Authors: Jonathan Franzen
Until the Rules become universal, though, such comfort as can be found in the market economy comes principally from norms. Are you worried about the size of your penis? According to
Sex: A Man’s Guide
, most men’s erections are between five and seven inches long. Worried about the architecture of your clitoris? According to Betty Dodson, in the revised edition of her
Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving
, the variations are “astounding.” Worried about frequency? “Americans do not have a secret life of abundant sex,” the researchers of
Sex in America
concluded. Worried about how long it takes you to come? On average, says Sydney Barrows, it takes a woman eighteen minutes, a man just three.
The problem with relying on norms for comfort, however, is not only that you may fail to meet them but that you may meet them all too well. Who really wants to be sexually just like everybody else? Isn’t the bedroom where I expect, rather, to feel special? Unique, even? The last thing I want is to be reminded of the vaguely icky fact that across the country millions of other people are having sex. This is the conundrum of the individual confronting masses about which he can’t help knowing more than he’d like to know: I want to be alone, but not too alone. I want to be the same but different.
POPULAR SEX BOOKS
are only a part of the sex industry, but one could argue that they’re the most representative wing, in that they are books. If a sexual fetish is understood as a displacement of genital energies, then language, even more than lingerie, is by far the most prevalent paraphilia in the country today. You can’t show a bare breast on network television, but there’s no limit to the backdoor prurience of talk about rape, incest, and sexual harassment. Cybersex and phone sex are vastly more popular ways of avoiding intimate fluids than is the worship of, say, knees or feet.
Although our pop sex writers seem to recognize the ascendance of language, they don’t trust their readers to know how, or even when, to use it. In
Sex: A Man’s Guide
we learn that lovers can be encouraged to talk dirty by making lists of “clinical” and “dirty” terms and comparing them. Dr. Block reels off forty-five possible pet names for a penis, including “peenie-weenie,” “dipstick,” and “lovepump,” and commands her readers: “Take your pick.” (More adventurous souls are urged to “make up something special” to suit their “very special wonder worm.”) Susan Bakos cues Tantric lovers to the appropriate moment for “whispered terms of endearment,” and she suggests that women who want to learn to talk dirty rent some video porn and study it carefully. “Once you are comfortable saying the words as a scriptwriter wrote them,” she tells us, “you can personalize them to make it sound more like you speaking.”
Reading a book of expert sexual instruction must rank near the bottom on the scale of erotic pastimes—somewhere below peeling an orange, not far above flossing. One problem is that, although the intention is precisely the opposite, these books collectively and individually make the world of sex seem very small. Never mind that there are only so many ways to fit body parts together or that Alex Comfort has already said and said well, in works that have sold better than eight million copies, pretty much all there is to say about it. There seems, in general, to be far too little lore to go around. Author after author derives the etymology of “cunnilingus,” stresses the importance of doing “kegel” exercises to strengthen the pubococcygeal muscles, and quotes Shakespeare on the topic of alcohol. (“It provokes the desire, but takes away the performance.”) Author after author insists that men are “visual creatures” and that the size of a penis matters less than what its owner does with it. When the lore runs out, the advice turns bleakly otiose. Dr. Susan Block commands lovers: “Use babytalk, or at least ‘pet names.’” In
Sexational Secrets
, whose subtitle promises “exotic advice your mother never told you,” Susan Bakos instructs masturbating men to use, “in various combinations,” the Slow Single Stroke, the Fast Single Stroke, the Slow Two-Hand Stroke, the Fast Two-Hand Stroke, the Cupped Hand, the Finger Stroke, the Wrist Pump, the Slap, the Beat, the Rub, the Squeeze Stroke, the Open-Hand Stroke, and the Vagina Simulator Stroke; instructions for each are provided.
The italicized cheerfulness with which pop-sex authors convey the useless and the banal is identical to that of the newscasters on airport.TV, whose most striking talent is the ability to summon (or to fake, like an orgasm) fresh wonderment over the latest wrinkle in automobile safety. Trying to make fascinating and new what is neither, the authors tirelessly coin neologisms. They toss off “sexation,” “prime-mate,” “soulgasm,” and “partnersex” with the supreme self-assurance that American audiences now demand from professional exhibitionists. Dr. Block, who calls herself an “erotic philosopher,” illustrates her commandments with glimpses of her husband and herself in bed: “Max grunts like a bonobo chimp when he wants to go down on me, then moans and coos and tells me I’m delicious as he slurps away.” For people who have never shared a fantasy with their lovers but “would like to try,” the philosopher has this advice: “Watch the
Dr. Susan Block Show
together—that’ll stimulate your fantasies!”
