Best Sex Writing 2009 (15 page)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, but there is also something both daring and poignant about Lawrence’s attempt to win over his straitlaced and corseted readers to the liberating effect of erotic nakedness. His late phase especially, which includes
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and the short novel
The Man Who Died
(first published, by the bye, as
The Escaped Cock
), shows him pushing beyond what speculum-gazing Kate Millett and others have decried as his worship of the phallus into a more psychologically expansive view of carnal matters.

Lawrence was singular among his contemporaries for naming women’s body parts and for attempting to depict female orgasm decades before Norman Mailer and Harold Brodkey got around to trying their hands at it. It seems all the more curious therefore that Virginia Woolf, in a speech she gave to an audience of two hundred women in January 1931 (almost a year after Lawrence’s death), noted that it would take another fifty years before “men have become so civilized that they are not shocked when a woman speaks the truth about her body.” Whether or not we have arrived at this juncture depends, I suppose, on your sense of how shock- able we remain under our contemporary posture of jadedness, but please do note that Woolf ’s speculation does not make mention of a woman speaking the truth about
his
body. It is as though this were a possibility not even to be hinted at except on a different planet than ours.Which brings me back to where I began, unwilling to consign myself to the outpost of raunch yet unsure whether a seat will be found for me inside the clean, well-lit rooms of polite company.

It is to be asserted, then, that very few women talk about the specifics of penises: the too-shortness, longness, thinness, fatness, curviness, redness, veininess,
whateverness
of them. Nice girls aren’t supposed to take note of the individual penis in all its clinical details

(its potential for beauty or hideousness as well as defining charac- teristics like length, girth, and color)—for fear, I suppose, that the whole delicate scaffolding, the prerequisite of a cock-of-the-walk confidence if a man is to be able to perform in the bedroom, would come crashing down around us.

Or perhaps it’s simply that no one wants to know what her hus- band’s or lover’s penis really looks like when seen through the key- hole because it’s too heavy a responsibility—like carrying around a state secret with you all the time, burning a hole in your pocket, imperiling future lives. An article I read in a woman’s magazine about how to maintain strong friendships advised readers not to step over the other person’s “comfort zone” and went on to cite a conversation about penis size—in which a friend of the writer’s revealed in a whisper over lunch that the man she was dating and whom she would later marry had a very small penis (“It’s, like, min- iature”)—as its first and most glaring example of an inappropriate revelation. The writer felt burdened with this indiscretion forever after and can’t, apparently, see this friend alone or together with her minusculely endowed husband without feeling overcome with mortification.

Indeed, I have sophisticated female friends who to this very day continue to insist that there’s no difference between one pe- nis and the next. This claim always make me feel morally suspect, as though I were a foot fetishist or a frequenter of bondage cha- trooms—someone mired in trivial and immature considerations, measuring the circumference of a banana while everyone else has moved on to worry about global warming. And, yes, I know that on the grander existential scale, or even on the less grand functional scale, it doesn’t matter all that much, but then again neither does breast size or the shape of your ass—and men never tire of discuss- ing these. One might conjecture that while the male gaze makes

us feminine, confirms heterosexual women in their sense of their own desirability by the very act of assessing it (weighing breasts like so many sacks of potatoes and coming up with ideal ratios of waist- to-hip size as if women were Barbie dolls made real), the assessing female gaze
un
makes the masculine principle (the breast standing in for the woman, the penis for the man, rather than whole glorious be- ings)—He who does the Desiring.We in turn collude with men in treating the detached appraisal of sexual parts as an exclusively male prerogative by looking away and talking of the ardor or duration of men’s sexual performance rather the prescribed nature of their equipment, whether crooked or straight, daunting or drooping.

Then again, there is no way not to take notice of what
is
more often than not first perceived to be an absurd and even ungainly appendage—before, that is, its emblematic significance to the hu- man race is factored in, like bonus points for giving added Erector Set value. Not even I, brought up in an Orthodox German-Jew- ish household where my mother went wild if we failed to put on robes (“dressing gowns,” as we called them) could successfully overlook the penises surrounding me. It’s one thing to deliberately blind yourself to the reality of your father’s penis—which, with the exception of girls who happen to be brought up around nudists, is what I think most of us do.To the extent that I wondered about my father’s penis, I ascribed to it my feelings about him, which would have made his penis unlikable and scary at once (albeit not scary in a curiosity-inspiring way). But it’s another thing altogether to overlook the penises of three brothers, especially if you happen to have slept in the same room with two of them until you are eight years old, at which point a psychiatrist suggests to your mother that it would be better for your already faltering mental health if you slept either by yourself or in a room with your two sisters.

I don’t know whether I suffered from any adverse comparisons

I made between my own body and my brothers’ bodies—whether, that is, I was affected by what used to go by the formal appellation “penis envy”—but I do know I felt outmuscled by them. And that I studied the crotches of their pajama pants when I thought no one was looking, intrigued by the odd way the cotton bunched up in this area—as though it contained a small cluster of grapes—while my own pajamas had to make no such accommodations.Years later I would be reminded of this disparity (and the fact that it had prob- ably made more of an impression on me than I consciously realized) when I read one of Flaubert’s tirades against the treacherous nature of women:“Women have no notion of rectitude. The best among them have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counseling and practicing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their origin.Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humidity, confusion.” No wonder Madame Bovary gave up and swallowed arsenic.

And sometimes, it must be admitted, even
after
such calculations are made, after one has an idea of what penises can get up to, they still pose themselves as less than sublime. I think of a conversa- tion I had not long ago, sitting around the kitchen table with my adolescent daughter and my forty-year-old Filipina housekeeper, concerning the physical noncharms of the penis. Of the three of us, I’m quite sure I was the only one who had seen an adult penis up close, and thus could draw on the vehicle of my senses rather than the evidence of visual images. But no matter: my daughter and my housekeeper were in cheerful agreement as to the unregenerate ug- liness of penises—the sheer aesthetic silliness of the design, as they saw it, especially when you took into account the whole picture, including the surrounding hairiness and the existence of those two undignified balls.

