Something is lost here

But something is lost here. While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty. In Intercourse (1987) Andrea Dworkin warned of just this:

Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which in only — pathetically — a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses.

If sex education sought to endow young people not just with better "rote responses" but with an emboldened sexual imagination — the capacity to bring forth "new meanings, new forms" — it would have to be, I think, a kind of negative education. It wouldn't assert its authority to tell the truth about sex, but rather remind young people that the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them. Sex can, if they choose, remain as generations before them have choses: violent, selfish and unequal. Or sex can — if they choose — be something more joyful, more equal, freer. 

— from "Talking to My Students about Porn," in The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan.

(What would it be like to discover sex with a wholly open mind, with child-like innocence, without media influence? Instead, we live in a world where porn is now if not ubiquitous then very readily acquired. Granted, my generation sneaked peeks at girly magazines stashed in their dads' garages and  videos pilfered from adult-only backrooms. Sometimes I think I would've benefited from an education of this sort, beyond the romance and passion modeled for me by mainstream film and television. But it's all so performative, so results-oriented; and even when it's different, it's same same.)

The essays in The Right to Sex cover #MeToo, incels, porn, sex positivity, race, TERFs, sex work, carceralism. Clearly, sex is political. Mostly accessibly written, veering slightly into the overly academic, many of the issues described here are at the heart of today's feminist thinking. Endless questions raised, no clear answers offered. 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn't imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

Essays
Does anyone have the right to sex?"  
Who lost the sex wars? 

Reviews
Is a new book feminism’s next new wave or yesterday’s backlash?  
Who Gets to Be Desirable?  
Questioning Desire 

What do you know about yourself?

In a man, not liking women is a pose. In a woman, not liking men is a pathology.

Sounds a little like Atwood's, "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." This is Virginie Despentes. But her statement is not about how men and women behave, it's about how society perceives them. Imagine, Despentes prompts us, if a woman wrote about men the way Houellebecq writes about women.

This is not an easy book. King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes, is ferocious. Like any good manifesto, it sucks you into its worldview without giving you space to breathe or time to think. 

So I read along, yes, yes, yes! 

Little girls are bought up learning never to hurt men, and whenever a woman flouts that rule, she is quickly put back in her place. No-one wants to know that they are cowardly. No-one wants to feel that in their own flesh. I'm not angry with myself for not daring to kill one of them, I'm angry at a society that educated me without teaching me to wound a man if he tries to fuck me against my will, especially when this same society has drummed into me the idea that it is a crime I should never get over. And mostly I am fucking furious at the fact that, having been faced with three guys and a gun in the middle of a forest with nowhere to run, I still feel guilty that I didn't have the courage to defend us with a little knife.

This is the kind of feminist the world needs! Or is she? Though I was swept up in her diatribe, when I stepped back to unravel what I'd read I found myself not always wholeheartedly agreeing. For example, she defends prostitution for the agency it lets women claim over their bodies. To which I can only say, yyesss but that's nnnott exactly the whole story.

Despentes is angry. In this series of essays, she tackles rape, porn, and prostitution. Capitalism, the beauty industry, the marriage contract.

If we do not push on towards the unknown that is the gender revolution, we know exactly what we will be slipping back towards. An all-powerful state that infantilizes us, meddles in our every decision, for our own good — keeping us in a state of childhood, of ignorance, fearful of punishment, of exclusion. The special treatment so far reserved for women, using shame as the primary tool to enforce their isolation, their docility, their inability to act, could be extended to everyone. To understand the mechanics of how we, as women, have been made to feel inferior, and been trained to become a crack team that polices itself, is to understand the mechanics of control of the population as a whole. Capitalism is an equal-opportunities religion in the sense that it subjugates us all, and leads each of us to feel trapped, as all women are.

Several of her arguments are simply uncomfortable, not because I disagree with them but because I haven't formulated a stance on my own, and I'm not sure I always need to (my personal relationship with porn is near nonexistent and I don't feel compelled to change that). Despentes writes that "the true history of porn, what creates and defines it, is censorship." Clearly, society's relationship to porn is convoluted at best — to be expected of an industry that we demand reflect reality while embodying pure fantasy — and it's hard not to agree on the necessity to smash the stigmatization of porn. It's just hard to keep up with her — for example, in a paragraph on female nymphomania, she concludes that it's men "who rack up conquests in the hope of one day experiencing something approaching a real orgasm." Which, OK, yeah, but then she just moves on to Paris Hilton and how her social status trumps her gender. 