Not every pop-sex book points to television quite this literally, but all the books seem bent on enmeshing sex (formerly life’s one free pleasure) in the web of consumer spending. The reader is relentlessly exhorted to buy erotic videos, high-quality lingerie, candles, champagne, incense, oils, vibrators, perfumes, bath-bubble mix. Betty Dodson, Ph.D., sounds less like a prophet of an autoerotic utopia than like an infomercial host; she twice gives readers an address from which her videos may be ordered. Sydney Barrows suggests that renting luxury cars, wearing full-length fur coats, and taking expensive vacations will spice up the deadliest marriage. In
Sexational Secrets
, Susan Bakos sets out to gather for the presumably impecunious reader the rarefied sexual know-how that members of the moneyed classes spend thousands to obtain. Apparently, the best sex is being had today by a lucky international elite who can afford $625 for multiple-orgasm workshops. Whether Bakos is interviewing “beautiful French courtesans” or a master of Kundalini yoga, she goes out of her way to stress the demographics of their clientele. They are “sheiks,” they live in “secluded” suburban homes, they wear “business suits” and drink “flavored coffees.”
As for the benefits of better sex, Betty Dodson reports that after attending one of her lectures on the vulva a woman asked for a raise at work “—and got it!” (Dodson attributes the woman’s enhanced self-esteem to becoming “cunt positive.”) And a raise at work is small potatoes compared to these authors’ promises, expressed and implied, for the sexually liberated society as a whole. We can look forward to the disappearance of “prejudice and bigotry, heartache and misery, loneliness and violence”; the obsolescence of guns and missiles; the release of “the spirit of creativity” and the renewal of “the joy of living.” Here is Dodson’s “futuristic fantasy” of liberation:
It’s New Year’s Eve, 1999. All the television networks have agreed to let me produce “Orgasms Across America.” Every TV screen will be showing high-tech, fine-art porn created by the best talent this country has to offer. At the stroke of midnight, the entire population will be masturbating to orgasm for World Peace.
It was Mao’s nasty inspiration that for a revolution truly to succeed it must never stop, and our own culture’s version of nonstop revolution is collected and distilled in pop-sex books: a ceaseless propaganda of self-congratulation wedded to a ceaseless invocation of the still-powerful Enemy. If victory in the Sexual Revolution should ever be declared, people might no longer seek instruction and guidance from commercial sources. Consequently, our experts fill their books with reminders of how much better off we all are than our grandparents. They laud the science of Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson; they gleefully puncture the myth of the Freudian “mature” vaginal orgasm; they ridicule, under such banners as “The Annals of Ignorance,” the hopeless stupidity of human beings a century ago. But the running dogs of sexual repression still hunt in packs outside our doors. One author blames “narrow, paternalistic 19508-style family values” and our “sex-negative, genital-shaming upbringing,” while another blames “traditional marriage” and “anti-porn activists who are intent on preserving their romantic illusions.” Absolutely everyone blames religion. To hear the experts tell it, we live in a sexually repressed nation, under the dark thrall of Catholicism, fundamentalism, and ignorance.
I wonder what planet these experts are on. They seem blind to the way today’s fifteen-year-olds act and dress, oblivious to the atmosphere of sexual license of which they themselves are the direct beneficiaries, and wholly ignorant of the large body of recent scholarship, by Peter Gay and others, that has revealed beneath the veneer of Victorian “repression” a universe of sexual experience as richly ramified as our own. There doubtless still exist a few American teenagers who choose to give greater weight in their lives to religious scruples than to pop culture. But who is Dr. Susan Block to tell these kids they’ve chosen badly? As for the overwhelming majority of young people who pay more attention to
Baywatch
than to the Bible, they are indeed lucky to live in a time when it’s common knowledge, for example, that women have orgasms and that few, if any of them, are vaginal. It’s worth pointing out, though, that what made this knowledge common was the growing power of women, rather than the other way around.
