If You Thought Bibliographies Weren't Sexy...

Check out these bibliography titles -- they're lists of erotic books compiled by the Victorian collector Henry Spencer Ashbee:

Index librorum prohibitorum: An Index of Forbidden Books (1877)
Centuria librorum absconditum: A Hundred Books Deserving to Be Hidden (1879)
Catena librorum tacendorum: A Chain of Books Which Should Not Be Spoken Of (1885)

As usual, the forbidden sounds quite delicious. If some publisher wants to start a line called, "A Hundred Books Deserving to Be Hidden," I think I will buy a subscription to the whole series. It makes me want to read every single one.

Hat tip to Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors, which is my current ongoing source of interesting sexual errata.

Savages Offers Little Resolution

A bit late to the party, I went to see Savages over the weekend, an uber-violent Oliver Stone film that intrigued me mostly because the primary romantic relationship in the movie was a menage. While I was pretty sure the menage was there for titillation, I was really interested to see how menage would be portrayed in a film currently out in mainstream release (obviously, there have been other films that included menage -- Doom Generation and Threesome spring to mind, and I'm sure there have been more). Though it's been done before, I wanted to see what I could glean about possible current societal attitudes toward sex. (Note: I'm going to talk freely about the movie, without regard to spoilers.)

The film definitely played the titillation. Though I don't find menage shocking, I suppose I was there for the titillation, too.

The reason the female narrator gives for the menage is that, between the two men, she nets one perfect man (summarized by lines like "Chon fucks. Ben makes love."). There are some cringe-inducing lines (such as, about war-veteran Chon: "I have orgasms. Chon has wargasms."). But overall, the premise seems to be these are three wounded people who need each other to be whole. They are all home for each other.

She acknowledges societal attitudes ("I know what you're thinking: Slut."), but then justifies her actions somewhat defensively with the argument about wholeness and home.

Soon, this female narrator is kidnapped by a drug cartel, and her two men are desperate to rescue her -- to the point that they get their hands dirty in ways that go far beyond any of their previous misbehavior.

The main problem I had with the movie was that it didn't really settle most of the questions it raised about the relationship. In a scene that I think was supposed to be significant, Salma Hayek's character, Elena Lopez, leader of the drug cartel, tells the narrator, "There's something wrong with your love story, baby." She goes on to say that the two men can't really love her as much as they love each other -- "or else they wouldn't share you." The way the scene was shot, I believed this raised questions for the narrator, maybe even shook her faith in her way of life. However, it's never spoken of again and never clearly resolved. To be clear, it's OK with me if the narrator ultimately decides to shake off the question. But the shot didn't read confidence to me. It read confusion, and then it was dropped.

The ending is even worse. What I first saw seemed like a classic punishment ending to me (where everyone dies in a sort of metaphorical and spiritual payback for their effort to live outside of society, sinning with respect to both sex and drugs). After Ben is mortally wounded in the process of trying to save the female narrator, the narrator and Chon kill themselves so they don't have to leave him. This happens amid carnage in which pretty much everyone else dies, too. I was a little annoyed by the punishment ending, largely because it seemed like a huge copout -- a way to not address, for example, the issues raised in the scene above (or raised by Ben's fall from innocence over the course of the movie, or raised by the female narrator's rape during her imprisonment, or any number of things).

But this proved to be a minor annoyance in the face of the utter copout to come -- because that wasn't the real ending. The narrator says that ending represents the way she imagined it would go down, and then the audience is presented with a fantasy ending -- one where everything works out fine, the three end up hidden away on an island somewhere, and everything rings equally false and is left equally unresolved.

This is one way to handle controversial material, I suppose -- use it for titillation, and then avoid making any sort of statement about it. I was pretty disappointed that the film pretended to engage with some sexual issues, but ultimately turned away from the debate. By providing two endings, Savages essentially provided no ending.

Music Mondays: "Sweet Sour" by Band of Skulls

"Sour by the minute, but you're sweeter by the hour."
-- Band of Skulls



How do blues riffs manage to sound so sexy? This song also has that achingly slow rhythm that's super-hot.

Given the Right Partner and Circumstances...

I wish it felt more acceptable to disclose kink -- it would save so many later incompatibilities.

For my part, I suffered in a vanilla marriage in part because I didn't take my need for kink seriously. I did disclose my kinky experience and thoughts at the outset of that relationship, but in a tone of contrition, along with promises to "get over it" and "not give in to that behavior anymore." I feel this was mostly because I didn't have any sign at the time that it could be acceptable to be kinky, given the right partner and circumstances.

Problems like this seem pretty widespread to me. I recently came across the following passage in Geoff Nicholson's Sex Collectors:

Henry Spencer Ashbee was part of a coterie of Victorian bibliophiles, collectors, and sexual adventurers who shared a theoretical and practical interest in flagellation. ... The idea of this group of rich, serious, outwardly respectable Victorian men getting together to discuss flagellation, no doubt in a bookish, scholarly, high-minded way, strikes me as infinitely depressing. It may have struck Ashbee's wife, Elizabeth, in much the same way, though no doubt she took it a lot more personally. In his introduction to Prohibitorum Ashbee tells us that flagellation "has caused the separation of man and wife" and I suspect there's a deliberate ambiguity there about whether he means its occurrence in books or in real life. ... Having a husband who's obsessively interested in flagellation may not be the recipe for a happy marriage, regardless of where he keeps his collection.

