So some of you may have seen Katie Roiphe’s long and sometimes-sharp-and-other-times-kind-of-annoying piece in the New York Times Book Review about literary S-E-X. You can read the blow by blow here.
Here’s the money shot:
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… for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced.
Whew.
The whole “generational” gambit upon which this critique rests is pretty lazy and despicable. And I’m pretty sure Katie Roiphe shouldn’t be making sweeping assessments of college girlfriends she’s never met. But I basically agree with her.
I’ve complained, with some regularity, about the dearth of sexually explicit material in the work of my contemporaries. It strikes me as a peculiarly Obamaish tendency, by which I mean full of rhetoric that promises the goods and proves utterly chickenshit at crunch time.
Like many of you, 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.
So for smacking that one on the kisser, Katie Roiphe, I award you one chocolate kiss.
The problem is that I don’t think Katie Roiphe really cares about this stuff. I don’t think she wrote the piece because she was concerned about the degree to which our most prominent literary voices tell the truth about sex.
I think she wrote the piece because she liked the idea of having a big, long, “provocative” think piece in the NYTBR, one lots of people would argue about. I don’t blame her for that. If I had my shit more together, I’d probably aim for the same brass ring of neediness.
But there are problems.
The first and most basic one is: why the hell is she just talking about hetero white men? I’m not sure what feminist nomenclature Katie Roiphe would assign herself, but I can’t fathom why she would choose to “assign primacy” to The Man.
As a hetero white man (okay, Jewish, with an occasional trannie impulse, but still), 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 Díaz and Alicia Erian and Mary Gaitskill and…
Really, we can handle it.
But even beyond that, I wish Katie Roiphe didn’t misrepresent the writers she does cite so flagrantly. I get that she’s “a cultural critic” writing a big think piece—a little convenient slander comes with the territory. But dude, have you ever read “Big Red Son,” David Foster Wallace’s astonishingly frank disquisition on the adult film industry? Yeah, it’s nonfiction. But it’s pretty definitive proof that Foster Wallace wasn’t afraid to write about sex. He just did so on his own terms—not those of John Updike or Phillip Roth.
As for Dave Eggers, you want to say he doesn’t write about sex, fine. But to call the guy an ironist—I mean, come on. That angle is so, like, 2003. Read the guy’s last three books (two of which are novels). Not a lick of irony. Roiphe has confused a differing agenda with an emotional posture.
What’s stranger to me is that she never thinks to ask the basic question: why? Why are these white boy writers she’s handpicked for their erotic timidity not flogging the joy knob the like the white boy writers of yore?
Actually, that’s not fair. She does have a theory. It has to do with their castrating collegiate girlfriends, who have them pussywhipped.
Right.
But wouldn’t a cultural critic writing a think piece for the NYTBR want to consider something a little less, uh, conjectural. Such as the role of sex itself in the culture at large? Might it be worth observing that, in the days of Updike and Roth, a certain brand of sexual candor still felt taboo, whereas today lesbian bondage and interracial blowjobs are pretty much a standard marketing tool for most Fortune 500 companies?
Roiphe—who has spent her career writing about sexual mores, as far as I can tell—seems unable, or unwilling, to entertain the notion that certain writers may be reacting to the broader pornofication of our discourse, the ubiquitous vulgarity, the way in which sex is immediately received as a public pitch, not a private activity.
We need look no further than the parade of bestselling memoirs in which former frat boys discuss beer and its formative role in the promotion of their ejaculate as evidence of this dark tendency. Why make good porn, when there’s so much bad porn already out there?
Now then.
I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m not grateful to Katie Roiphe.
I happen to believe that literature would be a happier and more honest place if writers were braver about sex. 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.
Or you can do me one better and ask Stephen Elliott. He’s been writing about sex for years. It’s searing material that deserves to be widely read, particularly in light of how neurotic and unforgiving we’ve become, as a nation, about the compulsions of our bodies.
But you see, part of the reason Katie Roiphe can point to Eggers and Foster Wallace as “acclaimed” is precisely because they keep it above the waist. For the most part they keep it above the neck, and that makes the critics—who tend to be bigger prudes than anyone—happy.
Yes, we’re in the presence of another Big Irony. It’s not really those big bad feminists who’ve made male writers cock-shy. It’s nasty little critics. Imagine.
