Well, yes according to an article by Katie Roiphe in the January 3rd issue of the NYTBR.
Her claim is that hetereosexual male authors who deal with sex explicitly are now attacked.
She cites seeing a copy of a Philip Roth novel tossed into the subway tracks by an irate female reader.
Years ago, male writers were cheered for dealing with sex explicitly. Now they are hammered.
What do you think? Has the way we, and especially male writers, talk about sex changed? Do you need to handle sex with kid gloves? Have we demasculated sex for male writers? I'm just asking-no judgments here.
37 comments:
Well, I think that writers, particularly male writers, have to tred very carefully around the area of sex where the male shows dominant characteristics. That's just my impression. Our society in general seems to have gotten more "sensitive" to a lot of issues.
I wonder about which of Roth's novels went into the train's path. (Portnoy's Complaint comes to mind.)
I'm thinking yes. For example, I watched "Young Frankenstein" in one of my classes and was kind of surprised by the sexual innuendo (okay, some of it wasn't even innuendo.) I honestly think that movie would be R rated, rather than PG-13 for the "sexual content" if released today rather than 40 years ago.
On the flip side, violence is all good.
Sex is one of the big issues that people seem to be very leery of right now. IMHO.
Yes, sex trumps violence for sure. Portnoy was probably his most explicit. Now the problems of old age seem to overwhelm sex.
I wonder if genre fiction allows more latitiude than straight literary fiction. Crime fiction readers expect murder and mayhem, expect savages to run amongst us.
1) Roiphe is, at best, a bit of a reactionary about such things.
2) Roth is not known for particularly well-balanced portraits of women. I suspect that any of his later books at least as much as PORTNOY (or GOODBYE COLUMBUS) might've annoyed a woman reader in the right mood, but I'd like some eyewitness accounts to the littering. Sounds like an Awvully Convenient Metaphor for Roiphe.
3) No. Male writers are not being particularly strongly attacked any more, or even as much, as female writers have been. There are always prudes and scolds of various sorts, and some of them work for the rather bad NYTBR...note the off-the-wall insults hurled at Katha Pollitt for LEARNING TO DRIVE there by the likes of Ana Marie Cox (easy joke potential) and Toni Bentley (easy joke anyway). There is more sexual expression than ever previously, with less actual oppression or suppression, but thank goodness there's the Anti-"Feminazi" squad to "save" us...with their useful idiot "adversaries" among the prudish feminists to be trumpeted about, as if the latter were the only feminists. Of Course they are, that makes it all so simple, doesn't it.
Yes, this country has usually been more permissive with portrayals of violence than sex. That's how you get the warrior spirit flowing. It is a country whose foundation was in colonies sparked a mixture of perscuted religious zealotry and crass commercial exploitation, neither of which are nearly as conducive to sexual release as to a closed fist.
Yes.
The quotes from the essay from writers like Dave Eggars, David Foster Wallace, Benjamin Kunkel and even Jonathan Franzen are kind of shocking. "The artificial hopefulness of sex." Really? Artificial?
I admit I don't like a lot of these writers because I find their books too often clever without saying anything. Leaving out the sexual relationship between the characters seems like a big gap in literature.
I agree with you, John. These are not my favorite writers whereas writers of an earlier era seemed to be more "transparant" as the current catchphrase goes. There are male writers with plenty to say like O'Nan, Cronin, Chaon. They may be more careful about sexual encounters though. It certainly doesn't seem to have the cache it once had.
Indeed, the writers she cites, with the possible exception of Chabon (and his strengths frankly lie elsewhere) are among the most flashily shallow, however much rewarded they are for that, and as she doesn't quite own up to, the older generation had different pressures and blithe assumptions to fight, and continue to, than do the younger writers.
So, this:
What comes to mind is Franzen’s description of one of his female characters in “The Corrections”: “Denise at 32 was still beautiful.” To the esteemed ladies of the movement I would suggest this is not how our great male novelists would write in the feminist utopia.
--No kidding. Also, no surprise.
We can't pretend that any essayist doesn't select her evidence, but that doesn't mean that the selected evidence is particularly persuasive in any given case.
No, she definitely chooses male writers who write in a particular way-post-modern perhaps. Rather than the scores of men who are interested in something more than proving their cleverness-as John points out.
Seduction has always been more interesting than the plumbing.
