Best Sex Writing 2009 (14 page)
Read Best Sex Writing 2009 Online
Authors: Rachel Kramer Bussel
“It’s very difficult to be free sexually and experience sexual pleasure when you’re hiding something about your body,” agrees Dr. Britton. “Such issues pervade the culture at large but they
become heightened and exaggerated when there is scarring, loss of a limb, or injury. More psychological and emotional healing may be required to accept the body as it is.”
Physical injuries may also affect how an individual has sex, Dr. Britton adds.“For example, if a soldier comes home missing a leg and doggie-style is his and his wife’s favorite position, it could be problematic because he can no longer easily assume that position,” she explains.
“It becomes a matter of,‘Can I replicate this behavior and en- gage my partner in helping me do it, or has this been wiped out of our spectrum of how we can connect sexually?’ ” Dr. Britton notes. “Those are the kinds of important issues that must be faced.”
The Department of Defense and the Veteran’s Administration are stepping up to help. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have brought PTSD and the other debilitating effects of combat to the national forefront, and more is being done than ever before to pre- vent and treat them.
For example, servicemembers receive a mental health review prior to deployment, have access to mental health professionals in theater, and receive a mental health assessment within ninety days of their return home. In addition, the VA has greatly increased the number of mental health professionals on staff nationwide, and many VA centers have special OEF/OIF coordinators who look for and help servicemembers who may be struggling with their wartime experiences and/or the transition home.
“We have a whole team of people who go out and talk to sol- diers, family members, and partners prior to deployment,” confirms Dr. Finger.“They talk to them about the types of things they may experience when their family member is deployed and the types of available services that they can access while their family member is away.
“There is also a much greater emphasis on careful screening upon a soldier’s return in regard to physical and mental health is- sues. There is much more effort to educate them about the types of services that are available. My understanding is that all return- ing OEF/OIF veterans have unrestricted access to health care for a minimum of two years to help them deal with anything re- lated to their deployment. So there is a real effort to get them registered, identify their problems, and get them treated much more quickly.”
Dr. Finger considers sexual issues the same as any other health or medical issue.“If a veteran brings up a sexual issue, it’s going to be evaluated and addressed here,” he notes.“And our providers are doing a much better job of actually making an effort to address those issues, to evaluate them and take care of them.
“That doesn’t mean that every soldier who has a problem like this is going to report it. It’s a sensitive, sometimes embarrassing topic and one that often is not brought up, even if a health-care provider asks. And if there is a problem, it may be denied. That’s common.”
When such barriers are broken down, say the experts, treatment for PTSD-related sexual dysfunction is usually quite successful.“If we can just cure the depression, rebuild the relationship a little bit, and keep the patient [from self-medicating with alcohol or drugs], he or she will usually be able to resume normal function,” notes Dr. Russell. “Couples counseling with a good marital or sex therapist can also be very beneficial.”
Nonetheless, if theVietnam War is any indication, PTSD and its related side effects, including sexual dysfunction, are issues the De- partment of Defense and the VA will be struggling with long after the last soldiers return home from Afghanistan and Iraq.
“In many ways, the infrastructure is not in place right now to
handle the sheer volume of disabled veterans coming back,” ob- serves Dr. Gardos. “Unless we make a concerted effort to expand available resources, we are going to have an entire generation of men and women who are scarred, both physically and psychologi- cally, by their experiences. And this is going to have a devastating impact on their spouses and families. We cannot afford to ignore this problem and hope it will go away.”
Dr. Britton agrees. “What we will discover is that [sexual dys- function] will be a hidden epidemic that will be part of the fallout of these wars,” she warns. “We will be dealing with this issue for many years to come.”
Sources:
Linda R. Mona, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist in Los Ange- les, who has had experience with the veteran population. Email:
[email protected].
Patti Britton, PhD, a board-certified clinical sexologist, sexuality educator, and sex coach in Los Angeles. Tel: 310-575-8889. Email:
[email protected].
