Defeating the Skirmishers of Venus

The Latin term pudendum and the Greek term αιδοίον (aidoion) for the genitals literally mean “shameful thing”. (Wikipedia)

Interesting times we live in (wonder what Chinaman we pissed off?): Fifty days left until we see whether Bush actually leaves office. Joe the Plumber’s book comes out tomorrow. Sarah Palin continues to dominate digital searches, fighting it out for first place with Paris Hilton.*

[* As Libby Spencer brilliantly notes at The Impolitic:

Looking at these [comparison search] numbers one might extrapolate that searchers were more interested in Palin’s body and Hilton’s mind. Paris might be considered the smarter and the more honest of the two and people were more interested in Hilton’s stand on the issues. Remembering Hilton’s ad in response to John McCain’s early slam at Obama’s celebrity, one might also surmise he would have done better to invite the known celebrity of Paris to front his ticket than to have used all that capital in making Palin one. As I recall the base was ready to elect Paris after just that one ad and she was already well vetted.]

The Mumbai Massacre still has the world roiling (although not much in the political blogosphere any more. Only a couple pieces on Memeorandum this morning). The snarkers of the Right are flailing about trying to figure out what and how to attack an Administration still fifty days from taking office.

Oh, and the New York Times publishes a self-admitted crazy woman’s essay on how sex isn’t important to her, and, therefore, not really probably important to anybody else.

Seriously. After spending the last twenty-two years plus trying to get ANY publisher to read my deconstruction of the porn industry, I certainly understand WHY the New York Times would embrace an anti-sex screed that’s also an excerpt from a forthcoming book.

For the past 22 years, I have been told that the SUBJECT of my book was so awful that even reading the manuscript wasn’t within the realm of possibility.

You see, they have no idea what my book’s about, but are categorically opposed to its very existence. I am reminded of many an “obscenity” trial, like that of Ida Craddock, as she was hounded to death by that über-censor Anthony Comstock [emphasis added]:

… Comstock began to pursue a vendetta against Craddock and set out to have her prosecuted for distributing obscenity. His first attempt came in 1899, when Ida was arrested and charged with sending copies of her “Right Marital Living” pamphlet through the mail. She managed to stay out of jail only because the famed criminal lawyer and free-speech advocate Clarence Darrow posted her bond. (Darrow is best known for serving as defense counsel in the Scopes Monkey Trial which outlawed the teaching of Darwinism in public schools).

[...] On March 5, 1902, Ida was arrested under New York’s anti-obscenity law for sending copies of The Wedding Night through the mail. The judge refused to allow the jury to even see the offending document, calling it “indescribably obscene.” The jury took his word for it and found Craddock guilty, as it was reported, “without leaving their seats.” She was sentenced to three months in the city workhouse, in which she endured inhumane conditions and harsh treatment. All the while, support was pouring in from free-speech advocates, publishers, doctors, and clients, but to no avail. Upon her release from prison, she was immediately re-arrested under the federal Comstock law. She refused an offer to escape a prison sentence by pleading insane. On the morning she was to be sentenced, she committed suicide by slashing her wrists and inhaling natural gas.

[see Ida Craddock's, Letter to the Public on the Day of her Suicide, New York, Oct. 16, 1902.]

Think that’s hyperbolic? I just got precisely that same reaction by a publisher I was speaking to, face-to-face in Philadelphia just this past July. (No thoughts of suicide, however.)

I called him a bigot to his face, and there was some satisfaction in that, because he had no defense.*

[* "judging a book by its cover" except that the cover doesn't yet exist.]

This reaction neatly bookends the reaction I got from Jeremy P. Tarcher books in Los Angeles in August of 1986. The intervening period is filled with precisely that and no more. In 1979, before I’d written it, I proposed my book to the late literary agent Robert Mills. He wrote me back (I have the letter somewhere, but I’ll just paraphrase): There’s no market for this sort of thing. I tried to shop a book by “Behind the Green Door” porn star Johnny Keyes, but no one was interested in seeing it.

IN SEEING IT.

You get that? You can write about being raped by your father, or being a junkie. You can write about being a “groupie” for every rock and roll band that visited your town, or about how you turned from alcohol to Jesus, or any sort of creepy, sick thing, but try to simply pull back that “Wizard of Oz” curtain on what’s behind porn, and they won’t so much as READ the book to see if it is publishable.

The simple, irrefutable fact remains that the prejudice against talking about the sick pathology of American sexuality (as reflected in its Dorian Gray portrait — commercial pornography) remains taboo to the American Publishing mind (alleged). You can WRITE pornography, of course, but you can’t write ABOUT pornography, evidently.

But you can rave any kind of sick and twisted shite that you want AGAINST sex and the mighty New York Times will publish an excerpt from your about-to-be-published by Delacorte Press book.

Given the mutually exclusive nature of the two positions, somebody’s got a problem in their head here, and we ought to see just who that somebody might be.