Very true, Richard. That closing bedroom door was a real turn-on once I figured out what it meant. I think I was about seventeen though.
Lots of pomo writers with libidos.
Among them, Nicholson Baker, William Harrison (at least arguably, although he like Robert Coover is older and Coover is certainly nearly as miogynist at times as Mailer consistently was), Jonathan Lethem, et al.
Really, the older gen were trying to make it possible to talk about sex openly at mid-century, without as much masked language as the O'Haras and even the Farrells had to use. The newer folks don't have that hurdle...instead might well describe what they wrestle with. Most of us know that sexual drives and desires are primitive, and what that means for us is still a question, after all, no matter what we want them to be or not be.
I think I am not reading a lot of these writers-Lethem, Baker, Coover. I find them very difficult to penetrate-excuse the word usage there. So I may miss the way they describe sex. I look for very straight forward writing-which is why I read mostly crime and female writers who don't seem quite as given to obfuscation as a writing technique. IMHO.
Well...at times it's richer language, at times it's playful. At times simply self-indulgent (also pardon that in this context, though it's apropos!) (amd never more than Mailer, in every sense). Harrison, btw, is Very plainspoken, and recommended.
Really, though, the NYTBR seemingly has a real and continuing problem with feminist viewpoints. And lets the likes of William Vollmann drool (or spill other fluids) across its pages with enthusiasm, as recently.
I can strongly recommend Pollitt's LEARNING TO DRIVE if you haven't read that essay collection, as well. Relevant here in several senses.
I'll check out Harrison. The name is completely new to me. Have read Jim Harrison though.
I agree with Todd that the “disgusted woman throws book onto subway tracks in reaction to sex scene” sounds like something that Riophe thought would make good copy, not something that actually happened (and happened, conveniently, when Riophe was there to observe it). On the other hand, I do think some of the male writers who were publishing during the 1960s and 70s tended to write sex scene that were very much wish fulfillment—gorgeous women who were sophisticated, sexually available, and fell headfirst in love/lust and into bed with the protagonist (yes, John D. McDonald/Travis McGee, I’m looking at you). I suspect most women have metaphorically thrown a book on the tracks when they encounter that sort of sex scene. I don’t find those sort of scenes so prevalent in books published in the last couple of decades. I'm sure there's a number of reasons (cultural, social, political, medical) for that. I'll leave it to the sociologists to sort that one out.
Speaking personally, I find that very detailed, graphic scenes take away from what is going on elsewhere in the book; everything stops for some time while the characters are getting it on. I prefer the literary equivalent of the old movie trope where the couples kiss and the camera pans to a shot of a roaring fire or raindrops on the window. We’re all adults, we all know what happens next.
We’re all adults, we all know what happens next.
I guess that's my issue with all this. Do we always know what happens next? Is it always the same and always the way we imagine it?
We could say that about anything that happens in a book, couldn't we?
An interesting question. If the sex scene is necessary, then we must have it. If it shows us something about the characters and their relationship. Why what happens happens--if their sexuality is driving the plot. But if it's there just to be there, it's different. Though that seemed to happen more in movies in the seventies than novels of today. At least in the ones I read.
Well, John, I suppose, if something happens that is an important plot point during the sex scene, then, yes, there's a reason for including the details, but I've read very few books where some pivotal aspect of the plot was communicated between the sheets, as it were.
Sex in America today is being completely redefined. Political correctness, Viagra, same-sex marriage, etc. are changing the rules. For those of us used to the "old rules" this upheaval is confusing and frustrating.
Americans in general are puritanical about sex and especially uncomfortable about portrayals of it. It's telling that for mainstream writers, there's still a fear, hence the anonymity of most of the writers in In Bed With and the perception that "women don't like explicit images" which persists because most men are uncomfortable with male nudity for women.
Re: Roiphe what Todd said, times 10. She's made a career of pooh-poohing feminists and still somehow gets referred to as a "feminist".
I happen to hang out with a bunch of erotic fiction writers [okay, I'm one of them under a poorly disguised pseudonym at least until granted tenure] and the market is healthy and expanding, particularly so with the advent of digital books. Even Harlequin/Mills & Boon has expanded to explicit because that's what readers want (and no, they're not all women).
As usual claims about the broad world of fiction writing made by people who only read the MFA genre have little to do with reality.
And as for young people being squeamish -- only around older people. They think you don't know that they think about sex!
