Once upon a time across the ocean, many centuries ago, there lived people who liked having sex. “Musselmans” and “Hindoos” alike celebrated the art of physical love through exhaustive—or as I like to say, sexhaustive!—manuals detailing positions, spells/love potions, and weird anecdotes wholly unrelated to genitalia. And the peasants rejoiced to have these manuals for, being devoid of both Stieg Larsson novels and Smirnoff Ice, there were few appropriate recreational activities outside of trying 80 different sexual postures that basically all break down to: woman on her back, legs up.

Sound juicy? It is! And also, depressing. Because in the astounding amount of time that’s passed, it’s probably no longer kosher to suggest that one read the Koran as an aphrodisiac or cry out “I want it done in all ways. Let the revelation of God descend upon me!” while on all fours. (Perfumed Garden, pages 77 and 154.) What I wouldn’t give to be back in the good old days….

Bad News Before Good: Alan Hull Walton, long-winded intro writer for my edition of The Perfumed Garden, delivers some sad tidings early on. The original Garden included a “considerable” chapter on homosexuality, but Sir Richard did not originally translate it, because the French soldier who created the very first translation of the text omitted it.  But Richard soon realized what a grave disservice he’d done to humanity and decided to create a second, annotated translation of the work, which would include the missing chapter as well as citations from Numa Numantius,  “a learned German [who was] himself sexually inverted.” Tragically, Burton died before his work was finished and his wife, who’d apparently not paid a damn bit of attention to anything her husband worked on while alive, was so shocked by the sexually explicit material that she burned the manuscript-in-progress. Women! Can’t live with them and apparently can’t die in the vicinity of one either.

Making Machiavelli Proud: Indian men, it seems, would stop at nothing to get the women they want. The Kama Sutra recommends endless varieties of charming ladies, including pretending to like children while in her presence, using the same service people she does (blacksmith, jeweler) and taking care not to “contradict her, but point out that he agrees with her in every way.” These relatively innocent techniques give way to some brazenly criminal behavior, however, for once a man determines he wants to marry a woman, Vatsyayana advocates ambushing her with the fire ceremony that seals the deal, either through abducting her, drugging her, or killing her guards. Should she ever be unconscious, the man is encouraged to “enjoy her” before she wakes up. Icky!

???: Here’s a memorable gem from The Perfumed Garden: “A man buys a he-goat who, in voiding his excrements, hits the buyer’s eye with part of it and injures the same. ‘Who has to pay for damages?’ ‘The seller,’ promptly says Abou Arouba. ‘And why?’ asked the Katif. ‘Because he has sold the animal without warning the buyer that it has a catapult in its anus,’ answered the man.”

If anyone can figure out what the h-e double hockey sticks this has to do with fucking, please email me.

Indians Got Kinky: “Mouth congress” and eunuch sex is no big thing, according to The Kama Sutra. There’s even a defensive riff on why oral sex isn’t unclean, and numerous reminders that “in all these things connected with love, everybody should act according to his own inclination.” Furthermore, “nothing tends to increase love so much as the effects of marking with the nails, and biting,” and a chapter is devoted to each activity.

And even more further, Vatsyayana is a tremendous advocate of “striking” both during and before penetration, although (sorry, tool-lovers) he advises against using implements as they can sometimes result in tragedy.  The “wedge,” “pinchers,” “scissors,” and “piercing implement” have all been known to kill or deform hapless female partners, so best to stick with “the back of the hand, slowly at first, then proportionately to the increasing excitement, until the end.” But you all already knew that.

Men On Penises: Straight men from back in the day flat out love to talk about penis size.  The only thing they love more than talking about the length of other men’s penises is actually measuring said penises. And there are plenty of asides in The Perfumed Garden noting that Arabs (and, of course, “Negros”) have it going on in the trouser region, as proven by the tireless observations of the self-admittedly less-endowed European men. The Garden suggests that, when it comes to length, “the breadth of twelve fingers, or three hand-breadths” will do the trick of satisfying a woman, and if you’re thinking that sounds like a whopper of a cock, you’re right. According to the footnote, that would be about nine inches. (Woundedly, the footnote concludes, “medical opinion, however, states that size is of much less importance in the marital act than tenderness in approach.” Ha. That’s cute.)

Well-Rounded Women: Unsurprisingly, these old texts can be pretty misogynistic. But The Kama Sutra starts to seem downright feminist when it argues against those who would deny women access to its pages. According to Vatsyayana, even “young maidens” should study up. They should also spend their time developing skills in: tattooing, “the art of making beds,” fashioning earrings, magic/sorcery, “making parrots [etc.] out of yarn or thread,” “teaching [real] parrots to speak,” and practicing “sentences difficult to pronounce” i.e. tongue twisters. Character building! Even more awesomely, it is also advised that girls study up on sword-fighting, gambling, carpentry, chemistry, and cock, quail, and ram fighting. Throw cigar smoking in there, and you got yourself a private school education.

You Will LOL: The Perfumed Garden is simply delightful. I want to share every hilarious moment with you, but since I must restrict myself to only a few, let me give you a taste.

During a distinctly Bugs Bunny-esque tale, a king dresses like a woman to fool some bad guy who’s abducted a bunch of hot chicks, and the cross-dressing monarch avoids having sex with the villain by pretending he’s about to puke, then running away. The villain marvels, “God bless you! Any other woman would have been sick into the bed!” (Because that happens on the regular for him. This is the same guy who, “holding in his hands his member in full erection, hit [a girl] on the face and head.” Dude was doing Max Hardcore over 500 years before Max Hardcore was even born.)

The preferred word for “poke” is “rummage,” as in, “you can rummage her in a convenient, measured way.” Charming, right? And some of the names of sexual positions are: “sheep-fashion,” “ram-fashion,” “pounding on the spot,” “the summersault”[sic] (which involves a woman wearing pants around her ankles,) and, my personal favorite, “fitting on of the sock.” Different hip thrusts are also detailed, one of which is called, wonderfully, “the mutual shock.”

The Book That Is Triumphant: I’m tempted to say both are winners. But the truth is, while The Kama Sutra is a revered classic, the quirkiness of The Perfumed Garden stole my heart. Plus, it includes this exhortation no less than two times: “I swear by God that it is necessary to know this book. It is only the shameless bore and the enemy of all science who will not read it, or make fun of it.” So suck it, haters. The rest of you, go forth unto he-goat sex with the blessing of the Lord.

