woman who says “down there” is a different creature from a woman who says “my cunt.” When I did a brief stint in Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues in New York, I was given the monologue of an uptight old lady who could not say the word “vagina.” She could hardly say “down there.” Impersonating that character, I really began to understand how hard it was for certain people to deal with spoken sex. Our sexual speech reflects our discomfort with the whole subject.
Part of the great fun I had in writing Fanny was to play with all the rambunctious sexual words that were current in the eighteenth century. Once you have your pick of pillicock , picklock and privy member, how can you ever be satisfied with a mere prick again? Once you have cunnikin , divine monosyllable, altar of hymen, belle chose, centre-of-bliss, cream-jug, Cupid’s cloister, quim, quimsby or quivive, why on earth would you want snatch ?
When I have trouble writing about sex with freshness, I retrieve abandoned words from the past—words like “quim” or “quente”—or I content myself with describing the yearning for sex without the mechanics. The yearning is probably the most important part anyway. I find the most difficult aspect of writing about sex to be evoking the spiritual connection between people. Sometimes the things that are most important in life are beyond words.
Not long ago I went to the opening of a movie in which I appeared as a cultural commentator. It was a documentary called Inside Deep Throat and basically it took the position that this 1972 porno film had permanently changed the world.
That’s not at all how I remember it. I remember the late sixties and early seventies as a time of exuberance and hope. Pornography was only a tiny part of it. Many of us believed that once people were no longer hypocritical about sex, they would no longer be hypocritical about other things—like politics. How naive that was! We never imagined a world where right-wing ideologues might jerk off on their computers and then go to Congress and vote against sex education for teenagers. We foolishly believed that all hypocrisy would vanish once people stopped being hypocritical about sex. It’s not that simple. Hypocrisy is always with us. We now live in a world where sex is everywhere but has been utterly degraded. That was the last thing I expected The Sixties to promote.
All the more reason to write about sex honestly today. Sex motivates. Why pretend otherwise? Close-ups on the genitals are sometimes needed, sometimes not. Sometimes close-ups only blur the view.
And what about the fear of disease? How has that changed sex in our time? Larry Kramer has written movingly about the recklessness of young gay men growing up in the age of the AIDS “cocktail,” confident that pills exist for every malady. Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.
Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
When it is ecstatic, nothing is more powerful than sex. And nothing is more difficult to capture in words than transcendence. It’s not only because sex is embarrassing to many people, but also because ecstasy implies loss of control. This is difficult to acknowledge.
Nobody seems to talk about ecstasy these days. Sex is always talked about in terms of control. Teenage girls giving blow jobs for power not pleasure, middle-aged women boasting of their boy toys, men modelizing for the sake of show. Only gay men admit to being in pursuit of ecstasy, but often their ecstasy is fueled by drugs. If you go back and look at D. H. Lawrence, who has been discovered and abandoned so many times that he bores most literary folk, you’ll see that his great revolution was to get ecstasy down on the page, and ecstasy cannot exist without loss of control.
She could do nothing. She could no longer harden
Part of the great fun I had in writing Fanny was to play with all the rambunctious sexual words that were current in the eighteenth century. Once you have your pick of pillicock , picklock and privy member, how can you ever be satisfied with a mere prick again? Once you have cunnikin , divine monosyllable, altar of hymen, belle chose, centre-of-bliss, cream-jug, Cupid’s cloister, quim, quimsby or quivive, why on earth would you want snatch ?
When I have trouble writing about sex with freshness, I retrieve abandoned words from the past—words like “quim” or “quente”—or I content myself with describing the yearning for sex without the mechanics. The yearning is probably the most important part anyway. I find the most difficult aspect of writing about sex to be evoking the spiritual connection between people. Sometimes the things that are most important in life are beyond words.
Not long ago I went to the opening of a movie in which I appeared as a cultural commentator. It was a documentary called Inside Deep Throat and basically it took the position that this 1972 porno film had permanently changed the world.
That’s not at all how I remember it. I remember the late sixties and early seventies as a time of exuberance and hope. Pornography was only a tiny part of it. Many of us believed that once people were no longer hypocritical about sex, they would no longer be hypocritical about other things—like politics. How naive that was! We never imagined a world where right-wing ideologues might jerk off on their computers and then go to Congress and vote against sex education for teenagers. We foolishly believed that all hypocrisy would vanish once people stopped being hypocritical about sex. It’s not that simple. Hypocrisy is always with us. We now live in a world where sex is everywhere but has been utterly degraded. That was the last thing I expected The Sixties to promote.
All the more reason to write about sex honestly today. Sex motivates. Why pretend otherwise? Close-ups on the genitals are sometimes needed, sometimes not. Sometimes close-ups only blur the view.
And what about the fear of disease? How has that changed sex in our time? Larry Kramer has written movingly about the recklessness of young gay men growing up in the age of the AIDS “cocktail,” confident that pills exist for every malady. Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That’s one reason old men can send them to war.
Sex has the unparalleled power to make us absurd to ourselves. It also has the power to make us understand transcendence.
When it is ecstatic, nothing is more powerful than sex. And nothing is more difficult to capture in words than transcendence. It’s not only because sex is embarrassing to many people, but also because ecstasy implies loss of control. This is difficult to acknowledge.
Nobody seems to talk about ecstasy these days. Sex is always talked about in terms of control. Teenage girls giving blow jobs for power not pleasure, middle-aged women boasting of their boy toys, men modelizing for the sake of show. Only gay men admit to being in pursuit of ecstasy, but often their ecstasy is fueled by drugs. If you go back and look at D. H. Lawrence, who has been discovered and abandoned so many times that he bores most literary folk, you’ll see that his great revolution was to get ecstasy down on the page, and ecstasy cannot exist without loss of control.
She could do nothing. She could no longer harden
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