King Leer

In a recent Times Op-Ed piece (“What Does a Lifetime of Leers Do to Us,” NYT, 6/4/16) Jessica Valenti a columnist for The Guardian writes: “Today, one of the more unpleasant parts of my job writing and talking about feminism is dealing with online harassment—a now common side effect of writing online while female.” Is this not a form of prolepsis that is answering a question before it’s been asked or in this case, answering a criticism? What an effective way of fending off attacks. Valenti begins her piece by describing the  reaction she had to the man playing the wolf in a childhood performance of “Little Red Riding Hood.”  She says “It was just a play, just a scary man, yet my young brain was indelibly affected by that one moment. What about all the other moments? The other scary men who aren’t fictional characters, but real life terrors in girls’ and women’s lives? The looks that start when we’ve barely begun puberty, the harassment on the street and online, the violence we survive or are constantly on guard for: What does it do to us?” Is this not a case of injustice collecting and is anyone who makes such a point to the author, just another online harasser? What's the exact crime? Looking at women's or men's bodies? Later in the piece Valenti talks about growing up in Queens and finding that her "commute" to "junior high and high school" was "a time when it wasn’t unusual for a man to grope or flash me.” Now certainly this is abusive, but "Let’s go to the videotape!"as Warner Wolf used to say. At the beginning of the article Valenti is talking about what's plainly a traumatic experience. In the next paragraph this translates into a sensitivity to being looked at. Leering may not be pleasant, but it’s not a crime. There are no laws on the book about looking. Remember those “No Expectorating” signs? One wonders what the world would be like if there were fines for gazing? Will California’s affirmative consent laws now apply to giving the eye to a person of the opposite sex? Is Valenti implying that objectifying the breasts of a comely woman or the package of a attractive man is a crime?

Sperm Count: How ISIS Affects Blowjobs

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I Love You Not

Is saying “I love you,” a trigger? “Love you means never having to say you're sorry,” is the famous line from Love Story, but it appears such declarations may soon require apologies. In a Sunday Review piece  (“Regulating Sex,” NYT 6/27/15) Judith Shulevitz points out that reaching out to take someone’s hand could one day be considered “criminal sexual conduct.” This is already happening on college campuses. Governor Andrew Cuomo just signed an “affirmative consent” law similar to that passed in California (“Cuomo Signs Affirmative Consent College Sexual Assault Bill Into Law,” Huffington Post, 7/7/15). The absence of a "no" is no longer equal to a yes. Remember Molly Bloom's soliloquy? "I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me and he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes." Who would ever have dreamt that it would epitomize the doctrine of  “affirmative consent?” But when will we start hearing about “speech rape?” When will certain kinds of language be considered an unwanted advance? Young men and women in particular are impressionable and could easily be triggered say by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…” Pity is a famous form of entrapment and before long the object of your desire (aka prey) may be reaching their hand out to you. If nothing else "affirmative consent" will make the legal profession happy. Imagine the new kind of ambulance chaser arriving on the scene of a  neo-Juliet stalking her would be Romeo with an unwanted, “Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?” Speech is a very potent aphrodisiac, which can be almost as effective as Spanish Fly. Certain poems have such a powerful effect on emotion, they're like Quaaludes, the drug that has recently come back into the news in connection with Bill Cosby (“Bill Cosby admitted he got Quaaludes to give to women,” CNN, 7/7/15). What about D.H. Lawrence,  Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Charles Bukowski, not to mention Catullus, Chaucer and Rabelais? What about the Kama Sutra? Perhaps only very old friends, or old married couples who have known each other for decades, and have signed waivers should be permitted to read these forbidden texts to each other. And we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief when Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” is finally banned for good.

Pornosophy: Loving Sex?