All this to say, this book is loaded with theories sprung from analyses on top of throwaway observations, and I wish some of them had a little more room.

Despentes puts a lot of responsibility on women, which doesn't seem fair, but that's the point. Who else is going to fix things?

I realize that what other women do or don't do with their clitoris is none of my business, but I'm still slightly troubled by their indifference to masturbation: if they don't get themselves off when they're alone, at what point do women connect with their own fantasies? How much do they know about what really turns them on? And if you don't know that, what do you know about yourself? What connection can you have with yourself if even your pussy is systematically controlled by someone else?

Excerpt. 
Author profile.
#fuckthepatriarchy

Close-packed human chaos

Writing, I'm convinced, is often nothing but revenge — a way of twirling one's mustache, donning buckler and sword and feathery hat, shaking one's gauntleted fist at the gods.

I thought I could use some laughter in dark times; Geoff Dyer's recommendations of funny books came just when needed. He reminded me that I've been meaning to read Eve Babitz, but of all the books he listed, the library had only Terry Castle.

I got off to a rocky start with The Professor and Other Writings. This collection of essays opens with a piece on World War I, which I found neither funny nor particularly interesting, so I was a little wary of what I'd gotten myself into.

While I wouldn't call these essays funny exactly (certainly not in an uproariously side-splitting way), Castle certainly knows how to tell a story.

There's a piece on Susan Sontag, about whom I know shamefully little, and pieces about Agnes Martin and Art Pepper, about whom I'd known nothing at all (and now want to know more).

I realize there may be a few lost souls who've never heard of him. Forget the overrated (and vapid-looking) Chet Baker. Art Pepper (1925-1982) was an authentic American genius. One of the supreme alto saxophone players of all time, Charlie Parker included. A deliriously handsome lover boy in the glory days of his youth. A lifelong dope addict of truly Satanic fuck-it-all grandeur. A natural writer of brazen, comic, commanding virtuosity. A proud long-term denizen of the California prison system. And now, no doubt, a tranquil if desiccated corpse.

In "Home Alone," Castle shares her "shelter mag obsession" and highlights how the industry was traumatized by 9/11, when the idea of "home" was attacked and our sense of "sanctuary" threatened. She later turns a bit morbid considering the furnishings of death and evokes the avian-flu epidemic of 1918-19, noting that bird-to-human influenza viruses were much in the news at the time of writing in 2006. It was somewhat eerie to be reading this against the backdrop of quarantine. In 2020, with virus on all the airwaves, home is our only safespace — it is our office and our entertainment and it circumscribes our whole life. Remind me to check out a home decor magazine next time I pass the newsstand.

Ostensibly the star of the show, is "The Professor," about Castle's relationship with a teacher when she was in grad school. Perhaps because this essay is the longest and most personal, my feelings toward it are ambivalent. It's got some great lines: "Cathy and Heathcliff were like old acquaintances — my weird second cousins or something." But it is also self-indulgent — Castle's old journals are a springboard to the 70s, an emotionally juvenile time. The drama of the affair feels out of proportion, despite the morally questionable behaviour (a student-teacher relationship of this sort today might be judged much more harshly).

Castle's lesbianism is a constant presence, and if not central, then certainly significant to some stories. It made me wonder to what extent is my sexuality present in my writing, even when not the subject of it. Castle's references throughout to therapy also has me reconsidering whether I should give psychotherapy another try. (Why should I? What is it that fascinates me? Why do I feel I'm not good at it? Why do some people get so much from it, and why can't I be one of them?)

All in all, this is the kind of book I'd prefer to have in print, to pick up and browse at my leisure. A bookful of Castle is a lot of Castle. Were this not a library book with a due date, I'd've approached it differently. I'd rather take an essay at a time now and then.

Sometimes in raucous old bebop recordings from the late forties — the grotty straight-ahead bootleg ones with murky nightclub sound, people talking and glasses clinking in the background — the music doesn't end properly, with the usual reprise and nail-it-down final chord. It just breaks off abruptly in the middle of a solo or chorus as if someone had knocked over the mike. You're left with the sense of a close-packed human chaos, now terminated. Art Pepper is a kind of mannequin or decoy, I guess, the sort of mummified icon that even a person as terrified by mortality and other people as I am can latch onto and worship. It's true: I love his deftness and valor and craziness, and the exorbitant beauty of his playing. I love the quick, creamy sound he gets out of his alto. I love his shame-free storytelling. I love his handsome young male face.

