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Thursday, September 6, 2007

No, Really, We Internet People Fuck Better When You Think Of Us

filed under: Erotic Elite by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

(Hello, Nerve readers. I hope you enjoyed the only bit of sex advice I’ve ever given on the internet. Now I don’t usually do that. Or this, either. For you, just for today, an excerpt from my own journal.)

Triumphant, triumphant, joyous, raucous sex. Some virtue in it, to accept that the people who touch our core in sex are not always the ones to shack up with, the ones we love. But there is an enduring rapture: I adore fucking, fucking him, love how we fuck, love that he tells me that he loves how we fuck.

“You have a book here,” he says.

I’m fuck-drunk on this, this joy, this coming Fall. Fucked on possibility. Drunk on the moment. On the sort of pleasure that is all encompassing, that can exceed even one’s own capacity for pleasure, in a moment — can show you what you could be.

I fall in love with this possibility. Not people. I fall in love with the future.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

When Porn Confessional Gets Off YouTube

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

And I’ll never forget my first exposure to this video, “thanatos,” when it was screened at the American Film Institute as part of Pixelodeon, the first festival of online video. There’s nothing like watching video meant for the web in a theatre full of strangers. Even more so when it’s playing a game of, “is she, or isn’t she?” before an audience you can hear and feel the response from.

For instance, you just know something is off from her opening greeting, “Hey, Tubers.” (And not just because the video is hosted at blip.)

The artist is Victoria Lucas — not her birthname, but chosen “so not even daddy can find me,” and in a nod to Sylvia Plath. Bear in mind that shifting of identities as you watch. And don’t be shocked if your hand finds its way to your throat without you even knowing why.

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Sublimating Sex to Story: “Writer of O”

filed under: Pomoerotic by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

I spent the night in bed with Writer of O, which is a sort of triple narrative: the revelation of the novel’s author, Dominique Aury, as a prominent intellectual, of her affair with another member of the literary establishment, and of how a novel can — sometimes — be a love letter.

“The mystery of sex is dwarfed by the mystery of what French intellectuals are talking about.”
- Kyle Smith, New York Post, in his review

The reviews were as mixed as a sex film can get, though, as some of the critics themselves complained, there’s not so much sex in this film as the story of sex.

Anaïs Nin appears briefly, just a glimpse lifted from Robert Snyder’s 70’s-era “Anaïs Nin Observed,” and provokes this quote I had just read in Noel Riley Fitch’s biography of this other mythic, erotic figure:

“I believe that because of Anaïs I learned that the journal creates me as much as I create the journal.”
- Leah Schweitzer

We do not conduct sex in isolation of how it is: to be remembered, to be retold. (And it needn’t be so grand as all that. A girlfriend offered that her chat transcripts and sent messages box had started to feel like her diary.) We are each our own historians of sex. Though there may be more of us conducting that investigation publicly than there ever has been before, what stirs one to do so has not changed that much over time.

Now we have benefit of sidebars, links, and backmatter. Now we have infinite time and slightly less infinite freedom to provide context to our sex. We aren’t — generally — as criminal for speaking and writing sex as Dominique Aury, who herself wrote as a private act…

‘…lying on her side with her feet tucked up under her, a soft black pencil in her right hand… the girl was writing the way you speak in the dark when you’ve held back the words of love too long and they flow out at last. For the first time in her life, she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting or discarding; she was writing the way one breathes, or dreams… she was still writing when the street cleaners came by at the first touch of dawn.’ (”La Fille Amoureuse,” Dominique Aury on writing “L’historie d’O”)

… never intended for anyone but her lover, Jean Paulhan, who later wrote the preface, “Happiness In Slavery,” when it was published.

Beyond literary sexual acts that can endure, just as this love letter loosed has, what persists is the practice of framing such acts as the telling of the truth of sex, as, we believe, the most true sex to be the sex we have. Even if, as in Aury’s case, the sex she tells was the sex of her fantasies, of her longings. Even if it is clear that she need never have been bound herself to inspire thousands to seek the same. And for, of course, the writing to be as taut and perfect as someone who had lived it. In fact, perhaps even more so.

So, then, is the truth of sex possibly more universal — if there is such a thing — when it must be veiled and protected for release? Or might we do well with our freedom and be as precise and faithful to the story, that it might live more completely beyond our own? Or maybe, as Nin’s student offers, is it in the writing of sex that we change ourselves? And if so, is there any way to relate the story of sex without changing sex, too?

More: Guardian UK: “I wrote the Story of O”; Salon: “The mother of masochism