I grew up playing lots and lots of rugby. I obsessively played rugby to the point where I believed that it was the only thing worth devoting my time to. I thought I knew everything about the game; at times I played on 4 teams, training at least three times a day, and my weekends were devoted to matches and tournaments. However, this book has taught me one thing I didn’t before understand. Hyper-masculinity in contact sport is actually just really, really gay.

Rugby acts as a sexual release for our adolescent post-pubescent protagonist. Bennie is an “affable young man” (p. 6) who, prior to seeking homosexual relationships, has regular has wet dreams about “all that physical contact with fit male bodies, and hitting the showers afterwards with the rest of the team” (p. 8). Ten pages of backstory can be summarized in the following sentence: Bennie refrains from his desire to get banged by big hairy dudes so as to avoid disappointing his religious fundamentalist mother who remains unstable, resulting from the tragic death of his father in a fishing accident. Nevertheless, the backstory provides the most creative technique found in the book through the genius use of foreshadowing, i.e. Bennie is really gay and is going to bang a lot of dudes when he goes off to university.

Bennie goes to university in Aberdeen where the gay scene is too small for him to discreetly hide his homosexuality from his mother. But, he really wants to have sex with dudes and has never done it before. He chooses to respond to an online post, which states: “two grizzly bears looking for a discreet but adventurous cub to play with!” (p. 11). Bennie responds, goes to their house, and that’s basically the entire book. The following forty pages are long descriptions of old dudes banging a “rugby cub”. Oh and guess what, both of the bears are buff and have huge dicks. One of them has a PhD in Behavioural Psychology and uses his expertise to become the overbearing controller of the threesome and completely submit Bennie. Also, Bennie goes to the university where he’s a professor. Ethics and rapeyness aside, at one point they at least have a real “penile feast” (p. 55) on Bennie to at least make sure he blows a load as well.

This review is limited due to the fact that I have not previously read either straight or gay erotica. However, this book really is just a massive pile of shit. Regardless of the subject matter, the overall lack of literary tact makes this read simply challenging. As you read on you come to the realization that the book has a near total disregard for literary technique; tools such as allegory, metaphor, hyperbole, imagery, paradox or simile are simply omitted. Anthropomorphism is occasionally used, but only when describing cocks, so I’m not sure whether or not that even counts. Rather, we’re left with fantastic literal descriptions, such as the following definition of ‘spit-roasting’: “shafted at both ends; a dick up the ass and in the mouth at the same time” (p. 12). For clarification, spit-roasting is in fact a metaphor, but the author did not make it up so this does not count. I would also like to clarify that the error in semicolon use in the sentence is a direct quote.

Bennie and the Bears is ripe with dick and asshole descriptions. Up to three different dick words are used to describe one dick in one sentence: “Scott reached over to grasp Jim’s big solid prick, pulling the skin down on the obscenely fat shaft and fully exposing the huge knob at the end” (p. 22). Cock… meat… cock meat… penile meat… rod… shaft… prick… dick… phallus… member… pole… knob… all used in the act of “spurting out a load of spunk into guts” (p. 32). Guts is a common asshole description, with less used examples including chute, hole, cherry, flower, arse, juicy ring, and pucker. Here I can provide some positive feedback; the author has an impressive repertoire of penis and anus synonyms. For this reason, the book receives a generous 2/10.

For the record, I only had one erection when reading this book, but I’m pretty sure that was about something else.