When Did Literature Get Less Dirty?
When Philip Roth published his novel Zuckerman Unbound 45 years ago, The New York Times called it an “act of contrition.” The literary critic George Stade read it as an autobiographical account of Roth’s experiences as the author of Portnoy’s Complaint, the virtuosically neurotic tale of a nice Jewish boy trying to either shake or embrace his sex obsession, which made Roth famous when it came out, in 1969. Portnoy is a tremendous novel: I’m on record in this magazine arguing that it’s a great American one. Upon its release, though, it got decidedly mixed reactions. Readers, rabbis, and reviewers accused Roth of anti-Semitism, misogyny, sexual excess, deviance, and creative gimmickry. In Commentary, Irving Howe wittily if wrongly claimed that the “cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice.”
In Zuckerman Unbound, Roth’s recurring stand-in, Nathan Zuckerman, seems to regret having written his version of Portnoy’s Complaint at all. He accuses himself of betraying every woman who has ever been “bound to him by trust, by sex, by love.” His agent urges him to quit “trying to show them up in heaven and over at Commentary”—just in case readers weren’t sure this was about Roth and Portnoy—that he’s a good guy, but he can’t. He’s so busy self-flagellating, in fact, that he hardly even has sex, which is highly unusual in a Roth novel. Stade considered it not only an apology but also a concession to the reactionary “custodians of our high literary culture.” His review reads as if it were common knowledge, in 1981, that critics and readers were so prudish that Roth had to write a whole other novel wringing his hands over his sex book.
Stade was being dramatic, I think, given how much good literary writing about sex came out in the United States around the same time as Portnoy’s Complaint. Erica Jong, James Salter, and John Updike all relied heavily on sex scenes to externalize their characters’ inner lives. Nettie Jones’s deliriously sexy Fish Tales, which came out in 1984, has recently won a new generation of readers, as has Norman Rush’s Mating, first published in 1991. But Stade was right that American book culture has a puritan strain, one that showed in Portnoy’s reception and that manifests today as a surprising absence of sex—of straight sex, that is—in literature.
I’ve been on the lookout for contemporary Portnoys for years—in particular, ones by and about women. I reread Roth’s book frequently while working on my second novel, The End of Romance. In part, I was reacting to the overwhelming maleness of Roth’s work, but mainly, my search was a response to a growing lack of faith in heterosexuality and in straight romance—and my desire for some optimism about both. Sex scenes in literature struck me as a natural place to go, given that intimacy is a powerful motivator for men and women alike to work through the challenges that ingrained misogyny can create. Instead of exploring this possibility, though, many male authors have shied away from writing about women’s bodies, while many female writers have avoided straight sex entirely, or approached it with a mix of shyness, pessimism, and scorn.
These emotions have dominated cultural postures toward straight relationships since #MeToo, if not since the start of what Lora Kelley has referred to in this magazine as the era of the swipe. The internet, with the maelstrom of options it presents, can make sex and dating so confusing and exhausting that giving up on them can seem appealing even to people who want to pursue one or both. Novelists’ evasion of sex only adds to that impulse. If literature doesn’t contain realistic, hot sex, it suggests that such encounters are unimaginable. In Fear of Flying, Jong writes that women’s “big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with your unappeasable hunger for male bodies.” Surely giving up the unappeasable hunger can’t be the answer.
Sex scenes are not, to be clear, absent from the whole world of books. Romance is booming. (May I remind you about Heated Rivalry?) It has spawned not only television adaptations but also whole subgenres: When I worked at an independent bookstore eight years ago, we didn’t stock any “romantasy”—a term that wasn’t yet common in publishing. Now big romance displays are de rigeur; Billings, Montana, has a whole bookstore devoted exclusively to romantasy. Fantastical romance’s popularity highlights one of the genre’s central properties: its relationship to fairy tales and dreams come true. Romance novels end Happily Ever After. It’s part of the form.