Is loving sex all that it’s cracked up to be? Or is it the province of bad movies like Love Story (1970) or another sixties classic A Man and a Woman (1966). One of the nice things about a film like Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013) is that it shies away from loving sex. One of the film’s great scenes is an enormous argument that breaks out in an elegant hotel room which a couple has been treated to as a gift. Instead of passionate lovemaking the time away from the kids turns into a massive back and forth in which mutual recriminations almost end in a breakup. Another classic depiction of non-loving sex occurs in Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) when Claudia (Monica Vitti) discovers Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) in the arms of the American whore Gloria Perkins (Dorothy De Polioli). It’s a scene of almost orgasmic disenchantment in which everything that is wrong with the universe is concentrated in one spectacularly revolting embrace. David Lean’s version of Noel Cowards’s Brief Encounter had love, but the encounter was too brief to turn into sex. And then there is the case of the second to the last film John Holmes ever made, The Rise of the Roman Empress (1987). At this point in his career, Holmes already knew he was HIV positive yet he proceeded to have unprotected sex with the Italian porn star and politician La Cicciolina. If there were an award given for malevolently intentioned unloving sex or “loving porking," this film could very well get it. These days loving sex is literally the talk of the town. It’s the only way for students to indulge their promiscuous desires in California under the new “Affirmative Consent” statute which is one of the biggest challenges to the pleasures of the hate fuck. Last Tango in Paris (1972) contained some sex scenes which epitomized the misery of the human condition and are the perfect antidote to the virus of sentimentalism which is on the verge of infecting both cinema and life. The monologue of the nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), in Bergman’s Persona (1966) is also an effective remedy for romantic daydreams, along with the old locker room adage, “tell ‘em you love ‘em and you lay ‘em."

The Politics of Elder Sex

"American Gothic” by Grant Wood

Is it worth the risk of abuse that an elderly patient suffering from Alzheimer’s and/or dementia might derive pleasure from an intimate encounter with a loved one? A legal case in Iowa recently reported by the Times (“Sex, Dementia and a Husband on Trial at Age 78,” NYT, 4/13/15) seems to extend the principle of Affirmative Consent into the marital bed. As you may recall California recently passed an Affirmative Consent statute which essentially makes seduction illegal on college campuses. In an equivalent of a suspect being read his Miranda rights, a couple must stop even before they have gotten to the foreplay stage and establish whether each party is of sound enough mind to make a conscious decision. Volition would ostensibly be measured by an absence of ambivalence. The ability to make a decision would quickly relegate resistances to that dark closet of the unconscious where we pack away all our useless old toys. What a better way to throw cold water on sexuality than to deliver it from any relics of humanity or complex human emotion! In the current instance, the State of Iowa will weigh in on whether a husband may enjoy the comfort and pleasure of sexuality with his chronically ill wife, despite the fact that “experts,” according to the Times, agree that “physical intimacy can benefit dementia patients…calming agitation, easing loneliness and possibly aiding physical health.” What a charming way to usher in the last stages of life! Surely it will be the final nail in the coffin for those who fear that old age is nothing more then the famous description offered by Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It, “Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” The Times article begins by stating, “There is no question that Donna Lou Rayhons had severe Alzheimer’s…But another question has become the crux of an extraordinary criminal case unfolding this week in an Iowa courtroom. Was Mrs. Rayhons able to consent to sex with her husband?” The Times piece goes on to report that “Mr. Rayhons, a nine-term Republican state legislator, decided not to seek another terms after his arrest.” Daniel Reingold, chief executive of The Hebrew Home at Riverdale is quoted thusly, “Touch is one of the last pleasures we lose. So much of aging and so much of being in a long-term care facility is about loss, loss of independence, loss of friends, loss of ability to use your body. Why would we want to diminish that?” Mrs. Rayhons died in August, but from the Times quotes “a social worker at the center” as saying she “was always pleased to see Henry.” Let’s say she had lived, it’s unlikely she would have been called upon to testify. But would it have possibly helped her condition if an order of protection were issued or if, even worse, her husband were sentenced to prison and she wasn’t able to see him anymore? One wonders what Rand Paul’s opinion about this would be? Is sexuality amongst aging married couples one area where the libertarian approach of less government starts to make sense? Big Brother should not be watching the few lucky septuagenarians who have the wherewithal to get it on.