Okay, one final comment: yes, sex scenes do develop character. If they're just mechanical few people would read them. We reveal as much when we have sex as we do when we have lunch -- often more. It's a ridiculous notion that "we all know what happens" when the bedroom door closes. Why do you think mags like True Confessions etc were such big hits when the door was more firmly shut? Other people are interesting: sex is just part of life and an important part for many people. Why pretend it's without mystery and revelations? Or that refusal to look at it is anything but a discomfort with the act.
Again, K.A., perhaps it's just me, but I've read very few books where the sex scenes communicated something pivotal about the characters or about the plot. I think when fiction is specifically marketed as "erotica," we're discussing something entirely different because in that case: (1) the sex scene is integral to the work, and (2) the work is being read with the expectation of sex scenes.
I guess I'm just going to have to wear my Queen Victoria hat (tiara?) for the remainder of this thread.
The other day, I read Dorothy Canfield's short story "Sex Education" (THE YALE REVIEW, Winter 1946)...its point, George, that sex is constantly being redefined by society and by each of us as we age. And that story was well before The Pill, "Second Wave" feminism, or even THE NAKED AND THE DEAD.
Roiphe isn't even sticking with the MFA candidates in her essay, so much as the cocktail-party chatter gang. Yawn.
I doubt that sex was exactly easy at any time, since as Deb points out essentially no one falls into Meaningful Coupling the way Travis McGee (or Richard Brautigan characters) did, and that was always just part of the escapist or humorous fun aspect of that fiction, and as John and Kate note, no one's sex is really necessarily congruent with anyone else's.
Hence all the frustrations and frantic joy at sometimes overcoming (koff) those frustrations that all these writers, good and bad and middling, have dealt with. To say nothing of all of us in life.
Deb--well, ULYSSES, LADY CHATTERLY, MADAME BOVARY. Less obviously, Updike's COUPLES (mentioned by Roiphe), the short fiction of John Varley (unlikely to be known to Roiphe), Joanna Russ's fiction (including such work as ON STRIKE AGAINST GOD), at least some of Margaret Atwood's. None marketed as erotica, except CHATTERLY and BOVARY at times, and COUPLES barely so.
Obviously it is an ideological rather than aesthetical issue. As someone who thinks the author is king in his castle I think the decision to "do" sex or not is up to him/her and him/her alone.
Regarding sex as developing character, one can't help but notice that great authors from the past managed to create well-developed characters despite not being able (or willing) to enter the bedroom.
Yes, these are certainly author choices. And, as that cliche goes, not making a choice is making a choice.
I think Nicholson Baker was mentioned and both his Vox and The Fermata use sex, and sexual desires, as a way to develop the characters. Good books, I think.
One thing I'm not seeing here is that all writers who wish to make money from their writing have to write for the market, the editors and what will be likely to sell, regardless of their personal writing standards. So if at a particular time sex was going to be part of a book, the way it was handled had to appeal, in the mind of the writer and editor, to the market.
In this day, when there's more (sometimes barely) implied sex on television that there was 50 years ago in most books, authors can do pretty much whatever they want, which means some will forget that all facets of a relationship express should be relevant to the story being told.
My computer is being wiped. Or that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. This is my secretary's so I am off till tonight. Carry on as you are.
"woman throws book on tracks because of sex scene" sounds like an onion headline. I am a big fan of the leave something to the imagination school of not only sex but of horror as well.
There is a certain segment of the reading population (mostly female) who I am sure get upset at white men writing about sex from a white male point of view, but I have to think ask if you don't like white male writers why are you reading them?
I think it also has to do with where, when and how you grew up.
Hope your computer problems are soon solved and you're back, fast, smooth and happy.
If you want to grasp where literary sex has vanished to, read the reviews and reader comment about Larry McMurtry's 2008 novel, When the Light Goes. It marks the end of sex in modern fiction, and good riddance. There are more absorbing and momentous things to write about.
My gut instinct is we are supposed to be metrosexual now as we write. Well scented, manicured, nicely attired and nigh on feminine in our written view towards sex.
I will forgo that type of sexuality if I ever write a scene involving sex again.
My guess is that there has become a politically correct way to write about sex that makes the writing cardboard.
No matter what you write, some will like it and some may hate it.
I prefer honest writers to politically correct ones, though honest ones may be less published.
And I think you are right. Men writers may face this problem more than women.
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