Literary writers have other demands to satisfy. In general, readers come to their books seeking not an escape from reality but perspective on it. Romance novels can provide this, just as literary novels can have happy endings, but they’re still beholden to the fantasy that’s part of the genre. Literary writing can explore relationships as they are in the real world, stretching them and unearthing fresh dynamics within them. This is the reason I care so much about sex scenes, and why my novel contains so many. I want to encourage readers to think seriously but not pessimistically about the present and future of straight sex and love by imagining, as Rush once said of Mating, how a couple might “arrange things to a greater moral satisfaction.” Doing this, I would argue, requires attention to the sex that a couple has. Many queer writers excel at this, but when straight sex comes up in contemporary literature, authors have a marked tendency to approach it and then, in one way or another, twist away.
[Read: The death of the sex scene]
Sometimes the dodge is as simple as the end of a scene. Plenty of authors lead up to sexual encounters, then cut ahead in time. Others hide in the cloud of metaphor, emerging only when everybody’s got their clothes back on. In evading sex, these writers imply—intentionally or not—that it doesn’t matter. In Lily King’s Writers & Lovers, the heroine, a writer named Casey, balances her struggle to complete a novel with a string of relationships that King writes with heat and specificity until they get consummated. King is expert at conveying physical longing and highly attuned to her protagonist’s body; when Casey’s crush stands behind her at a crowded performance, King writes, “I became animal myself: alert, cautious, curious. More people came in and he was pushed in closer and there were long moments when my shoulder blades rested against his chest.” Shoulder blades aren’t usually considered an erogenous zone, but King changes that. She can be more direct too: After one long make-out scene, Casey reports to the reader, “When I get out of the car I’m so horny I can barely walk up the driveway.” And yet there’s not one detailed sex scene in Writers & Lovers, which could lead to the assumption that it matters less than desire or even that it isn’t integral to the early, exploratory stages of love.
Some writers avoid detail even when they do follow their characters into the bedroom. In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the protagonist, Cora, engages in imaginary adultery that Somers writes vividly until it becomes real. At that point, the book’s sex scenes, though exciting to Cora, become vaguely described and therefore dull. When Cora first sleeps with the man she’s been fantasizing about for a decade, Somers writes, “They lay down and he was soft with her, then he was less soft, then he was not soft at all”—a play-by-play without any linguistic fun.
A similar effect appears in Nicole Cuffy’s Dances, a close study of a ballerina managing the public scrutiny that comes with being the New York City Ballet’s first Black principal, while she also deals with an unexpected pregnancy. Cuffy writes her heroine Cece’s body with care and precision, evoking sweat and smells, cellulite and lost toenails. But though the plot, like any pregnancy plot, hinges on sex, when Cece is in bed with her boyfriend, the novel’s sensory intensity suddenly vanishes. On the few occasions when Cuffy goes into depth, she attends to Jasper’s movements—“He held my wrists above my head as he entered me, his forehead resting against mine”—but not how they feel to Cece. It can seem as if the character’s experience of her body is important at all times except during sex.
This is a troubling message for a novel to send. In the 1960s and ’70s, consciousness-raising groups aided women in discussing sex so that they might enjoy it more and not blame themselves for what they didn’t like. Rosa Campbell writes in her forthcoming biography of the sex educator Shere Hite, who in 1976 released The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, that Hite got thousands of letters from women that all “expressed a similar relief, ‘I am so glad to know it is not just me.’”
[Read: Who’s afraid of women’s pleasure?]
For novelists to evade sex in books that are meant to mirror or comment on reality curtails the potential for such connections with the reader. It also cuts off character development. So much of Cece’s life centers on controlling and perfecting her body. What might Cuffy have shown about her by depicting that body during sex?
