Elle describes itself as “the definitive modern high-fashion magazine for smart women.” Bear that in mind as you read these columns by Daphne Merkin, especially the words “modern” and “smart.” A former book critic for magazines like Commentary and The New Republic, a movie critic at The New Yorker during the Tina Brown years, a novelist and an essayist (her 1997 collection was titled Dreaming of Hitler), Merkin generates what the National Magazine Award judges called “the Merkin effect, sometimes strange, always dazzling” when she writes. Here she gives spring fashion a feminist vetting, challenges the notion that women like living alone, and examines the sexual pratfalls of writers ranging from de Sade to Lena Dunham. In all, the judges found Merkin’s work both provocative and inspiring.
Portrait of a Lady
I used to read a winsome children’s book to my daughter when she was young that began with the all-important question: “Jesse Bear, what will you wear? What will you wear in the morning?” I found myself thinking about Jesse and his daily dilemma while I was looking at the coverage of the spring shows and trying to envision myself dressed in peplums, floaty prints, and A-line frocks—the kind of clothes that convey unadulterated, unsubversive femininity. Could I imagine trading in my wintry leggings and big sweaters, my armed-for-urban-combat uniform, for such transformative, ladylike vestments? How would white lace and pastel ruffles hold their own in my essentialist, black-on-black wardrobe? Did the New Prettiness speak to my sense of being a woman, mired in the muck of postfeminist, postmodernist, “he pays/she pays” definitions that attach to same? What had happened, I wondered, to all the ironic, ostensibly empowering signifiers of contemporary women’s fashion—whether body-parading or menswear-inspired or languidly androgynous?
One answer might be innate to the fashion system itself, whereby fashion exists to pull up the shades on an eternally new day, appearing to offer us something we haven’t yet seen—or that we haven’t seen recently—while simultaneously addressing relevant concerns. Although fashion designers constantly reference earlier eras, they also put their own spin on them in part by virtue of a more distanced perspective. Dior’s New Look of 1947 caused as much excitement as it did not only because it introduced an overtly feminine silhouette harking all the way back to Madame Bovary—tiny waists, sloping shoulders, and long, full skirts—but also because it came right on the heels of World War II, when a workshirt-clad Rosie the Riveter held aloft the torch of female solidarity with our men in uniform. The New Look signaled a return to woman as a decorative object, a beautifully plumed bird in a gilded cage, rather than a practical partner in a common larger cause.
Similarly, the New Prettiness comes at a moment when the culture at large seems freshly enticed by old-fashioned values, whether served up in extreme form by the Tea Party or conveyed by the hipster embrace of everything vintage and homegrown. Nostalgia is everywhere you look, no longer self-consciously so, but fully in play as a motif, informing such theater revivals as Porgy and Bess and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and (underviewed) TV shows Pan Am and The Playboy Club. Prabal Gurung, whose own clothes this season almost singularly manage to hint at racier concerns (in the form of a black leather and silk-cord harness and the use of erotic images) while also gesturing toward a softer treatment, observes that “the world is moving so fast that we are feeling a bit lost in the whirlwind.”
Another answer might be that we have all, designers and customers alike, grown tired of identity politics, that we yearn for the sort of social sureties we imagine existed in the decades right before consciousness raising and bra burning. “I feel that right now is an uncertain time,” says Jason Wu, “and there’s something about a polished, dressed-up look that’s a nice contrast. When times are challenging, the one thing you can control is the way you look.” We might ridicule the gender constrictions that marked the fifties and sixties, but the success of Mad Men, among other backward-looking phenomena, suggests that they also speak to some part of ourselves that doesn’t want to construct a working model of femaleness from scratch each day. I can’t be alone in sensing a withdrawal from embattled agendas of self-definition, especially among younger women, as well as a renewed interest in traditional modes of femininity—even if it’s as gestural as slipping on a skirt instead of a pair of pants. It’s hard enough getting out the door in the morning in these complex, economically shaky times without having to put on a suit of armor first—and looking pretty might require less energy, conversely, than we have been taught to think.
