Erica Jong - Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex

SUGAR IN MY BOWL

Real Women Write About Real Sex

Edited by
ERICA JONG

For BJG and her brothers
when they grow up

Tired of bein lonely, tired of bein blue,

I wished I had some good man, to tell my troubles to

Seem like the whole worlds wrong, since my mans been gone

I need a little sugar in my bowl,

I need a little hot dog, on my roll

I can stand a bit of lovin, oh so bad,

I feel so funny, I feel so sad

I NEED A LITTLE SUGAR IN MY BOWL,
BESSIE SMITH, 1931

Contents

W hy are we so fascinated with sex? Probably because such intense feelings are involvedabove all, the loss of control. Anything that causes us to lose control intrigues and enthralls. So sex is both alluring and terrifying.

Perhaps that is why assembling this anthology surprised me.

Conventional wisdom tells us that we live in a sex-saturated society where nothing is taboo anymore. Teenagers supposedly give blow jobs at the flash of a zipper. Reliable birth control and Internet mating have made casual sex ubiquitous at younger and younger ages.

So why was it that when I first started asking for contributions to this collection, some women thought they had to check with their husbands before they agreed to contribute? Or their significant others. Or their children, for goodness sake. (I know that ones children positively avoid ones writingespecially if they are literarily inclined themselves.)

I guess I had bought the bullshit that everything had changed, that pudeur was obsolete, that women today were wild viragos. I knew I had been in a state of palpitating terror about revealing sexual fantasy while writing Fear of Flying, but things were supposed to be different now (and I was usually blamed for it).

I was wrong. At least half a dozen contributors to this book would not say yes until their partners agreed.

That was the first surprise.

The next surprise was the fear some potential contributors had that they would not be taken seriously if they wrote for my anthology.

Anas Nin had made exactly the same argument in 1971 when I asked her why she allowed her diaries to be bowdlerized for publication: Women who write about sex are never taken seriously as writers, she said.

But thats why we must do it, Miss Nin, I countered.

And that is why we must do it. We must brave the literary double standard. Doing so, we also liberate our brothers, sons, grandsons, lovers, and husbandswho now write more fiercely and honestly about womenthink of David Grossman, John Irving, Jonathan Franzen, and Abraham Verghesethan even Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, John Updike, and Philip Roth did in the past.

I admire these men. They can teach a youngor oldwriter more about writing than any book purporting to teach the art of fiction. Read them and learn. The ones who came of age after literary censorship gave way in the 1950s and 1960s have plenty to teach.

When did literary censorship become obsolete? It actually happened in the United States within my own memory. I was a graduate student in eighteenth-century English literature at Columbia when suddenly Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure migrated from the locked rare book room to the open shelves at Butler Library. Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita was published by Putnam in 1958 after several years of underground notoriety thanks to Olympia Press, Paris. And D. H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover, first printed in Florence, Italy, in 1928. Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer was first privately published thanks to Obelisk Press in Paris in 1934 and later published in 1961 by Grove Press in the United States.

At first, writers were ecstatic. We thought we would usher in a new age of classical bacchanalia. We thought of Sappho, Aristophanes, Ovid, Juvenal, Chaucer, Shakespeares bawdy plays, Swifts unprintable poems, and of course D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. And it was true that Couples, Portnoys Complaint, and my own Fear of Flying promised honesty.

But it didnt take long for Debbie Does Dallas to drown out Ulysses . Sex, once so literary and rare, got dumbed down like everything else. When published sex became ubiquitous, it also became banal. Profit triumphed over art, and pornography became as dreary as other sleazy products in a culture where everything is for sale.

Many writers began to think it was time to clean up sex. The younger generationchildren of hippies and nudistswere, like my daughter, appalled by their parents freedom.

Why shouldnt they be? Isnt it our job to be appalled by our parents? Isnt it every generations duty to be dismayed by the previous generation? And to assert that we are differentonly to discover later that we are distressingly the same?

Nothing new under the sun. The child is mother to the woman, father to the man. Our parents once were usand now we are them. Our parents, bless them, thought they were oh so modern.

My own artist/musician parents ran around Provincetown in the 1930s wearing nothing but their scanties (which were much less scanty than scanties are today). They were modern bohemians of the Depression Era. Their children grew up in the fabulous 1950s, when even bohemians could be affluent. And our children grew up in the 1980s, thinking Greed was Good.

Now Depression is backthough we hope not here to stay. But sex hasnt changed all that much. Not since the bonobos and silverback gorillas. We use sex for relaxation. We use it for domination, for power, for pride, for pleasure. We use it to titillate, to ejaculate (including women), to cuddle, and to coo.

We even use it to make babiesalthough we can use in vitro for that too.

We use it to hold back consciousness of mortality, as Jennifer Weiners moving story shows. We use it to assert ownership as Daphne Merkins story about obsession illustrates. We even use it for loveas Elisa Albert ecstatically shows in A Fucking Miracle, and we use it to indulge our kinksas Linda Gray Sexton shows in exploring asphyxiation. We use it to depict outrageous fantasyas Marisa Acocella Marchetto demonstrates in her imaginative graphic piece, Cock of My Dreams.

In none of this are we radical. Sappho got there first. And so did Catullus, Ovid, and Petronius, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and so many others.

We have not invented adultery. Nor have we invented kink. We are just the same old primates who have, for thousands of centuries been hallooing at one another from the trees and doing it behind the bushes.

The beat of blood in the slippery clitoris, the thrusting of the cocknone of it surprises. Fay Weldon talks about her first experience of sex and how much she liked it despite her dowdy mother-made cover-up. She wasnt supposed to like it, but she did anyway. Nature made us that way, and not all the promises of the promise keepers or the purity-ring wearers can change it.

So sex is here to staythough perhaps not for reproductionas the prophetic Aldous Huxley predicted.

But we like it. We are made to like it. As long as two halves must come together to make a whole, there is no chance that we will stop clicking the like button.

And once women start writing about it, theres no stopping us. Doing it is another thing, apparently.

Rereading these contributions, however, I cannot help thinking that the fantasy of perfect sex is far more powerful than explicit sex itself. There is much yearning here, and the yearning is often more thrilling than the consummation. Sexual women are in touch with their fantasy lives. They do not always have to act out their fantasies. I think the so-called sexual revolution misunderstood the importance of fantasy in our lives. We do not have to make fantasy literal to be enriched by it. Fantasy itself is empowering. Because my contributors span the generations, we read about the great range of sexualitysubtle and overt. Sex has changed a lot, and it hasnt. Sex is more about imagination than friction. Most of these efforts are psychological rather than explicit.