Sandor Gardos, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist and sex therapist in San Francisco. Tel: 415-749-0942. Email: sgardos@ mypleasure.com.
Medpagetoday.com:“A Quarter of Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Show Mental Health Problems” by Neil Osterweil, March 12, 2007.
d aphne m er kin
There are penises so memorable that you never get over them: JC’s for instance, a perfect edition worthy of my rapt contempla- tion, or so it seemed to me when I lay next to him on his seven- ties-style platform bed in his bachelor’s pad on an unmemorable Manhattan side street years ago. Others, too, that you would like to recall—the one belonging to your first lover, for instance, the guy who “cracked your geode” (as the man in the red socks, another lover in your not inconsiderable lineup, once put it)—that seem to have eluded your visual grasp, through no fault of their own.Then again there are those that linger in you, like a ghost penis, although they are long gone, such as the impressive piece of equipment that came along with the deceptively slight fellow you met on a Jewish singles weekend at the now-defunct Grossinger’s, a battering ram of a penis that left you raw, a penis so inflexible and obdurate that you
could hang a towel on it—which, I might add, he did.
How to talk about your personal history with penises without sounding either all Mae West–bawdy (the old “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” routine) or all fluttery and awed, like a hitherto-untouched heroine in a bodice ripper (or, perhaps, like the touched-but-hitherto-unorgasmic heroine of D.
H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
), by the supernal otherness of the thing? “Now I know why men are so overbearing,” Constance Chatterley says of her gamekeeper, Mellors, or more specifically of Mellors’ penis, which he refers to as his “John Thomas,” as though it were indeed an actual third person in the room, observing the action:“But he’s lovely,
really
. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really!”
The problem, for starters, even before we get to the fact that it’s difficult—impossible, even—for any single manifestation of this indubitably male organ to live up to its reputation, is how to deal with the word itself so that we’re not all blushing or smirking.“Pe- nis:” If you say it quickly, pass your eye over it glancingly as though it were not the quasi-scientific clunker of a word, you have accom- plished nothing other than a grown-up game of peekaboo: I don’t see you, big feller, bulging over there in the middle of the sentence. If, on the other hand, you give the thing its due and enunciate it fully,
pee-nus
, draw it out, acknowledge that it is an awkward coin- age pretending to be at ease with itself under the enormous meta- phoric burden it carries—bearing the weight of the phallocentric world between its legs—you are left having to deal with the (often incredulous) attention you have drawn by insisting that everything, but everything, is a stand-in for the phallic principle: cars, buildings, pencils, tails, fruit, revolvers, literary images. Take Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”: it can be read as a poem about the life-giving power of a divine force, or,
in my view, it can be read as a poem about the life-giving force of penises, the surging motile energy of the male orgasm.
But here I am, getting stuck in an
apologia por vita erotica sua
be- fore I have even begun.There are countless designations for “penis,” of course, just as there are many terms for its equally klutzy-sound- ing female counterpart, the graceless “vagina.” These designations include those one-syllable terms that sound like blunt, wham- bam-thank-you-ma’am heavy objects, such as “dick,” “prick,” and “cock,” as well as the half-amused, half-abashed Yiddish approxi- mations like “shmuck” and “putz.” “Putz is worse than shmuck,” Maggie Paley declares in her
The Book of the Penis
, which is a veri- table font of information on points of lesser and greater interest, including the etymology of “penis,” which is Latin for “tail” and a relatively late entry into the vernacular. She adds that the two terms “are now used almost entirely to mean ‘ jerk.’”