To this end, designers, with Miuccia Prada leading the pack, seem to have studied their theme books and visual inspirations and decided to bypass the contested ideological territory of the female figure in favor of exploring a tried-and-true template of femininity, someone pristinely ladylike, not so much retro-anything as prefeminist hullabaloo. And there is indeed a certain comfort to be had, after so many years of overly exposed and overly sexed-up fashion, in clothes that flatter the feminine shape without parodying it or exploiting it. Perhaps we are feeling our way back to a period when it was possible to look pleasing without feeling insipid or obeisant to male dictates. Think of Bette Davis in All About Eve, a ballsy and driven dame if ever there were one, admitting toward the movie’s end that being a woman is “one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not.”
Of course, for some designers, such as Carolina Herrera, it has been ever thus. “The idea of getting dressed is to look more beautiful,” she tells me in a phone conversation. “I want to see women dress very feminine, very soigné.” Herrera goes on to ridicule the notion of fashion as a deliberate statement, a costume to be painstakingly pieced together from what we see on the runway and in magazines. She thinks the metaphysics of getting dressed is simpler than that: “Women want to be admired by men and women,” Herrera observes. “They don’t want to be laughed at.” I listen to the note of assurance in her voice and wonder at my own resistance to the feminine mystique, my entrenched fear of Stepford Wife glossiness and insistence on comfort and informality. Even so augustly cerebral a figure as Virginia Woolf fretted about looking risible in the wrong dress and consulted with the editor of British Vogue about which dressmaker to see. Who am I to eschew the seductions of a nipped-in waist and prim pumps?
Then again, I can’t help feeling some unease about all this reclaimed femininity and where it might lead. Does dressing like Doris Day in an A-line or pleated skirt mean that we have to go around batting our eyelashes and acting all helpless? Is it possible, that is, to go back in time without feeling railroaded into an older, discarded style of being? Gurung, who insists that “there’s got to be something that cuts the sweetness, a bit of grit,” sounds a cautionary note: “Femininity is good, but conflict and confrontation are not a bad thing. Are women really going to dress up in clothes that look like a rehash of vintage? It feels a little regressive.”
My guess is that designers are betting on our being able to have it both ways, loosening up on power dressing while losing none of our power. One has only to look at Michelle Obama’s relaxed habitation of a wife-and-mother role versus Hillary Clinton’s rather strident efforts to influence policy when her husband was in the White House to realize that there has been a shift in the wind, that women no longer feel the need to roar. Wu, meanwhile, insists that the new femininity is sharper, infused with a tougher attitude and the cleaner lines that are a legacy of minimalism. And Miuccia Prada sprinkled images of cars over pleated skirts and demure white and yellow dresses as if to suggest that toughness is at best a pose you can borrow as you please. Here’s hoping that they’re right, that this time around the lady is neither a vamp nor a tramp but serenely in charge, not waiting for Prince Charming but confident in her ability to save herself.
Social Animal
I have lived alone on and off for much of my adult life, and, despite a recent wavelet of articles and books attesting to the wonders of the single life and what it signifies about us as a culture that so many more people are “going solo,” as one book title calls it, I can safely say that I have never made my peace with it. Nor do I believe that the new statistics on single living—which are now higher than they have ever been, coming in at 28 percent of U.S. households and nearly 50 percent of Manhattan residents—indicate a profound psychological change in the way we conceive of ourselves, as some are arguing. Rather, I think they’re a reflection of certain social realities, not all of them positive (accomplished women who put off marriage often find a scarcity of compatible mates), and certain adaptations (rather than compromise, women remain single). But perhaps the best place to start is not with a fresh-off-the-press “trend,” based on more or less factual evidence and more or less provocative findings by sociologists and opinionmongers, but with myself, as an ostensible representative of this new singleton condition.
