone in erotic possibilities.
🙂
Forgot to mention that bony fishes have four limbs, too, namely their (paired) pectoral and pelvic fins. The single dorsal and anal fins are not attached to the spine in the same way, and the caudal fin is the tail, of course. The same basic skeletal plan serves for mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and most fishes, in spite of the many variations of detail. I find real life so much more wondrous and exciting than fantasy…
🙂
I’ll shut up now.
You can’t shut up till you give me your take on the Catherine the G legend. Surely just a malicious smear, right? (That’s tongue in cheek but not sarcastic – I really thing it’s an historical smear manufactured by guys who didn’t like powerful women but I’ve never really researched it….)
Some guy wrote a poem about a girl going out to the barn and making love (to?) (with?) her horse. I thought it was Wallace Stevens but it’s not and the person who told me about it doesn’t remember. This is unrelated to the Equus thing about which I also have limited knowledge.
There, wasn’t that helpful?
Tell us all about Catherine the Great.
CtheG was supposed to have been sexually insatiable – her husband wasn’t quite up to it and, IIRC, he was crazy as well (most of the Romanovs were). And the story goes that Catherine had a whole contraption devised whereby she could get it on with a horse.
I should go look it up on Wikipedia or something but I’ll bet you AgT knows and she’s way more clever and erudite than Wikipedia eds.
Surely there is an historical novel out there somewhere regarding this.
I’m afraid I have no idea about the historical facts concerning Catherine the Great. But claiming that a woman was able and willing to copulate with a horse is a fairly obvious way of saying that she was a total monster of sexual excess and depravity. I take it to be a legend rather than a fact. Great physical size allied with extreme rapidity of mating actually does not seem to me to be a recipe for human sexual satisfaction, but we all have different tastes.
One thing that is seldom considered in legends of this sort is that some ingenuity would usually be needed to induce a male animal to actually mate with a human female, because the male must take an active role, and mating behaviour is triggered by all sorts of species-specific scents and actions which the human, however randy, is not fulfilling. In the Minos legend, Pasiphaë had a hollow statue of a cow made, into which she was able to enter to entice the interest and passion of the Cretan Bull: result, the Minotaur. Bad idea. Something rather similar, though cruder, is actually used today for collecting bovine semen for use in artificial insemination (without the woman inside, of course).
Male dog / human female seems more understandable to me, because dogs, having lived with humans for perhaps as much as 100,000 years, are extremely good at reading and understanding our behavioural signals, and can probably detect a sexually-aroused woman almost as easily as they can a bitch in oestrus. As animals of high intelligence and adaptability, I don’t think it would take much to induce some dogs to copulate with a woman. In any case, we know it happens.
The sexual exploitation of female livestock animals by human males, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward. The male tendency to insert protruding objects into any likely-looking hole takes over, and sheep, cows and other female domestic animals are so accustomed to being manhandled in strange and unnatural ways by their human masters that they probably merely roll their eyes and think, ‘what the hell is he doing now?’
Not sure how to take that, Kinsey, since I am an occasional Wikipedia editor! But not on any of the subjects that arise here: only on those that relate to my professional knowledge.
😉
I’ve read this entire thread with great fascination! I feel like I’ve learned so much!