Exercising a restraint so formidable you will have to imagine the throbbing veins in my neck, I will cite but one example from my own non-illustrious career. This would be the critic who saw fit to condemn my first story collection in part because the title story was, she claimed, based on a physiological implausibility: that a woman could ejaculate.
It is so awesome to have one’s work taken seriously.
Does this all sound like sour grapes? I sure hope not. I’m glad Katie Roiphe wrote about how (famous white male hetero) writers of “my generation” don’t write enough about sex. I just think her reasoning is pretty silly.
Still, I hope her readers, once they finish arguing, will head out and buy these books, which are (I promise) full of sex and equally full of heart:
A Sport and a Past Time by James Salter
Spending by Mary Gordon
The Good Mother by Sue Miller
My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up by Stephen Elliott
The Royal Physician’s Visit by Per Olov Enquist
On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction by Karl Iagnemma
The Song of Songs by God
***
Feature photo by PracticalOwl.
35 responses
“…for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better….” What, exactly, is this supposed to mean? Let’s distract ourselves through sex so thoroughly as to prevent or preclude our impulse to bad mojo? Make love not war? This is such a hideous, out-of-date non-issue raised to the 13th power it staggers the mind. Journalism gives us the fictive linear narrative once provided by the novel. Pornography is ubiquitous and more graphic than ever, and so places us in a post-sex world. Irony is a survival technique in the world of automatons. Etc.
Thank you for writing this! Excellent piece.
With all the uproar about what Katie Roiphe didn’t get right, I don’t think there’s enough talk about what she did get right, which is that a lot of the criticism anytime Philip Roth writes a new book isn’t criticism that does what criticism should do, which is engage with the work, so much as it is a knee-jerk “criticism” that follows an old script and overuses the word “liver.” For the first time in a long time, a feminist critic writing for a major cultural arbiter decided to think and speak independently and originally about Roth. It may be true that the last two books aren’t as good or as well-made as American Pastoral or Sabbath’s Theater or Operation Shylock or The Ghost Writer (I’ll stop, only because this list is getting long), but what they do offer the reader is the pleasure of another couple hundred pages in the mind of our greatest living novelist. If Roth must compete with the best of Roth, maybe Roth is going to lose, but if I have to choose between lesser Roth and almost any new book on the bookstore shelves, I’m going to choose lesser Roth every time.
I think what Roiphe was lamenting was the kind of timid, unvirile politically-correct tiptoeing/hand-wringing that you can’t quite seem to shrug off even though you agree with her larger point(see first paragraph).
I mean, second paragraph. Oops.
Steve, let me buy you a virtual beer. This is fabulous. Pretty much exactly what I wanted to say to everyone on the street after I read the Roiphe piece. Rock on.
http://www.nerve.com/fiction/lin/sexafternotseeingeachother/
The thing that bugged me about Roiphe’s piece was its skimpy simplification of Roth’s 1986 novel “The Counterlife.” She suggests that Roth didn’t become interested in the loss of male virility–what she calls “impotence in various forms”–until recent books like “Exit Ghost.” But the thing is, Roth opens “The Counterlife” (again, published in 1986) with a disturbing evocation of one male character’s experience of impotence (“…but nothing helped: he no longer awakened with his morning erection or had sufficient potency for intercourse” etc etc) and this of course informs everything else the book suggests about sex, virility, manhood and so forth. In other words, back in the 80s Roth was already complicating his notions of what happens to male sexuality and virility as youth fades. One of the things that makes “Counterlife” great is that it gives us a portrait of male sexuality that is tinged with a sense of human loss. That’s very different from, say, “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
Literature might be in a “post-sex world,” but for fuck’s sake, who else is? And that’s the problem. Porn is not sex. Porn is commodity, fantasy, porn is the Colosseum, porn is Jackass with its dick all the way out. Porn is broken. We’re post-porn, if anything. Cheap digital video and the internet killed the commercial juggernaut that is porn. Everyone can make porn now. People still only masturbate sincerely, even if they fuck ironically.