Looking back, I can’t recall ever having harbored a deep wish to live alone. Although I grew up in a big family and shared my room for the longest time with first two brothers and then two sisters, there was a “lonely-in-a-crowd” flavor to my experience that didn’t lend itself to dreams of holing up by myself so much as sharing quarters with more compatible souls. Oh, there may have been a period during my twenties when living on my own seemed like a great adventure, a deep immersion in selfhood that would stand me in good stead, even if only for the inevitable pairing up that lay ahead. I enjoyed fitting out my first apartment, a dark faux triplex on Seventy-Ninth Street, with dishes and bookshelves, and reveled in the luxury of working at my desk, writing a bimonthly book column, into the early morning hours without anyone protesting the light or the noise. There was pleasure in staking out my own turf, filling the fridge with handpicked groceries, turning on my Farberware coffeepot every morning to brew the kind of ground beans—strongly flavored but not too tannic—that I’d come to prefer. But I also recall the heaviness of the air striking me each time I returned home and unlocked the door with no one awaiting me on the other side, only an empty apartment and what the English poet Philip Larkin, a lifelong bachelor, called “the instantaneous grief of being alone.”
Of course, there’s nothing like the drawn-out sorrow of being part of an unhappy couple to make you wonder whether you overdramatized the burden of living on your own. To wit: I married in a state of great ambivalence at thirty-four, became a mother at thirty-five, and by forty was on my own again, sharing custody of my daughter with my ex-husband. By the end of my marriage I felt overrun, the most basic decisions—like whether to feed our girl broccoli or some other virtuous green for dinner—taken out of my hands, and the idea of having a living space to myself, without an antagonistic male presence to contend with, seemed heaven-sent. I remember the sense of spaciousness I felt toward evening, when I looked forward to getting into bed and the prospect of reading or watching TV without having to make conversation or, as was more likely, patch up an earlier argument. But it must also be said that living with a small child, as I did for some of the week, is not the same as living alone; I found a good deal of companionship in my daughter even when she was addicted to make-believe and couldn’t discuss grown-up subjects. Then too, the fact of her dependence on me was a constant, space-filling one, which went a ways toward alleviating my newfound partnerless state.
The years passed, my daughter grew up and away from a focus on me, and I meanwhile became involved with two men in succession, each of whom spent a lot of time in my apartment without officially moving in. The idea of marriage came up with both of them, but I didn’t feel prepared to take that conclusive a step, and they both went on to other relationships. Then, as can happen without warning, the opportunities for meeting men became ever more scanty; I was older, for one thing, and pickier, for another. My daughter lived in a dorm in the same city and came home for sleepovers, but other than that, I was back to being the sole occupant of my apartment. Given that as a writer I also work at home, and of necessity by myself, that’s a lot of time to one’s own.
So let me be blunt about it. These days living alone often seems closer to a sentence of solitary confinement—an advanced course in living within the boundaries of the unaccompanied, unechoed self—than it does a racy prelude to a more domesticated future. If there is a claustrophobia that comes with being in too close proximity to another person, I’ve discovered that there is another kind of claustrophobia that comes with being in too unmediated a relation to one’s own hermetic self. For one thing, there is no one to put on your “best” self for, so you’re more likely to skip brushing your teeth before bed, say, or forgo a shower. It’s nothing radical, but the subtle softening of grooming standards comes to reflect a deeper laxity of self-care. For another, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of inertia, of not making the effort to see the movie or exhibition everyone’s talking about. Not to mention something more important that is rarely alluded to in the new paeans to the single life—the lack of physical connection with another person, be it as basic as the touch of someone else’s skin next to yours or the heightening of the senses that comes with good sex.
Indeed, there’s a certain hour of the night—usually right before I go to sleep, when the noise of the city has abated and I can hear the anxious whirring of my own mind—when my aloneness strikes me with renewed strength, almost as a metaphysical condition to be uneasily pondered: What am I doing adrift in a queen-size bed, with no one’s snoring to grumpily ignore or leg to push out of the way? How did I get to this place, where everyone I know seems to be coupled, happily or unhappily, but coupled all the same? (Although I don’t mean to suggest that I’d prefer being in just any relationship to being on my own.) And am I fated to be stuck in this condition? From here it’s a hop, skip, and jump to forecasting the scene of my own death, à la Bridget Jones, with no one to find me before the dogs have finished off my remains.