Related Posts:

• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #5: The Gurus of Gash
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #4: Bumpin’ Uglies with the Beautiful People
• The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #3: Ladies Gotta Get Some
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #2: Porn Takes It on the Chin

Firstly, before you decide you want to hunt me down and punch me in the face, know that the title of this Throwdown is taken straight from The Game. Secondly, I could at least use a hug before I get a punch, because I’m pretty sure books like these are what drive sweet, sane feminists like me to become one of those man-eating, half-gorilla femi-zombies I keep hearing so much about. Reading these selections definitely made me feel like I was PMSing to the max, but I persevered for you, dear Rumpus readers! Let’s puke together, shall we?

Bummer: There’s a lot of sexist bullcrap in The Way of the Superior Man. Deida reiterates many times that men need a “mission” or a “purpose” in life, while women only need a relationship, and that women’s moods are illogical and rarely rooted in real problems. Furthermore, women are so obsessed with their partners that they “feel [them] all day” and “do not frequently consider other options.” (Don’t worry about your wife cheating on you. That doesn’t even appeal to her in her fantasy life!) For men, “their woman is replaceable.” But “your woman” will never be able to replace you.

In this murky misogynist soup, one line in particular made me straight up sad: “Your need is far deeper than any woman can provide. Your ultimate desire is for the union of consciousness with its own luminosity.” Damn. It’s deeply depressing on a semantic level (“provide” a “need”??) but even more depressing when I focus on what he’s trying to say, and realize that some guys actually believe this—they think women are not human beings like them who need self-actualization beyond relationships and parenthood, who are interested in a spiritual life or serious self-inquiry. In Deidaland, a woman is not very curious about her own consciousness because an intimate relationship is always the highest priority of her life. Your consciousness does it for me, you big strong masculine man!

Pick Up Artists Fight Back: You might be thinking, surely those pick up artists put Deida to shame in the arena of archaic sex stereotyping! Maybe they do. I had a hard time concentrating on what exactly was going on with them because they’re such a flat-out pitiable lot. They give themselves names like “Grimble” and “Sisonpyh” (hypnosis, backwards) and their conquests, girls they’re allegedly attracted to, are called such flattering nicknames as “Wideface.” The general public became familiar with techniques like “neging” (saying something rude about a hot girl to lower her self-esteem) back when the pick-up artist world was getting a lot of media traction and that ridiculous Mystery had a show on VH1. (Is it a Fruedian slip that I first typed “VHS”?) To his credit, author Neil Strauss is aware of how the men who join this community seem to move from dysfunction into more dysfunction, evolving from guys who don’t know how to connect with women into guys who still don’t know how to connect with women but can at least con a make out session out of them.

Anyway, a lot of their picking up (which can be as tame as just getting a phone number) takes place at spots like California Pizza Kitchen and T.G.I.Fridays—which reminds me, I came up with a great neg: “Hey, you’re in a T.G.I.Fridays.”—and the girls they designate “10s” are inevitably self-styled tan, big boobied blondes.

Finally, the number one item in their pick-up arsenal is gum. Ew. There should be an age limit to buying gum and that limit should be 12. If you’re an adult who still thinks gum-chewing means “fresh breath,” you can come over sometime and we’ll eat a bag of sour cream and chives potato chips together. Then we’ll take turns smelling each others’ mouths after we suck on some Wrigleys. Oh, no takers? How strange. Plus, have you ever seen someone chew gum and manage to look even halfway intelligent while they do? Smoking a cigarette is sexier, and smoking is gross. Hell, gnawing on a piece of hay is sexier. (Free tip: add “piece of hay” to your pick up gear. It will also be a good conversation starter.)

David Deida is a Terrible Writer: You can like his ideas. You can think he’s a brilliant public speaker. But the guy has atrocious word choice instincts. Most of the time he treads in the water of obtuse new age nonsense, but on occasion he gets carried away and earnestly pens some high hilarity. Here are a few choice phrases that should make his editor curl up in shame:

“Bloom her into fullness.” This is kind-of fun in a koan way, since “bloom” is a verb that can’t be done to something but only by something. I tried to think of another verb like that and all that came to mind was “fart.”

“Thrust love from the freedom of your deep being even as your body and mind die blissfully through a crucifixion of inevitable pleasure and pain[…]” The sentence I pulled that from is three times as long. Language is a privilege, David, not a right!

“Your masculine thunderbolt of love can brighten her darkness.” I can’t even. Thunder? Thunder is brightening something? I just can’t.

“You will not want to [have sex with her] that’s for sure. When you are depolarized, the last thing you want to do is get it up for that potato.” I LOLed.

“Know eternity. Do whatever it takes.” Pretty weak sauce. Whose definition of eternity is he using? How does one know when they truly know? It’s a cop out, on par with “Feel through not only your boundaries, but also her boundaries, so that you are both dissolved.” That type of instruction is not helpful because it’s not instruction at all. It’s just an imperative. Not everyone is mentally prepared to “die in the giving of your gift.” Or even understand what it means. For some people, that’s going to lead to a crack up.

Which brings me to my next point—

Deida Wants You Dead: There are some practices that require education to be undertaken safely and effectively. One of these, I would say, is going to “the middle of the woods by yourself” and fasting and abstaining from sleep, which Deida recommends rather flippantly with the additional advice “don’t quit before you fall through the hole of your fear and emerge with a vision.” Well, starving, exhausted people do have visions, I guess that’s true.  And they may fall into a hole while deliriously stumbling around foraging for berries. David Deida: results guaranteed!

I know we’re Americans, so we can do anything we want and be awesome at it without any training, and I know (with a 50% chance of accuracy) that you’re a man, and you’re super tough and capable and have watched that TV show where the British guy lives from drinking his own pee—but maybe your should hold off reliving “Grizzly Man”/”Into the Wild” for the time being?  Don’t forget that, according to Deida, your woman is replaceable to you but you are not replaceable to her. So, really, you’ll end up with two deaths on your head if you pull this stunt.

Homoerotism: The Game is doing it right. To start, there’s the subtitle. “Penetrating?” Ok. You penetrate that secret group of dudes, Neil! Then come back and tell us about how good you are with women.

Although the men of The Game are obsessed with ladies and with fucking said ladies, there’s little joy in their conquests, and the time not spent out hunting for poon is whiled away on the computer, where they diligently type up reports about who they had sex with or made out with. They may even upload audio or secret video records of their pick up attempts for feedback. The most important thing is not that they connect with a woman, but that they gain affirmation and recognition from their partners in pick-up.

In this way, they are entirely like the members of TheEroticReview, a popular site where johns brag about how they are The Shit because they’ve hired, like, three hundred prostitutes in the past two years, and written up reviews about every one, so other guys can read about it and get hard and then hire the same girl and think “awesome, I’m boning the chick that BigOne69 got a mind-blowing BBBJTC from! I’m king of the world!”