However manfully I resist nostalgia, Victorian silences appeal to me. Dr. Block, in an uncharacteristic fit of wisdom, observes, “The irony of creating a taboo is that, once something is forbidden, it often becomes very interesting.” Sex in a time of ostensible repression at least had the benefit of carving out a space of privacy. Lovers defined themselves in opposition to the official culture, which had the effect of making every discovery
personal
. There’s something profoundly boring about the vision that is promulgated, if only as an ideal, by today’s experts: a long life of vigorous, nonstop, “fulfilling” sex, and the identical story in every household. Although it pains me to remember how innocent I was in my early twenties, I have no desire to rewrite my life. To do so would eliminate those moments of discovery when whole vistas of experience opened out of nowhere, moments when I thought, So
this
is what’s it’s like. Just as every generation needs to feel that it has invented sex—“Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me)” was Philip Larkin’s imperfectly ironic lament—we all deserve our own dry spells and our own revolutions. They’re what make our lives good stories.
Unfortunately, stories like these are easily lost amid the slick certitudes of our media culture: that a heavy enough barrage of information produces enlightenment, and that incessant communication produces communities. Susie Bright and Susan Block and Dr. Ruth are loud and cable-ready. You can turn them on, but you can’t turn them off. They yammer on about the frenulum, the perineum, the G-spot, the squeeze technique, bonobo chimpanzees and vibrators, teddies and garter belts, “eargasms” and “toegasms.” Their work
creates
the bumbling amateur. Their discovery of sexual “technique”
creates
a population bereft of technique. The popular culture they belong to thus resembles an MTV beach party. From the outside, the party looks like fun, but for passive viewers its most salient feature is that they haven’t been invited to it. “Are some people having multiple orgasms . . . electrifying oral experiences, incredible and emotionally intense love-making sessions that last for hours?” Susan Bakos asks the reader. “Unbelievable as it may sound—yes. Why not you?” A lonely reader could be forgiven for replying: Because there’s a television in my bedroom.
THE TERM “PARAPHILIA
” connotes perversion, something unhealthy. But, while there’s little doubt that our culture promotes a paraphiliac displacement from the genital to the verbal, this displacement is not intrinsically diseased. The reason that reading a sex book can assuage loneliness (at least momentarily) is that sex for human beings is easily as much imaginative as it is biological. When we make love, we forever have in our heads an image of ourselves making love. And, although substituting a hot text for a warm body may be nothing but a way of tricking our genitals, what’s remarkable is that the trick so often works. When I was fourteen I canvassed and recanvassed my
Webster’s Collegiate
for words like “intercourse.” Scouring
Ann Landers Talks to Teenagers About Sex
for the dirty bits, I was excited to learn that the mere sight of a “girl in a tight sweater” is sufficient to arouse a teenage boy.
For the person who seeks such written thrills but lacks the resources to compile his own supply of frisson-inducing texts, there now exists
The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers
, a kind of para-paraphiliac volume, by the novelist Elizabeth Benedict. This new
Joy
consists mainly of sex scenes excerpted from the work of contemporary fiction writers and framed by Benedict’s own chirpy, sanitizing glosses. Whatever subversive thrills
Portnoy’s Complaint
might provide are unlikely to survive an analysis like this: “Roth manages to turn the cliché of the teenage boy’s first visit to a whore into a rich, sidesplittingly funny scene that leads us back again to the themes of the novel, the struggle between being a good Jew and a good Jewish son and being as naughty as your libido begs you to be.” Benedict confides that a big attraction of writing the manual was that she could “read sexy books and think for long periods of nothing but sex.” That she considers this an enviable circumstance may explain the deep kinship—the quite striking parallels—between her product and the products of pop-sex authors. Its price sticker is its destiny.
Like the pop-sexers, Benedict congratulates our age on its enlightenment and congratulates her readers on their good fortune in having come of age after the publication of
Fear of Flying
. She alludes to the “incalculable tragedies of self-censorship” that befell authors in the dark ages before i960, and she hints at the evil forces (Puritanism, fundamentalists, sexually repressive governments) that threaten our precarious liberty. Although she, like Dr. Block, briefly acknowledges the excitement that taboo generates (“Now that we can say anything, what else is there to say?”), pursuing this argument would undermine her project, and so she doesn’t. Similarly uneasy is her recognition that divorcing sex-scene technique from the larger challenges of writing good fiction is as useless as divorcing sexual technique from the challenge of loving someone. Good sex writing, it turns out, is a lot like good fiction writing in general. It has, she says, “tension, dramatic conflict, character development, insights, metaphors and surprises.” These qualities are the Slow and Fast One-and Two-Handed Strokes to which Benedict returns, in various combinations, throughout the book. Avoid clichés, she advises—or at least “give them a unique twist.” Try to “make the writing interesting.” Don’t forget: “You need not be explicit but you must be specific.” And if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.