I’ve been thinking about this issue, despite the fact that I don’t fully qualify as living on my own now that my twenty-two-year-old daughter is temporarily back in her old room, because from what I can tell the single life—or “singlism,” as social psychologist Bella DePaulo calls it—has suddenly acquired a new cachet. Whether it’s a much-noticed article in The Atlantic by Kate Bolick called “All the Single Ladies” or a book called Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, by Eric Klinenberg (who himself is married and a father of two), there is a growing cadre of people bent on making a case for the promise of living alone. Most recently, New York Times op-ed writer David Brooks penned a column addressing the multiple factors—including the more than half of adults who are single—that have led to “an amazing era of individualism,” in which “people want more space to develop their own individual talents.” Unlike many others, though, Brooks also points out that this more flexible approach to human connections favors people with greater “social capital”—those who have the ambition and gifts to custom-make their lives—while leaving others to “fall through the cracks” into hapless solitude.
Klinenberg, whose book has become the go-to manifesto for what looks to be a movement of cheerleaders for the single life—although earlier books, such as E. Kay Trimberger’s The New Single Woman and DePaulo’s Singled Out helped set the stage—believes that the rise in living alone is nothing less than “a trans-formative social experience.” To back up his claim that “we have embarked on this massive social experiment in living alone because we believe it serves a purpose,” he brings together anecdotal evidence regarding all manner of “singletons,” ranging from young people who’ve left home and are partaking “in their city’s robust social life” to women who have outlived their husbands. He invokes something called “restorative solitude” (a little of which, I’d like to suggest, goes a long way) and touts the “rich new ways” the Internet offers us “to stay connected,” with little mention of the impoverishing effect it has had on old-fashioned, flesh-on-flesh contact.
To his credit, Klinenberg does address the sense of stigma that women who live alone in their thirties and forties continue to feel. “Regardless of their personal or professional accomplishments,” he points out, “they see their public identity ‘spoiled,’ as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it—reduced from something big and complex and interesting to that of the single woman alone.” Still, he insists that confidence in being a singleton comes if you work hard at it. Perhaps, but most of us are brought up with the expectation that grown-up existence entails being part of a duo of some sort. All of our cultural forces promote this image, from romantic songs to vacation resorts, and the fewest of us, I’d hazard, cultivate youthful visions of a future that features ourselves living alone by choice. Add to this the fact that in our society loneliness and aloneness are often experienced as one and the same state. “People are in this incredible panic to avoid being alone in the room with themselves,” says Helen, one of the few women Klinenberg interviews who doesn’t chirp about loving her domestic autonomy or remaking society. “Many people—and I’m one of them—absolutely live with loneliness all the time. It’s like an illness.”
I don’t begrudge people who’ve found definition and meaning in the very fact of their being alone. I applaud their enthusiasm and satisfaction in being able to live as eccentrically as they like without worrying about being observed conversing with their cat or walking around in days-old clothes (heck, some days I barely make it out of my nightgown), but I’m not convinced that these are the signposts of a thrilling alternative to a more conventional way of being. Perhaps the real issue has less to do with whether we end up in a pair or alone than with the dramatic lack of options in how we conceive of adult living arrangements. By far the most intriguing part of Going Solo, tucked away in the conclusion, has to do with a description of the cooperative housing that exists in Stockholm, where people of different ages and sometimes genders live in collective dwellings, alone but not isolated. One such building, called Färdknäppen, operates like a modified kibbutz—offering different-size units, depending on family size, along with communal dining and shared services such as exercise classes and hobby rooms. To me, it sounds ideal—a way of living with others outside the usual confinement of coupledom. I can’t imagine that this kind of visionary housing will be hitting our shores anytime soon, though, so in the meantime I’ll have to make do with navigating my solo life as best I can, trying to ignore those lines from Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” that I can’t get out of my mind: “Don’t make no difference what nobody says / Ain’t nobody like to be alone.” Ain’t that the truth.
