Between Hunger and Shame
Sallie Tisdale
A few days ago, an editor from a women’s magazine asked me to write an article about internet sex. Such a request always comes a bit breathlessly, with the certainty that I will agree. I have written about many subjects—pioneers, libraries, the Salvation Army, fish. As a writer, I fall in love with problems and try to write my way to a solution. When I’m done, I move on to a new problem. The very things that drew me to the subject of sex—the American fascination with and fear of it—have made it impossible for me to leave it behind. I am never asked to write about pioneers, libraries, the Salvation Army or fish. But 10 years after Talk Dirty to Me was published, I am still trying to convince editors I’m not a “sex writer.”
I was naive when the book came out. Not naive about sex (though I certainly learned a great deal about sex in the course of writing it), but about how Americans and the American media handled the topic. I toured for the book in both England and Canada and spoke there with serious, well-educated book show hosts and critics who referenced Freud and Barthes. In the course of an American book tour, I was kissed by strangers, approached for “play dates,” caught between two horn-honking morning show comedians making jokes about “buy-seckshuals” and handed a great many very personal book manuscripts.
If I sound a bit reluctant, it is not because of the interesting and thoughtful responses in this magazine. I have been a little resistant to this review of old work, in part because of how much distance there is between the person who wrote it and the person I find myself to be today. If I were to write a book about sex now—an extremely unlikely prospect!—it would be a very different book than Talk Dirty to Me. Few of my opinions have changed, but much has expanded, softened and blurred. Such is the gift of time and age—and such is the urge we have to repair things long out of reach.
Another part of my resistance is the impossibility of being fair to a book-length work in a short excerpt. A few paragraphs can only touch on the larger, interwoven themes of a book. My intention with the book is in its subtitle: “an intimate philosophy of sex.” I wanted to attempt a philosophical explanation of sex in the culture in which I live and the only way to do it was to bring intimacy into the attempt. The book grew out of my own cognitive and emotional dissonance about sex. I believe that all being, all life, is sexual—that the root of sexual energy is animating force, the drive to be alive. But I am in the same mess as most people—tangled up in confusion, shamed and excited by surprising things, curious about the experiences of others, embarrassed about my own. So my real intent with Talk Dirty to Me was to confront our discomfort and come to a resolution with my own.
In a culture that approaches sex with adolescent prurience and fear, to talk about sex at all is to talk dirty. As Dorianne Laux’s students discovered, however liberated we consider ourselves, it isn’t easy to talk about sex in any kind of personal way. The first thing we have to do is get permission. Since the realm of sexual desire has no boundaries—and by that I mean to say that anything is potentially an object of sexual ideation—the only way we can really talk about sex is to step outside the boundaries. And the only way we can do that is by discovering how tightly bound we are in the first place.
Behold—it is difficult even to carry in public a book called Talk Dirty to Me. This phrase is the name of a famous porn film, and one of the anecdotes in the book is what happened when I went to an adult store to rent it. I liked the plainness of the phrase, its blunt command and I liked a title that clearly pushed that button of discomfort that is the root of our confusion over sex. But I didn’t begin to imagine how a large publishing company might handle it. I had no control over the cover or design and feel lucky the book looks as elegant as it does. The first proposed cover was a garish yellow-green photograph of several exaggeratedly phallic asparagus spears. One of the senior editors wanted to sell the book with a bar of soap, a suggestion I found horrifying. In the end, it was packaged in a box so as to look like a video tape!
“Soap-on-a-rope!” said the editor. “Get it? Dirty?” I liked the title phrase partly because of our tendency to equate sex with dirt—to describe sex not as though it was related to the earth, but as if it was earth itself. Earth, dirt, soil, the source of food and life. We use dirt, blackness, darkness as negative words for things we fear and we do this frequently with sex. David Shields obliquely addresses this in his lovely story about blurry boundaries, and Gary Nabhan notes the nearness of sex to eating of many kinds. Our relationship to cleanliness, to the rough unpredictability of bodies, has a lot to do with our inner sexual life.
Melanie Domenech Rodríguez notes that how we judge the bodies of others has a lot to do with how we judge our own, and vice versa. To me, this is a much bigger topic than weight or appearance; it is one of meaning and value, the dichotomy of good and bad, right and wrong into which we divide our worlds. We can’t entirely escape the value systems with which we are raised, but we can become intimately aware of how they function. And we can talk about it. As Rodríguez notes, “Silence begets silence,” and I wanted this book to be a matter of “talking about it.”