(Quick disclaimer: Non-sex workers get very excited about TER. They think it is the most fascinating site of all time and that they have stumbled on a “secret society,” just as Mr. Strauss seemed to think that the easily locatable, internet-based, seminar-offering pick up community was somehow “secret.” But don’t bring TER up to a prostitute or you’ll sound like a jackass. It would be the equivalent of asking a banker, “Hey, have you ever heard of this thing called the Wall Street Journal?”)

Winner: On the occasions that Deida said something I agreed with— “[Your woman] knows when you are just dicking around”—I comforted myself with that old adage about monkeys and typewriters.  I’m not saying that he’s a bad person, per se. Mostly he just seems confused. He says women possess destructive energy but that men have “Shiva” energy, when everyone knows Shiva is the destroyer. He says “beer” is a form of “feminine energy.” He writes that women “surrender” while men “release,” although, true to form, there’s no elaboration as to how those are different. He’s under the impression that all women everywhere love soap operas. And he throws out statistics he clearly made up off the top of his head about how many women have a “masculine core” and how many men are “balanced.” (10% and 10%, if you’re curious.)

Neil Strauss also seems like a nice enough guy, and he happened to stumble into this crew of men who should have also been nice guys, but instead they became bitter and misshapen with neediness and aggression. He ends the book with: “We were all searching outside ourselves for our missing pieces, and we were looking in the wrong direction. Mystery didn’t have the answers. A blonde 10 in a two-set at the Standard didn’t have the answers. The answers were to be found within.” This would seem like a nice conclusion if I weren’t so poisoned from Deida. Now all I can think is, that’s easy for you to say, Man! If only women had such inner resources…. Sadly, we have only our men to turn to for fulfillment. The femi-zombies can’t invade fast enough.

Related Posts:

• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #6: Thirsty Vaginas Meet
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #4: Bumpin’ Uglies with the Beautiful People
• The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #3: Ladies Gotta Get Some
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #2: Porn Takes It on the Chin

I thought this match up would be a battle in predictable, one-size-fits all advice, a Stupid-Off of Olympic proportions. Instead, I uncovered one of the best sex books I’ve read in years. Ladies and Gentleman, prepare to be read something nice for once!

It’s Bunny Tales, right?: Hahaha! No! Let me tell you about Izabella St. James, an entitled, ungrateful bitch whose writing is so boring that reading her book made me sometimes wish I were illiterate. She went to law school (although she has never passed the bar exam) and speaks several languages because of her gypsy childhood, so she knows for a fact she’s better than every other girl ever associated with Playboy, even though she claims to be writing her book in order to encourage people to be less judgmental.  She means, of course, people should be less judgmental about her, because unlike the rest of the women Hugh called “family,” she isn’t “trailer trash.” This after she admits to getting into three physical fights with the other girls during her time at the mansion, and initiating at least two of those.

Then The Porn Book Is The Awesome One?: Sure, it’s got lots of self-indulgent plugs for various Vivid movies, and a center section with inexplicably retro looking pictures of the female performers, and starts off with a line about how women should always wear six inch heels around the house, even while vacuuming—which had me ready to light the pages on fire right then and there—but it’s actually really good! XXX Sex Life is written for women and men, and it covers everything from dirty talking to kissing to the g-spot to threesomes. It frequently reiterates the importance of communication and individual preference when it comes to everything, be that toy use or grooming or a particular sexual technique. It also provides many quotes from the Vivid performers, both male and female, to prove how subjective sensations are. There are even good suggestions about how and when to talk sex with your partner so as not to seem critical or pushy. (I.e. do it after the act and not during, start with a compliment or affirmation, say what you do like rather than what you don’t.) It’s all the more charming for being read in the wake of the reprehensible Bunny Tales.

Aren’t You Being A Little Hard On St. James?: Am I? She denigrates the mansion (aka her chosen home for two years,) calls Hefner egomaniacal and deluded, and delivers snide remarks about Bridget and Holly, two girls who were once her housemates and who enjoyed significant success with their appearances on E!’s “The Girls Next Door” after St. James moved out. She regularly reminds the reader that she was never a gold-digger or sugar baby and only lived at the house for fun, all while complaining that Hefner never did anything for her financially. (For instance, “What was strange to me is that Hef would gladly pay for any plastic surgery, necessary or not, but he would not help me with school loans.” Necessary plastic surgery? Oh, right, I forgot that period when Hef only dated severe burn victim and girls with cleft lips.)

And here she is on her belief that the mansion staff were not as deferential as they should have been: “I was not some girl Hef took in off the street; I had a professional career ahead of me and if I was working in my profession, I would be doing all right without Hef.” Right on, Izzy! If I weren’t born female but were born ten years earlier so I’d be age-eligible, and hadn’t tried every drug under the sun and broken upwards of twelve federal laws while in my early twenties, and campaigned really hard for public office and could pretend that social conservatives don’t make me throw up in my mouth, I might be President of the United States right now! And people should treat me accordingly.

There’s Another Surprise: The Vivid book was co-written by Dan Anderson and Maggie Berman—the same two people behind Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man, as featured in the very first throwdown! My god, they have come such a long way from that Mr. Softee  nonsense. Check it out: “His anticipation of what’s to come should cause his mini-me to jump straight up.” Alright, so, baby steps.  It’s still much more bearable this time around, and the sections focusing on female genitals are mercifully free of shockingly dumb euphemisms. Probably because Maggie was like “Dan, there’s no fucking way I’m referring to a clit as a ‘lil’ pink button.’ Or ‘Ms. Pinkie.’ Or ‘Lady Pinkerton of Pink Pussy Hill.’ We’re adults. How about we call it a clit?”

They also have a major slip up when they claim that a guy coming during a boob job (yeah I said a boob job, what else am I going to call it? Titty fucking? Like I’m common trailer trash?!?!) is called “squeezing for dollars” because no, it’s not. No one anywhere has ever called it that unless that person was so drunk they promptly vomited on the penis afterwards, and let’s not be taking our slang from someone in that compromised state. Even Urban Dictionary is like WTF with that one.

Re: Mansion Sex: It is the tamest, most pathetic sex ever. It involves Viagra, drunk girls hoping to become stars, and sex with an old man who lies on his back while covered in baby oil.  I’ll give St. James the benefit of the doubt when she says Hefner has “no passion, no physical abilities” and “technical difficulties.” She adds that “the two years I lived at the Playboy Mansion were the years I had the least sex ever.” But she implies that sex in multiple positions is somehow “more than what one considers standard sex,” so I don’t think the men of the world were missing much.