Still, novels such as Dances and Writers & Lovers take a real interest in the physical experience of womanhood, when rejecting or ignoring it has grown common. Loneliness and lack of connection—whether brought on by social marginalization, urban precarity, the habit of living online, or all three—are among the main subjects of 21st-century literature. Male writers conjuring these phenomena often focus almost entirely on its intellectual aspects; think of Ben Lerner, whose novels rarely descend from their protagonists’ heads to their bodies. Interestingly, though, many female writers express alienation through close attention to characters’ disconnection from their physical self.
This has gotten so common that female characters who drift through the world experiencing no pleasure or pain have practically become their own literary trope. In Danzy Senna’s New People, the main character would seemingly rather hide under a strange man’s bed than get into hers with her boyfriend. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind, meanwhile, follows her protagonist, Dorothy, through a prolonged miscarriage that she treats as dispassionately as possible, at one point dismissing it as “brute and meaningless physiology.” Her denial of the body is, of course, a way of dodging grief, but it also reflects her belief that she lives in a blighted historical moment in which “want itself was a thing of the past.” Such a conviction, which appears in many more novels than Smallwood’s, drains fiction of life.
I’ve wondered whether this literary anti-wanting is a reaction, in part, to the ubiquity of porn in contemporary culture; maybe writers are responding to the fact that we’re oversaturated with graphic depictions of bodies. That would, in and of itself, be worth addressing, as Alan Hollinghurst does in his 2004 novel, The Line of Beauty, which has both excellently written gay sex scenes and a character whose ability to enjoy other men’s bodies is severely sapped by his addiction to pornography. More recently, in Moderation, Elaine Castillo writes a character, Girlie, who works as an online-content moderator, a job that exposes her to sexual imagery so brutal and degrading that she can hardly stand the thought of being touched—but then she falls in love in virtual reality. This isn’t a cure-all, and the novel does not contain much sex; it does, however, have perhaps the most graphic and well-written sexual fantasy I’ve encountered in a literary novel. It reads as a rebuttal to the norm of anhedonic women in literature and makes clear that for Castillo, Girlie’s disconnection from desire is a problem for the character, not an inherent trait.
Moderation wouldn’t have to be a love story for Girlie’s physical reawakening to work. It could just be a sex story, like Portnoy’s Complaint. Portnoy’s conceit is that it is a patient’s monologue to his psychoanalyst, a structure that means it’s fundamentally a story of self-discovery, told through masturbation and sex. Roth isn’t exactly subtle about this; at one point, he has Portnoy say of his tendency to date blue-blooded Protestants, “I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds.” Of course this is hardly charming, but psychologically acute writing often is not.
Consider Miranda July’s All Fours, much of which revolves around a highly erotic connection that the unnamed narrator—who is married—has with a much younger man she hardly knows. She never has sex with him; instead, she has sex with a woman who has slept with him and is willing to talk about it the whole time. The scene is intentionally unsettling, not least because the narrator thinks unkindly of the woman, whom she views as a “sad character.” Still, the encounter leads the protagonist toward a much-needed rediscovery of her desires, nudging her to follow her wants wherever they lead.
All Fours’ embrace of sexuality is a welcome change in a cultural landscape full not just of pleasurelessness but also what the scholar Asa Seresin calls “heterofatalism,” a phenomenon that almost anyone who’s dated, or read about dating, in the past decade will recognize: women making a show of their exhaustion with men. If you’ve heard a straight or bisexual woman say that she wishes she were a lesbian, then you know about heterofatalism. Seresin sees these declarations as performance, which isn’t quite fair; dating can be a hellscape, and sexist expectations don’t help. It’s tempting, in this context, to take refuge in “book boyfriends”—a common term among romance readers—and decide that having a real one is simply too embarrassing.
But, as Seresin writes, to be “permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better.” Sex in literature—tangling with what happens between people in bed, whether it occurs once or leads to love, marriage, and a baby in a baby carriage—is one way to imagine a better version of heterosexuality. If novelists won’t rise to that challenge, doing so will only get harder for everyone else.
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