Paisley Rekdal writes that she “fell in love with difficulty” when she confronted a wild landscape. I agree that sexual behavior isn’t always “big” or grand—sex can be minor, forgettable and vaguely irritating. It is sexual nature, or sexual view, that I consider big—big in the way an ecosystem is big. Sexual nature is more than its parts, more than its themes, more than its acts. The difficulty in opening to the land that Rekdal describes so well is the difficulty we feel when we open to our own lives—when we finally drop our hopes, fears and wishes and see things as they are, thick, complicated and demanding. When we fall in love with our own life, we invariably fall into difficulty; that this chaos can be joyful is one of the surprises.
In the book, I spend a lot of words on the troublesome fact that our sexual responses are extremely fluid, unpredictable and textured. Behavior may be controllable, but response is not; it simply is, and even if we ferret out the roots of the response—genetic, environmental, traumatic, glorious—we can’t trade in our sexual framework for another. We are who we are. Most of our troubles about sex come directly from our attempt to deny this and box up our responses to fit an ideal.
Bruce Bagemihl explores the necessary question of whether the naturalness of sex is something we should cultivate or transcend. Do we consider certain sexual acts wrong because they are based in nature or because they are not? He sees my “sexual planet” as an attempt to “connect sexuality to ‘the earth.’” No connection is required. Sexual desire, like hunger, the need for sleep, the pleasure of a warm summer afternoon, our urge to find shelter in the dark—these are mysterious things. Ordinary, and very mysterious.
The argument is rather how much or how little we should try to control these needs, the borderlands between body, mind and heart. I can’t easily draw a line that divides sexual desires into “good” or “bad” desires. Each of us can draw a line in regards to behavior; this is not the same. I think we are all essentially pansexual beings, falling all over a rocketing continuum that is no more a bell curve than it is a the outline of a mountain range. We change from day to day; we are surprised and sometimes shocked by our desire, a fantasy appearing from nowhere, a sudden splash of lust where it never was before. I have been surprised enough times to know that my sexual responses have little to do with my conscious plans, my morals—or my behavior. I have to assume that the same is true for others.
Bagemihl sets “humanity” (as in the human ability to construct—waltzing, cakes and art) against and opposed to “nature and animals.” He wants a humanity that is “laden with sex” but free of violence; I’m not sure it is so simple to separate these things. I have been as surprised by violent emotions as I have by sexual ones. Might they not be part of the same thing, that aliveness, the urge to be and grow, to complete ourselves by competing with others that is at the root of fertility? If we insist that sexuality always feel warm, loving or spiritual we will spend a lot of time suppressing unexpectedly rough-and-tumble feelings. Again, this is not about behavior, but acceptance of the driving urge itself.
Tim Birkhead writes, “What was once perceived as ‘talking dirty’ is now talking truth.” His comments on the biological basis of promiscuity rest comfortably with evidence of widespread homosexual behavior in many species, the frequent use of sexual favors among primates, and animal masturbation, none of which fit the Darwinian picture exactly. Anthropology makes it clear that even within the human species, the range of sexual behavior is vast.
Science doesn’t easily lead opinion, however. The current debate over the meaning of marriage makes it clear we have a long way to go to find any agreement on what is natural for humans—and more importantly, whether humans should allow themselves to behave in natural ways. Those who claim marriage should be only a romantic bond between a single man and a single woman have little sense of biology, and obviously no idea how rare that kind of marriage has been historically. But their feelings have nothing to do with the facts. The philosophy of law addresses the very fact that we want to behave in ways that others think we should not behave. The law is there to define what constitutes transgression.
I am in favor of transgression, myself—that is, I don’t think we can truly understand ourselves until we move into a realm that feels transgressive in some way. (This is true in all arenas, not only sexuality.) We have to move into our discomfort, bring it into the light, investigate it. Transgression is fluid, too, of course—“talking dirty” is a culturally relative behavior. It is transgressive to talk about sex outside a moral system or behave in uncommon ways. (It is almost as shocking these days to declare one’s self to be celibate as it is to declare one’s self a lover of sheep.) And it is still naughty to ask someone to talk dirty to you. That’s why it’s exciting, isn’t it?
We use sex for so many things. We use it for protection and for forgetting; we use it as payment and as a gift, with greed and hatred and love. As I read the culture today, the old question of accepting desire without being controlled entirely by it remains. We don’t know how to do this, and so we bounce painfully between hunger and shame. I believe there is a middle ground, though it may be hard to find. There, we can admit and accept the huge and manifest nature of our sexuality, and we can express it by eating a peach as easily as making love.
Perversity is what other people do, that’s all. Perversity is always about the “other,” the one who is not part of your planet. When we can expand self to include others, and expand world to mean all that we see, the wildness of our own hearts is no longer such a frightening thing.
Responses from:
Tim Birkhead | Paisley Rekdal | Bruce Begemihl | Melanie Domenech Rodriguez | Dorianne Laux | David Shields | Gary Paul Nabhan