Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (6 page)

A half hour later I knew. As we browsed among the booths, I could see that almost every one featured winsome fawn and baby seal portraits, droll crocodile dishware sculptures with Disney

grins, and refrigerator magnets of Kewpie babies with their diapers flirtatiously drooping. In the nonbaby, nonanimal category, there were huge sunset and waterfall posters—sometimes with a silhou-etted couple in the foreground, clasped in a prayerful embrace, or with a little gilt text that read “Our Love Is Precious.” There were an infinite number of teddy bears in different cunning outfits. Beanie-acs were out in full force. I thought I was going to puke.

My daughter thought differently: “This is the best art show in the whole world!” she said triumphantly, gasping at one cutesypootsy artifact after another. Even though it was on the tip of my tongue to share my complete and vicious opposition to her enthusiasm, I had to stop myself and think, “You know, when I was eight, I would have thought this was the most wonderful stuff in the world, too.” My taste changed dramatically as I grew up, and it’s more than likely that hers will, too.

What’s so strange is that there is actually little social incentive for a girl’s taste to mature as she grows up, and this art fair was mighty evidence of it. When the newspaper advertised it as a family event, I realized this meant that it was aimed at women and children and that its appeal to both groups was determined to be virtually identical. No “real man” is supposed to chortle with joy and make kissy faces at tiny animal figurines, let alone clasp a furry baby an-imal doll to his chest. That’s for girls, big and small, and for baby boys who don’t know better yet. The ever-ageless girl is encouraged to show her partiality to the soft, the innocent, the helpless, the virginal. Her call to action is a teary violin crescendo, a flutter of doves, and an infant’s sigh. That’s what little women are made of.

Young men, on the other hand, right from the get-go, are shown the appeal of the crash and boom; they can play games of

death and glorious torture as opposed to attending to Baby Betsie Wetsie. Since they’re boys, this can look like a bunch of wild creatures screaming and blowing things up. Nevertheless, they get the glee of the shadow side, the thrill of the risk takers, the romance of the antiheroes.

What they are denied, in the most conventional households, are the treasures of nurturing and adoration. When my friend Cary was eight, he made a little bed for his GI Joe to sleep next to him, and he cared for him when he had a “fever.” His parents caught him in this act of love and threw his beloved Joe in the trash.

People ask me all the time if there’s a difference between men’s and women’s erotic expression, and I have to say: Go back and open your toy chest. Look at your photo albums. Ever since you’ve been playing pretend, you have been creating your future erotic land-scapes. And you can easily see for yourself whether you were an early gender traitor, a perfect little role model, or someone who changed dramatically over time.

I was one of the latter. I loved my Barbie like no one ever loved before, and then I forgot all about her. The next time I picked Barbie up I was twenty-four, and I was in the company of some of my subversive friends who wanted to destroy Barbie’s reputation by posing her in a satiric erotic photo spread for our self-published magazine. I thought we might draw some public hair on Barbie’s hard body, or maybe add a clit ring to her plastic nongenitals.

My photographer friends decided not to put a mark on her lovely body, but they did deploy her flexible figure in all sorts of shocking positions, a kind of “Barbie Is My Lover” tableau. “Going Down on Barbie”—it was just a matter of time. Days after our new issue hit the bookstores, a stranger who recognized me walking down San Francisco’s Castro Street grabbed my arm and

told me that he loved the Dirty Barbie pictures so much he had photocopied the pages for stationery.

Ah well. I had loved my little baby-doll, baby-girl day-dreams as a child, but there came a time when I was sickened by them. There was also a time when I decided to revive and reinterpret some of the old props. What’s nauseating about so many depictions of “women’s erotica,” and the “feminine touch” in sexuality is that, at their core, they are nothing more than childish melodrama. Just like we play Barbie, girls talk the baby talk; we prance around on little Barbie feet. We open our peepers real wide and squeal when anything exciting happens, especially if Prince Charming is on the hori-zon. When someone hurts us, we cry and cry and cry, until someone picks us up and makes it all better.

