Not an anthology of "alien sex" stories but rather investigations of human sexuality. This definition of alien: strange and not familiar.

This was a group buddy read but I didn't vote for it and didn't want to buy it. Read only these because I could find free copies at the library or online:
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~ Oral by Richard Christian Matheson 3* A little interesting and a little awkward. Guy doesn’t want to touch anything. Germaphobe so he hires prostitute not for sex but to touch things and describe how they feel. The story length makes it more like flash fiction. It is successful for such a short story.
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~ Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland (1996) by Gwyneth Jones 4*

I liked this one quite a bit for a lot of the parts but the issues the MC is facing and the offered solutions, went over my head. It felt like the author was too smart for me :/

I did enjoy the Virtual Reality and it was so cool after your reading it for a while to realize that is what is going on. A woman meets a person in Virtual Reality while she is trying to get well from Real Life encounters but I don’t think they are any better living in a VW than the real world.

I don't know if this is in the book (I found the story online), the author notes say - "This story, from Ellen Datlow's anthology, Off Limits — takes on the complexities of computer online sex. Never lacking in ambition, Jones addresses role playing and the issues of control, bondage, and therapy. In real life, says Jones in an afterword, "sexual negotiations are costly and dangerous," so a lot of people would prefer escape.
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~ The House of Mourning by Brian Stableford 1* Not fond of the story nor the author's style.

We get dropped into the story after all the main events. Things are slowly revealed regarding what the MC is up to now and what she has been through previously. I found the "been through" kinda confusing and the subject matter of little interest. [Story opens with the MC getting a day pass from loony bin. She tricks a friend by instead of going to another friend’s house she wants to go on her own. She goes to a funeral for someone that was her John. I guess based on new technology they became addicted to each other.
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~ Ursus Triad, Later by Kathe Koja & Barry N. Malzberg WTF! How does that end up in The Year's Best? It's told from a not fully coherent POV. The writing style was not a good match for me either. The raping was relentless. I don't know what went over my head but it must have been a crap year for SSs for that one to end up in a Best of the Year anthology." ( )

It's been a while since I read "Alien Sex," but, for my money, "Off Limits" actually improves on the original. There are twenty-two stories here, so it's no surprise that not everything works, but, for my money, the writing's better in this volume than in the original, and the hit-to-miss ratio improves considerably. Either that or I'm beginning to learn how to read science fiction. Still, even some of the pulpier stuff works: Martha Soukup's "Fetish" plays out like a Tool video in short-story form, but its images have stayed with me. There's also a surprisingly good story by Elizabeth Hand, whose "Waking the Moon" I found incredibly cheesy. She acquits herself well here, meditating upon what might happen to femininity if the roles that have traditionally been assigned to women were to be replaced by technological substitutes. Some more standouts: "Lucifer in Blue" and "The House of Mourning," two meditations on prostitution that go deeper than mere smut: the former meditates on the psychology of political extremism, while the second tries to figure out where altered brain chemistry ends and real love begins. There's also John Kaiine's "Dolly Sodom", a particularly surreal vision of suburban ennui, and Richard Matheson's "Oral," which takes a fairly obvious title in directions most readers won't see coming. There's also a Samuel R. Delany story that seems to prefigure the psychological reaction of straight society to both the AIDS crisis and the increased visibility of transsexuals.

Lastly, there are a couple of boundary-pushing stories here that more or less have to be read to be believed and whose plots I won't describe here. Bruce McCallister's "Captain China," which describes the redemption of a young Vietnamese refugee forced into the sex trade is painful to read but also hugely imaginative and hair-raisingly grotesque, is one of those hit-you-in-the-gut stories. So is Kathe Koja and Barry M. Matzberg's "Ursus Triad, Later," which has got to be one of the strangest, most disturbing re-imagining of a fairy tale ever put to paper. That genre's pretty popular these days, but this is the sort of thing that trigger warnings were invented for. The fact that it's probably one of the best-written pieces here, a showcase for writing that's both bizarrely poetic and unrelentingly brutal, makes it difficult to read and harder to forget. Datlow's collections are usually good bets, and "Off Limits" is no exception. ( )

I really liked this collection, though I found the editor's paragraph before each story to be unhelpful. I enjoyed things much more once I started ignoring that paragraph altogether and allowing the story to stand alone.

This is not erotica. These stories are about the boundaries of sexuality and gender. ( )

Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, edited Ellen Datlow, is full of provocative stories, but I think the one that's stayed with me the longest, resonating the most since my previous reading, is Fetish by Martha Soukup, about a woman growing a beard, on purpose.

Other stories are quite powerful and memorable as well, like Samuel R. Delaney's Aye, and Gomorrah.... There's an interesting back and forth, in meter, between Joe Haldeman and Jane Yolen, on themes of aliens and human sexuality as witnessed by aliens.

If you're thinking, however, that this collection is a thinly-veiled excuse for science fiction pornography, you couldn't be further from the truth. While some stories do feature explicit sexuality, in a human sense, many of them are not so much exploring sex in its physicalness as investigating society's ideas and values about sex and those who "practice" it or live or die by it.

Foreword by Robert Silverberg
Introduction by Ellen Datlow
The Reality Trip by Robert Silverberg
The Tattooist by Susan Wade
Dolly Sodom by John Kaiine
The Lucifer of Blue by Sherry Coldsmith - Tiptree longlist 1996
The Queen of the Apocalypse by Scott Bradfield
Oral by Richard Christian Matheson
Grand Prix by Simon Ings
The House of Mourning by Brian Stableford
Fetish by Martha Soukup - Tiptree longlist 1996
Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland by Gwyneth Jones - Tiptree longlist 1996 - very good
The Future of Birds by Mike O'Driscoll
Captain China by Bruce McAllister
Background: The Dream by Lisa Tuttle
Aye and Gomorrah by Samuel R. Delany
Ursus Triad Later by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg
Sextraterrestrials by Joe Haldeman and Jane Yolen
The Dream-Catcher by Joyce Carol Oates
His Angel by Roberta Lannes
Eaten by Neil Gaiman
In the Month of Athyr by Elizabeth Hand ( )