Peace Corps Porn

The paperback jacket is torn. The wrinkled pages bent and stained. Still, the cover photo of the naked Peace Corps Volunteer is crystal clear and one exposed breast is bright in the sunlight of the camera flash.

Beneath the woman’s breast, as if a yellow sticker has been tapped over her belly button, is a bold declaration.

A REPRINT FROM THE BEST OF
OUR ADULT NOVELS WHICH MAY
HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY
PUBLISHED UNDER ONE OR
MORE DIFFERENT TITLES

The novel is entitled Passion Delight, written by Frances Sibley. It is, the back cover says, a Body Talk Library book, published in 1985 by American Art Enterprises of California.

A quick google search found the publisher, but no mention of Passion Delight, or where one might buy a copy. Perhaps this is a new title. Nor could I find out anything about “Frances Sibley”…..was she an RPCV in Senegal who set out to write this novel when she came home?

The story, as far as I read (and I’ve only read enough to write this blog) is about a newly married couple, Doug and Penny, just out of college with degrees in anthropology who are assigned to “Corps-sponsored Mgoro Technical School” and are deeply and newly in love. That is until Penny realizes what is waiting for her in West Africa!

It doesn’t take long. By page 26, Penny is having a hard time ‘adjusting’ to the sight of her naked houseboy, Ojike, and his “omnipresent erections.”

There is more to come, so to speak, for Penny in these 188 pages that appears to be about how she is taken into sexual slavery while serving in the Peace Corps.

The brief (one page) Epilogue has her husband Doug standing on top of a Sahara hill in the Republic of Mauritania, scanning the horizon with field glasses as the author writes, “Somewhere out in that God-forsaken nothing is Penny. She had to be. He’s already checked all the brothels in Nouakchott and Port Etienne…”

And as my nephew Tom (Morocco 1981-82) noted when he found the book and sent it to me, thinking that it would be an interesting addition to my collection of  Peace Corps literature, “Let’s just say this novel Passion Delights gives new meaning to ‘…the toughest job you’ll ever love.’”