If there were ever a time for literature to come in an fill the gap left by porn, this is it.
hilarious article! well-done
I basically agree with her, and therefore (I guess) I basically agree with Almond, too. I also think that trying to divide people up according to “generational gambits” is usually a waste of good air. But if you’re going to use that as a reason to apply a heavyweight word like “despicable” to Roiphe’s arguments, you ought to do a better job of acknowledging that she didn’t start it; she was directly addressing David Foster Wallace’s essay implicitly defining writers (and readers) of HIS generation (“our” generation, for what it’s worth) as more honorably cerebral, less sex-obsessed, and better-adjusted than the older writers he summed up as “white male narcissists”, and using that dubious charge to explain why the work of some of the greatest American writers then still alive was largely irrelevant to people his age, or at least the people his age whose opinions he deemed worth caring about. Wallace was a great writer, but that was the stupidest (and most self-aggrandizing) thing he ever wrote, and it deserves to be slapped down on the terms he set. If you want to also call his essay despicable, I have no problem with that.
Wow, kudos both to Steve Almond and to Melissa Gira Grant here. She makes a great point, which is similar in spirit to the one David Foster Wallace made many times, which I will not do justice to here but will merely say: irony is not enough; literature does need to do more to represent the hope of which sex can be one expression, when people strive to build relationships and to keep going through the motions until something, quite spine-quiveringly, feels real. And the very fact that someone like Max Fiction, who is whip-smart and on top of things for sure, will likely object to my referencing anything like hope in a non-ironic way–despite that, because of exactly that, literature needs to do more to remind people what they already know (in the limited, flawed, fleeting way we know anything): that people give meaning to life and to each other, and they do it with their imperfect words and their imperfect thoughts and their imperfect actions. Sex certainly isn’t anything as reductive or convenient a thing as “the melding of body & soul,” which leads out all the potential violence of two messy, baggage-laden people colliding in the most socially, psychologically, and otherwise complicated way possible. It also doesn’t have to be, and never, truly, is, just a little sweaty snack for two solipsists making their regular pit stop. But what it is is an unavoidably huge nexus for most of what complicates, frustrates, informs, and (if you will) transforms our lives. Thus, as Melissa wisely says, we’re not in a post-sex world, and so why should literature be in a post-sex world? Writers can do whatever they want, obviously, and there are decided limits to what they can possibly wrought in this world, but somebody somewhere should be writing about sex (and other stuff) in as honest and useful a way as possible. More is not enough.
Don’t see what the big deal is. I tried to read it Sunday, but got bored. I wondered, are there so few books being published that they had to devote so much space to this? Couldn’t she find a literary magazine to take it?
As for sex, I subscribe to the “write what you know” school, which means I rarely write about sex, and then only briefly, and in short, unsatisfying sentences.
Let Roiphe tease white male writers about sexuality — maybe she’s just coquettishly urging them (“us”) all to prove her wrong.
One thing bugged me, though. She takes a few quotes from Franzen’s “Corrections” that I believe are from Chip’s scenes to prove her point. But she ignores the abstract, cold yearning behind most of Denise’s (graphic) sexual encounters (the father’s coworker, the chef, the chef’s wife, the new boss, the new boss’s wife, never seeming to know what she wants or why), an aspect to the story that points more clearly to the way “we” actually feel about “this stuff.”
As usual, Steve Almond, you’ve got it about right.
Thanks for the smart, impassioned rebuttal. For Roiphe to cherrypick a handful of critical darlings and then ignore the critic’s role altogether — in the New York Times Book Review — is either willfully blind or deeply disingenuous.
Sam, That raises the other problem: These examples are quoted as though we’re getting a direct feed from the mouth of Updike or Roth or Franzen or whomever. But these are fictional characters who are speaking, and characters aren’t supposed to do or think or be the “right” thing, whatever that is, nor are they direct stand-ins for their authors.
Thank you, Steve Almond, for the best piece of counter-critique ever. I would a thousand times rather read you than Philip Roth. You also look better in a headband.
But, but, but, can we really be talking about “post-sex†here at the Rumpus? Really? Here, where we tenaciously defend our sex blog as essential to the mix of a cultural and literary magazine? Where we’ve proudly published, for example, the writing of Sam J. Miller whose “lust explodes, expands like a toxic mushroom cloud over Manhattanâ€? https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2009/09/sex-death-facebook/ As well as loads of other columns, interviews and essays on sex? But, most shockingly, is it possible that readers have been sticking to the road and staying off the moors for so long that we actually have to introduce them here, on the Rumpus itself, to the prolific and adept sex writing of our own Editor in Chief? Especially when his book was mentioned in the same edition of the NY Times Book Review as Roiphe’s article??? Is anyone paying attention, or even glancing beyond the mainstream, at all? Readers, like lovers, have to want it. And it just happens to be, in this case, right under your nose. “Post-sex†is an absurd term that I hope the Rumpus will banish forever. Or just continue to prove irrelevant.