We’re All Helmut Newton Now
A group of young women—ranging in age from their early twenties to early thirties—have gathered in my apartment ostensibly to talk about fundraising for an online magazine, but along the way we segue into a discussion of Girls, Fifty Shades of Grey, Internet porn, the mandatory denuding of pubic hair, and all the rest of the phenomena that seem to characterize the present erotic moment. These young women routinely refer to men as dudes and appear to be at ease with casual sex—speaking dispassionately about their experiences, reducing them to amusing anecdotes—in a way that was once seen as more true of men. I find myself wondering whether this has been all to the good, whether some essential frisson has been lost along with the traditional self-consciousness about sex. I think of the film director Luis Buñuel’s famous statement, “Sex without sin is like an egg without salt,” which I’ve always taken to mean that sexual satisfaction requires an edge—that without some sort of impediment to bump up against, we risk vertigo-inducing psychological free-fall.
What strikes me as truly strange, however, is this: I’m older than these women and should by all rights be envious of their paradise of sexual opportunities, but I find myself feeling sorry for them instead—just as I winced when I watched Girls, finding it as sad as it was funny. I’ve read various defenses of the show’s deflated rendering of sexual engagement, and I’m still not convinced that the pivotal scene—in which Adam (played by Adam Driver) masturbates over the awkwardly naked body of Hannah (played by Lena Dunham) to the tune of a vocalized fantasy about her being an eleven-year-old druggie—is impressive for its candor so much as dreary in its implications.
For one thing, what is so new, much less revelatory, about autoeroticism and a young man’s “wanton absorption” in it? Why on earth would it engage the viewer, as Elaine Blair suggests in the New York Review of Books, more than Hannah’s flustered attempts to connect at all costs, even if that means going along with said fantasy? “We can feel the erotic charge of the scene,” writes Blair, “in spite of its limitations, qua sex, for Hannah. We can contemplate Hannah’s lack of sexual confidence without condemning Adam. We can appreciate, rather than lament, Hannah’s attraction to Adam despite the fact that he is wont to do things like dismiss her from his apartment with a brusque nod while she is still chatting and gathering her clothes and purse.”
Can we? Perhaps, if we don’t have our own identification with Hannah—and our own hopes on her behalf for something approaching sexual fulfillment (not to mention a little love). Unless we’re all irretrievably jaded voyeurs by now, on the lookout for the next debased thrill, it seems to me that the erotic context is still potent with promise for many of us, remaining one of the last outposts of the unironic in a culture bent on demystifying every last experience. Or, at least, it ought to be, if we weren’t so set these days on undercutting its power by holding it up to the light and examining it. What, one might ask, happened to the blissed-out dream of sex that came with the Sexual Revolution, the promise of intense intimacy and naked abandon—sex as “the long slide / To happiness, endlessly” that the British poet Philip Larkin envisioned in his poem “High Windows”? Why does it seem to have been cast aside in favor of a more banal discourse, one bleached of excitement and mystery?
Let me make clear where I’m coming from. I’m not trying to speak for the joys of good, old-fashioned sex as against current subversions/perversions thereof. I’m not even sure I believe in such an entity as good, old-fashioned sex. Sexual arousal, to the extent that it takes place in the brain as much as in the body, is one of the most subjective of all pleasures, encoded in highly individualized scripts that contain our psychic histories in the form of charged images and fantasies. The details of these scripts—or “microdots,” as the psychiatrist Robert Stoller calls them in his book Sexual Excitement—are designed to reproduce and, ideally, repair past traumas and humiliations that we carry with us from childhood. But as Stoller points out on the very first page of his book, the phrase “sexual excitement” is itself woefully inexact: “Sexual has so many uses,” he observed, “that we scarcely comprehend even the outer limits of what someone else indicates with the word; does he or she refer to male and female, or masculinity and femininity, or eroticism, or intercourse, or sensual, nonerotic pleasure, or life-force?”
I should point out as well that my own tastes have historically run to the edgier end of the sexual spectrum—and, indeed, in some circles I am seen as a promoter of unsavory sexual preferences. I am referring to a lengthy essay I wrote for The New Yorker in 1996 called “Unlikely Obsession.” This piece, which has continued to haunt me from the moment it appeared, was a graphic account of my longtime fascination with erotic spanking and my cautious flirtation with more serious S&M; it also attempted to trace the psychological origins of my interest and to envision a future less tied to this kind of scenario. “The fact is,” I wrote early in the piece, “that I cannot remember a time when I didn’t think about being spanked as a sexually gratifying act, didn’t fantasize about being reduced to a craven object of desire by a firm male hand….”
