what if sex is no longer a viable metaphor

So, Amazonfail fallout continues a day later. Really, the best part is the discussion that the debacle has sparked.

Still, answers coming out of Amazon itself are conflicted and I have no idea what to think about what's really going on over there. There does seem to be an effort underway to remedy this situation (see update here), which is the important thing. But it's been an amazing phenomenon, regardless.

Debauchette has posted some more interesting thoughts here. In particular, she says this:

Sure, we have erotic texts that are intended to arouse the reader, and that genre of literature usually gets its own isolated aisle. But sexuality is often used as a means to explore deeper themes, or to expand on philosophical discourse, or to access internal experiences, psychology, emotion, spirituality. Sometimes sexuality is political, legal, historical, or grounded in current events, and can take the form of fiction, memoir, history, essay, poetry. Identifying something sexual as “adult” is clumsy and arbitrary, like some clunky algorhythmic Miller’s test.

Specifically, she's discussing the disappearance of Catherine Breillat's book, Pornocracy, that was the companion piece to her film Anatomy of Hell. I've found both book and film to be weird and full of philosophical problems (e.g., they posit a victimhood inherent to the female experience and a model of gay manhood as "pure" and immune to the "corruption" that is female. Such things make me bristle for several reasons.) But Pornocracy is an excellent example to point out that sexuality can function in a text as a vehicle to discuss any number of other things, just as debauchette says. And that's why Amazon's new practice of shuffling texts that deal in sexual subject matter to a virtual ghetto is so deeply unnerving. If we can no longer find books that talk about sex, we'll be losing a deplorably great percentage of centuries worth of recorded human thought -- thought regarding a hell of a lot of stuff that's only tangentially sexual in nature.

Anyway, all these other bloggers linked above and below have said it all better than I. With any luck, all 57, 310 books will have their popularity rankings properly restored in short order and Amazon will devise a smarter system for preventing Harry Potter searchers from stumbling upon this damnably pernicious book with it's filthy, wanton jacket.

N.B. To be fair, I ordered my personal copy of Pornocracy off Amazon a while ago-- and I had to wait several months for it. The current printing was released in July of last year. Before that, there was some older translation of it that Amazon just didn't stock. So, the barring of this particular book may have had just a little something to do with the fact that they've only sold a handful of copies (to pervs like me) in the first damn place.

What other people have said about the (dubious?) marital project

"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue."

—Voltaire

via The Ch!cktionary

It continues to baffle me that traditional wifery might be the only job for which an applicant's utter ignorance of one of its primary duties has historically been considered her chief, and most desirable, qualification.

"...Marie returns to seduce the reluctant Paul and squeezes just enough sperm from their half-hearted encounter to become impregnated, or, in Breillat's extrapolationist thesis, wholly alive. Pauls slumbers on when her water breaks. In a cool rage, Marie turns on the gas and leaves the apartment to give birth to their child. The final scene shows Marie in a ritualistic procession holding the newborn aloft. Dolly the Cloned Sheep was already 3 at the time of the movie's release and the transgender queer movement raged on American campuses. Still, it's interesting to note just how appealing this ancient narrative is to a great number of upper-middle class women in their 20s and 30s who've revived the traditional wedding ceremonies with a vengeance. If a wedding is "the most important day in a woman's life" (Bride magazine) it is because it serves as an affirmation of her as a woman. Perhaps accurately, now that the culture has only inertia to offer, this generation perceives marriage and its ensuing spawn of the nuclear family as the only achievable utopia."
--Chris Kraus, describing Catherine Breillat's film, Romance, in his essay introducing the novel Pornocracy, the companion piece to Breillat's other film, Anatomy of Hell.

I watched Anatomy of Hell some time ago and it irked me. It explores an old fundamentalist (meaning, not "fundamentalist" in the sense of fundie-Christian, but in a sense far closer to essentialism) notion that what is inherently problematic about female existence is that the "abyss of cunt" is necessarily horrific. And it predicates an inborn fragility in the female as well. Now, that's an interesting idea with which the "auteur of porno" might toy, but Breillat is simply employing the idea to inquire as to whether the essential vulnerable nature of women is designed to inspire tenderness in men, thus drawing the sexes together. Now, I tend to think she's using this very ancient thesis about the nature of woman to pose an argument-- to force her audience to ask again, in a contemporary, post-feminist context, whether there might be something to the concept-- the one that, to me anyway, seems to do a real good job of putting us girls at a real disadvantage-- after all.

But, c'mon! Cunts are dark, slimy pits of terror? And the female condition is, by default, one of weakness? Really? Is this really a discussion that is actually still relevant in 21st Century Western culture?

In any case, I've just started reading Pornocracy and I might well come to understand Anatomy of Hell a little better by the end of it. I may or may not have more to say about it when I'm finished. We'll see.

In the meantime, though, I'm fascinated by Kraus' comment that marriage and the nuclear family just might be the modern woman's last finger-stretching grasp towards a micro-utopia, thus explaining the great wedding fervor of our times. Personally, I think he's making a cute little connection with little to no basis in actual reality. The Oprah crowd and the over-therapized masses regularly raise the chant, "But marriage takes WORK!" Young women enter into marriages having seen at least a couple of their peers establish life-- and even happiness--after divorce. And so many of us have pre-marriage long-term relationships in our early 20s-- difficult, experimenting-with-adulthood, long-term relationships.

So, even if we claim to be holding out for the loves of our lives, deep down, we have already learned that love doesn't eradicate the fucked-upedness and baggage that any adult entering into such an arrangement with another fucked up, baggage-laden adult is bound to pull behind him- or herself. And every day, more and more of us fight off the urge to hide under the covers when faced with the all-too-apparent discrepancy between white wedding photos and Planet Couples Therapy.

But is getting all entwined in the solipsistic endeavor of the Bride Show still preferable to the "inertia" that Kraus claims our culture holds out to us? It can only be a brief distraction, and not much more, I'm afraid. No matter what, ladies, we've still got bigger fish to fry than invitation fonts and seating charts. I mean, what if our pussies really are just so many little mouths of hell, clapped shut, safely for the moment, between our thighs? Or worse, what if there are folks out there who still actually think that? Surely we collectively still have bigger hopes for our world than the small consolation of the domestic marinade?

***

I know I've been terribly lax in writing lately. I've been busy. I've been reading. I've been exhausted. I've been traveling. I've been perched on the edge of my usual wintry sinkhole. I've been social. I've had a holiday and a birthday. I haven't had a Saturday at home in a month, and tomorrow will be no different.

But I miss this conversation with the ether. Maybe some time soon. Soon.