You make an excellent point with “certain writers may be reacting to the broader pornofication of our discourse, the ubiquitous vulgarity, the way in which sex is immediately received as a public pitch, not a private activity.” I would go further to say that you don’t see a lot physical description these days of scenery ala the grass around Daisy Buchanan’s house, or the view out the window of the long, long train trip of Eugene Gant. Mostly because place has become ubiquitous in pictures and movies (and TV), whereas we used to rely on authors to describe things we’d never seen. Is it really any different with sex? As with the scenery, one needs a compelling reason to describe sex, such as fear or loathing, or anything Stephen Elliot writes about it.
Thank you for writing out what I could only mutter and grunt spastically about. Now, if I could just go back in time 12 hours and have that conversation all over.
This makes me think of a David Foster Wallace review of an Updike book.
DFW writes: “…[the narrator and, DFW notes, probably the author of the book] persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair.”
Now, DFW is one of my favorite writers and John Updike is nowhere near close, but I’ll tell you right now–getting to have sex with whomever you want whenever you want is PRECISELY a cure for human despair, and anybody who disagrees should just crawl back to their dorm room with their irony and ambiguity and wool blanket and Wilco albums and stay out of the way of those of us who are trying to enjoy life.
So y’know, Roiphe had a point about the late, lamented David
so, you know, i’m a huge zak smith fan. his piece on sasha gray and tara is maybe the smartest and funniest thing ever cybered. and i couldn’t agree with him more about the emotional evasions of a certain breed of hipster. but i have to disagree with him, vehemently, on his essential claim. one of the points of my response to roiphe — one i should have expressed more pointedly — is that sex is an emotionally complex human activity, one that elicits and expresses the totality of who we are as a species, the hedonism and ecstasy and liberation AND the anxiety and self-loathing and masochism. and one the great pities roiphe might have pointed to is the impoverishment of those writers who choose (for whatever reasons) to avoid or oversimplify or neglect the sexual lives of their characters. and so, as much as i agree with zak that sex CAN be a cure for human despair, i’d argue that it’s ALSO — and sometimes even SIMULTANEOUSLY an expression of despair, or at least a conscious path to despair. and i’d refer you to much of stephen elliot’s work, or any of your own troubled erotic relationships as evidence. that’s what writers should be grappling with, in my view — the ecstasy and woe of physical congress, the rich brew of joy and despair that charges the entire enterprise. and DFW, in fact, in his piece about the adult film industry DID this noble work. there’s a wonderful moment when he talks about encountering an elderly police detective – a gentle, soft-spoken grandfather – who watches porn “for those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets drop their stylized … sneer and become, suddenly, real people.†i mean, that’s what we’re really talking about here.
i also wish i’d made the brilliant point articulated by melissa gira grant above — it’s the very pornification of the culture, the commodification of sex, the sickening reductionism of how much it all matters — that should spur those of us who write to correct the record, to write about sex as it actually exists in our private, individual worlds. again, stephen elliot and lots of other folks are doing that work…
Is it possible that the literary exploration of sex, first mined by the above Bellow, Mailer, Updike, etc. has been taken over by women? I submit Gina Frangello’s excellent books “My Sister’s Continent” and the forthcoming “Slut Lullabies”, “The Star Cafe” by Mary Caponegro, and my own dirty book of stories “Things That Pass for Love” as well as many, many others. If women have taken over the mantle of writing graphically honest sex scenes, it’s no wonder some men are shrinking from the challenge(Almond and Elliot excepted of course, and that’s why I love reading them!)
Brilliant post and comments. Like others, since Sunday, I’ve been walking around mumbling to myself things like: What writers? What exactly is she blaming the girlfriends for? And what about the total pornification? How can she not give nod to that?
The heat and complexity of sex. As Steve points out, that’s not going anywhere, ever, and for sure there’s always news. But with anal sex and threesomes so much wallpaper, maybe writing frankly about self-conscious, dry, awkward sex a la Franzen’s Chip scenes is a frontier. And maybe so is straight boy-on-boy sex, a la the hot Dylan and Mingus scenes in “Fortress of Solitude.” Those were written by an A-list, youngish white hetero dude. (Did Updike, Roth et all cover that?) And what about Nicholson Baker, just for sex in general? Is he in-between the generations?