After reading this, all I could think was that having a husband who's obsessively interested in flagellation might be the recipe for a very happy marriage, given the right wife. I'm glad for kink events and sites like Fetlife and anything that can help kinky people find each other, thereby sparing themselves and prospective vanilla partners from the pain of this incompatibility.

I still think there's too much shame floating around. There's all kinds of titillation going around about Fifty Shades of Grey, but from what I've observed, there's still a heavy aura of shame about it -- shame directed at people who are turned on by the book, as well as shame within the book directed at the character of Grey himself.

More on Sexual Disgust

In yesterday's post, I wrote about being troubled by the idea that "women tend to be specifically more disgusted by sex than men are," as described in Rachel Herz's book That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion. A couple points she makes a bit later in the book shed some light on what might be going on when it seems women are more disgusted by sex than men.

The main study Herz cites found that female college students shown pornography were more disgusted by it and enjoyed it less than their male counterparts did. I already raised the question of whether the presentation of sex acts was disgusting to the women, rather than the sex acts themselves. I wonder if the women felt the pornography presented sex in a degrading rather than pleasurable way.

But there could be more to it than that. Herz writes later:

The faces of anger and disgust are most likely to be confused for each other throughout our lives, which ... has some intriguing implications for understanding what "moral disgust" really might be.

I wonder if the women's disgust had more to do with anger than disgust at the human body and its natural functions. Obviously, there's an interpretation I'd prefer to make, but this seems like a reasonable question.

I also suggested the women might have been disgusted because they were socialized to be disgusted (i.e. "good girls don't like that"). This passage suggests this could certainly be a factor:

There is not one disgust, but many disgusts that vary from simply and physical to abstract and complex. The emotion of disgust is probably universal but it is not innate; disgust has to be learned and is subject to a myriad of influences. Our age, our personality, our culture, our thoughts and beliefs, our mood, our morals, whom we're with, where we are, and which of our senses is giving us the feeling, all shape whether and how strongly we are able to feel disgusted, both as a personal predisposition and in the moment right now.

Clearly, sexual disgust is a complicated issue. I'm convinced this isn't just a biological or hard-wired neurological thing. I think that if women are in fact typically more disgusted by sex than men (I also questioned the cited sources in my original post), there is likely a constellation of societal factors operating to promote the effect, ranging from what girls are told as they're raised to how sex is typically presented in society.

I'm still planning to get hold of the paper that seems to be Herz's main source for the claim.

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Are women really more disgusted by sex than men are?

I've never liked the stereotype that men like sex and women don't. It seems so patently false to me, both because of my own experience and because of things like the apparent success of publishers like Ellora's Cave, Harlequin, and all the rest.

There does seem to be some kind of scientific backing for the stereotype, however. Here's a bit I came across in Rachel Herz's book That's Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion:

Closely connected to our repulsion at animality is our disgust at sexuality. ... Sex is among the most brutish behaviors we engage in, and though all cultures have rules for "proper" sex, we cannot escape the fact that sex itself is raw and physical and that we make the beast with two backs quite literally.

Besides being more generally squeamish than men, women tend to be specifically more disgusted by sex than men are. For example, in the first experiment to investigate differences between the sexes in response to sexually explicit films, female college students rated pornographic movies as 20 percent more disgusting and less enjoyable than men did. Many subsequent studies have corroborated the finding that women are more disgusted by sex than men are.

When I read things like this, I always wonder if the disgust the female students are reporting is truly biological or neurological or the result of a lifetime of being told that women don't like sex. I'm also curious about how the specific pornography shown influenced the female college students' response. Are the women more disgusted by sex, per se, or are they more disgusted by something about the way the sex is presented? This seems a significant distinction, though it's all too easy to conflate the two.

For those interested, a nitpicky analysis of the footnotes to the paragraph quoted above:
I want to get hold of the study cited in this paragraph -- D.L. Mosher, "Sex differences, sex experience, sex guilt and explicit sexual films," Journal of Social Issues 29 (1973), 95-112 -- I imagine it may answer some of my questions. But right off the bat, I have to note this study came out in 1973. If female disgust at sexuality is socially based rather than biologically based, then I'd be really interested in an update.

Herz cites another study (in a footnote after the sentence about how many studies have corroborated Mosher's finding), but when I checked out that citation, I wasn't sure how relevant it was. (D.M.T. Fessler and C.D. Navarette, "Third-party attitudes toward sibling incest evidence for Westermarck's hypothesis," Evolution and Human Behavior 25 (2004), 277-94.) It was a paper about how third parties respond to sibling incest, which found women reacted with stronger disgust. Saying women are more disgusted by incest than men are seems pretty different from saying women are more disgusted by sex than men are.

Given my dissatisfaction with these footnotes I wonder if the problem here is that Herz is buying into the cultural stereotype that women don't like sex. If those two citations are the best she's got, I wonder if there really is scientific evidence to back up her statements about women's disgust at sexuality.