Here’s what Vivid says: “You don’t want to substitute household products for lube, so things like […] cosmetic creams, Vaseline, baby oil—all of which most men have probably used to toss off at one time or another—can be harsh on the vaginal tissue, cause an allergic reaction, or give women a bad yeast, bacterial, or other infection.” Cosmetic creams?! Men jerking off with cosmetic cream? Like Clinique or Oil of Olay or something? Aw, now we can tell this was written by our good friend, the sex-tip-giving gay man. I bet the skin of his mini-me is fantastic.

Down and Dirty: The Vivid Crew ends with a safer sex section that discusses STD testing, condom use, dental dams and rubber gloves. They also require condom use in their films

Meanwhile, St. James says Hef’s previous girlfriends ended up with herpes, and sure enough, the prince of pajamas never bothers wearing condoms with any of his playmates, even when he screws one right after the other. (But he did have the courtesy to wipe off with a wet rag in between. Chivalry, thy name is Hugh.) Allegedly these encounters last less than a minute for each penetrate-ee, and Hef can only come by masturbating, so I suppose it’s relatively low risk. Although when it comes to genital herpes, I hope we can all agree that “low risk” is not ideal.

Winner: How To Have A XXX Sex Life was one of the sweetest, most thoughtful, and most thorough sex manuals I’ve ever read. It encourages encounters that are connected, kind, and pleasurable for both parties, which means it touts the exact kind of sex porn usually eschews. Oh, the irony! Therefore, the winner has to be Izabella’s heinous Hefner exposé. The sad condom-less sex contained therein, replete as it is with Viagra-induced boners and women faking moans for money, is far more in keeping with most “XXX” scenes. God help us.

***

Read “SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #1: Battle of the Blowjobs”

Read “SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #2: Porn Takes It on the Chin“

Related Posts:

• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #6: Thirsty Vaginas Meet
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #5: The Gurus of Gash
• The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #3: Ladies Gotta Get Some
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #2: Porn Takes It on the Chin

Presentation: Catherine M.’s straightforward title is unavoidably bland, even a little clinical, like she was a psychologist’s case study. I appreciate its honesty but it gets no points for creativity. Frankly, a better name would have been, Those Bunch of Guys I Fucked: A Book. But I guess I should be grateful she didn’t go that route, because then what I would call my autobiography? (Still looking for a publisher, folks.) Also, my boyfriend saw me with The Sexual Life and asked, “Are you reading the girl version of Dennis Reynolds: An Erotic Life?” Sigh. I wish.  As usual, Dennis Reynolds may have not been the first to do it, but he was the best.

Both covers feature images of what I presume are the bodies of the authors. Bentley rips off Lost in Translation’s opening butt shot, which is only fair given how often we have to read about the tight supremacy of her impeccable ballet ass, while Millet opts for toplessness and an emo hair-in-face look. Screaming infidelities indeed.

Both are tasteful enough, by which I mean they’re less obvious than romance novel covers, and designed to appeal to snobby folks who like their dirty stories packaged as “erotica.” (You know how subway conversations with those people go: “What’s that you’re reading? Mutiny on the Boobies by Jackee St. Clair? Well, I’m learning about this dancer’s 176^th encounter with God through anal ravaging. Grow up, plebian.”)

Who You Would Rather Bone: I’ll give you the facts and you decide. Our girl Toni styles every anal encounter with fin-de-siècle decadence, which means lighting incense and candles, saving her lover’s come-filled condoms in a giant lacquered Chinese box, and dressing up for him in a long velvet gown. (Yes, I said velvet! That’s one step away from velour. And that’s one step away from Zap Branigan.) She left out the part about wearing opera length gloves and dropping belladonna into her eyes but I suspect that was usually involved. She and her lover, who she calls “A-man,” never go on a date, but if they did, I like to think they’d shop for taxidermied animals or visit the Renaissance Faire.

Meanwhile, Catherine’s dispassionate, cerebral recounting of her many humpings is fastidiously monotone. Almost every time I read a contemporary French author, I get the impression his or her soul is perpetually cloaked in glasses and a white lab coat. It’s no different with Ms. M. Whether she’s taking it from some random guy through a car window or servicing 30 men in an hour, she’s got all the placidity of a hand mirror held between a lady’s legs. Yeah, there’s a pussy involved, but there’s no reaction.

It’s exactly like another Catherine’s (Breillat) movies: nakedness abounds, you want to feel turned on, you feel turned on with a question mark because Rocco Siffredi revealed his big slab of meat but the sex is cold and abrupt; then you’re left feeling empty and untouchable like Camus’s L Étranger, and so eat ice cream straight out of the container, standing in your kitchen with a blank look on your face. I’m not saying Millet doesn’t have a personality. I’m saying she doesn’t have a personality while she’s having sex, and she admits as much.

Both women claim to have superb blowjob technique.

Speaking Of Bones: I have two big ones(!) to pick with Bentley. Firstly, she compares testicles to almonds. I don’t want to give anyone a complex, but I’m pretty sure that if your guy’s balls are the size of almonds, you’re either dating someone who needs immediate medical attention or you’re a pedophile. Secondly, she indulges in that arrogant, lecturing style of sex advice. You know, lots of imperatives related to technique, including “If you can’t gag for your man, how can you really love him?” Mercifully, this is brief, but I’m over it even in small quantities. Do men talk to other men this way about sex? Are articles in dude magazines exhorting their readers to “eat her until you’ve swallowed so much girl juice that you have to pass on dinner?” Or “spank her with sincerity and precision?” Or accusing, “if you won’t snowball your own ejaculate, you’re not serious about her happiness?”  (Ok, I admit I stole that last one from He’s Just Not That Into You, the movie.)

Makes Me Wanna Shoop: I tried reading The Sexual Life years ago, and went through the first hundred pages with an incensed crankiness over the downright anti-sexual rendering of Millet’s wild nights and days. My shy self could only dream of such debauchery and here she was, bored by it. Yet finally the sheer litany of ol’ in and out got to me, and I had to resort to masturbation. That didn’t happen with The Surrender. It’s not that Bentley’s sex isn’t inspiring; it is. But it’s described as so outrageously intense as to be nearly unattainable, or at the very least not attained with a simple Craigslist posting.  And dammit, sometimes a Craigslist post is all you have in you.

What About Getting Off?: Both women spend very little time writing about their orgasms, except to mention that they (orgasms) are entirely beside the point. The consensus seems to be that fucking of such profundity and variety and athleticism as theirs is beyond orgasms, maybe even insulted by orgasms. Millet mentions that one of her partners says she’ll someday find a man “who would know how to take me from the front and bring me to orgasm that way,” but she also says her anal sex was purely “a primitive method of contraception.” According to Bentley, “Only a fool would hold on to what she knows while being shown some land of release beyond orgasm.” What about getting off, you say? Grow up, plebian.