Well, that’s the fun of a Roiphe essay. I also still argue in my head about the one where she said women would trade writing “The House of Mirth” for having babies. (http://www.doublex.com/section/kids-parenting/katie-roiphe-my-newborn-narcotic)
And for the record, yes, there might have been some snide comments by me to my college boyfriend about Updike’s Cock poem (wait, is there more than one?) and, later, about “Brazil” (worst sex scenes ever, but I finished it). But he wouldn’t have been my boyfriend if he shrank at a little gendered sparring. Geesh. Quite the opposite.
Steve, Have you and your family come up with a date for us to be “bound” in “un”holy matrimony yet? Because I’m ready when you are. The only thing better than your response to Roiphe, is your response to Zak. I think I maybe know a thing or two about sex as an expression of despair… There is nothing smart and literary about this comment – sorry. I just wanted to experience the warm rush of my outpouring of love for you (and your brain). I don’t think it has despair at its core – but it might. Hmm. Yup. It does actually.
Steve,
What you wrote in the comments section of your article is much more interesting and relevant to this discussion than your actual article, which seems, no offense, to be a knee-jerk, hastily-constructed defense of your literary buddies. I also wonder why you would question Roiphe’s motives, especially in such a haphazard way. Why do you think she doesn’t actually care about the role of sex in American fiction? I don’t doubt that there are plenty of holes in her argument–and I’m not well-read enough, especially in the respective oeuvres of the contemporary writers mentioned (Foer, Eggers, Kunkel, et al) to confidently comment either way–but why would you assume that she’s simply writing to impress–or provoke–the New York cognoscenti and not out of some deeper, more personal place? Such as yours?
David Foster Wallace’s surname was Wallace, not Foster Wallace.
Hi,
I’m new to your site and love this post. I read the article referenced and had lots of thoughts about it, none of which I could articulate as well as you have.
I am doing some writing and want to be able to write freely about sex as a part of my dating experiences as a middle aged woman…so I’m always looking for good examples of writing about sex.. Can’t wait to read some of the books on your list!
delicate flower: you should start by reading Almond’s own “How to Write Sex Scenes: The 12 Step Program”:
https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2009/07/how-to-write-sex-scenes-the-12-step-program/
For someone who “basically agree[s]” with her article you have a strange penchant for misinterpreting multiple parts of it, then making it seem like the “problem” is intrinsic to Roiphe’s argument. (for example: she mentions Eggers once: she says his writing smacks of “innocence” and a “childlike” take on sex: you blast her for dismissing him as an “ironist,” because she generalizes that overuse of irony is one [of several] problems with the “new guard” of writers. Sloppy.)
But what is possibly most disconcerting, and sadly, it isn’t just you, about your, what could we say? 80% “agreement”? (in which you go on to attack the premises of the article): you call out Roiphe for merely “talking about hetero white men.”
Somewhere, and it seems to make an excellent bedfellow for the semantic PC-ness Roiphe implies is birthed from feminism, people latched on to “multiculturalism” as a basic tenet of every discourse. No, something other than white male heterosexuals does NOT need to included, because that’s not part of the her HYPOTHESIS. She’s looking at a fairly basic (if specific) definition of today’s “new guard” and yesterday’s “old guard.” The three old guys were famous in their time, the young guys have achieved considerable renown today. Those are the boundaries of the argument! If you’re talking about the use of the tritone in “top 40” songs for the last 20 years you shouldn’t be attacked because you don’t reference Fela Kuti and Cesaria Evora! Yes, Kathi Acker, William S. Burroughs, Kobe Abe, Jean Genet, A.M. Homes, Robert Coover, Nicholson Baker, and your boy Stephen Elliott have all written– graphically, even!– about sex. Let’s never forget that for moment, regardless of what we’re arguing about. But they (and those on your erudite list) are not part of THIS argument. If you want to write a thesis about those writers’ use of sex, fantastic, but we’re looking at (a) American males who are (b) popular, (c) write about women and (d) generally deemed artistically gratifying. “A” and “C” destroy the need for discussion of your beloved queer, Ceylonese, southern gothic female, and Andalusian anarchist scribes; “B” is a group you do an admirable job of qualifying yourself. As you would have it, the formula is as simple as: they are not popular because they write about sex! “D” negates the need to mention, say, Chuck Palahniuk. Thank christ.
