Book cover image via Chuck Tingle’s Twitter account
For anyone who’s grown tense and worked up over the United Kingdom’s seemingly suicidal decision to leave the European Union on Friday and craves a release, you can now hop on Amazon and, for the price of a cup of coffee, order Chuck Tingle’s new homoerotic opus Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union.
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Tingle’s 37-page tome, which he pumped out within hours of the referendum results, tells the story of Alex, who is at first shocked by how normal the new UK seems post-vote—until he is molested by a giant, living British Pound coin from the future. After the Pound shows him the dystopia to come—a hellscape beset by lava and dominated by a flying dinosaur police force—Alex sets off with the coin to convince the people of the past to vote to remain in the EU through the power of “sizzling, human-on-monetary-unit action, including anal, blowjobs, rough sex, cream pies” and more.
On its face, Pounded by the Pound is just one new offering in the weird erotica genre, a category in which humans engage in dangerous liaisons with anything you can think of, and which is absurdist humor to many (but probably legitimate Rule 34 wanking material for to a few).
The truly ineffable Tingle has penned dozens of offerings within this genre. He seems to be obsessed with aggressive, homoerotic trysts between men and dinosaurs, beasts, or unicorns, but also puts out meta titles like Turned Gay by the Existential Dread That I May Actually Be a Character in a Chuck Tingle Book.
But Pounded by the Pound is so much more than absurdist smut. It’s one of the greatest entries in the emerging subfield of political absurdist smut. Over the past year, Tingle has given the world such gems as Feeling the Bern in My Butt and Pounded in the Butt by My Irrational Bigoted Fear of Humans Who Were Born as Unicorns Using a Human Restroom. In so doing, he joins fellow authors who have released literally hundreds of erotic tales about Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Justin Trudeau and Barack Obama, to name just a few.
The political flowering of weird erotica is hardly surprising; people will take the piss out of the painful, frenzied seriousness of politics however they can. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that this genre doesn’t strike evenly at every political issue or candidate. Tingle and his ilk create smarm almost exclusively from debates that have moved past disagreement, past acrimony, and into drop-to-the-ground-and-howl-at-the-moon apocalyptic crises and rages. (To treat the story a little too seriously, Alex’s Pound is the manifestation of a domineering, inescapable force that turns a measured huh, we did that? reaction into a jeremiad.)
They are the next logical step beyond headlines that already parody themselves. The frenetic anger and frantic, grasping insecurity involved in the post-Brexit freak-out, or the entirety of the Trump campaign, ooze a certain passion that easily transmutes itself into campy, overdone sexual collapse.
Pounded by the Pound and its kin are probably not the political satire-cum-legitimate masturbatory aids we wanted. But they are what we need to relieve some of the damn butt-clenching tension of recent news—and what we deserve for letting Western politics go this far.
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