Well, Then, What About God?: Bentley writes “I came to know God experientially, from being fucked in the ass.“ Millet replies, “I can no longer really pretend that I believe in God. It’s highly possible that I lost this belief when I started having sexual relationships.” That pretty much sums it up.

Winner: I read a Tin House interview with Millet not too long ago, and she was likable and intelligent, so I mean this with no disrespect—but anyone can have sex with hundreds of men, especially if those men are French. Toni Bentley found true love and spiritual fulfillment through her fornication. In other words, there’s no contest.  (Full disclosure: she also admits to being a cat lover. That’s the equivalent of slipping me a large cash bribe. More promiscuous cat ladies, please! )

**

Next time when Sex Books Throwdown, former Hefner flame Izabella St. James challenges the Vivid Girls to determine who truly has the most XXX Sex Life.

Read “SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #1: Battle of the Blowjobs”

Read “SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #2: Porn Takes It on the Chin“

Related Posts:

• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #6: Thirsty Vaginas Meet
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #5: The Gurus of Gash
• SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #4: Bumpin’ Uglies with the Beautiful People

Once upon a time, in the early 90s, censorship of pornography was a hot topic, as was censorship of music thanks to Al Gore’s wife, Tippy. (If you don’t believe me, just google “Tippy Gore,” click on “did you mean Tipper Gore?” and see what comes up.) ACLU’s Nadine Strossen got fed up with that noise and wrote a book about why censorship sucks, but Andrea Dworkin saw that move coming in mutha-fuckin 1979, and so she wrote a book about why censorship is great. I know what you’re thinking: Censorship clearly IS great! And we don’t need written material to tell us that or anything else! But just hear Nadine out on this one.

Who Wants It More: Defending Pornography is dense with court cases, specific censorship incidents, and meticulously outlined arguments. In other words, it’s unfailingly logical. But when it comes to Pornography, lizard brain is king, and Dworkin is queen of emotional rhetoric. Nonstop, no-holds-barred, ballistic rhetoric: “Pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth.” Well, then. You have the floor, Ms. Strossen, you woman-hating, rape-loving sociopath!

Dworkin also analogizes porn production to slavery and the holocaust. Which makes me think I should start some sort of support group to coach people away from comparing anything to the holocaust that is not an actual, literal holocaust. (You’re invited, too, scary Planned Parenthood protesters.)

Uh-oh Moment: Strossen sometimes employs quotes from Jack Kammer, who identifies as a men’s right activist, and it’s not like I don’t think guys deserve rights, but I tend to think men already have rights, unless they’re men of a certain subset, like say illegal immigrant or gay or Gitmo detainee. Obviously men don’t have “the right “to abortion, or to childbirth, which is a big sticking point for some MRAs, but that’s sort-of like me trying to start a movement based on the fact that women don’t have “rights” to experience erections or the sensation of a scrotum sticking to our inner thighs on a hot day.

Anyway, Strossen follows this dude right down the path of “but women have all the power, because men want sex constantly and women only want sex sometimes!” line of reasoning, which is never going to do anyone any favors. And according to Jack, “An archetype of male erotica is the woman who participates enthusiastically in sex, who loves male sexuality, who need not be […] seduced. Erotica portraying such joyful, egalitarian sex—” woah, woah, woah, hold up, “egalitarian”?  I totally get why men would be into such a fantasy, and they’re entitled to it, but “egalitarian”? I mean, I have fantasies about Thom Yorke moving into my second bedroom and being my best friend and confessing he’s actually my biggest fan while we go to yoga class together, but I’m not under the delusion that getting whatever I want when I want it means equality.

Hottest Writing: Dworkin, hands down. She does her best to make every porn example ominous and horrific but bless her, sometime it’s just not possible. Some of what she describes is tame (two women masturbating together—!!!!!) or funny to the point of cuteness (“Rod says that George is more thrilling than the ‘shapely, desirable young cunts [that] thrilled my prick in the past.’”) or downright sexy if you’re of the right mind. Take for instance her rendering of a woman tied spread-eagle on a car hood as part of a pictorial called “Beaver Hunters.” According to Dworkin, “[the photograph will] evoke fear in the female observer unless she entirely dissociates herself from the photograph: refuses to see the bound person as a woman like herself.” Yeah, okay, except for women who are super into that sort-of thing and are therefore associating themselves with the photograph with all their mental might. Some kinky ladies would love to be beaver hunted. And those ladies might very well love this book.

Hidden Gem: Strossen tosses out this historical tidbit about Margaret Sanger’s 1912 article called “What Every Girl Should Know:” “Post officials were offended by […] her use of words such as ‘gonorrhea’ and ‘syphilis.’ Consequently, the newspaper’s next issue contained the following announcement: ‘What Every Girl Should Know: NOTHING!’ By order of the Post Office.” Bad. Ass. Man, I miss the days when the Post Office was all maverick and up in our faces like that. Now they just tell us to go fuck ourselves with the hour-long queues and broken stamp machines.

Good Point, Nadine: Although Dworkin relentlessly claims men primarily get off on causing women sexual suffering, Strossen cites a 1991 study that found the arousal level of men went down by 50% when they were under the impression that a woman was in pain, as opposed to their arousal during scenes where sex was pleasurable/consensual. And having been blessed to encounter many well-endowed men in my freewheeling past, I can say, that’s sometimes true! A lot of studs are paranoid about inflicting pain because their size has occasionally caused discomfort, and they’re consequently hypersensitive to any ambiguous noises. So sometimes, I’m like “[guttural sound]” and the guy is like, “ah! Am I hurting you?” and I’ll be like “just a little, it’s cool, that’s why big cocks are fun” but he’s getting a little soft like “my giant cock has a gentle soul!” and I’m like, “damn, my Monday night is ruined.” Why doesn’t that come up more often in First Amendment debates?!

Good Point, Andrea: “This is not a book about the First Amendment. By definition the First Amendment protects only those who can exercise the rights it protects. Pornography by definition—‘the graphic depiction of whores’—is trade in a class of persons who have been systematically denied the rights protected by the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.” Let me translate for you non-Dworkin scholars out there: Because the word “pornography,” in Greek, means “writing about whores,” and whores in ancient Greece were slaves, all women appearing in porn should be regarded as though they were enslaved, as they were in the ancient Greek system, and therefore have no free will and are incapable of “exercis[ing] their Constitutional rights.” Because contemporary jurisprudence has taught us to make laws based solely on etymology and not on practical circumstances. In other words, Ms. Dworkin, you’re hardcore crazy. Thanks for letting us know that right off the bat.