If I had ever imagined the reading public was no longer shockable, the reception to what I thought was my carefully considered and psychologically nuanced revelations cured me of that notion. The article caused an immediate stir, the likes of which was impossible to foresee but easier to understand in retrospect. I’d talked openly and in a high-toned forum about matters of the flesh—unwholesome, perhaps titter-inducing matters of the flesh, at that. I received hundreds of letters, was praised and reviled in print for my courage and my effrontery, and eventually discovered that my name had become a form of shorthand (as in “looking for a Daphne Merkin type”) in personal ads. “Unlikely Obsession” was referred to in a recent Newsweek cover story by Katie Roiphe that explored the renewed interest in S&M among younger women, and it was then raked over the coals by Virginia Heffernan in a rebuttal to Roiphe’s piece: “Did anyone read Merkin’s 1996 tale of her unlikely obsession with finding men to whack her and conclude she needed a Nobel Prize for savage honesty and lapidary prose? Not as I remember it. The takeaway was, Something is wrong with Daphne Merkin.” (To which I will only add that Heffernan’s response put me in mind of a remark the journalist Richard Goldstein once made about an infamous sex scene in Last Tango in Paris: “There’s no unity in people’s fantasies; some of us will always think a stick of butter is for bread.”)
I am dredging all this up in the interest of full disclosure but also to try to provide some perspective on the way we view contemporary manifestations of age-old sexual preferences. Sadomasochistic impulses, whether light or heavy, have been a staple of the erotic imagination at least since people started reading novels, beginning with the eighteenth century’s Fanny Hill and the works of the Marquis de Sade. The nineteenth century saw an outpouring of fiction dealing with flagellation and enslavement—the most notable instance being Venus in Furs, written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whose name the term masochism derives). Closer to our own era are works like Story of O, Nine and a Half Weeks (my personal favorite), and the Sleeping Beauty trilogy, penned by Anne Rice under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. Fifty Shades of Grey, the pros and cons of which have been widely discussed by every journalist with a blog to stand on, is the most recent entry in this genre. The runaway success of the book, which tells the story of an “innocent” college girl’s introduction to S&M by a sexy corporate titan, doesn’t suggest to me anything so much as the fact that, in the world outside of Girls, the collective sexual imagination is kept on a pretty tight leash. By which I mean that we live in postfeminist, assiduously politically correct times that don’t allow for much deviation from “enlightened” behavior both in and out of the bedroom. The transgressive may be part of our daily cultural fare—a little perversion here, a little fetishism there, we’ve seen it all, we take it in stride, we’re all Helmut Newton now—but we tend to file it away silently rather than discuss its significance. The insistence on gender equality, which is one of the legacies of women’s liberation, even for younger women who are otherwise disengaged from its politics, has put the lid on the articulation of desires that don’t speak to a carefully maintained balance of power within couples. This, in turn, has only whetted our appetite for expressions of love-slave desires, abject or unruly though they may be.
Then again, it’s the nature of our sexual selves—no matter how see-through our amorous lives might appear—to remain impenetrable in the uniqueness of our references. In other words, the quality of a sexual experience is something known only to oneself, a reality neatly summed up by the question we’ve all either asked or been asked: “Was it good for you?”
It’s probably easier to get a consensus on any subject other than sex. The very variableness of what we might mean when, for instance, we refer to someone as being “great in bed” is what informs the dismissively mordant German saying my mother used to be fond of citing: Bei Nacht sind alle Katzen grau. (“At night all cats are gray.”) Your idea of a stud might be my idea of a lummox, but the point is: How am I to know other than by trying him out for myself? In “The Forbidden Realm,” an essay in The Best American Sex Writing 2004, the subtitle of which asks, “Why Hasn’t There Been a Great Movie About Sex?,” Steve Erickson makes the telling observation: “Every sexual relationship is so much the calculus of two subjectivities colliding that the sex other people have is too foreign for most of us to even consider, let alone watch, no matter how great the actors look or how well posed their interplay.”