Then there are the many fancy descriptions of peckers that a certain kind of male writer delights in providing on behalf of his protagonist, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert ren- dering his Lolita-avid penis in typically self-aggrandizing locution as the “scepter of my passion.” James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, who hasn’t had sex with his wife Molly in more than a decade, consid- ers the generative potential lying dormant within his own relaxed endowment while lying in the bath (“limp father of thousands, a languid, floating flower”) with a kind of endearing yet pathetic self- regard. And in Bellow’s
Mr. Sammler’s Planet
, Sammler comes face- to-face with a black pickpocket’s “large tan-and-purple uncircum- cised thing” only to find himself counterphobically fascinated with distinctions of color and creed:“Metallic hairs bristled at the thick base and the tip curled beyond the supporting, demonstrating hand, suggesting the fleshy mobility of an elephant’s trunk, though the skin was somewhat iridescent rather than thick or rough.” Not to
overlook John Updike, who can always be counted on to sprinkle a few exactingly detailed, paint-by-number evocations of penises in each of his novels. In
Toward the End of Time
, there is a salute to the erect penis of the sex-preoccupied (but of course) narrator, who has masturbated himself to “full stretch” with the aid of his cache of pornography, the better to admire his own handwork: “the inverted lavender heart-shape of the glans, the majestic tensile column with its marblelike blue-green veins and triple-shafted underside. Stout and faithful fellow! My life’s companion. I loved it, or him.”
As for myself, I’ve always warmed to “Johnson,” for some inef- fable reason, just as I’ve always warmed to “cunt” over “pussy,” for a similarly ineffable reason. And the ironic—or what I take to be ironic—majesty of “rod” speaks to the eighteenth-century serving girl in me. And yet, there is something about the word “penis” in all its obdurate two-syllabled out-thereness (I’ll take one penis, if you please) that seems to rise above itself, if only because of the stiffly protruding quality of the first syllable (
pe
) followed by the curled-up flaccidity of the second (
nis
) seems to mimic the dy- namic of charge and retreat that is embodied in the piece of male anatomy being alluded to.
Then again, what is this high-minded introductory musing on the strictures of a given lexicon—or, as is more likely, an extended patch of throat-clearing—but a symptom of the larger predicament of inarticulateness that I, an ordinarily voluble creature, find myself facing when in the presence of this subject? Despite their appar- ent demystification, penises themselves retain an odd aura of un- speakableness. For all the huge strides we appear to have taken in our discussion of
sex
—mainly by making it into a discussion about body and gender—the discourse doesn’t seem to have advanced much since Lytton Strachey first dropped the word “semen” in one of those Bloomsbury discussions he and his friends, including Vir-
ginia Woolf (then Stephen) and her sister,Vanessa, used to have in one another’s houses on London evenings in the early twentieth century. Which is why trying to talk about penises still feels, even after Erica Jong’s zipless fuck, Monica Lewinsky, and “Sex in the City,” like smashing through glass: as though one were daring to touch a precious and lovingly curated object behind its protective pane with the audacity of mere language.To talk about penises as a woman is to turn yourself into an outlaw and the conversation into smut even before we’ve gotten to the age-old question of whether size matters. Once and for all: it does, although in less significant and subtle ways than men think. Ernest Hemingway’s infamously strutting account in
A Moveable Feast
, for instance, of being called upon to reassure F. Scott Fitzgerald that his equipment was adequate despite Zelda’s ball-busting insinuations (the anecdote comes from a chapter with the insufferably coy title of “A Matter of Measure- ments”) seems bogus on many accounts, not least of which is the suggestion that anxieties about the male-signifier-to-end-all-signi- fiers can be put to rest in quite so concrete a fashion. But the topic makes for easy send-up, as in the brand of condoms that offers a variety of prophylactics (the Nightcap, the Weekender, and the Ex- tended Stay) all in boxes with the word
HUGE
printed on them.
Penises, it appears, deserve to be worshipped or envied (or, if need be, encouraged) but they don’t deserve to be nattered on about.This is still sacred male territory and women trespass at their own literary peril.The potholes are everywhere you look, waiting to trip you up into porn or parody, or perhaps the high gutter baby talk of D. H. Lawrence.Which is not to suggest that Lawrence didn’t, despite what is clearly a complicatedly ambivalent attitude toward women, manage to move the conversation more radically forward than most.There may be something laughable about the rhapsodic way Mellors and Lady Constance talk about his “John Thomas” in