Vibrating on the retina

On Agnes Martin:

Making art seems to have been a kind of meditations for her: she meant her paintings as aids to contemplation — "floating abstractions" akin to the art of the ancient Chinese. And it's true, though they are built up line by line, by almost imperceptible increments, that after a while her pictures begin vibrating on the retina with strange energy, flipping gently back and forth between metaphysical registers like one of Wittgenstein's playful visual paradoxes. The sense of calm they evoke in the viewer is similar to the liturgical mood Rothko's wok can produce, but Martin is less morbid, theatrical, and self-consciously "profound." Facing down the void, Rothko can at times be downright bombastic. Martin is more humane and in some way stronger: smaller in scale, indifferent to sublimity (though her paintings achieve it), uninterested in making statements. It's the difference, perhaps, between Lowell and Bishop.

Yet there is no doubt that Martin's work will always be caviar — the very palest of pale fish roe — to the general. [...] Martin is the sort of artist show-offs show off about, know-it-alls know about. I think I like her — the whole chaste package — because she was so obviously unlike me, so seemingly unencumbered by envy or the need to strategize. Thinking about her has a soothing effect, like imagining myself reincarnated as a smooth and shiny pebble glinting in sunlight at the bottom of a cold, clear mountain stream.

— from "Travels with My Mother," in The Professor and Other Writings, by Terry Castle.

Her glorious, whiplash despair

In a chapter about feminism, on Dorothy Parker:

Finally, through Woollcott, I come face-to-face with the holy Dorothy Parker, who I feel had been waiting for me forever, in 1923, with her lipstick and her cigarettes and her glorious, whiplash despair. Dorothy Parker is monumentally important because, it seems to me at the time, she is the first woman who has ever been capable of being funny: an evolutionary step for women as major as the development of the opposable thumb or the invention of the wheel. Parker is funny in the 1920s and then — I am led to believe — no other women are funny until the eighties. Parker is the Eve of female humor.

Robert Johnson invented the blues, at midnight, at a crossroads, after selling his soul to the devil. Dorothy Parker invented amusing women, at 2 p.m. in New York's best cocktail bar, after tipping a busboy 50 cents for a martini. It's hard not to draw conclusions as to which is the brighter sex.

But Parker also worries me, because half the funny stuff she writes is about killing herself: funny doesn't seem to be working out as well for her as it does for, say, Ricky Gervais. And it cannot be ignored that it takes nearly 60 years for any women to be funny again after her. The trail she blazed stayed notably untrodden.

— from How to Be a Woman, by Caitlin Moran.

I love Dorothy Parker! Or so I thought. The fact is, I barely know her. I know her aphorisms, a poem or two, and her reputation. It's time I change this.

So this week I read Alpine Giggle Week, a letter Parker wrote to her publishers from Switzerland, by way of excusing her late delivery of the Great American Novel she was purportedly working on.

It's damned near impossible to write from this place. I must be seen to be believed. It's so out of joint with any other form of life that you can't tell about it. The Magic Mountain is the nearest thing to it, and even that is an understatement. (Scott, by the way, is incensed that Thomas Mann has already done that book, because he wants to do one about a tuberculosis colony; having been her three days, he feels he is an authority.) My attitude toward the sicks has changed, since last Winter, when I spent too damn much time in being sorry for them. Now they disgust me.

It's fresh and frantic; it recounts plenty of drinking and drops a lot of names. It's funny. But it's a letter; it wasn't crafted with care and sarcasm — it's off the top of her head.

I've started in on Parker's short stories. They are incidentally witty, but they are primarily dark, with feminist leanings. "Such a Pretty Little Picture" describes the epitome of suburban domesticity, from which a man walks away. It calls to mind the Flitcraft parable in Hammett's Maltese Falcon (but predates it), and any number of Simenon's novels — it's unusual, though, to read the story as framed by a woman.

I've never confessed anything

This summer, a girlfriend asked me in hushed tones if I knew what squirting was, and do I squirt. I didn't know, and I don't (not yet, anyway).

Here's an irony: (almost) everything I know about squirting I've learned from men. I don't know one woman who squirts, but then, I haven't asked all my female friends — it's not a socially comfortable question.

And that pisses me off, like it's men's secret knowledge, in their control. It pisses me off because I'm already pressured to be the perfect lover with the perfect body and have orgasms the way they're portrayed in porn (I don't watch porn, I suspect I'm still not doing it right), and now I'm supposed to squirt too.

So Sexographies, by Gabriela Wiener, is wow. She writes about squirting.

