Sperm Count: Squirting the Issue

“If it’s been done it’s been said and if it’s been said it’s been done” is the old saw that's usually applied to human sexuality. But do you give credence to everything you're told? Boccaccio, Rabelais, Frank Harris, Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller all regaled their readers with tales of bravado, but the guy or girl confiding/bragging about their exploits in the locker room is no Pauline Reage, the pseudonymous author of the Story of O. Still sex seems to be a source of inspiration especially when it comes to the creation of tall tales. Do you believe the tour operator friend who tells you about the woman who picked up her blouse after booking her Disney "package"? Do you believe your lawyer acquaintance who describes how she walked into her colleague’s office, shut the door behind her and asked him to relieve her afternoon itch? Do you believe there are squirters (women who ejaculate)? And do you believe the friend who met one who demonstrated her unique ability on on a deserted stretch of Caribbean beach? And of course there are the historical examples of the monk Rasputin, who had outsized appetites, of Catherine the Great who supposedly had sex with her horse, the Batista era’s munificently endowed Superman and of George Bernard Shaw who reputedly never consummated with his wife at all? Then there are the elixirs. The Bill Cosby case has brought Quaaludes back into the news, but what about urban legends like the mysterious Spanish fly, which is supposed to make women hot but which some claim only works on men. Here is one on-line citation,  “Why Spanish Fly Works Only on Men, and Is Deadly?” Lot of people tell tales. For instance politicians are great practitioners of hyperbole, but the willing suspension of disbelief tends to go with the territory when it comes to sex. We buy even the most far flung scenarios because we want to. If religion were like sex, everyone would be a believer.

Fame Shark

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Royal Young’s Fame Shark  should really be called Fame Piranha since it describes the sensibility of an omnivore and polymath who is plainly intent on gobbling up reality. Even though it’s a memoir Fame Shark reads like an old fashioned bildungsroman and aficionados of Yiddishkeit will appreciate the comparison between the Lower East Side that Young (aka Hasak Brozgold ) describes and the immigrant world of the Henry Roth classic Call It Sleep. Fame Shark is really American Psycho meets Call It Sleep with a little bit of Frank Harris’s My Live and Loves thrown in to the extent that it’s a no holds barred saga of the extremes a human being can go to in his or her quest for attention. Ultimately Fame Shark is a book about a life and Young’s is a life that has the precocity and audacity of a Shelley who also had a considerable amount of what euphemistically used to be called “experience” at a young age and the fearlessness of a Philippe Petit.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Can Stephen J. Gould’s notion of punctuated equilibrium be applied to human sexuality?  If evolution doesn’t conform to a smooth pattern, how do we determine what sexual congress will be 500 years from now? For instance, rather than being a period of repression, the Middle Ages were a very sexy time. The Canterbury Tales is one of the most ribald works of world literature, easily competing with Frank Harris, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Going back further in time, there’s Sappho and the great erotic poet Catullus. It’s odd that the swingers club of the ‘70s was named Plato’s Retreat. Shouldn’t it have been Caligula’s Retreat, for a time when the vox populi was urged to carpe diem?  In fact, sexual expression seems to move by the principle of devolution rather than evolution, with advances in man from his earliest prehensile form, homo habilis, leading to the predominance of mind over matter.  In the ‘60s there were love children, but homo is often not erectus by the time he reaches his adult state. He’s too sad.

   

Still there’s the notion of progress.  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discussed the compromise that man must make between his instinctual drives and his social nature. The mind is rather inventive. If fetishism provides a detour that allows the discharge of sexual energies that might otherwise have been inhibited, then perhaps progress can be described as the movement from merkins (pubic wigs) to hot waxing, from girdles to thongs, from pantyhose to the scene in the appropriately named Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone startles her interrogators by revealing the absence of any undergarment at all?

  

But what does the future hold?  If the sexual drive derives from procreation, then Viagra has helped to make sex a gratuitous act that persists far beyond the procreative years. Will there be some drug in the next century that makes sex possible for consenting adults who have already passed away? Nicholson Baker created a character in his novel The Fermata who has the futuristic ability to undress women with little or no consequences. Now this fantasy has become a reality with the new generation of security devices to be used in airports around the world.  Do these devices herald the prospect of a kind of parthenogenesis or immaculate conception—at least in airports—in which the voyeuristic impulse can impregnate another mind? What about timeless erotic passion, what the Germans called Liebestod, or love-death? And what about Wagner? Will there still be a Bayreuth Festival in 2500?