I listened with some amusement to their remarks, envisioning us in a bawdy scene out of Chaucer, set in a dim low-ceilinged room lit by sputtering candles rather than in my linoleum-floored kitchen awash in recessed lighting, three girls sitting around the hearth speaking the unvarnished truth about men. (I should in- clude my friend Elizabeth—who has been conversant in her time with a shuddersome number of penises and stoutly believes they’re an acquired taste—in this warm and candid circle.“If you’re a visual person,” Elizabeth once explained to me, “the penis is a hideous organ, which isn’t to say I don’t like them.”) But I also felt a slight sense of unease, even foreboding, at the dismissive tone that was being taken.What, I wondered, if men (any man, the father of three across the hall, say, or the doorman who guarded us from potential marauders and always greeted us as though he was genuinely happy to see us again) knew that they were being viewed in this way— that it was even possible to size up their most prized credential with so much irreverence? I understood that my unmarried and possibly virginal housekeeper had little use for men, but how had I failed in transmitting to my daughter the necessary sense of gravitas about the subject, without which she would clearly be doomed, giving off the wrong signal, a slew of insufficiently dazzled pheromones?

It wasn’t, after all, as though I were consciously trying to raise a rampaging shrew, a Lorena Bobbitt, say, or, going back several de- cades, a maddened man hater like Valerie Solanas, who first penned the
SCUM Manifesto
and then shot Andy Warhol. Heaven forfend. I had loved men in my time, including my daughter’s father; I had loved penises, sometimes more than the men they were attached to. Presumably I would do so again, but meanwhile I saw the line I had to adopt. It was up to me to put matters right, to defend the maligned organ. “It’s actually quite nice,” I heard myself say, as we all scraped the last of the mint-chocolate-chip ice cream from our

bowls. I moved gingerly from the particular to the general, trying to walk a line between a discriminating embrace and wholehearted sluttishness:“They sort of grow on you.” And then, as the coup de grace, I, who had gone through life half resistant and half in thrall to men and their effect on me, especially in bed, who had resisted the “privileging” of the male sexual organ even as I marveled at its ability to transform itself from something soft and passive into something hard and driven and capable of filling you up like a stop- per in a bottle, came out openly as an advocate.As my daughter and my housekeeper first stared at me and then at each other, I added: “I like them.” Just in the nick of time, I retracted a bit, lest I sound like I was a come-one-come-all appreciator of penises, the sort of woman who liked all flavors of ice cream as long as they were cold. “I mean, some of them.”

Sooner or later it happens. They exert their charms; persuade you that your Hole needs their Eminence. Or if not quite that, they prove indispensable to your feeling more vivid and less alone, no longer adrift in the vastness of the world but grounded in the snug fit of the erotic moment. In my case, the pivotal “Aha!” arrived, in the manner of many belated recognitions, with a compensatory force, so that for a while in the latter half of my twenties I found myself walking around in a haze of penis longing.After holding on to my virginity until the age of twenty-five with a slightly deranged fervor indicative of equal parts fear and desire, I acted as though I had awakened to a new morning. The world seemed charged not with the grandeur of God, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had it, but with the grandeur of erections. I liked the feel of a penis growing firm in my hand (it would take years before I felt truly comfortable with a penis in my mouth), and I loved the feel of an

urgent penis inside me, pushing through beyond my usual barriers to the hopelessly receptive Lady Chatterley core of me. I thought they—the confederacy of penises—were close to amazing in their ability to change shape in so dramatic a way. I imagined it to be a special effect that kept happening just for me, over and over again. It was hard for me to believe that other women—scads of other women—could produce this same result.

The penises I became acquainted with were uniformly circum- cised—I had wandered away from my religiously observant up- bringing, but not that far—and early on I noticed small differences between one circumcised penis and another that turned out not to be so small. There were a few times I got out of bed midway because the penis in question was too big or too stocky or hazard- ously curved, like a scimitar. Once I fled the Plaza Hotel because a minor movie producer with a legendary reputation as a cocksman appeared not only to be hung like the proverbial horse but had a slightly glazed look in his eye, which, together with his mus- ings on the wonders of anal sex, scared me back into my clothes. Several years later, when this same man and I went to bed in a hotel in Beverly Hills, I felt appreciative of the vigor with which he made love, his penis no longer striking me as gargantuan but rather as generous.

I remember watching afterward as he sat naked on the edge of the capacious hotel bed, singing some ditty he had learned in military school decades earlier. He began to get dressed by pull- ing on a pair of red socks and for a moment, before he put on the rest of his clothes, I felt a great sense of loss. He was leaving me in my expensive room—taking his penis, which I had become fond of, with him. For a moment, I thought of asking him to stay, or of asking him to leave me his penis as a memento. We women become quite attached, you know, which is both our triumph and

our defeat. If I had to make a guess as to what it is that we become attached to I would end up fumbling for the right words, talking in slightly abject terms about the feeling of being filled, which sounds suspiciously as though I believed in Flaubert’s antiphonal Holes and Eminences, when what I really believe in is something vaguer, something along the lines of a certain kind of need being met by a certain kind of virile understanding. Not to get too Lawrentian about it, I suppose I might say that we are all composed of psy- chological Holes and Eminences and that sometimes a man comes along wearing the red socks—or maybe it’s really the penis by way of the red socks—you’ve been looking for all these years.At which point you’re a goner and his penis, whatever its reality, looks like the very model you’ve been lusting after without even knowing it.