Babies want love, not sex, and that’s what nice girls want, too. A nice girl can’t be concerned with orgasm, because that would make something go crash and boom—right inside her porcelain figure! A nice girl wouldn’t want to look at explicit pictures of sex, because that’s too vivid and visceral for a baby doll. A nice girl can’t say naughty words, because that makes people upset, and it’s so embarrassing.

What does this have to do with her erotic life? Well, as I’ve said on many sour occasions, a woman dieting is a woman not having orgasms. A woman gnashing her teeth over her plastic surgery and her thankless children is a woman who is prompted to use Prozac instead of Pussy Power. A woman with a closet full of shoes and dresses that she can’t wear anymore, even though the debt is still sitting on her credit card, is a woman who didn’t make an investment in her erotic potential. A woman who feels like a used-up whore is someone who never treated her own sexual satisfaction as a virtue.

The most curious breakthrough of my career editing middle-class- looking books of erotic literature—the women-authored
Herotica
series, and
The Best American Erotica
annual—was that they attracted so many women readers. Because of the appearance and location of these pretty books, women felt that they could approach the sales counter with them.

The first
Herotica
cover was based on a dream I had in which the title appeared in a hot pink oval-shaped bubble. Round, pink, no illustration of bodies at all. My publisher was not all that impressed with it and gave the next printing a different cover, this time baby blue with labialike silver wisps behind the title. I’ve always thought that one looked like a tampon box. I’m embarrassed to describe these attempts, but the effect we were clumsily aiming at was something that would symbolize the sensuality of women’s genitalia but wouldn’t frighten anyone with an outright beaver shot. We also didn’t want to put an actual woman on the cover, because we didn’t want any single figure or face to define what feminine eroticism was.

The next two
Herotica
collections I edited were printed by a large publisher, Penguin, who was not as nervous as we had been about putting a woman on the cover. The publisher chose illustrations of women from the mannerist artist Tamara de Lempicka—the sort of painter you read about being displayed in Madonna’s mansion, breathlessly reported by
Architectural Digest.
Yes, her work is erotic and presents female nudes, but it is undeniably fine art, not cheese-cake, fashion, or porn. The female figures shown are attractive, but they have pensive faces, dark hair, serious hips, and modest-sized breasts. No Playmates or Supermodels, in other words. The back-grounds were magenta and violet, the lettering rather delicate and playful.

What’s interesting about these designs is that although they are unquestionably “girly,” a slim majority of the buyers for these books are men—men buying for their lovers, men hoping that their women friends will give erotica a chance if it’s got a feminine or feminist point of view—and also men who just find they like the story and character quality of these collections better than the average erotica in the plain brown wrapper. After all, when
Herotica
began, the male tradition of erotic writing was dead in the water—it had been decades since Henry Miller or D. H. Lawrence—and even the edgier writers of the time were writing about sex only as tragedy and farce, not to arouse. I had thought of
Herotica
as a way to inspire women; but as it turned out, it sparked a renaissance of contemporary erotic literature from all quarters.

With
Best American Erotica,
I finally had men’s as well as women’s stories in one volume, and I wanted covers that had a little more bite to them. I knew that the days of softly seducing readers into erotica with fleurs-de-lis and Victorian-era figures were way behind us, as was the pedantic use of feminist symbols like pomegranates and seashells. I wanted male and female bodies on the cover this time. I wanted bold titles and a design that implied a little risk. I wanted the audience to understand that this book was ready for anyone, that I would dare you to turn yourself on.

In retrospect, I’m amazed that so many people bought the original
Herotica
when its treacly cover was such a turnoff, but then we were the only choice at the time. Now there is competition from lots of erotic anthologies, and women are not nearly as timid about their erotic reading tastes. Younger readers aren’t even aware of all the hand-wringing we went through to present these sexual fantasies to the public. The look of the books now needs to have more erotic confidence.

I’ve been elated that I’ve been able to connect with so many eager women readers. Yet at the same time I also sometimes feel like I am a cat celebrating inside a cage of canaries—women who feared so much for their femininity if they crossed the line into Bad Girl territ-ory. They would never have seen these stories, or been provoked by them, if we hadn’t presented them with kid gloves and lace. Why does feminine virtue rest on high-maintenance appearances?

