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Authors: Erica Jong
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and grip for her own satisfaction upon him. She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting, coming to the terrible moment when he would slip out of her and be gone. Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamouring like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamouring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him in unconscious passion and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.
It’s so easy to make fun of Lawrence (which I have done myself) and so hard to be open to his grasp of ecstasy. His gerunds were not old hat then (Joyce got all gerundy too, in Molly Bloom’s voice) and his sea anemones were not yet clichés. His deliberate repetitions had not yet been parodied. If you can overlook all that in Chatterley and appreciate his depiction of sexless, lifeless marriage, you will see that he is one of the great novelists of marriage. He understood the longing for ecstasy. He was not afraid to give sex its due. We have fallen a long way since then. Sex is everywhere in media, but ecstasy is absent. Many literary novelists shy away from sex because it’s become a pornographic cliché. But it doesn’t need to be. In Philip Roth’s repellently brilliant novel Sabbath’s Theater , Mickey Sabbath’s rape of the cleaning lady at his friend’s New York co-op becomes a powerful signal of his decline into chaos. First he rampages through his friend’s wife’s lingerie drawers. Then he desecrates his friend’s daughter’s belongings. Finally, in case we have any doubt about what kind of guest Sabbath is, he sodomizes the cleaning lady. Sometimes only a character’s sexuality will give us the interior view.
I tried to write about the role of sex in my life in Fear of Fifty , but I realize now, in my sixties, that I didn’t know the half of it. Until you get wise enough (or old enough) to understand sex as a whole-body experience, you know nothing. All my life I had heard about tantric sex and I thought it was utter bullshit—raising the kundalini, yoga poses in tandem, mysteries of the East and all that rot. Most of our sexuality is so focused on the stiff prick that we have no idea what to do when that becomes occasionally problematic as it does with age. You can become a Viagra junkie or you can create other ways of making love. The deliciousness of skin, of oral sex, of sex without homage to the divine Lawrentian “phallos” can be a revelation. Is this what it means to become androgynous—that buzzword of the seventies? Is this what it means to be bisexual? There’s a great deal to be said for both androgyny and bisexuality, then. Whatever breaks our fixation on the genitals and turns us into entire bodies linked to entire minds enhances sex. The best Italian lover I ever had could practically make me come by stroking my neck.
The married poet who shook with fear, then fucked me with a stiff cock, was no sort of lover at all. A lover makes love with words, with stroking, with laughter. Anxiety ruins sex. Which may be why married people can have great sex—as can longtime lovers, or longtime friends. Music, stroking, scent, poetry—these things are far more important than a stiff prick.
I realized only when my husband had to take heart medication and could not tolerate Viagra that we were able to discover things we never knew before. He could have a whole-body orgasm while giving oral sex—his orgasm triggered by mine. He could feel electric
It’s so easy to make fun of Lawrence (which I have done myself) and so hard to be open to his grasp of ecstasy. His gerunds were not old hat then (Joyce got all gerundy too, in Molly Bloom’s voice) and his sea anemones were not yet clichés. His deliberate repetitions had not yet been parodied. If you can overlook all that in Chatterley and appreciate his depiction of sexless, lifeless marriage, you will see that he is one of the great novelists of marriage. He understood the longing for ecstasy. He was not afraid to give sex its due. We have fallen a long way since then. Sex is everywhere in media, but ecstasy is absent. Many literary novelists shy away from sex because it’s become a pornographic cliché. But it doesn’t need to be. In Philip Roth’s repellently brilliant novel Sabbath’s Theater , Mickey Sabbath’s rape of the cleaning lady at his friend’s New York co-op becomes a powerful signal of his decline into chaos. First he rampages through his friend’s wife’s lingerie drawers. Then he desecrates his friend’s daughter’s belongings. Finally, in case we have any doubt about what kind of guest Sabbath is, he sodomizes the cleaning lady. Sometimes only a character’s sexuality will give us the interior view.
I tried to write about the role of sex in my life in Fear of Fifty , but I realize now, in my sixties, that I didn’t know the half of it. Until you get wise enough (or old enough) to understand sex as a whole-body experience, you know nothing. All my life I had heard about tantric sex and I thought it was utter bullshit—raising the kundalini, yoga poses in tandem, mysteries of the East and all that rot. Most of our sexuality is so focused on the stiff prick that we have no idea what to do when that becomes occasionally problematic as it does with age. You can become a Viagra junkie or you can create other ways of making love. The deliciousness of skin, of oral sex, of sex without homage to the divine Lawrentian “phallos” can be a revelation. Is this what it means to become androgynous—that buzzword of the seventies? Is this what it means to be bisexual? There’s a great deal to be said for both androgyny and bisexuality, then. Whatever breaks our fixation on the genitals and turns us into entire bodies linked to entire minds enhances sex. The best Italian lover I ever had could practically make me come by stroking my neck.
The married poet who shook with fear, then fucked me with a stiff cock, was no sort of lover at all. A lover makes love with words, with stroking, with laughter. Anxiety ruins sex. Which may be why married people can have great sex—as can longtime lovers, or longtime friends. Music, stroking, scent, poetry—these things are far more important than a stiff prick.
I realized only when my husband had to take heart medication and could not tolerate Viagra that we were able to discover things we never knew before. He could have a whole-body orgasm while giving oral sex—his orgasm triggered by mine. He could feel electric
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