by Linda Jaivin
According to my Wordsworth Dictionary of Sex, two subjects commonly discussed during lovemaking are death and sex itself. Sport surely deserves a mention alongside the other perennials. As he approaches orgasm, one well-known actor is said to exclaim, ‘Sixty yards! Fifty yards! Forty yards!’ and so on up to the moment of ejaculation, when he reportedly cries out, ‘Touchdown!’ It makes you wonder about actual athletes. Do golfers call out, ‘Hole in one!’ as they whack it in? Are surfers inclined to holler about ‘tubes’? Do equestrians murmur ‘Trot!’ as they squeeze you between their thighs?
In any case, the dictionary wasn't wrong about people talking sex. For some people, the most titillating coital confab consists merely of stating the obvious. ‘Fred, my hard-headed, red-helmeted warrior of love is ready and waiting to batter down your sluicy juicy love gates’, that sort of thing. Just naming the body parts in question can be a thrill, for a potent taboo surrounds words like ‘cock’ and ‘cunt’. The very word for our external genitals, ‘pudenda’, is Latin for ‘something to be ashamed of’.
Speaking of Latin and taboos, religion has made its own unique contributions to the world of pillow talk. In the film Bad Boy Bubby, there's a scene where a woman working for the Salvation Army picks up the main character, Bubby, and takes him home. She's straddling him in her bedroom when she suddenly bursts into song, and trills a hymn to Jesus. Hanif Kureishi's novel The Black Album contains a scene in which the protagonist and his lover suffer a bit of relationship stress over an incident involving fanatical Muslims and an eggplant supposedly inscribed with the word of Allah. Later, while making love, she giggles,‘Give me your aubergine… Stick it in my earth and let me bless it with my holy waters.’
One of the wackier stories I've ever heard on this subject comes from real life. A friend once went home with a devout Catholic girl. In the middle of their lovemaking, he says, she suddenly cried out, ‘Your Holiness!’ Opening his eyes in shock, he gazed, with a growing sense of horror, at the pictures that covered her wall. They were all of Pope John Paul II.
What I'd like to know is this: if sex is supposed to be the ultimate expression of love between two people, a solemn and sacred act, why are most of the words we've invented for it so comical? Take, for instance, nookie-nookie, rumpy-pumpy, jiggy-jig, ficky-fick. People talk about playing a game of hide-the-sausage, having a meat injection, dipping the wick, getting a leg-over, doing the thang and having a grease-and-oil change. We use verbs like shag and poke and root and hump.
Parts of the body are funny in direct proportion to their relevance to sex. An upper arm is an upper arm, and no one chuckles at or even nicknames a shoulder blade, but think of all the silly names we've given male genitalia: dong, shlong, prong, putz, shmuck, sloop, wedding tackle, family jewels, love truncheon, pork sword. If the very thought of the male organ weren't so funny, cinema audiences wouldn't have burst out laughing every time the trailers appeared for Free Willy.
Most sexual positions are fairly droll as well, of course. Have you ever found yourself on your back with one foot on the bed, the other in the air, your head dangling down towards the floor, hands clawing the air behind you as someone half-kneeling on the bed makes odd little gurgling sounds while trying desperately to weld his or her pelvis to yours? I haven't either, of course, but I've heard it can make you feel rather silly.
There's a scene in the Mexican film La Tarea that epitomises all that is risible about sex. In it, two middle-aged people with ordinary, middle-aged bodies make love in a hammock. The camera is unflinching. There is nothing of the Hollywood treatment of sex, in which improbably flat stomachs glide over each other without perspiration or strange fart-like noises, and actresses don't even smear their lipstick during foreplay. In La Tarea, sex is a fumbling, jiggling, wriggling, squeaky, squishy sort of thing, with legs stamped suddenly down on the floor for balance, arms trapped in awkward positions and a fair amount of ungorgeous flesh not shown to its best advantage.
When we watch most movie sex, we think, longingly, that could be me. Watching the sex scene in La Tarea, we think, ohmygod, that probably is me. My friend Ross, with whom I saw the film, blurted out in the middle of the scene, and a bit more loudly than he intended, ‘I'll never have sex again!’
