Sex in the Library and the Eye of Eros

I am currently reading Lolita, as I haven't touched Nabokov before and would like to get through at least his most (in)famous works before the publication of his posthumous novel The Original of Laura. While Lolita is scandalous for its content, an aged European's ecstatic affair with a twelve-year old girl, the novel's style is perhaps the opposite of pornography: there is no mention of actual sexual acts (so far), or when they are they are couched in delicate, literary terms that apparently bore most readers, but to my mind heighten the impact of Humbert Humbert's desire.

Contrast this to recently-reviewed love letters from James Joyce to his wife Nora Barnacle, suppressed by their grandson because they contain some of the raunchiest, explicit sex acts (anal, S&M, masturbation, etc) as only a master linguist could describe them, including a fetish for farting: "It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and say your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue came bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.”

Over the winter I was working on a survey of sexual representation for an article called The Eye of Eros for my friend's sex anthology, the Living Room Handjob, an article I unfortunately never finished, that swings from the erotic symbolisms of Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye" to philosophies of sexual perversions to paleolithic sexual cave art to the fascination of sexualized horror in the Ciudad Juárez femecides dramatized in Roberto Bolaño's "2666," showing the broad range of ways that people have expressed both their fascination and discomfort with sexual desire over history and literature:


The Eye of Eros

In 1928, Georges Bataille published “The Story of the Eye,” since considered a masterpiece of pornographic literature. In the novella, two teenage lovers embark on a series of disturbing sexual escapades, opening with the narrator watching his lover sit naked in a dish of milk and progressing through orgies and rape to the insertion of not only a bull testicle but also a human eyeball (of a priest) into the vagina of the heroine. There are conflicting critical opinions of whether or not this work classifies as pornography; Susan Sontag suggests the book is, through its juxtaposition of sex and death and recourse to the transgressive sexual narratives of the Marquis De Sade. Roland Barthes on the other hand points out the centrality and interchangeability of the sexual objects in the story: liquids of milk, blood, semen, urine, vomit, and ovoids of eggs, testicles, the sun, and the eye, suggesting instead that the coherence of the underlying metaphors moves the story away from a pornographic reading. While sex scenes and perversions abound in “The Story of the Eye,” what is most fascinating, most arousing about the text, is that the sexual images are pushed far past the point where they can be considered primarily sexual, sex is pushed beyond standing for just sex, and the reader is left with the feeling that any symbol meditated on in a sexual way can elicit similar feelings of arousal and fascination, the pleasure principle of Eros.

Biologically, human sexuality is little different from animal sexuality, in that its primary purpose is the reproduction of the species. Sex however is also pleasurable, evoking sensations of ludic play over ergic work, through foreplay, masturbation, intercourse, orgasm, and sexual fetishes or perversions. People tend to experiment with a range of sexual activities during their lives, generally settling on a few that they find most pleasurable. The philosopher Michel Foucault suggests that what activities and sensations that are considered “sexual” are culturally and historically determined, that is, what is acceptable sexually is determined by social rules of behavior and the status quo. Societies however define some sexual activities as inappropriate (wrong person, wrong activity, wrong place, etc.). These social rules are referred to as sexual morality (what can and can not be done by society's rules) and sexual norms (what is and is not expected). In the United States for example, attitudes towards premarital sex and the use of contraceptives correlate to religious beliefs and political affiliation. As Foucault points out, society defines what is considered sexually “normal,” and in order to escape this culture-bound sexuality one ought to focus on “bodies and pleasures.” But in an age of hyper, almost obsessive media depiction is it possible to only focus on pleasures and bodies outside of their attendant images and modes of representation?

Sexual perversions, or paraphilia, refer to any “powerful and persistent sexual interest other than sexual interest in copulatory or precopulatory behavior with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners” (that is, any sex beyond reproduction), and are described by the DSM as conditions which "are characterized by recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviors that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." Hundreds of paraphilias are listed in the DSM: exhibitionism, the recurrent urge or behavior to expose one's genitals to an unsuspecting person; fetishism, the use of inanimate objects to gain sexual excitement; pedophilia, a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children; sexual masochism, the recurrent urge or behavior of wanting to be humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer for sexual pleasure; sexual sadism, the recurrent urge or behavior involving acts in which the pain or humiliation of a person is sexually exciting; transvestic fetishism, arousal from clothing associated with members of the opposite sex; voyeurism, the recurrent urge or behavior to observe an unsuspecting person who is naked, disrobing or engaging in sexual activities. The DSM also mentions telephone scatalogia (obscene phone calls), necrophilia (corpses), partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia (animals), coprophilia (feces), klismaphilia (enemas), urophilia (urine), emetophilia (vomit).

Reading a sex column like Dan Savage’s “Savage Love,” or browsing for any particular paraphilia on the internet, one almost gets the feeling that the majority of these perversions are now socially acceptable, that it is in fact straightforward, unkinky, heterosexual intercourse that is bizarre or perverse. But unless one is partial to one of these sexual fantasies, what is most likely to result in the mind on hearing of them are the images or objects associated with each perversion: the exhibitionist’s overcoat; dildos, butt plugs, and other insertable, fetishistic objects (including elongated vegetables and statuary); bondage belts, hoods, whips, chains, or soft rope and scarves; young boys talking to older teachers or priests; garter belts, underwear, and high heel shoes; and behind them all, the voyeur’s peeping eye behind a curtain. These images are such a vast part of popular culture and consciousness that it is enough to mention just one to evoke whole scenes and fantasies in an active imagination regardless of ones’ own sexual proclivities. The pleasure or fascination that results is derived from being able to see the experience, and the images of paraphilias add to the uniqueness (and thus visibility) of a sexual experience over other normal or perhaps boring sexual experiences. As such, the insertion of an eyeball into the vagina in “The Story of the Eye” becomes the ultimate fetish, the act of seeing itself sexualized, the witness of sex from the inside of the body.