She also writes about polygyny, dominatrix techniques, swinger clubs, Isabel Allende, egg donation, and ayahuasca. I want to go drinking with her.

This essay collection has the distinction of being one of the few books whereupon having read a review of it, I rushed out to get myself a copy.

Wiener writes from first-hand experience. You may call her adventurous, a bit of risk-taker. But she's also aware and reflective. [I wish I had the guts to live the life required to write this book.] She takes ayahuasca, she submits to a dominatrix, she lives (for a couple weeks) with a sex guru and his six wives, she finds someone to make her squirt.

In an essay on body image, she writes:

If my lovers or friends are ugly, I think they make me uglier by association. The same goes for what I write. What I write always makes me uglier. I won't go into my hatred for good writers who are also marvelously hot. I've got several of them buried in my backyard. Beauty kills, no? For Bataille, "Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.... The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled.

[What do I think is beautiful? What am I attracted to? How do I profane it? How am I profaned?]

I love that Wiener namechecks Bataille, Bolaño, Emmanuel Carrère. I was surprised to so thoroughly enjoy reading about Isabel Allende. Once upon a time I loved her books, but I grew out of them. Allende is a popstar, somewhat disparaged in literary circles. But Wiener reminds us that her books are valuable: "Her books reveal history through memory and reclaim sex so that it belongs to the home and not to poets of the body." Her work is belittled for being domestic. Thank god, at least she is popular.

Allende once said, "I learned how to be feminine, sexy, and a feminist. It can be done." Maybe not every woman wants to be all three; but a woman should be able to be whatever the fuck she wants. Perhaps Wiener sees in herself some of the same qualities Allende wields — Allende played the lead role in her "adventure-reportages," a feminist gonzo journalist ahead of her time.

Wiener inserts herself into all her stories. This is her strength. This is where authenticity comes from. She does not write about a subject; she writes about her relationship to a subject. [I like to think I write the same way.]

We need to write with frankness, without excuses. We need to say, this is what matters (and this, and this, no matter how silly or small, this can matter too), this is what it means to be alive.

It's Wiener's essay on motherhood that gutted me, brought me to tears. I read this entire collection of essays against the backdrop of the senate committee hearing regarding Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the US Supreme Court. My reality was a little more ghastly thanks to this juxtaposition. How hard it is for a woman to be frank, particularly regarding sexual matters, where men still have so much power — it's men who shape the truth and the law and the value of sex.

We stress over raising our girls right, to be confident and assertive of their rights and to be whoever they need to be. The world might be a better place if we agonized half so much over how we raise our boys.

My daughter is an intelligent girl, she learns new things every day; she draws portraits of Chinese emperors, she writes three-line novels, and she also just became a fan of Elvis.

Sometimes people ask me if I'm scared of her reading the things that I've published, the things I've "confessed."

I've never confessed anything. There's something perverse in the word "confession." Within it lives the word "guilt." I usually reply that I'm not afraid because I know my daughter knows the value of truth.

Reviews

Asymptote
LARB: I Never Got the Knack of Fidelity: On Gabriela Wiener’s “Crónicas”
L'Officiel USA: "self-taught chronicler of intimacy and sexuality"
On the Sea Wall
Underrated Reads

Excerpts
#Noespis (in Spanish)
The Greater the Beauty, the More It Is Befouled
Three
Isabel Allende Will Keep Writing from the Afterlife
On Motherliness
From This Side and from That Side

Related
For a discussion of how do we square sexual fulfillment and freedom from unwanted sexual advances, see Why We Need Erotica (framed around a review of Pauline Réage's Story of O), which says so well what I want to say.

When we ignore or demean consensual BDSM erotica, or stories about female sexual submission, we inadvertently contribute to a cultural legacy that routinely pathologizes, demeans, or erases women’s sexual desires.

This is why you should read Gabriela Wiener. This is why women should talk about squirting.

Until we are brave enough to investigate it [female sexuality] unflinchingly — without turning it into a pathology, without pitting it against feminist movements — women will not be able to achieve sexual liberation.

She has found an interstice

Ursula K. Le Guin is a wise woman. No one who has read any of her fiction could come to any another conclusion.

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters is a collection of Le Guin's blog writings. She has been blogging since 2010, having taken up the practice after being inspired by José Saramago's blog.

She reflects on aging, leisure, anger, writing, genre, feminism, social media, opera. She has interesting opinions to share. She tells tales of her cat.

Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.

