Lesbian writing should confront the banal. Its value surely lies in its ability to interrogate the conventional literary canon. Like lesbian desire, it should sparkle. Unfortunately, there is too much mediocre lesbian writing.

And then, the title. Titles are signals with the function of attracting the reader. They are also the first, and perhaps the most public, step in establishing the style of the work. Can you forgive ‘Suck my toes’? It has a habit of pushing itself in front of my eyes, whichever one of these stories I am reading. It throws the whole collection into a kind of trite relief. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s how it is. Titles are important – and if you choose a lemon your book is bound to taste sour.

It is the title story, however, with its S&M theme, which is the most successful. With a smooth confident tone it certainly does not attempt to sanitise the diversity of lesbian experience. Its main flaw is its uncertainty – when someone drops the dildo with the lubricant onto the dusty floor and renders it unusable, the reader is left hovering between humour and pathos. Is it unsisterly to say that I’ve read this before, presented much more deftly by Jane De Lynn in Don Juan in the Village? At one point the narrator observes, ‘This is supposed to be an S&M party, but Fleur’s seen more excitement at a Ballarat barbeque.’ Well said.

In fact this collection continues a long tradition of the unsavoury lesbian protagonist – the girl on the take with no moral, particularly feminist moral, inhibitions. In the deceptive post-modern liberalism of the 1990s, she allows the average straight reader to feel smugly voyeuristic, to be in the know without having to deal with any of us in the flesh. I suspect the world at large prefers to deal with degenerate lesbians.

But it would be unfair to say that this book has one exclusive subject. ‘Gold’ is a surprisingly sweet story of a gay man’s hopes for a new relation­ship. ‘Dirt’ documents the experience of two girls’ narrow escape from a molesting man. ‘Cappacino’ is problematised by the part misspelling plays in the narrative. I was never quite sure who was telling the story, for it slips uneasily between the point of view of Cathy the disdainful waitress, and Barry the cafe proprietor, who is portrayed as a bombed-out mummy’s boy. Unfortunately, there is always a slightly too explanatory tone, a little too much of the mundane, a metaphor that is pushed too far.

Fiona McGregor obviously wants to represent the polymorphous perversity/diversity of queer culture. But with its display of drugs, dildos, dealers and drag queens, this book reeks of a ‘look at me mum’ rebellion – and is about as substantial. Call me an old-fashioned girl, but frankly I am tired of this continual valorising of brutality. In any case it poses many questions – not least of which is why a lesbian with a manacle is more sexy than a lesbian with a mortgage.