But what of the body, which is perhaps the most common thing to human experience? Once unadorned, our differences are discernable by height, weight, shape, hair color, eye color, skin color, and physical age; generally the options one might find on a typical porn website, along with the previous lists of perversions. As opposed to erotica, which only uses or alludes to sexually arousing imagery, pornography is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer. It is important to note that it is not the sexual act itself that is pornographic but the depiction of the act. With more tolerant social attitudes towards sexual representation, an immense pornography industry has grown, using a variety of media – printed literature, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, or video game – depicting not only real human sex but also situations involving fictional, cartoon, and video game characters. Studies in 2001 put the porn industry gross at between $2.6 billion and $3.9 billion a year, and the industry is considered influential in deciding format wars in media. The weight of the porn industry, the sheer amount of naked and sexualized bodies available for perusal, has to have some effect on the way we perceive the human body. And this is not even to consider the gratuitous use of sex to sell products in advertisements. Humans are multiplied, catalogued, anonymously masturbated to, in short, objectified beyond all personal experience, pleasure, or identity.

Feminist critics generally consider pornography demeaning to women. It eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment, and contributes to the male-centered objectification of women. Other recent feminists claim that appearing in or using pornography can be explained as each individual woman's choice, and is not guided by socialization in a capitalist patriarchy. Some researchers interestingly have concluded that there is an inverse relationship between availability of porn and per capita crime rates; that an increase in pornography equates to a decrease in sex crimes. Japan for example, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world, though some attribute this to the emphasis on a woman's "honor" in Japanese culture, which makes victims of sex crime less likely to report it. The most shocking case of sex crimes are perhaps the over 400 women who have been victims of sexual homicide over the past ten years in the town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which still remain unsolved. In his recently published novel, “2666,” Roberto Bolaño dramatizes these sex crimes in several hundred pages of false police reports, giving the incidental details of each victim’s discovery along with the recurring line, “the victim had been vaginally and anally raped.” Despite the horror of attempting to represent such brutal acts, the act of murder is itself never depicted, and what results is essentially a reduction of sexualized human bodies to a meaningless catalogue of names and images, albeit with the threat that someone still might find this arousing. Someone has to in order to keep committing the crimes, regardless of the amount of pornographic imagery or social sexual norms in Mexico. Perhaps what they find arousing is that they are the only one(s) who get to see the actual act and not just its aftermath. Pornographers and rapists control the lens of the modern sexual spectacle.

If bodies and pleasures have been reduced to dehumanized catalogues, how was sex seen in earlier ages? The depiction of sexual acts is as old as civilization, but the concept of pornography as understood today did not exist until the Victorian era. Previous to that time law did not stipulate looking at sexual objects or images. In some cases, specific books, engravings or image collections were censored or outlawed, but the trend to compose laws that restricted viewing of sexually explicit things in general was a Victorian construct. When large-scale excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s, much of the erotic art of the Romans came to light, shocking the Victorians who saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire. They did not know what to do with the frank depictions of sexuality, and endeavored to hide them away from everyone but upper class scholars. The Victorians’ morality and sexual conservatism is legendary, so much so that the earliest psychological analysis carried out by Sigmund Freud focused primarily on sexual repressions, conjecturing the concepts of erogenous zones, psychosexual development, and the Oedipus complex. Freud believed that all culture was essentially a response to cover up childhood sexual traumas, though later it was decided that his theories were based primarily out of his own experiences (while perhaps with a desire to shock his stiff-laced contemporaries).

What would Freud have made of the Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings that are the oldest surviving examples of erotica, much less the entire history of human civilization? The ancient Greeks painted sexual scenes onto their ceramics; many are famous for being some of the earliest depictions of same-sex relations and pederasty. The Moche of Peru in South America also sculpted explicit scenes of sex into their pottery. There has been a long tradition of erotic painting among the Eastern cultures as well. In Japan, shunga appeared in the 13th century and continued to grow in popularity until the late 19th century when photography was invented, and the erotic art of China reached its popular peak during the latter part of the Ming Dynasty. In India the Kama Sutra was written between the 1st and 6th centuries. It was intended as both an exploration of human desire, including seduction and infidelity, and a technical guide to pleasing a sexual partner within a marriage sex manual, and is still popularly read throughout the world. In Europe, starting with the Renaissance, there was a tradition of producing erotica for the amusement of the aristocracy. In the early 16th century, the text “I Modi” was a woodcut album created by the designer Giulio Romano, the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the poet Pietro Aretino. In 1601, Caravaggio painted the "Amor Vincit Omnia" for the collection of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani. The tradition is continued by other, more modern painters, such as Fragonard, Courbet, Millet, Balthus, Picasso, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Egon Schiele, who served time in jail and had several works destroyed by the authorities for offending turn-of-the-century Austrian mores with his depiction of nude young girls. With the 20th Century, photography became the most interesting medium for erotic art, as it made the reproduction of images democratic, rapid, and widely distributable, a trend that has only continued through film to our present media overload. It would now be much more difficult to censor or legislate sexually explicit material, despite frequent governmental attempts to do so. The history of culture is too intertwined with the history of sexual representation to pull their sweating bodies apart. And yet how did we move from the erotic appreciation of sex as beauty to the pornographic selling of sex as spectacle, and what does this human fascination with sexual imagery mean?