The fact that our sex lives comprise a vast collection of secret histories may have suited the tenor of earlier times—the repressive 1950s, say, when women hadn’t yet been liberated from the myth of vaginal orgasm, men hadn’t yet been charged with understanding the complexity of female responsiveness, and everyone kept their deviant tendencies to themselves. But it’s decidedly less suited to the way we live now, in a “milk-and-honey society of free-market sex,” as Philip Roth characterized it in The Dying Animal. These days, the dominant cultural impulse is one of exposure, of uncovering what has previously been hidden from view, whether it is a Rutgers student spying on his gay roommate’s sex life via a hidden camera, or journalists tracking down Anthony Weiner’s show-and-tell e-mails or what exactly transpired in Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s hotel room. And I’d argue that it is our unease with the intractable privacy of the erotic experience that marks the present moment. We’re so used to the performance aspect of experience our digital culture fosters, so used to exhibiting our every gasp for others via tweets, pinning, etc., that we squirm under the burden of intimacy, the way it casts us back on ourselves and our own feelings without the mediation of an audience. In this erotic moment, when we imagine we can know all and communicate all about what creates desire or pleasure, throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into sexual communion, in all its unpredictable singularity, seems dangerous.
Then, too, as creatures of this great consumerist epoch, in which desire is relentlessly externalized and airbrushed, we’re wedded to the notion that what is of intrinsic value can be put on display and objectively assessed. If we can only zoom in on the grainy reality of sex, enlarge the pornographic images on our computers, we’ll be able to judge for ourselves, see how we stack up. Under the cover of voyeurism, we watch people we envision as being sexier than ourselves, doing sexier things to each other than we’ve ever chanced to try. That carnal appetites work in unfathomable ways gets largely lost in the rush to revelation.
It was at college, as an English major during the heyday of the French-influenced deconstructionist approach to literary texts, that I first became fully aware of the more twisted byways of passion, the roads less taken. In cloistered seminar rooms filled with attentive, note-taking types like myself, my eyes were opened to a hitherto undreamed-of philosophy of sex, its lawless nature, and the conviction that societal conventions, such as marriage and monogamy, are the death of sexual love. (De Rougemont: “Is there something fatal to marriage at the very heart of human longing? … It is obvious that Western Man is drawn to what destroys ‘the happiness of the married couple’ at least as much as to anything that ensures it.”) I warmed to the French writer Georges Bataille’s hip, truth-or-dare assertions about the wonders of transgressive eroticism (“Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death”), even if I wasn’t precisely sure what they meant, and I stayed up late at night in my narrow dorm-room bed reading and rereading the iconic, galvanizing piece of contemporary erotica, Story of O. As much as I was elated by these writers’ radical, non-white-bread approach to the implicit power play of romantic love, I wondered about the emotional consequences in the here and now. What if you wanted to do something with your life when you weren’t “moaning in the darkness” à la O—being flogged or branded with a red-hot iron with your lover’s initials? How did the wish to have children, much less a career, fit into this consuming vision of sexual absolutism?
In 2004, I saw a documentary called Writer of O about the pseudonymous author of the book, an editor at the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard. Her real name was Anne Desclos, and the filmmaker Pola Rapaport had tracked down the disarmingly mild-looking ninety-year-old provocateur in her modest house outside Paris, where she lived alone with her cat, before she died in 1998. According to her own clipped and elliptical statements in the film, Desclos wrote this groundbreaking (and, depending on your point of view, liberating or horrifying) novel as a form of a love letter to the married man with whom she was involved for many years, the prominent French intellectual Jean Paulhan, who was a glamorous womanizer and an admirer of the work of the Marquis de Sade, and who also happened to be her colleague at Gallimard.