Sex can be many things—exciting or dull, passionate or matter-of-fact, straight or gay or bent, tender or violent… but there's one thing it can never be, and that's dignified.
And even if Woody Allen remarked of sex in Annie Hall that ‘it was the most fun I ever had without laughing’, let's face it, sex is often a downright giggle. Reading an essay called ‘Sex and Euphemism’ by Joseph Epstein, I was tickled to discover that it's not just eleven-year-old boys and Howard Stern and me who think sex is funny. Epstein, editor of the American Scholar and a lecturer in literature at Chicago's Northwestern University, observed that ‘almost all sexual situations are humorous—excluding only those that one is oneself involved in’. Not surprisingly, pornography, which is the representation of sex at its most basic levels, can sometimes be hilarious. When I was researching ‘Confessions of an S&M Virgin’, I made a visit to one of the Club X bookstores at King's Cross.
Passing through the beaded curtains at the entrance to the shop, I was instantly paralysed by the vision of an immense glass display cabinet filled with dildos and vibrators of every size and description and colour and shape. Some of these, I'm quite sure, bore no relation to the range of human possibility—well, no human possibility I've ever come across. I finally wrenched my eyeballs off them and set about examining the selection of magazines on S&M and B&D and finally settled on one called Spiked Dominas: Domination Fantasies.
Spiked Dominas features photo-essays about dominatrixes (all of whom wear spiked heels) and their slaves. One of my favourites concerns Domina Becky. Becky wears a garter belt, stockings, high heels, a snarl and little else. She does various things to a naked male with a bad haircut—at one point she has him on all fours at the end of a leash, in another photo she's locking him in a closet, and in several others he's tonguing her high heels. In my favourite, she sits in a parlour chair, one stiletto-clad foot up on another chair and the other placed firmly on the open palm of his hand. He lies naked and spreadeagled on the floor, licking her shoe. She masturbates with one hand and raises a cup of tea to her lips with the other. The text goes like this:
Becky's firm luscious body drives all her slaves wild. She looks her most wicked in elbow gloves and six-inch spike-heeled shoes. It doesn't take much to anger this bitch goddess. Even resting one's eyes on the curve of her butt is a punishable offence. She often keeps her male slaves blindfolded, to deprive them of such sights. The most one can expect from her is the chance to lick her heels. And ‘one’ had better be prepared to do a professional job. Nothing irritates Becky so much as a scuff mark on her shoes.
I know what she means. I detest it when my slaves scuff my stilettos.
To convey how funny sex can be requires detail. Eroticism relies, however, to some extent, on omission of detail. Eroticism is the literary equivalent of what's called the ‘void’ in Chinese landscape painting, that unpainted portion of the paper where the imagination is free to leave its brushstrokes. Bruce Chatwin once wrote that erotic art is ‘oblique’ by nature. He called explicit depiction of sex ‘as boring as descriptions of landscape seen from the air—and as flat’.
Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles contain some of the most erotic prose I've ever read. Her vampires see and smell and hear more sharply than the living, and they feel everything more intensely as well. Vampires don't have genitalia; sex is entirely a matter of blood, skin, smells and mouths. They are always falling in love. One of the greatest passions in these books is between two male undead; another is between a 6000-year-old female and a male who is only a few hundred years old. Vampires may also form exquisite attachments with mortals, from whose necks they sip for mutual pleasure.
In my own writing, I tend to go from eroticism to sexual slapstick and back again,
sometimes all in the same paragraph. One friend said of his experience of reading Eat Me, ‘Hard-on one minute, laughing the next’. There's a chapter in which a feminist academic has rough sex with a truck driver behind the Big Merino in Goulburn. The climax of the story, and the sex, comes with her pressed up against a glass display window while ‘The Road to Gundagai’ pumps out of the shop's PA system, and the truckie drives his maximum load into her from behind. As they both come, she finds herself staring through the glass at rows of toy koalas waving little Australian flags.
This sort of thing happens to me all the time. When I write about sex, that is. What did you think I meant?