Winner: Tippy! She was and remains a party-pooper to pretty much everyone who loves pop music—really, TG? Madonna’s “Dress You Up” is “filthy”? Is it because of the line about satin sheets? That is kind-of skeezey.—but at least Nadine Strossen didn’t devote a whole book to dismantling her life’s work.

***

Next edition of SEX BOOK THROWDOWN: Toni Bentley’s anal escapades try to out-sex the orgy-riffic Sexual Life of Catherine M.

Read “SEX BOOK THROWDOWN #1: Battle of the Blowjobs“

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Masterclass: Blow-Jobs
vs.
Sex Tips for Straight Women From a Gay Man

One book is concise and British, complete with allegedly helpful pictures of female mouths on penises. The other, a chatty manual that uses phrases like “Mr. Softee” and “Mr. Stiffy.” On a regular basis.Yee-haw. Let’s learn some stuff about guys’ junk.

Looks: Masterclass is sleek and sexy, a petite hardcover that would be discreet were it not for the word “Blow-jobs” emblazoned on the spine. My version of Sex Tips is sleeved in plastic like it’s been booted out of some Midwestern library. Were I to be caught with one on my nightstand, I’d want it to be Masterclass. Both send the message that I’m clueless in bed, but at least Masterclass looks like I’m willing to spend money to get better. (Twenty-two dollars to be exact. Or about half of what it would have cost to pay someone else to give a blow job in my stead.)

How Smart They Think Their Readers Are: Barely literate, in the case of Masterclass. This is a book that delivers four different pictures on a woman giving a blow-job on her knees in order to illustrate the “on your knees” technique—including one that’s supposed to be an example of office sex in spite of the fact that the guy is wearing yellow board shorts and it’s taking place in a doorway to an outside stairwell.

Sex Tips knows we can read, but expects us to be surprised to learn of the old tying-a-cherry-stem-in-your-mouth trick. In other words, it’s for people who were totally flabbergasted by every topic ever addressed on “Sex and the City.”

Utilitarian Value: Trust a gay guy to understand exactly what women want. Throughout Sex Tips, we are regular reminded that oral talent with a penis equals “a Park Avenue penthouse,” “straight As in grad school,” or even “the Hope diamond.” Point me to the nearest billionaire; I’m gonna get myself an island.

Best Advice: Masterclass: “suck hard.” (The author goes on to say she’s pretty sure she herself invented this technique. I’m not joking.)

Sex Tips: “You really have to show respect and concentrate big time on what you’re doing. And he’ll know if you’re really being friends with Mr. Stiffy, or just being a phony.” I find it hard to believe that penises are savvy to the nuances of oral emotions when they’re so notoriously incapable of detecting vaginal orgasms, but if a gay guy says it, it must be true.  So stop faking your friendship with the Mr. Stiffies/Softees/Half-Hardees of the world, girls. They’re on to us!

Surprising Wisdom: According to Masterclass, “the mouth is the place where we instinctively want to put things we love.” Finally, we’ve solved the mystery of why some women are always exclaiming that they want to eat kittens and babies.

Speaking of solving mysteries, thanks to Sex Tips we now know “What is it about a blow job that makes it so prized? First of all, it feels great.” Full-on light bulb moment.

Why it’s worth the price: According to Sex Tips, “Gay men never swallow!!!” (emphasis and exclamation points added.) You can either take this to mean that all women everywhere are off the hook forever, or that particularly determined ladies finally have one reliable sexual weapon in the battle to turn hot gay guys straight.

Masterclass features very funny pictures, including one of a topless woman pouring urine-looking champagne down her beau’s Mr. Softee and into a glass, and another of her dragging one of those tricolored ice-cream truck popsicles over his balls, but the internet gives us that type of stuff for free. Twenty-two dollars could have bought me, like, eight vegan cupcakes, which is the world’s way of giving me a blowjob.

Head-scratcher: From Masterclass: “There are, however, probably only one or two methods that will produce the erection itself and in turn the orgasm (if that is your goal—remember, though, to make an omelette [British sic] you need to break a few eggs, but you don’t have to make an omlette with ‘em, do you?”)  Is she advocating ball busting here? Or eating eggs off a guy’s genitals once he’s bored with the popsicle and champagne tricks? I suspect all is revealed in Masterclass: Omlette-Making.

Winner: No one who reads either of these books!

Next week, Nadine Strossen and Andrea Dworkin face off over Pornography.

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“There’s something unique about being a member of the sex worker club, an instant camaraderie that bonds one to people who would otherwise be strangers, and this chemistry is something of which Sterry can’t get enough.”

You might be one of those people who doesn’t believe that sex workers are interesting. You may downright resent the cultural fascination with those who take money to titillate and masturbate strangers. Maybe you’re convinced that the only thing these men and women have going for them are passable looks and a wildly miscalibrated moral compass, and that paying attention to their déclassé life of the body glamorizes underachieving and turpitude.

If you belong to this camp, you probably don’t actually know any sex workers—at least none who would come out to you, and why would they? You’ve made up your mind about them already. You say things like: “Stripping is 1) a way to make a lot more cash than other “unskilled” service jobs [and] 2) incredibly degrading,” then add, “I’ve never been a stripper and I don’t know any strippers.” Never, for that matter, will you actually ever know anything about strippers, because they aren’t going to talk to you. Sex workers just don’t feel comfortable around you.

But many do feel comfortable with David Henry Sterry, a former gigolo best known for his memoir Chicken, and what they share with him should convince even the grouchiest non-believers that sex workers are an engaging, unusual tribe. In Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys, Sterry and co-editor R.J. Martin have assembled an array of poems, interviews, and essays in a professed attempt to humanize sex workers. The mission is an admirable one, but raises the question of how many individuals who don’t already believe in sex workers’ humanity are going to pick up this hefty anthology.

It also masks the true motivating energy behind the collection, which is Sterry’s exuberant love of his fellow pros and his desire to celebrate their histories and personalities. There’s something unique about being a member of the sex worker club, an instant camaraderie that bonds one to people who would otherwise be strangers, and this chemistry is something of which Sterry can’t get enough. He refers frequently to this sense of kinship and stresses the uncommonness of his access to such candid and diverse workers. (This bragging about connections ultimately seems a little silly, given that many of the book’s contributors are well-established go-to writers like Audacia Ray, Annie Sprinkle, and Xaviera Hollander.)