I remember watching the white-haired and straight-backed Desclos talk quietly but intensely, her still-blazing blue eyes seeming to look backward without so much as blinking, about her dogmatic belief in love as a kind of secular calling, demanding a complete surrender of self. What impressed me most of all about this brainy and fiercely proud woman, who lived with her parents until they died, was her desperate allegiance to a philandering eminence whose interest she was afraid of losing as she aged, having never seen herself as pretty to begin with (she was forty-six when she penned Story of O in a feverish period of a few weeks). How better to embrace the humiliation of trying to keep him than by insisting that there was a delirium all its own to be had in degradation.
What’s most curious about this hypersexual moment, filled to the brim with Internet porn, mega-best-selling erotica, and the casual nudity of shows like Girls, is that the fugitive spirit of eroticism seems to have quietly escaped through the bedroom window. Where are the extramarital love affairs that were all the rage in the seventies, endlessly described in novels like John Updike’s Couples and analyzed in the pages of women’s magazines? If they exist—and undoubtedly they do—they’re no longer touted as attempts to break free of stultifying marital conventions in favor of a more authentically lived existence. And why do younger women seem so rarely to be the objects of romantic pursuit or breathless seduction and much more likely to be willing partners in what one twenty-three-year-old woman I know refers to, somewhat defeatedly, as “goal-oriented sex”? This same woman muses that “the grand romantic gesture seems dead to my generation. I’ve never had a love letter counting the ways delivered to my doorstep. More often it’s a quick e-mail or text message asking what movie time is best for me.” That men are wont to compartmentalize sex and love is hardly a revelation, but now women are doing it themselves, or perhaps doing it to themselves.
Recently I saw a movie—Sarah Polley’s melancholic, lovingly observed Take This Waltz—that reminded me of everything that seems to be missing in today’s sexual climate. It stars Michelle Williams as an aspiring writer married to a cookbook author (played by Seth Rogen). She loves her husband but is bored by him, and then she meets up with a man (played by Luke Kirby) who speaks to all her buried sexual longings. The film makes a case for the elusive nature of sexual ecstasy—its way of bounding out of reach just when we think we’ve caught it—but it makes an even stronger case for our imagination as the authentic erotic domain, capable of lingering over the details of arousal in a way that real-life sex rarely lives up to. I’m thinking of a scene in which Kirby’s character, a free-spirited artist and rickshaw driver, describes in feverish language that put me in mind of no one so much as D. H. Lawrence how he would make love to Williams if and when such a possibility came to pass. The scene is charged with eroticism precisely because it is so untainted by self-conscious irony.
Which brings me to the following suggestion: Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the situation, beginning with a reconsideration of D. H. Lawrence, the high priest of antirationalist, transcendent fornication who went from an image of gross indecency to over-the-top datedness in less than thirty years. Lawrence, of course, is best known for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel characterized by overheated and androgynous insights that led T. S. Eliot to remark of its author that he “seems to me to have been a very sick man indeed.” It seems to me, on the other hand, that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with its mix of wordlessness and sudden dips into hamstrung tenderness on the part of Oliver and expressed vulnerability and fearful excitement on the part of Lady C, speaks with more truth to the original dreams we all have of where sex—or the sensuous experience generally—might take us if the lover in question were responsive enough and the circumstances conducive.
Then again, all of Lawrence’s work was marked by his peculiar, almost oracular sexual candor—“Sex is the fountain head,” he wrote, “where life bubbles up”—beginning with The Rainbow, which was banned in Great Britain shortly after its publication in 1915. He was willing to bet his all on klutzy, breathless passion—is passion ever graceful, except in the movies?—in his writing and his life, where as a young man he went off with someone else’s wife, having fallen in love within minutes of meeting her. Although he’s not taught much these days and probably read even less, Lawrence almost more than any writer I can think of took sex seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it lent him a suspicious air in his time and has rendered him impossibly uncool, almost quaint, in our own. Here is one of his many fraught, decidedly unironic, and resolutely uncasual descriptions of sex, which, even in its opening steps, is viewed as a kind of erotic dance to the death: “She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight. She seemed to be destroying him. He was reeling, summoning all his strength to keep his kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss.” Try a little of that on for size, why don’t you, Lena Dunham and Adam Driver …