But let us turn to our “author” and her pornographic Times screed, and we need a lens through which to view her prose. First, though, we need to take a small digression.

a small digression

I’ve been a book critic for thirty years, for some of the biggest newspapers in the land, like the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the Kansas City Star, but nobody’s ever bothered asking me the fundamental question (which, I’m sure, cost me at least one venue with a certain venerable East Coast newspaper), about HOW you measure writing.

This has always been my motto — which I made up based on my own experience wrestling with reviews of books from pulp histories, romance novels, National Book Award winners (later in that year), biographies, experiemental fiction, science fiction, etcetera. — You use the yardstick that the author gives you to measure the book.

Thus, I could review a really trashy Black Romance Novel and find admirable qualities, and review a multi-time National Book Award finalist and find an utter pile of horse dung, and in all cases, explain WHY. It’s one thing to adjudge, say, politics, or college football, but it is an entirely different thing to have the entire scope of human knowledge and imagination to draw from and be assigned, randomly, books for review. I’ve rarely had the luxury of picking the books I’m assigned to review. So, you got to have a baseline when you have absolutely no fore-warning of what’s going to be thrown at you.

I’ve enjoyed, it, of course. It is bracing to the mind, and keeps you on your toes. When you get a book of Western short stories AND a book of Best American Short Stories in the same BOX, and are expected to review BOTH on the same page, you need a baseline, or else you’ll shred your mental gearbox.

So, I’ve always lived by my own dictum: Use the yardstick that the writer gives you. That’s the lens you use to judge the work.

end of digression

Here’s the yardstick from the New York Times piece:

The Grim Reaper, who for me is not death but mental illness, visits me from time to time, drawing me down with his sword. And each time this happens I never know if I will return to love. And each time I do I am more grateful than the time before. And so I see my life — my large, unwieldy, disorganized life — as a banquet. So much! So rich!

I AM a captivated by things, by solid, actual concrete things that can be assembled, made, whether books or babies. For me, sex does not even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window I will use, of hearing the grit as the grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect.

So, that’s the pathology that the New York Times finds interesting: I have periodic bouts of mental illness, then return and wonder if I can love the people that evidently vanished from my consciousness while I was having an episode, and I’m really into THINGs and BUYING THINGS.

All right: it may well be a widespread phenomenon. Let’s see what the crazy lady who hates sex has to say on the matter to the readers of the New York Times [emphasis added]:

I COULD chalk it up to getting older, the fact that sex interests me these days about as much as playing checkers. But the fact is I’ve never much liked sex, even though it has, on occasion, captivated me. Says my proverbial therapist: “Sex threatens you, Lauren. You feel overcome.”

Another distinctly less sexy possibility is that I have never much liked sex because, when all is said and done, there’s not much to like. I mean, really: What is the big deal? Especially when it’s with the same person, over and over again; from an evolutionary standpoint, that simply couldn’t be right. I, for one, have always become bored of sex within the first six months of meeting a man, the act paling for me just as the sun pales at the approach of winter, and as predictably, too.

Her thesis “what is the big deal?” seems neatly refuted by the presence of 6.7 billion human beings on the planet, and a more-than-doubling of the population in my lifetime, nearly ALL of whom were conceived through sexual activity. (OK: All.)

Six billion people seem to think it’s a big deal. Much if not most of our literature, our commercial fiction, our articles, films, plays and internet chit-chat discusses matters of the pudenda, as we all sing “Love makes the world go ’round,” usually meaning “sexual love and its cutsie-pie offspring, romantic love make the world go round.”

I would submit, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that virtually ALL of humanity thinks that sex is “a big deal.” You may provide your own examples from personal observation.

The writer’s “lens” turns out to be a funhouse mirror. Here’s some more:

Predictably, almost as soon as the engagement ring slid onto my finger, I fell in love with someone else. I fell madly, insanely, obsessively in love with a conservative Christian man who believed that I, as a Jew, was going to hell. We fought long and hard about that, and then had sex. This is so stupid, it pains me to write about it.

And yet this affair, I sensed, was necessary for me to move forward with my marriage. It was a test. I believed, but could not be sure, that just as sex had cooled for my soon-to-be husband and me, it would cool with this man, with any man, no matter what or whom — in which case my fiancé was the person I wanted to marry.

Except suppose I was wrong? Suppose there was someone out there with whom I could have passionate sex the rest of my life?

This is not what I’d call a role model for your amorous life, of course, and I’d caution you, “Don’t try this at home,” but you’d only ignore me. Sex (that “no big deal”) makes us all stupid, and just about everyone has done some really, really, stupid things under its irresistible influence.

Our sexuality is NOT under our control, which seems to carry a special horror for the “Free Will”-obsessed Western Mind. We do not get to choose WHO we are attracted to, nor, if there is no chemistry, can the spark of desire be fanned into a flame, for all the Viagra™, Levitra™ and Cialis™ in the world.

Eros is the force that binds the universe together: at every level, there is interpenetration and new creation. Even the engine of the stars contains the process: two hydrogen atoms are merged together to form a new, helium atom, and the resultant “fusion” energy boils outward from our daystar, Sol, and George Hamilton deepens his legendary tan.