This distinction is even more glaring in the adult video business. For years I’ve supported women directors who make erotic movies where women’s pleasure and integrity are up front, unapologetic. A few such videos have come out and have found a small appreciative audience. But that isn’t the reason so many more women are watching adult videos. The erotic videos that have achieved critical mass in the couples market, where women make the choices, are the ones that feature beautiful locations, sumptuous interior design, and cover-girl fashion. All the actors are tan, impeccable, ready to go yachting or refresh their caviar. Despite the fact that they get down to it like any other actors in an X-rated movie, their moneyed appearance is the most important signifier to the female audience. It’s like a tonic that instantly relaxes.

Why do so many women feel reassured by the icons of
Martha Stewart Living
in the erotica they favor? Because the single most important message women receive about their femininity, to this day, is the
ching-ka-chang
value of their virtue.

That virtue no longer rests on their technical virginity (unless you’re the future queen of England), but it is still defined in rather strict terms.

A traditional woman who wants to be a success cannot let her sexual curiosity take her down the status ladder. That could

mean avoiding everything from a sleazy magazine to a man who has less status than she does. It also means that she has to portray herself a certain way in public, in her costumed life. Women’s magazines—with all their makeup, hair, and clothes—are the ultimate fetish bibles. This is what women are asked to sublimate their libidos for. Obviously it’s a struggle sometimes, and the most rebellious or least successful women just give the whole program the boot.

Nevertheless, the very word
pornography
is a class barrier that keeps many women from looking at erotic expression seriously. It’s like asking them to strip naked in the street. On the other hand, when they see an “adult” movie that is choked with lavish symbols of conspicuous consumption, it’s a revelation, a green light. Whether the glamour models on-screen actually have orgasms is entirely secondary for a woman who feels threatened that she might lose it all if she lets herself be seen as a cheap date.

Until the modern wave of “grown-up” women talking about their sex lives, the conventional wisdom was that women had to be sold romance and love, sugar and shopping, men who can be tamed. But when Erica Jong came along and said she wanted a “zipless fuck,” that didn’t sound like a little girl. When a group of San Francisco lesbian-feminists put together a collection of S/M erotica called
Coming to Power,
you knew that Barbie had left the building. When I wrote my first grown-up erotic poetry, I knew, romantic as I am, that I was leaving the baby bubble forever. Good-bye Beanie-acs, hello Amazon sex goddesses. Don’t let your teddy bear bite you on the way out.

As difficult as it’s been for women to make the leap to erotic adulthood, it’s been the reverse challenge for men to rescue their boyhood loves from the dumpster and to lavish a little tender

loving care on their own romantic visions. There are plenty of men who are turned off by explicit pictures or who’ve never said a coarse sex word out loud. There are many men who find that an allegory of unreciprocated love and yearning is a thousand times hotter than a gang-bang marathon. These men, if they are heterosexual and want to be seen as such, find that they have to defend these preferences as vigorously as if they were protesting their very malehood.

Our society’s attitude toward the vanity of masculinity is so rigid and hysterical that it almost seems that a man has to come out as a homosexual just to have a heart. The Tin Woodsman must obviously be a fag. After all, didn’t he only want to love and be loved more than anything else? He’s tender, and he wants nothing more than to increase his tenderness. “Off with his penis!” cry the keepers of the Real Man Registry. Stop the kissing and hugging. If he’s going to cry, let him rust away.

Men are much more confident and aggressive than women about finding a way to make their sex stuff work; they aren’t as likely as women to sacrifice it. But over and over again, they will hang themselves up at the crucifix of the wounded male animal, wondering how much masculine power they have to surrender in order to be themselves. If they’re too soft, if they feel too much, will they lose their hard-on? It seems like a silly question, but GI Joe’s legacy begs for an answer.

Some men are so guilty and appalled over their past limitations that they think they have to abandon ship altogether, that their hard cock truly is “in the way” of recovering their emotions. The activist-author John Stoltenberg is probably the person who has argued most persuasively that “male supremacy [is] so insidious, so pervasive, such a seemingly permanent component of all our precious lives…that [our] erection can be conditioned to it.”