Cocky
I've been told on occasion that I have balls. But it hasn't really been true until recently. I'm cross-dressing these days—to the left. As I sit here tapping out this story, I reach down for a minor adjustment. Extricating my latex-and-foam testicles from where they are uncomfortably caught between my thighs, I have yet another raging insight into boy behaviour: they don't cross their legs the way we do because they can't!
As it turns out, that's wrong. Having had several men patiently describe to me how real testicles slip and slide over each other within the sac, automatically finding the most comfortable seat in the house, I am learning the limitations to my insights as a faux-male. This was brought home recently when I innocently asked my friend Dino if the balls ever crossed over to change position and he fell over sideways, as if stricken, moaning, ‘Oooh… What a scary thought.’
My life as a boy got off to a royal start when I had a fitting for my custom-made family jewels at the House of Windsor, an artists and propmakers' studio in Melbourne. The designer, William Eicholtz, no sooner kitted me out than I was off and hooning. The apparatus consists of what you might describe as a floppy dick with a hard drive—to simulate erection, you insert a wood-and-silicon spine into a discreet pocket on the underside. (It's a marsupial! I'm going to call him Skippy.)
The moment I put it on for the first time I am transformed into a complete lout. Advancing on William's studio-mates, I vogue obscenely and generally ensure I'll never be let back into Melbourne again.
Next step: a trip to the men's underwear department of David Jones. A long browse later, clutching a bag containing one G-string, one ‘hipster’ brief, one pair of Y-fronts, and one of those stretchy bicycle-short affairs, I rush home to try them on. William had modelled my dangly bits on those of an Outrage ‘hunk of the month’. It's quite a chunk off the old hunk—no matter how hard I try, I can't really manage to get all of Skippy into the G-string. (Those maddening balls—where do they go?) I love the bicycle shorts, but that might be because they suit my frankly unmasculine body better than theYs or the briefs, though both of those do keep my boy-bulge under control.
I've taken tips on the underwear issue from my friend Chris. He stresses the importance of dressing to the correct side. If you don't, he says, you may be walking down the street when some passing sexual siren sends your nether regions into turmoil. If your balls aren't properly positioned, then it makes you feel, well, the closest analogy he could come up with was having your arm twisted behind your back for too long.
The other problem with ‘pitching the tent’, as such incidents are known, is the terror that the whole world will see—and laugh. This is a serious problem with boxer shorts, which don't exactly boast a policy of containment. (Another fellow, Roger, informed me boxers did have the compensating double advantage of comfort and not having to be washed more than once or twice a week—his conclusion, not mine.) According to Chris, there are preventive measures, like laying your dick sideways rather than straight up and down inside your briefs; apparently this way whole dynasties could rise and fall without anyone even noticing.
For all of what I like to think is my not inconsiderable experience with the opposite sex, much of this information was entirely new to me. ‘How come you guys never told me this sort of thing before?’ I asked Chris.
‘Probably 'cause you never asked,’ he shrugged. ‘But you're a member of the club now.’
He doesn't think I've quite got the knack of being male, however: when he asked how big my dick was, I failed to retort, ‘As big as two tree trunks, mate, and yours?’
Posture, the way we sit and the amount of space we take up, is one of the big differences between the sexes. Studies suggest we women don't assert ourselves over as much space as men, that we hold ourselves more compactly. For instance, we keep our legs together, whereas men frequently sit with theirs spread apart (the sluts!). A good example of this, I suppose, is the photo from Outrage of the hunk whose dimensions I share. According to the text, his car has broken down in the desert. So, he's stripped off, is squatting down in front of the car, and has spread his legs to ‘wait for someone helpful’. Now that's something most women in a similar situation wouldn't dream of doing. I mean, we'd just fix the engine, right?
But I'm not sure where I stand in the great nature-versus-couture debate. When I'm wearing my ‘apparatus’, even under a short skirt, I find it natural to spread my legs while seated. But I've always tended to do that in trousers. And I think women who feel secure or powerful control more of the space around them than men who are weak or wimpish, which suggests differences in body language may be less a function of biology than destiny.
