• ABOUT
• CONTACT
• SUBSCRIBE
• HOME

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

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Once, Before Sex Was Post-Anything

filed under: Pomoerotic by Melissa Gira | 6 Comments

Sexerati has been on summer vacation. Or, maybe, having a summer love affair. Since we aren’t Julia Allison, speculation of said possible affair won’t surface at Valleywag, though it’s not out of the question. For a few reasons. But actually, a Gawker property is partially to blame for our absence, though only barely. Writing or travel or sex are rarely enough reason for a blog slow-up. It’s drowning in theory that does it, every damn time.

So, for the meta-curious, what did we learn on our summer vacation, then? Here you are.

She said he could have a mistress, so long as she was brunette and postmodern.

Why on earth someone would privilege theoretical inclinations over beauty, availability, or even marriage is only part of the problem. The main thrust is that, does having a familiarity with Barthes make one a better lover?

A better talker, maybe.

Strangely enough, it has been by courting the idea of being a mistress, and ultimately, failing at it, that has given me a stronger need for sexual honesty, that which was supposed to be murdered by all the posts- of theory. But no — theory itself is what makes possible a truly rich, sexual honesty, that spans not just the practice of sex, but spills full into the world of ideas. The kind of sexual honesty that has me speaking to this blog like a confidante and lover.

So in the midst of this — caught between sex and theory and honesty — I picked a little fight for no sensible reason (there is no sense in an affair, even as it might be wildly methodical) with a colleague. “But does one need an understanding of Foucault to have a healthy sex life?” she asked.

(It wasn’t the first time someone had gone there.

Many years ago, at the near edge of the last boom, I acquired an investor, largely on the merits of my blog. He drove up half the country to come meet me at a cafe, sheaves of my journal under his arm — printed — to question me. Really, his funding was just a ruse for this act, I thought. He wants to know if I really believe all this critical rot.)

“I don’t know — I don’t think a healthy sex life is what I’m after here.”

Which sounds terrible, terrible — what happened to being sex-positive? — but listen.

Really, what shakes me to the core, makes me susceptible in all those ways those who once moralized against the novel pointed out, is a good story. Which is all theory is: a story to explain why things might be the way we experience them. All this fucking around in texts has only made me all the more devoted to understanding why and how this thing called “healthy sex” exists at all. Who decides what is healthy, or good, or — daresay — right? What institutions and individuals have a say in that? Who stands to profit from the constant redefinition of what “the right sex” is?

Or, rather, all this sex — theoretically - has made me certain that I do not want to be a pundit, but an intellectual.

Because truly, at the root of her discourse, what a pundit seeks from sex is profit. A pundit sees sex not as a field in itself, but a means to an end. A pundit will put herself in bed with whatever puts most spotlight on said bed.

And you know, or those of you who do know, that as a one-time whore, yes, there is a deep contradiction in my saying this — decrying sex punditry — at all.

Sexual thinking and thinking sex has existed for the past hundred years or so inside this tension: that though sex sells, rarely do people want to buy something that they don’t already believe in. That we have taken for granted that the open market is where sex is being produced, far more so than in our own bedrooms, and yet some still insist that sex is private, personal, or pure.

For now, I’m in favor of an impure, unpopular, and difficult sex.

And what I ask of you is to hold me to that.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Sex 2.-OH NOES!!1!!!

filed under: Pomoerotic, We Are The Sex Media, Web Sex Index by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

Nobody’s famous!, is really all the headline ought to have read in the Times (UK)’s latest technology bit on internet celebrity. Of course, we know that the virtue in having total, always-on infamy available to everyone (oh, except those pesky people still living without highspeed web access or GPRS, or cameras, or computers, how dare they) is that if everyone’s famous, aren’t we all liberated by the flattening effect that nobody is?

Oh, that, and when there’s no bogeyman left to trot out, sex still brings the terror, old school style:

In Web 1.0, human nature expressed itself primarily through lust and greed. Everybody was trying – and failing – to find new ways of making money, and delivering pornography was the main purpose of the web. Both are still present in Web 2.0, but they have changed. Making money, through online gambling and advertising focused on individual users, for example, exploits the new levels of interactivity. Pornography is now delivered with streaming video and, frequently, high levels of interactivity. In addition, there are now porn social-networking sites. You can post your home-made porn on one site and join in the fun as a voyeur on another. And there are endless sites offering the full 2.0 sex experience.

Immaturity break: omg, wrong, wrong, wrong!

First, fuck web 1.0, remember 1994? If you want titty, you’re on Usenet, plain and simple. Want “interactive” sex? Learn to spell, pervert, and hang in the hottub at LambdaMoo. Web 1.0 just organized this activity, with the addition of hyperlinking directories of some relatively decontextualized nudie photos, behind payment screens — oh, and removed most of the flesh and blood “hey, this could be a real girl!” thrill from much of online sex. But what also came forth, between the birth of the “click-here” age verification and the ashes of VISA deigning to accept most porn dollars?

Well:

Two, there has always been an online porn community. Porn communities, in the form of blogs, forums, and personal profiles, were the glue that held together the earliest alt.porn sites (no, not the big pink & black kid on the block). Thanks in no small part, I say, to porn, an internet generation came up around the notion that content was one thing, but conversation (I know, I know, that word!) was another. We may not all have wanted to talk to one another, but we did want to more efficiently find what we liked, and so that leads to “users” unveiling desire to one another through the safety of a screen in an actually new way. It was this community & conversation that lent the context to online sex that makes it hot, makes it (dare I say) real, and makes it easy to sell.

It’s not sex, but the context of sex, that’s bought and sold online. (A few varieties of commercial sex notwithstanding.) And really, I like to think there may have never been a Facebook were it not for nakkidnerds (unfortunate misspelling aside).

Oh, three! Unless you’re still marveling at your shiny new Zip disc, streaming porn probably no longer bears the frisson of La Nouvelle.

Lastly, the “full 2.0 experience”? Sir, you wouldn’t know what that was like, even if every A-list blogger that ended up in your bed turned from your dick in the pale light of morning to their Blackberry, grabbed the latest sycophantic proclamations of THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET off of Twitter, and beat you about the balls with the baby blue screen.

Because for that sir, there’s a $5000 conference entrance fee, plus $1000 gratuity to the web-enabled domme of our sponsor’s choice.

(thx, and via, violet blue)