I recently ordered this book for someone as a gift; it was only afterwards that I was lucky enough to see a review copy. Because of the nature of the collection, I think it is much more conducive to print than to e-publication (somewhat ironically, given its blogly origins). It's the sort of book you flip through, let something catch your eye, settle in to mull over an essay or two. As something to read cover to cover, it's a little disjointed.

What most impresses me is the spirit of the book, which the title captures well. Don't waste time, be mindful, think things through, do something.

Some quotable highlights
"Lying It All Away" (October 2012):

I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising. That hard-minded man Saul Bellow wrote that democracy is propaganda. It get harder to deny that when, for instance, during a campaign, not only aspirants to the presidency but the president himself hides or misrepresents known facts, lies deliberately and repeatedly. And only the opposition objects.

"The Inner Child and the Nude Politician" (October 2014):

Children are by nature, by necessity, irresponsible, and irresponsibility in them, as in puppies or kittens, is part of their charm. Carried into adulthood it becomes a dire practical and ethical failing. Uncontrolled spontaneity wastes itself. Ignorance isn't wisdom. Innocence is wisdom only of the spirit. We can and do all learn from children, all through our life; but "become as little children" is a spiritual counsel, not an intellectual, practical, or ethical one.

"Belief in Belief" (February 2014):

I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence.

The whole undertaking of science is to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis, to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection — not to belief or disbelief.

Belief has its proper and powerful existence in the domains of magic, religion, fear, and hope.

Think about what matters.

Things I could write about

I found a book at the bookstore, and I wanted it, I wanted it badly. But the more I turned it over, the more I realized I didn't want it so much as I wanted to have written it.

Egg, by Nicole Walker, published by Bloomsbury.

(Also, I've been craving eggs for the last week.)

This book is part of a series, Object Lessons, about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

The egg, however, is no ordinary thing. Is it?

The series includes as subjects objects such as phone booth, eye chart, password, and tumor, but also concepts like silence, jet lag, and traffic.

Things I might like to write about
Salt.
Lipstick.
Grocery list.
Balcony.
Key.

Those are just the object things.

The important things I should be writing about include

• the buskers of Square Victoria
• the myth of the bored suburban housewife
• my coworker's doppelganger, who works just one block over
• how my mother is and is not a feminist
• the man who lived in two apartments

So I bought a completely different book instead.

Envy

A friend brought to my attention this wonderful "essay" by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker, The Only Thing I Envy Men.

I write "essay" after looking for how the magazine labels it. It's a memoir (probably) but it reads like a short story, with wit, poignancy, and unexpected twists.

She starts off discussing "women writers" and I expected her to envy men that they hold the default position. This is true in part, but it runs much deeper that; it pokes gentle fun at our gender biases, but then picks away at the biological basis for how men and women form different emotional attachments.

Let me tell you why I love this "essay." Go read it first, I don't want to spoil it for you. It's short and lively.

First, doesn't it make you want to read everything? Helen DeWitt, Dorothy Hughes, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, Even Virginia Woolf. The joy of recognition: yes, I've read Natsuo Kirino.

For many years, Shirley Jackson was nearly the only "woman writer" I had read. Then, around age twenty-five, I had the blunt experience of looking at my bookshelves and noticing that my bookshelves were filled almost exclusively with books by men. Which was fine, I wasn't going to get in a rage about it, I loved those books that I had read. But I was unsettled, since my bookshelves meant either there were no good books by women, or I had somehow read in such a way as to avoid them all. I had never had my Jane Austen phase or Edith Wharton phase or even George Eliot phase, I associated those writers with puberty, or "courting," both things that repelled me. (I now know I was stupid to feel that way.) But, like I said, I wasn’t going to rage at myself, or at the world, I was just going to try to read some books by women. But where to start?

Second, it turns the issue of gender biases in literature and publishing on its head. What makes the writing of a woman writer so womanly? What makes Walser and Kafka sound "female," in Galchen's opinion? I love how she persists in believing Denis Johnson is a woman, even while being surprised that his book was written by a woman.

Third, it goes where good girls don't. It considers the possibility of (female) sexual behaviour without bearing the burdens of its consequences. It considers motherhood without the burden of children. The possibility of covert babies.

Fourth, it makes me wonder about the metaphorical children, the creative works that authors nurture and give birth to, letting them make their own way in the world. Do men and women relate to those offspring differently? Are women held to task for these children, while men more easily dissociate from them?

The essay comes from Galchen's book, Little Labors, due out in May. I'll be checking it out, along with everything else she's ever written.