Walking down the street with Skippy between my legs, occasionally playing a subtle game of pocket pinball to ensure everything is where it should be, I feel a brief exhilaration. So this is what it's like. I take big, manly strides. I am empowered, inviolable. Then my mind begins spinning: what if someone were attacked in front of me? Would I leap to the rescue, heedless of life and limb, as opposed to following my female instinct of running for help? Or what if some guy challenged me to a fight in a pub? And, most inconceivable of all, would I watch sport on TV? I realised having a dick and balls without the testosterone was like having a brand new Ferrari and no petrol.
Women reportedly have 15 to 100 nanograms of testosterone per decilitre of blood compared to men's 300 to 1200. Holly Nadler, in an article for New Woman, revealed that after taking testosterone supplements she felt: ‘Fierce. Centred. Grounded to some elemental terrestrial-cum-galactic source of power.’ She cut her hair and no longer feared making business calls. She'd probably have flown to that imaginary victim's rescue, smashed a beer bottle over the head of the guy in the pub and even conversed freely on football.
As for oestrogen-rich me, well, my hair's already so short a cut would be a shave, and I've never been scared of the phone. I'm not sure I'd want to have the guts or the urge to throw a punch in a pub. But in some completely unmale way, I've always sort of felt that the force is with me. As Joan Jett says, ‘Girls got balls. They're just a little higher up, that's all.’
I gaze down at my genital extension and wonder what it would really be like to be a man. A strap-on can only offer so much insight. But that's just as well. As the nineteenth-century British poet Thomas Campbell wrote, ‘Tis distance lends enchantment to the view/And robes the mountain in its azure hue.’ I'd hate to have all the mystery taken out of this endlessly entertaining plaything that is the living phallus.
So I'll probably never quite tune in to what my male friends tell me are the best things about having a built-in console: the sensual surprise of early-morning erections, or what I'm made to understand is the incomparable bliss that comes from scratching one's balls.
I'm also missing one of the worst experiences: what it feels like to be hit in the nuts. Trevor, a man d'un certain âge, still recalls when, at seventeen, he caught a fast-flying cricket ball with his testicles. Not a smart play. He recalls the first overwhelming sensation was that of ‘complete breathlessness, like you'll never breathe again’.
If the connection between the balls and the lungs was never obvious to me, I was more prepared for the connection between the dick and the brain. Chris argues there is none: ‘And that's the point—it has a mind of its own.’
Another friend
, Geoff, who plays in a band called Prik Harness, assures me: ‘If you really want to know what it feels like to be a man, strap that thing to your head.’
Penis envy? I don't think so.
I'M A LOSER, BABY
1989
At the start of 1989, things were looking pretty good in China, and pretty fucked, too.
The economy had taken off like a rocket, growing at almost 12 per cent a year. For the first time in forty years of Communist rule, it didn't feel that much like Communism. People could get through the day without giving much thought to ideology or worrying about party policy. There were lots of interesting books to read, films to see and places to go and hang out. The whole structure of Communist control appeared to be collapsing. People felt free to speak their minds, and there was plenty to say.
Inflation in the cities had reached something like 40 per cent, the population was spiralling out of control, the gap between rich and poor was growing by the minute, corruption had reached epidemic proportions, the school system was falling apart, illiteracy was on the rise, transport systems and irrigation works were collapsing, and even the army was simmering with discontent.
On Saturday, 15 April 1989, I was hanging out in Beijing with the English singer Billy Bragg. (His manager's brother was the professor of Chinese at the ANU, who'd suggested that Billy look me up while he was in China.) Someone told us that Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, had died of a heart attack, reportedly following a heated exchange with some comrades and while sitting on the toilet. It happened to be the same day that China's official statistics bureau announced that China's population had reached 1.1 billion. At dinner with a gaggle of Beijing rockers, the singer Hou Dejian joked that Hu Yaobang had done his bit for population control. We all enjoyed a rude chuckle over the alleged circumstances of Hu's demise. No one seemed overly distressed, to put it mildly.