Sterry’s enthusiasm also manifests as frequent, ill-advised introductions to pieces written by individuals whom he personally knows. As he details first meetings with contributors such as Surgeon and mochaluv, the focus is directed on himself rather than the person he’s touting, and it creates the impression that the writing itself isn’t good enough to hold one’s attention—that without knowing how beautiful Lorelei Lee or Carla Crandall or April Daisy White are, we won’t care about their essays.

We do care, though, because in addition to being porn stars and prostitutes, many of these people are talented writers with strong voices and precise observations. They’re natural born storytellers who manage to encapsulate an aspect of their experiences in wonderfully succinct (Sebastian Horsley: “Brothels make possible encounters of extreme intimacy without the intervention of personality.”) and stark, unsentimental ways (Brenda: “I have been arrested eight times for prostitution. It messed up my life.”)

Among the most effective pieces is Melissa Petro’s “Mariposa,” an essay on her time spent in Mexico as a white American stripper, an unforgettable script-flip of the highest order (our girls go there to make money?)  Candye Kane reminisces about her sweet and genuine childhood friendship with an exotic dancer, while Sadie Lune explores the decadent excitement that comes from self-consciously inhabiting the role of an archetypal whore. Sterry himself reflects on his session with an 82-year-old woman, an encounter he initially dreads but eventually delights in: “I am making this happen. I have such a sense of joy and satisfaction.”

The standout offering, however, is Juliana Piccillo’s “Vice,” an exploration of her relationship with an invasive and needy client that rendered her alternately gratified and repulsed. Piccillo relentlessly mines the conflicting emotions that come with clients who want to play the white knight, a common but relatively undiscussed topic in most sex worker literature. “His fatherly concern co-existed with his hard-on,” she writes. “He left me to reconcile this.” She also admits to coming unintentionally (and practically unwillingly) while working in a job that generally disgusts her, and not wanting to leave in spite of hating the routine—paradoxes that many prostitutes shy away from acknowledging.

Some of these essays barely even explicitly address sex work, particularly those culled from SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation) workshops. The focus is instead on struggles with addiction, particularly clear and affecting memories, and current personal relationships. The inclusion of these selections may be the book’s greatest, albeit most subtle triumph. It serves as an invaluable reminder that hos and rent boys aren’t as prone to filtering their complex lives through the sieve of clients’ orgasms as are the civilians who debate about and condemn them.

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Seymour’s biggest strength lies in his crisp turns of phrase and the self-deprecating wit for which so many urban gay men are celebrated. (He describes his first strip club as sounding like “a gospel diva trapped in a washing machine” and smelling “like Clorox and crotch.”) He’s adept at integrating DC’s gay history into his own story without switching into a stiff educational voice, no mean feat given his extensive background in academia both as a student and a teacher.

Yet it may be at attempt to overcompensate for this academic past that leads to the creation of a style at times overly conversational and avoidant of substantive moments. Lily Burana’s memoir, Strip City, was eminently readable, full of rich details and good dialogue, yet anchored by honest meditations on the ways her strip work affected her boyfriend, her family, and herself. Seymour glosses over his breakup with his long time boyfriend and never discusses coming out to his parents as a stripper or gay man. (Maybe he waited for the book to do both for him?) His determination to keep the work light hearted sometimes makes it glib. He reports without much reflection.

Inadvertently, however, he provides some insight into how differently male and female sex workers are regarded in the public eye, and therefore, how they regard themselves. Since our society expects a man to be sexually resilient, there’s no indication here that any of the dancers believe they’re irrevocably harming their bodies, reputations, or souls by getting naked in front of strangers. Although one customer delivers a nasty spiel about male dancers coming from “broken homes”, Seymour encounters more discrimination due to his race than to pathologizing of male sex workers. Nor is there any evidence of public crusades to “save” the dancers by placing them in other jobs.

The book’s ending disintegrates into anecdotes about meeting Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey on behalf of Vibe and The Washington Post, the inclusion of which is justified by relating his interview habits to the skills he acquired while conversing with club customers. While this is an entirely plausible circumstance, it doesn’t need to be reiterated as many times as it is. These run-ins with celebrities obviously meant a lot to Seymour, but they lack the energy of the earlier chapters on stripping. Strangely enough, his entrance into the “straight” workplace as a journalist causes him to lose the candor that makes him a compelling narrator, and he begins to sound insincere and forced, like he’s catering to the conventions of made-for-TV movie: “Just a little more than a year before, I was selling dick feels for a buck. What made me think I could be a big-time cover story writer?”

Ultimately, All I Could Bare is laudable for its humor and honesty about a scene that, sadly, no longer exists. (At least not in DC.) Although Seymour, like all human beings, still struggles with what his past means, he manages to come to something of a conclusion about his confusion: “The very idea of what a stripper is exists only in our minds. It’s a fantasy. That’s the point”

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The Rumpus: In The Female Thing, you wrote about the development of femininity as a tool to help women on an uneven playing field. With that understanding in mind, I was wondering what you thought of “metrosexuality” or men playing with traditionally feminine behaviors?

Laura Kipnis: When I was writing the book, I was thinking about the ways that men are becoming more vulnerable in terms of bodily anxieties, which is more comparable to the female position. You see far more articles on male grooming these days, now men have to tweeze their eyebrows too; there’s far more self-consciousness about their bodies than in the past. You can look at it positively and say it’s gender play—there’s more flexibility around gender roles; or you could look at it negatively and say it’s just a redistribution of bodily vulnerability more equally between the genders and that’s actually what metrosexuality reflects.

Rumpus: You’ve talked about capitalism creating more vulnerability in men in a variety of ways. Not just in lower wages but in men getting plastic surgery or using tanning beds

Kipnis: Obviously men are doing these things to increase their attractiveness in various markets, whether it’s the job market, where youth is a plus or the dating market where looks are a plus. But the point is that there’s an increasing commodification of bodies generally. It started with the female body as a profitable territory to exploit, now men’s bodies are becoming an equally profitable territory to exploit. But the fact is that everyone’s perpetually on one sort of market or another, both women and men.

Rumpus: Which comes to the question of just how valuable “equality” is if no one’s life is really being improved.

Kipnis: Exactly! Everyone’s trying to improve themselves but nobody’s actually achieving greater freedom, which was what feminism was supposed to be about. I admit there’s a mean side of me that’s a little happy that men are feeling more vulnerable, since traditionally it’s the female body that’s been the more vulnerable site, but feeling vulnerable isn’t the best thing in the world for anyone really. The point I was trying to make (in the book) is that feminism was initially meant to be about enhancing people’s freedom, as opposed to just spreading the misery around more equitably.

Rumpus: There’s a new tagline for feminism: “spreading around the misery since….”

