Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

As for the benefits of better sex, Betty Dodson reports that after attending one of her lectures on the vulva a woman asked for a raise at work “—and got it!” (Dodson attributes the woman’s enhanced self-esteem to becoming “cunt positive.”) And a raise at work is small potatoes compared to these authors’ promises, expressed and implied, for the sexually liberated society as a whole. We can look forward to the disappearance of “prejudice and bigotry, heartache and misery, loneliness and violence”; the obsolescence of guns and missiles; the release of “the spirit of creativity” and the renewal of “the joy of living.” Here is Dodson’s “futuristic fantasy” of liberation:

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1999. All the television networks have agreed to let me produce “Orgasms Across America.” Every TV screen will be showing high-tech, fine-art porn created by the best talent this country has to offer. At the stroke of midnight, the entire population will be masturbating to orgasm for World Peace.

It was Mao’s nasty inspiration that for a revolution truly to succeed it must never stop, and our own culture’s version of nonstop revolution is collected and distilled in pop-sex books: a ceaseless propaganda of self-congratulation wedded to a ceaseless invocation of the still-powerful Enemy. If victory in the Sexual Revolution should ever be declared, people might no longer seek instruction and guidance from commercial sources. Consequently, our experts fill their books with reminders of how much better off we all are than our grandparents. They laud the science of Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson; they gleefully puncture the myth of the Freudian “mature” vaginal orgasm; they ridicule, under such banners as “The Annals of Ignorance,” the hopeless stupidity of human beings a century ago. But the running dogs of sexual repression still hunt in packs outside our doors. One author blames “narrow, paternalistic 19508-style family values” and our “sex-negative, genital-shaming upbringing,” while another blames “traditional marriage” and “anti-porn activists who are intent on preserving their romantic illusions.” Absolutely everyone blames religion. To hear the experts tell it, we live in a sexually repressed nation, under the dark thrall of Catholicism, fundamentalism, and ignorance.

I wonder what planet these experts are on. They seem blind to the way today’s fifteen-year-olds act and dress, oblivious to the atmosphere of sexual license of which they themselves are the direct beneficiaries, and wholly ignorant of the large body of recent scholarship, by Peter Gay and others, that has revealed beneath the veneer of Victorian “repression” a universe of sexual experience as richly ramified as our own. There doubtless still exist a few American teenagers who choose to give greater weight in their lives to religious scruples than to pop culture. But who is Dr. Susan Block to tell these kids they’ve chosen badly? As for the overwhelming majority of young people who pay more attention to Baywatch than to the Bible, they are indeed lucky to live in a time when it’s common knowledge, for example, that women have orgasms and that few, if any of them, are vaginal. It’s worth pointing out, though, that what made this knowledge common was the growing power of women, rather than the other way around.

However manfully I resist nostalgia, Victorian silences appeal to me. Dr. Block, in an uncharacteristic fit of wisdom, observes, “The irony of creating a taboo is that, once something is forbidden, it often becomes very interesting.” Sex in a time of ostensible repression at least had the benefit of carving out a space of privacy. Lovers defined themselves in opposition to the official culture, which had the effect of making every discovery personal . There’s something profoundly boring about the vision that is promulgated, if only as an ideal, by today’s experts: a long life of vigorous, nonstop, “fulfilling” sex, and the identical story in every household. Although it pains me to remember how innocent I was in my early twenties, I have no desire to rewrite my life. To do so would eliminate those moments of discovery when whole vistas of experience opened out of nowhere, moments when I thought, So this is what’s it’s like. Just as every generation needs to feel that it has invented sex—“Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me)” was Philip Larkin’s imperfectly ironic lament — we all deserve our own dry spells and our own revolutions. They’re what make our lives good stories.

Unfortunately, stories like these are easily lost amid the slick certitudes of our media culture: that a heavy enough barrage of information produces enlightenment, and that incessant communication produces communities. Susie Bright and Susan Block and Dr. Ruth are loud and cable-ready. You can turn them on, but you can’t turn them off. They yammer on about the frenulum, the perineum, the G-spot, the squeeze technique, bonobo chimpanzees and vibrators, teddies and garter belts, “eargasms” and “toegasms.” Their work creates the bumbling amateur. Their discovery of sexual “technique” creates a population bereft of technique. The popular culture they belong to thus resembles an MTV beach party. From the outside, the party looks like fun, but for passive viewers its most salient feature is that they haven’t been invited to it. “Are some people having multiple orgasms. . electrifying oral experiences, incredible and emotionally intense love-making sessions that last for hours?” Susan Bakos asks the reader. “Unbelievable as it may sound — yes. Why not you?” A lonely reader could be forgiven for replying: Because there’s a television in my bedroom.

THE TERM “PARAPHILIA” connotes perversion, something unhealthy. But, while there’s little doubt that our culture promotes a paraphiliac displacement from the genital to the verbal, this displacement is not intrinsically diseased. The reason that reading a sex book can assuage loneliness (at least momentarily) is that sex for human beings is easily as much imaginative as it is biological. When we make love, we forever have in our heads an image of ourselves making love. And, although substituting a hot text for a warm body may be nothing but a way of tricking our genitals, what’s remarkable is that the trick so often works. When I was fourteen I canvassed and recanvassed my Webster’s Collegiate for words like “intercourse.” Scouring Ann Landers Talks to Teenagers About Sex for the dirty bits, I was excited to learn that the mere sight of a “girl in a tight sweater” is sufficient to arouse a teenage boy.

For the person who seeks such written thrills but lacks the resources to compile his own supply of frisson-inducing texts, there now exists The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers , a kind of para-paraphiliac volume, by the novelist Elizabeth Benedict. This new Joy consists mainly of sex scenes excerpted from the work of contemporary fiction writers and framed by Benedict’s own chirpy, sanitizing glosses. Whatever subversive thrills Portnoy’s Complaint might provide are unlikely to survive an analysis like this: “Roth manages to turn the cliché of the teenage boy’s first visit to a whore into a rich, sidesplittingly funny scene that leads us back again to the themes of the novel, the struggle between being a good Jew and a good Jewish son and being as naughty as your libido begs you to be.” Benedict confides that a big attraction of writing the manual was that she could “read sexy books and think for long periods of nothing but sex.” That she considers this an enviable circumstance may explain the deep kinship — the quite striking parallels — between her product and the products of pop-sex authors. Its price sticker is its destiny.