Fearful of the Wetlands?
Lisa Hilton 2:12pm
Literary news this week suggests that when it comes to women writing about sex, reviewers are still reacting in the same way as Dr Johnson to his walking dog, surprised that it’s being done at all. So hats off to Charlotte Roche, who has managed to give both the Sunday Times and the Guardian the willies by cheerfully confessing to consuming pornography with her husband and starting her book Wetlands with a graphic discussion of hemorrhoids.
Male reviewers seem barely to have moved on from the mentality of the Chatterley trial: anything which disturbs or shocks them must be dismissed as pornography. Thus Rod Liddle (who presumably wouldn’t want his servants reading Wetlands) fulminates against dim feminist critics who interpret the ramblings of “cheapjack book sluts” as serious art. In the Standard, David Sexton slags off the offerings of Faye Weldon and Rachel Johnson in the short story volume In Bed With... whilst claiming that a new edition of My Secret Life, the sexual memoir of a Victorian gentleman, reveals its author “Walter” to be a surprisingly modern writer.
If women are so bad at erotic writing, though, where are the male masters of the genre? I had four English graduates to dinner last night and we couldn’t come up with anyone decent except Rochester and Cleland. De Sade only works if you don’t read him (the bad boy of Victorian poetry, Swinburne, upheld the Divine Marquis as “the apostle of perfection” until he arranged a reading of Justine and his guests fell about with laughter. Presumably, as an old Etonian, Algernon felt he knew a thing or two about flogging.) In the Twentieth Century, the Great American Novelists, Roth, Mailer and Updike, just got plain embarrassing in their dotage. They can’t hold a candle to Pauline Reage, Anais Nin, Alina Reyes or Catherine Millet, whose prose Mr Liddle perhaps didn’t appreciate in translation, but whose “rather strange” predilection for “shagging her way through the whole of Paris” clearly put the wind up him.
Writing off writing women should be an old man’s game by now. Yet the reception of Wetlands suggests that when it comes to writing about sex, the chaps are perturbed enough to maintain that nice girls still shouldn’t.
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Flobble
February 10th, 2009 2:57pm Report this commentHere is my care cup: \_/
As you can see, it is empty.
Hawkeye
February 10th, 2009 3:18pm Report this commentMaybe it is just the gender divide?
Many women find male-targetted porn dull and many men find books that give women a thrill duller than dull.
Each sex has its own "turn ons" and surprisingly (not!!) they are different. Maybe women writing "porn" will only ever appeal to women (I'm generalising here - there will be male exceptions)
Men and women are different. "Quelle surprise" as M. Sarkozy would say....
Ivan Dunnow
February 10th, 2009 3:46pm Report this commentIf there's a sadder sentence written this year on the internet than, 'I had four English graduates to dinner last night', please God I don't get to read it.
Paul Huxley
February 10th, 2009 4:00pm Report this commentA Jewish King wrote a poem about sex a long time ago, it's called the Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs). Never been bettered.
Craig
February 10th, 2009 4:07pm Report this commentI used to like the stories that were (supposedly) written by women best when I bought porn mags. They were that bit more thrilling because it was a woman telling the story.
Alex H
February 10th, 2009 4:17pm Report this commentI'm not sure that the two reviews mentioned at the beginning of the piece have been given the willies at all. Surely they are both just stating that the novel isn't very good or well-written and the only reason it will sell is because of its graphic nature. Hardly a rabid indictment of a reactionary reviewer,
Reg Varney
February 10th, 2009 4:46pm Report this commentAny idiot can shock. Next.
(Ivan, Seconded. Death to the institution of the dinner party.)
Max Kaye
February 10th, 2009 5:05pm Report this commentWetlands sounds like a pain in the arse.
It should, therefore, be popular in certain progressive quarters.
Verity
February 10th, 2009 5:35pm Report this commentMac Kaye - Ha ha ha ha ha!
Polly and Alice's mum
February 10th, 2009 5:46pm Report this commentI think Anthony Trollope captured the breathtaking wonderfulness of falling in love better than most - certainly better than Dickens.
But I suppose you are talking about porn, which is a whole different subject. And how boring.
How old are you, by the way?
Polly and Alice's mum
February 10th, 2009 5:48pm Report this commentAnd yes, I have read Kate Millet and Erica Jong in my day (about 30 years ago) and it was all very well for THEN, but NOW I would prefer to read about gardening frankly.
Old age, I suppose.
(thats why I ask how old you are - I wasnt trying to be rude.)
Alf Tupper
February 10th, 2009 8:20pm Report this commentI gave up with porn ages ago because, be it written or film, all it provides is the stuff that is 'in attendance' at the vinegar stroke - the tits, dicks, groans which are the rags of sex.
Even 'erotic literature' does this - just a bit wordier. Anais Nin? Don't make me laugh. I tried 'Erotic Review' thinking the toffs will have got round to sorting it out, but no, just the same tosh but tied round a few ideas that sound like what one might have encountered if one had attended college.
Worse still is the continual pushing of some or other bizarre fetish. Just good sex and how it is generated is all that's required and there's an absolute fortune to be made.
I did like your line there, about not being able to hold a candle to Pauline Reage.
Martin D
February 11th, 2009 3:36pm Report this commentI found Catherine Millet rather corny.
rod liddle
February 12th, 2009 11:41am Report this commentIn answer to the question, I don't think many men are very good at writing about sex. But you seem to have missed my point, which is that when men write about sex they do not attempt to diginify it with political import. Unless they are gay writers, I suppose, like Denis Cooper.
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