Kipnis: I’m going to make a note of that. Maybe I can use that somewhere.

Rumpus: In The Female Thing you also looked at male on male prison rape and the ways in which rape victimization is not the exclusive domain of women, even though some feminists seem to have an interest in positing it that way. But in my generation, I see more young feminists and more young women taking an interest in prisoner rights and addressing prison rape. I’m wondered if you had any thoughts on why men seem absent in discussions of rape, even when a man is the victim.

Kipnis: I think the way men aren’t absent is in the sphere of joke-making. I was just thinking about this recently, about this endless preponderance of jokes about what happens to men in prison. Though when I was reading about prison rape activism I found there actually were a lot of former (male) prisoners who had initiated the discussion about what was going on behind bars, so I do think some of the activism is coming from men, though they may not intersect much with the feminist anti-rape movement. So I’m not sure if the premise of the question is true. Is it just your impression?

Rumpus: It’s definitely an impression, not anything I’ve quantified. I just feel that, for most women, rape is something they can talk about fairly readily; it’s something they could condemn or discuss publically in a serious way. And given the prevalence of male on male rape in prison, I’d think men would be more interested in stopping it…but I suppose it’s just that most men think “well, I’m not incarcerated, so I’m not affected.”

Kipnis: If you’re a man and you manage to stay out of prison, your exposure to rape is far less than women’s exposure to rape, so I think that’s definitely an element. The other is the orifice issue. This is impressionistic but I think there still is, despite the greater social acceptance of homosexuality, a certain cringe-factor for a lot of men around the question: “would you like to have sex with another man”, particularly “would you want to be fucked in the ass?” I think there’s a large percentage of men for whom that’s just a verboten thought, no matter how sexually enlightened they consider themselves to be. Whether it means there’s some sort of buried attraction to it or not, I don’t know—we can always speculate! But in my experience, a good number of straight men cringe and shudder at the idea of anal penetration.

Rumpus: I read that your next book will be on American scandals.

Kipnis: Yes. It’s called How To Become a Scandal, coming out next year from Metropolitan.

Rumpus: Do you think there’s less of an appetite for scandal now that the economy seems to be consuming everyone’s attention? Would this be an era in which a married governor has a secret boyfriend and the American public for once would say “oh, ok, we’re not interested”?

Kipnis: Well, he did have to resign.

Rumpus: Oh I know. I meant right now.

Kipnis: Oh I see. Well, it’s hard to say—no one really knows what the cultural effects of the economic downturn are going to be. It also depends on how you’re defining scandal and part of what I’m doing in the book is trying to redefine it, or at least clarify what it is. What mostly interests me about scandal is the element of people scattering unconsciousness around in public, and other people punishing them for it. You do have the gossip-level of scandal—Hollywood divorces and the which-starlet-had-a-nose-job items on TMZ—but I’m far more interested in a deeper level of scandal: self-destruction and self-organized downfall. People really wrecking their lives while the rest of us watch and gloat about it. I’m not sure that people’s interest in that is going to abate.

Obviously self-destruction isn’t a trivial thing, It’s a concern for everyone with an unconscious. The underlying question is how people do or don’t reconcile themselves to the reality principle and adhere to the social rules and not completely screw up their lives through some unknown self-destructive element within themselves?

Rumpus: So then would the Madoff story and these finance-based scandals fit within your definition, or are they a separate entity that relates to lawbreaking?

Kipnis: One thing to remember is that scandal isn’t simply law breaking. There’s a lot of law breaking that isn’t scandalous, and there are also scandals that don’t break laws but simply defy community standards—adultery scandals for instance. Someone like Madoff does both: he broke laws but he also defies our idea of what it is to be a proper person. People are really scandalized by Madoff, less because of the laws he broke than because of the inhuman betrayal of trust and leading a double life and so on.

There still are all sorts of unanswerable questions about who he was, how he could have done it, and what he was thinking while he was doing it. How could he have convinced people he was an honorable guy and what form of self-knowledge did he have about his duplicity? The interesting question to me is whether people actually do know what they’re doing when they’re in the midst of doing some irrevocably life-destroying thing. Or is consciousness fundamentally split, such that you can, at some level, be entirely ignorant of your own actions?

Rumpus: So it seems that your position in the book is that our penchant for scandal, when it’s beyond what actress is pregnant by what actor, is legitimate. That it’s not just lowbrow and petty.

Kipnis: I think it’s far from that. I think it’s about classic dilemmas of rationality and irrationality, about self-knowledge and the lack of it. And the consequences of having an unconscious.

Rumpus: Do you think the public should be privy to private information about public figures or is it more that we have a right to be critical of and thoughtful about public behavior?

Kipnis: I try not to make a lot of “should” recommendations in my books, I think I tend to examine things from a bit of a distance without taking policy positions. I would just say the lines have radically shifted about the public/private divide. There’s definitely more of a demand for transparency and in holding people’s private conduct to their public statements; for example, outing a closeted gay congressman who voted against gay rights.

But the really interesting thing to note here is the corresponding economic shifts, and the demand to expose of what was considered private to public scrutiny in the realm of the economic. In what’s been called the digital economy, people are encouraged to voluntarily give up all sorts of private data about themselves and their preferences which is a highly marketable commodity. Then you have all these new cultural forms springing up at the same time in which people also voluntarily give up their privacy: from blogging to Facebook pages to putting up webcams in your bathroom and so on. So people are volunteering all this information about themselves and giving up their privacy in the cultural sphere at the very same time the economy is demanding it of them. Then on the political side you have an increasing abridgement of privacy with the Homeland Security act and other forms of heightened government surveillance. So we see, at this moment, all those levels aligning: the economic, the cultural, the political. That’s how I would think about it rather than focusing on say, whether movie stars should have a right to privacy from gossip magazines.

Rumpus: I thought it was interesting that you’re writing about public disclosure because around the time of The Female Thing, you were getting criticism about the book on the grounds that some people felt you weren’t sharing enough personal examples or…a non-issue that became a big issue, which was bizarre.

Kipnis: That has been on my mind, In the writing of this new book, I’ve been kind of playing around with self-exposure: there’s more first person in it than in other things I’ve written, and though it’s all a bit ironic, but it still has me thinking about privacy questions, and what I want to expose about myself or withhold. I got criticized a lot in Against Love for not giving people advice—people did seem to want to read it as a self-help book. One criticism of The Female Thing was also about it not providing enough answers, not addressing the “What do we do now” question. So it amused me to call the book How To Become A Scandal—it’s a self-help aisle kind of title, but an entirely perverse and useless form of self-help. No one actually wants to become a scandal, presumably.

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