You’re the equivalent of the guy who wants to dominate a conversation about some TV show by harping on about Fellini. Or by adding a list of Korean “revenge” films at the end of an article someone wrote about “Speed.” “Hey, how come there aren’t more white dudes mentioned in your essay about the origins of be-bop?!?!!”
After all the other random slights you’ve made on an ARGUMENT YOU BASICALLY AGREE WITH, you have either the gall or naivete to ask why someone would write this piece in the first place… “Wouldn’t a cultural critic writing a think piece for the NYTBR want to consider something a little less, uh, conjectural. Such as the role of sex itself in the culture at large?” Hey, if the only thing keeping you from writing for the NYTBR is “getting your shit together,” go for it! What precocious 7th grader wouldn’t want to read (or indeed, write) an essay on “The role of sex in today’s culture at large”? Oof!
Alas, with this grandiose, vague, unformed idea you giveth; with the other, you cruelly taketh away again: writing for such high stakes is deemed merely reaching for “that brass ring of neediness.” Well, I’m no apologist for her, and there are plenty of things about her argument I’m unsold on, but Roiphe obviously can’t win. Why write an article appearing in a world-famous publication and for which you are remunerated monetarily? Apparently, you’re just showing us how needy you are!
Your stern protestations aside, I think you’re delighted this article exists. Look at all the copy you generated, and all the responses from a bunch of people who are delighted to jump on any snarky bandwagon against something else. (whoops, I just realized I discovered this piece on Flavorwire; the comments on Rumpus actually seem to be the result of some kind of cognitive process, so let me take that part back.) Just icing on the cake: you got to write “Big Cock Block” at the top!
hey martin — do you work for Fox News?
Isaac,
Great one, thanks.. I may have to incorporate those tips! I always struggle with what to call a penis. Willie, wanker, Johnson, one-eyed trouser snake.. all so plebeian and overused. I’ll probably dream about alternate words tonight!
Thanks.
I am weighing in way too late I know, but I stumbled across this discussion, read it with interest and thought I’d add a small contribution as someone who has covered both the high and low ends of sex writing: I was a porn writer and editor for Hustler among others as well as a literature/comp lit/ writing grad student….you decide which was higher or lower.
Here goes: The thing I notice is not a lack of sex writing among US writers, but how much of it is either embarassing or boring, which also reflects a deep discomfort. Not too long ago, I was writing something that I knew would contain extensive, explicit sex scenes and also passages of critical, literary reflection. Looking for models, I noticed how, although there were some fine writers, what was really missing was a tradition of such writing in American lit. as opposed to some European and Asian cultures. I think our legacy of Puritanism and religious zealotry combined with an anti-aristocratic, ant-elitist populism has lead to an instinctive anti-erotic anti-intellectual trend in our literature. Those who do write about these topics (and who are mostly listed already in other posts) then appear as rebels or subversives, which can be great, and has produced some of my heroes, but is still a kind of adolescent position, ultimately defined by the larger culture. I think this is a kind of historical lack: We have no Sade, as it were.
I have not had time to think this all through completely. I even came to suspect a secret complicity between say, philosophy and pornography. But I do think that one thing American Literature can use more of is not just “sex” but smart, dirty, grown-up, exciting writing about sex and ideas: We need Adult Entertainment, in every sense of the term.
As a quick shout-out: Sade is a lot better than Hollywood’s idiocy portrays. He’s a real writer, and brilliant on the realm of desire. I agree with David Gordon on his essential point: the pointless segregation of sex from the realm of ideas and vice versa…
Leaving aside the inherent risks of “generational” summation (the main one being that not every member of that generation is going to fit your profile, especially when it comes to writers), Roiphe has it wrong for a very simple reason: it’s not that the younger writers she cites are afraid of sex; it’s that to them it’s just not the Big Deal it was to men like Rothdike, who came of age at a time when it was far less available then it would be thirty years later. The so-called Sexual Revolution freaked them out probably even more than it did the somewhat younger people who supposedly engineered it. Wow, I’m almost forty and suddenly everybody’s doing it! Pussy galore! Only a fool would say sex is no longer important, but it’s long since lost the charge of the forbidden that galvanized Rothdike. And so it has less prominence in some contemporary work.
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