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| Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:59:27 |
SusanCrainBakos |
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WHITE MEN AND SEX: Look Who's Talking About It Now
Feminist writer Katie Roiphe in The New York Times Book Review—that’s who. She stands up for the sexual writings of the much-pilloried old lion generation of novelists—Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer—and puts down the puny erotic efforts of the next generation—Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers—who are, in fact, now middle-aged.
She writes: “The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex…”
I got stoned in the public square—in the figurative sense, but only because my address wasn’t published—when I wrote in a New York Press essay that white men lose their sexual MoJo after forty while black men don’t.
Moral to the story: One can safely draw conclusions about white male sexuality within the confines of writing about the white male literary establishment. Leave black men out of it—and please bury the white penises in nice, big expensive words so we can’t tell if they do have erections or likely not.
Roiphe does make some good points. White men don’t write, or write convincingly, about sex anymore. (Okay, sure, some, like William Boyd, do, but I am going with the path of sweeping generalization that Roiphe takes. You travel faster this way. It’s fun, like skiing on friendly slopes or water sliding.)
Partly we can blame the curiously asexual Iowa School of Writers (and its clones), institutions that have given us too many novelists, male and female, who write technically proficient prose inside boring novels. Sex doesn’t belong in these books because sex, done well, is not boring. An avid reader, I can pick up the cadences of an Iowa grad in the first few pages—and they are not cadences that kick start the libido.
As Roiphe indirectly acknowledges, we can also look for the roots of that “passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite” in the 70s’ rhetoric of anti-male, anti-sex feminism that helped shape our modern thinking about sexuality, specifically male sexuality—and gave us David Ducovny as sex addict in “Californication” and perhaps real life.
She failed to mention David Letterman, who fathered the culture of “irony” which made “snarking,” judgment without investigation, the lowbrow intellectual equivalent of Wikipedia. Throw in media sexual overkill--from ads to porn—and we have the soup in which white men seem to float flaccidly.
But I’m talking about white men—and she, the white male literary establishment.
Author Steve Almond both praises and tweaks Roiphe in his entertaining blog post, “Katie Roiphe’s Big Cock Block.”
He says,
‘I’m tired of reading novels and stories in which two or more central characters get naked and all we get is the morning-after orange juice. It strikes me as a huge missed opportunity, because people (and therefore characters) are never more themselves than when they’re exposed to the ecstasies and humiliations of what we in the biz call the nasté.”
Yes!—but he asks:
“Why the hell is she just talking about hetero white men?
“I hereby empower the Katie Roiphes of the world to stop writing about us as the dominant literary/cultural faction. Instead, you can lump us in with all those females and people of color and homosexuals and female homosexuals of color, who also write great books, many of them with great sex scenes. Such as, uh, Mary Gordon and Michael Lowenthal and Junot Diaz and Alicia Erian and Mary Gaitskill and…”
Finally, he posits that literary critics, not feminists, may have killed sex in literature:
“But I can also pretty much promise you that writing about sex as it actually exists – as a complex and dangerous emotional experience – will not help your literary career.”
I never claimed to have a literary career, but I did have a career as a journalist—until I used words like “cock” and “pussy” in print and, omigod, wrote about my own orgasms. Writing about sex in a personal way is not, and probably never has been, the short cut to professional validation.
Read Roiphe’s essay in NYTBR and Almond’s response, including his literate and sexy reading suggestions.
British journalist Andrea Busfield’s born under a million shadows (Holt paperback) is not my kind of book. The main viewpoint character is a child—and the press release describes born as “life-affirming” and “heart warming”. So is a good bowl of Irish oatmeal.
A few months back I opened the advance reader’s copy and decided to give it ten pages, tops. I read straight through to the end. Busfield’s story of an Afghan boy and his widowed mother and Georgie, the Englishwoman who falls in love with the Afghan warlord Haji, is an international best-seller—and deservedly so. Beautifully written, wise and funny, it did touch my heart, yet without making me feel like Oprah had just applied the emotional jaws of life to crack open my chest.Busfield spent three years in Afghanistan where she fell in love with a captain in the Austrian army and went home with him when his tour of duty ended. She captures the longing of desire between a man and a woman from two different cultures living in a sexually repressed society--Georgie and Haji who must be careful not to touch even hands in public. Smoldering. That is the word. Go buy this book.
Reprinted with permission from Susan Crain Bakos Blog Sexy Prime http://sexyprime.typepad.com/sexyprime/
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