Bonobos, baby talk, and bullshit: one perspective on the usefulness of sex writing

While on the subject of fiction writers who have briefly alighted on sex culture, I found “The Corrections” author Jonathan Franzen’s 1997 article “Books In Bed” (included in his essay collection “How To Be Alone”) in which he says of every person who attempts to give book-based sexual instruction, “Their work creates the bumbling amateur.”

Reading a book of expert sexual instruction must rank near the bottom on the scale of erotic pastimes – somewhere below peeling an orange, not far above flossing. One problem is that, although the intention is precisely the opposite, these books collectively and individually make the world of sex seem very small. Never mind that there are only so many ways to fit body parts together or that Alex Comfort has already said and said well, in works that have sold better than eight million copies, pretty much all there is to say about it. There seems, in general, to be far too little lore to go around. Author after author derives the etymology of “cunnilingus,” stresses the importance of doing “kegel” exercises to strengthen the pubococcygeal muscles, and quotes Shakespeare on the topic of alcohol. (“It provokes the desire, but takes away the performance.”) Author after author insists that men are “visual creatures” and that the size of a penis matters less than what its owner does with it. When the lore runs out, the advice turns bleakly otiose. Dr. Susan Block commands lovers: “Use babytalk, or at least ‘pet names.'”

Reading something like this, in the business that I am in, and knowing the people that I know, I feel at first a little protective of the friends of mine who have detailed in print the origin of the word “cunnilingus.” And I also raise my eyebrows at someone who is unfamiliar enough with the term to place the word kegel in quotes. But this might also be because each piece of work I’ve encountered by Jonathan Franzen has coincided with an awful time in my own life while reading it, to the point that I think that Jonathan Franzen is in league with enemies I’ve not yet met.

But also, thinking of a wider group of people, I know that it is true that one way to justify one’s time somewhere is to write a book about the experience (or do a reality show), no matter how ultimately useless those things can be.

It was Mao’s nasty inspiration that for a revolution to truly succeed it must never stop, and our own culture’s collection 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

i.e. Repression in All Forms.

(Return to this site periodically for up to the minute commentaries on late-90’s literature.)

Previously: David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
See also: Jonathan Franzen