The mating rituals of our fellow Terran animals, complex and varied, are infinitely diverse, and endlessly fascinating. (We tend to pretend that WE, big-shot hominids, are above such petty concerns, and yet, magazines and bookshelves are filled to bursting with dating (read: MATING) advice, sexual advice, and flirtation (i.e. mating RITUAL) advice. Still, it’s no “big deal” right? Our authoress:

But then the inevitable happened. Sex with this man turned tepid, then revolting. While the revolting part was particular to this crazy relationship, the tepid part was wholly within my experience and proved, for me, that there is no God of monogamous passion. Thus freed from the tethers of this affair, I returned to the gentle arms of my pagan husband. We are going on our 10th anniversary. He wants hot sex. I turned tepid long, long ago.

And the writer includes an appeal to “popular opinion” just to show the author’s not a “freak” :

A University of Chicago study published in 1999* found that 40 percent of women suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction, usually low libido. There are treatments for this sort of thing: Viagra or a prescription for testosterone. But the real issue for me is that I’m not sure I have a dysfunction. On the one hand, I am miserable about our lack of a sex life because it makes my husband miserable and cold and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy, living this way. “Have sex with someone else,” I tell him.

“The problem with that,” my husband says, “is falling in love. If you have sex with someone else, you just might fall in love with them.”

“I’d kill you,” I say.

Of course I wouldn’t. But I just might kill myself.

[* Note: without the study or methodology, this is very thin evidential gruel to prove a point. HW]

You see? Even in these somewhat bizarre and twisted circumstances, the twins of amor and eros (romantic and sexual love to the Greeks, as opposed to “brotherely” or Platonic love, agape) can’t be separated. Screw ‘em (eros, and its antithesis “don’t bother me with your male sex needs”) is contrasted with don’t fall in love (amor, or “I’ll kill myself if you love anyone else”). Why this “amor” is discrete and either/or after the author has savagely attacked the idea of monogamy, is not explained:

I, for one, have always become bored of sex within the first six months of meeting a man.

[...]

In our culture, sex has lost its sacred quality. If I were mayor or president, I think I would institute some rules for the good of the American Marriage, a prohibition or two — no touching allowed until Tuesday — because longing springs from distance. It is ironic but also absolutely understandable that proximity can kill sex faster than fainting.

I’ve always found it odd that on a Tuesday night you might go about the bodily act of having sex and then, the next morning, amid a chattering group of children, eat Cheerios. It seems to me that if sex were separated out from the daily wheel of life, it might survive monogamy more intact.

This is either intentional or inadvertent dadaist thought. Or, as an equally repressed and bizarrely obsessed (long self-destructive affairs with ill-matched lovers) woman of my acquaintance loves to say: “Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.”

To which I would add, “and makes the frond grow harder.”

But the writer betrays our fundamental cultural ambivalence about matters sexual, just as the New York Times‘ decision to publish this quasi-pornographic bit of mea culpa* betrays that ambivalence: Sex, we love it, we hate ourselves for loving it, therefore, we hate sex because we like it.

[* And, while we're on the subject, If you take a look at THIS, you might want to rethink your use of the fancy Latin term for "it's my fault," mea culpa, in light of its everyday Roman use.]

Or, in the twistoflex world of this writer, we hate sex because we liked sex, but then we get bored, so we, therefore have no sex drive and what the hell’s the matter with all you horny people? Don’t you know there’s a SALE at Wal-Mart?

I am a woman in love, but I am not in love with sex. I am in love with glass and stones, with my children, my animals. I am in love with making, as opposed to making love. Someday, I hope to build a house. And inside this house I want to live with my family — my children and animals and husband, whom I love so imperfectly, with so many gaps and hesitations.

[...]

I AM a captivated by things, by solid, actual concrete things that can be assembled, made, whether books or babies. For me, sex does not even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window I will use, of hearing the grit as the grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect.

Sex cannot compete with the massive yet slender body of granite I excavated last week, six feet long, this sedimentary stone (sic), packed with time and stories if only it could speak. I’m going to spend months carving it with a silver chisel. I am going to figure out a way to make this stone into an enormous mantel under which, in the home I share with my husband and the babies we made*, our fire will flicker. The stone will give off waves of warmth in the winter, and it will keep the night-coolness captive all through the summer days.

I imagine my mantel, my windows, my glass, my gardens. I cannot believe how lucky I am. I have so very much to do, such wide and persistent passions, so little time in which to explore their many nooks and curves. Here. Now. Don’t bother me. I’m busy.

[* Wait a minute! "babies we made"? Ah ... how, exactly?]

Er, can you say “transference” boys and girls?

Actually, it’s kind of creepy: I’m going to smack a phallic chisel into a rock for “months” and that will be better than sex.

Really?

Courage.

[This ends part i. the second part of which follows tomorrow: It was a single essay, and I've broken it into two digestible chunks. Part ii follows, "Ripping Cupid's Grove Together" --  CLICK HERE.]

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NOTE: “The skirmishes of Venus” is one of many Roman euphemisms for having sex (or, politely, ‘engaging in coitus,’ ‘having intercourse,’ etc.), as was one of the euphemisms that classically educated Founding Father John Adams used: “Madam, shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?”

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