A while back, I reviewed the first Emmanuelle novel, a book which, through its film adaptation, kicked off what was, for a time, a mainstreaming of erotica. I’ve now finished reading the sequel, titled Emmanuelle II, and it almost addresses some of the problems that I had with the first book, but ends up re-introducing them late in the book, and introducing some new ones.
Content Warning: As with the first novel, I will get into some frank discussion of sex, sexuality, and some of the sex acts that are depicted in this novel.
Emmanuelle II starts off on the right foot – it starts off taking the piss out of Marco – the character who I felt was the most frustrating part of the first novel. His monologues, which felt like they were meant to be read as him being a font of sexual “wisdom” in the first novel instead feel like they’re being presented as Marco engaging in a show of bloviating self-importance. Instead, the continuation of Emmanuelle’s journey is much more heavily focused on her journey.
The supporting characters who guide Emmanuelle on her way now are also more frequently women instead of men. The character of Ariane feels like she takes more of Marco’s place, but the way she talks about sex is different – and leads into Emmanuelle’s perspective – which steps away from Marco’s point of view that sex should be divorced from love, but instead sex is a part of love, but in the humanistic perspective where we should show our love with all humanity, so should we – according to Ariane and Emmanuelle – make love to all of humanity.
This does, in turn, lead to some… very problematic aspects to the story. There’s an open endorsement of incest and pedophilia – including Ariane literally saying the words “The family that lays together stays together,” which is not something I expected to pre-date the internet. There’s also a rather unpleasant misunderstanding of the dynamics of sex work and prostitution in the story, the risks sex workers take, and the importance of being able to turn down clients, and having mechanisms to warn other sex workers off about dangerous clients – in how prostitution is brought up within this story. Additionally, because the focus is on having a good time, the dangers of abuse and sexual assault never really come up in the story.
There’s also a real issue in the novel about conflating bisexuality with homosexuality, and while there are issues with members of the “L” & “G” parts of LGBT+ denying the existence of the “B” part, as a bisexual person it feels weird to read a story that presents bisexuality as the default and gay and lesbian people as bisexuals in denial, instead of the more frequent reverse – and also finding it gross because of the trope of homosexual people needing to be “fucked straight”.
A particularly interesting decision is to give Emmanuelle a woman who she frequently talks to who very much doesn’t agree with her worldview, the character of Anna Maria. A large portion of the book is spent on various conversations between Anna Maria and Emmanuelle as they bounce their worldviews off each other. To the credit of Marayat Rollet-Andriane/Emmanuelle Arslan, there are more than a few occasions where Emmanuelle’s view is depicted as being unreasonably extreme, and Anna Maria calls her on it, and generally more than a few of Anna Maria’s arguments are presented as being very reasonable. Perhaps Anna Maria’s greatest victory is when Emmanuelle does finally seduce her and they have sex – it’s off camera. We get a one-sentence paragraph that says they had sex, and then it stops there.
The sex itself is still just as explicit and raunchy in the first novel, and also more balanced in terms of sex with both men and women – whereas the first novel felt somewhat book-ended with sex with men, here we get a bunch of both. There’s lots of sex scenes with anonymous or mostly anonymous men, often leading into threesomes and foursomes, including sequences of double-penetration. As I stated in my review of the first novel, it still feels a lot like something where if a company like AdultTime or Dorcel decided to file the serial numbers off the novels and hope that the Rollet-Andriane estate didn’t find out and sue (or if some mangaka decided to do an eromanga adapting all the novels), this would be a work that I think would work well in a more hardcore adaptation.
As with the first novel, if all you know of Emmanuelle is the Skinimax movies, it’s nice to go back to the original and see how things have shifted with time. Also, I’d recommend reading this one digitally or getting a book cover for this one, as the cover’s more NSFW than the first book.
Emmanuelle II is available from (Affiliate Links) Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop.org, BooksAMillion
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