III

 

1.

It is the end of January. I have been thinking a lot about sex. I am in a boxy gray room in Bloomsbury, early for a talk by Shere Hite. I have with me a copy of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. This, of course, was her stomping ground; after a spell in Richmond, she and Leonard came back here in 1924, living at Tavistock Square. Virginia used to walk her dog, Pinker, through the streets; she would sit in Gordon Square, “under the shelter of trees with the rain pattering between the leaves,” reading, or talking with Leonard. I go from office to bookshop, from Tube to café, dry cleaner to library. I walk through these two squares, or dip alongside them on my bike, and see her there, in a long skirt, a dress—“I must remember to write about my clothes next time I have an impulse to write. My love of clothes interests me profoundly; only it is not love; and what it is I must discover”; “This is the last day of June and finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat”—and I do something, internally, halfway between doffing a cap and curtsying. Bowing, perhaps. Un salut bien bas.

*   *   *

Woolf’s love for Vita Sackville-West flickers throughout the diaries. “Vita having this moment (twenty minutes ago) left me, what are my feelings? Of a dim November fog; the lights dulled and damped. But this will disperse; then I shall want her, clearly and distinctly…” And then: “I feel a lack of stimulus, of marked days, now Vita is gone; and some pathos, common to all these partings; and she has four days’ journey through the snow.”

*   *   *

After dinner with Lytton Strachey one evening: “Oh I was right to be in love with him twelve or fifteen years ago.” But her love with Leonard: the sense of a tender, fruitful life together: “… I was overcome with happiness. Then we walked round the square love making—after twenty-five years can’t bear to separate. Then I walked round the lake in Regent’s Park. Then … you see it is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.”

*   *   *

The last entry in her diary reads: “L. is doing the rhododendrons.”

 

2.

Shere Hite has much to say about women’s relations with men, and with women. She comes, escorted, into the room, slightly unsteady on her feet. She has wide, glassy eyes, bleached—flaxen—hair, and an air of confusion and wonder. She doesn’t quite seem here; she looks a little plastic, manufactured. Talking in a robotic, trippy monotone, she reads from a paper, pausing at the end of each page for really quite a long time, midsentence, to locate the next. The audience is uncomfortable; this is not what we expected. Every now and then she looks up at us, with either a blank look of disorientation or a beatific smile. We shift uneasily in our seats.

*   *   *

In a confusing jangle of thoughts that touch on cloning, romance, brothels, and women loving women, she repeats familiar arguments against the uniformity of the reproductive model of sex; against a sexual culture that prioritizes male orgasm, and that glosses over the fact that few women reach orgasm during penetration.

*   *   *

She is so deeply strange. I have a sudden pang of warmth and gratitude toward her, for it is easy to forget what she did, all those years ago—what all those women did—those women!—I bow to them, hand on heart—again, un salut bien bas. I think about pornography’s parade of women reaching paroxysms of pleasure through penetrative sex alone; coming crazily, wantonly, easily, through the most perfunctory of attentions from a swollen, mechanical male. For all my feelings that pornography is—of course—a fantasy, a projection of a fear of female sexuality, a way of rendering women as men (and perhaps women?) would like us to be: endlessly affirming a male potency which never fails to bring us to grateful orgasm, I now—oh—feel a cascading dejection at the thought of men, of women, of girls, of boys, thinking that this is what it is like, or what it can only be. Yes yes fuck me there yes yes yeah.

 

3.

The conversation moves on. Hite is now saying that sex for women has changed; that women are more active in sex; they now have sex on top.

*   *   *

Oh. Oh. I am deflated. Is this all that sexual agency for women might mean? Is power really just that: being on top? And is the converse true: Is lack of power being underneath? Gradually, the starkness of her vision—supported by murmuring around me—becomes clear: penetrative sex is unpleasurable, and demeaning. Women, she says, should abandon sex with men, and instead focus on their clitoral pleasure. There is clapping, and there are whooping sounds. I want to growl, in defense of the men who, because they responded to me, because they loved me and wanted me, gave me so much pleasure, so much blurred pleasure—pleasure of a clitoral kind, pleasure of a vaginal kind, pleasure of many kinds, pleasure of who cares what kind?

 

4.

My irritation builds—she and an audience member are agreeing that images of lesbians using dildos in queer porn should be boycotted; I become so fidgety I think my neighbors will be annoyed, and I wonder if I can leave—can I leave?—but I am trapped in the middle of a row, and would have to clamber over people sitting in the aisles—what a gesture!—to get out, to get some fresh air.

*   *   *

Usually I take issue at this point, and up goes my hand, and I begin. But today I cannot summon the energy.

*   *   *

I often take issue, but today I am tired, so I am staying quiet, though I am taking notes furiously, and my leg is jigging up and down, and a craving for a cigarette plunges in at me from nowhere.

 

5.

Sometimes it would be nice, I think—it would be a relief—to be so certain. To be so sure, to have such sharp edges. To know where one began and ended.

*   *   *

But I did, in fact, use to be sure, to be that certain. And it felt like this: like a hard stone in my body that caught and scraped, and made it difficult to move. That made it impossible to feel, to taste and trace the contours of myself, of others.

*   *   *

Today I am tired. I walk out, face burning, into the fresh January night.