Susan Sontag on Sex

“If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself.”

“Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be… It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should,” Alain de Botton wrote in his fantastic meditation on how to think more (meaning better) about sex. Indeed, for all its promise of pleasure, sex has invariably been a source of great frustration and anxiety even to some of history’s most brilliant and enlightened minds. Take, for instance, Susan Sontag: From As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980 (public library), which came in as one of 2012’s best books on psychology and philosophy and which is now out in paperback, comes this remarkably, relatably human contemplation of the psychological turmoil of sex, a snippet of which you might recall from Sontag’s illustrated insights on love.

Susan Sontag by Peter Hujar, gelatin silver print, 1975

In an entry from November 1, 1961, shortly before her twenty-ninth birthday, Sontag muses:

As a writer, I tolerate error, poor performance, failure. So what if I fail some of the time, if a story or an essay is no good? Sometimes things do go well, the work is good. And that’s enough.

It’s just this attitude I don’t have about sex. I don’t tolerate error, failure—therefore I’m anxious from the start, and therefore I’m more likely to fail. Because I don’t have the confidence that some of the time (without my forcing anything) it will be good.

If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself.

I experience the writing as given to me — sometimes, almost, as dictated. I let it come, try not to interfere with it. I respect it, because it’s me and yet more than me. It’s personal and transpersonal, both.

I would like to feel that way about sex, too. As if “nature” or “life” used me. And I trust that, and let myself be used.

An attitude of surrender to oneself, to life. Prayer. Let it be, whatever it will be. I give myself to it.

Prayer: peace and voluptuousness.

In this, no room for shame and anxiety as to how the little old self rates in the light of some objective standard of performance.

One must be devout about sex. Then, one won’t dare to be anxious. Anxiety will never be revealed for what it is — spiritual meanness, pettiness, small-mindedness.

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh is sublime in its entirety and has previously given us Sontag’s wisdom on writing, boredom, censorship, and aphorisms, her radical vision for remixing education, her insight on why lists appeal to us, her illustrated wisdom on art, and her bulletpointed bodily self-portrait.

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The Seducer’s Cookbook: A Vintage Guide to the Lost Art of Seduction

“Seduction … is becoming as much of a lost art as hand-caning and bookbinding. But while those two crafts can be replaced by machine work, seduction, if it is not done ‘by hand,’ will not be done at all.”

As a lover of unusual cookbooks and inventive recipes — from The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook to Modern Art Desserts to the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook to Patti Smith’s lettuce soup for starving artists — I was delighted to come upon The Seducer’s Cookbook (public library). This amusing 1962 gem by legendary food critic Mimi Sheraton, which falls somewhere between Esquire’s Handbook for Hosts and The Art of Kissing, presents a collection of “helpful and hilarious hints for situations into which men may lure women and vice versa,” including drink and dining menus, décor, dress, and dialogue. Gracing the book’s pages are illustrations by the great Paul Coker, who contributed to iconic counterculture magazine MAD and illustrated the wonderful 1968 volume MAD Better or Verse.

Sheraton sets the scene:

What we are concerned with here is the delectable and subtle art of luring, tempting, enticing, leading someone into going to bed with you in the most delightful way possible. For if the seduction is planned artfully, it can whet your sexual appetite in the same way that a piquant hor d’oeuvre prepares your palate for the main course to come.

Though it is true people are getting into bed with each other every day, seduction, as opposed to pushing, pulling, pleading and promising, is becoming as much of a lost art in America as hand-caning and bookbinding. But while those two crafts can be replaced by machine work, seduction, if it is not done “by hand,” will not be done at all.

She enumerates her three main goals:

I am for the game — as much fun, and often more, than the prize; hence this book for the following reasons:

1. To enable men to get the answer they want — Yes.
2. To give women a better reason for saying it.
3. To keep America from becoming, sexually, a have-not nation.

But behind this amusingly lewd and seemingly superficial premise lies a deeper meditation on gender politics and women’s empowerment in the Mad Men era — published months before The Feminine Mystique turned the tide and a decade before the second wave of feminism was in full swing. Sheraton challenges the era’s assumptions in a wonderfully heartening way:

The first question to be answered if we are to get anywhere is: Just exactly who is seducing whom? If we are to believe the editors (male) of the American College Dictionary we must assume that only men seduce women, else why the definition “to induce (a woman) to surrender her chastity”? Even masculine vanity in its most extreme form should permit the editors’ minds to allow as how sometimes a man is seduced — perhaps even to the extent of adding the definition “to induce (a man) to lead (a woman) astray.”

She argues for seduction as a gender-blind art, but one the mastery of which is as intricate as it is fruitful:

The whole thing becomes a kind of round robin, and if it is hard to tell the seducer from the seduced (everyone wants to be both), it is important for all of us to be on our toes, to develop our seductive proficiencies so we can play our roles properly should the need arise.

Sheraton even flips certain gender-perception conventions around to give the stereotypical pop-culture male more dimension, arguing against the idea that getting laid is his only consideration:

He has his ego, and nothing deflates it more than the thought that a woman’s sole interest in him is sexual. This may not sound plausible, but it’s one of the best-kept male secrets. Just let a man think any woman he’s at all interested in would have gone to bed with any other presentable male who chanced by, and he is enraged and starts competing. He will immediately begin to turn hand-springs on her lawn (intellectually and even physically), trying to convince her he’s really a pretty special guy — out of bed as well as in. This is where his talents as a seducer will stand him in good deal.

But what makes the relationship between food and sex so compelling, after all? Sheraton writes:

The urge to eat and the urge to procreate are basic, natural and deliciously intertwined … and certainly no other method of seduction is as healthful or nourishing. No matter what else may go wrong, at least you’ve had a good meal.

It may be worth noting here the three sorts of appetite described by Dumas père in his Dictionary of Cuisine — as applicable to sexual hunger as to gastronomic.

1. Appetite that comes from hunger. It makes no fuss over the food that satisfies it. If it is great enough, a piece of raw meat will appease it as easily as a roasted pheasant or a woodcock.
2. Appetite aroused, hunger or no hunger, by a succulent dish appearing at the right moment, illustrating the proverb that hunger comes with eating.
3. The type of appetite that is roused at the end of a meal when after normal hunger has been satisfied by the main courses, and the guest is truly ready to rise without regret, a delicious dish holds him to the table with a final tempting of his sensuality.

Sheraton goes on to offer several menus for various occasions and scenarios — from morning-after breakfast to seduction outside marriage to dumping someone by serving leftovers. Here’s a sampling from a menu for seducing young lovers:

STRAWBERRIES CHANTILLY

Wash ½ pint strawberries, drain on paper toweling, hull them and cut lengthwise into quarters. Leave 2 of the nicest berries uncut. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon Cointreau, and a little sugar if they are sour, and chill them for ½ hour. Beat ½ cup heavy sweet cream until it is stiff, adding ¼ teaspoon sugar and the tiniest drop of rose water to it halfway through the whipping. Fold berries into the cream, pile into two individual serving dishes and top each with a whole strawberry. Chill for 1 hour before serving.

The Seducer’s Cookbook is delectable and diverting from cover to cover. Pair it with this fascinating read on ancient aphrodisiacs and anti-aphrodisiacs.

Thanks, Kaye

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Ancient Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs

The erotic lives of gladiators, or why pomegranate juice is the opposite of fresh lettuce.

“Self-respect … it’s the secret of good sex,” Susan Sontag wrote in her diary. And yet since time immemorial, humans have engaged in all kinds of practices of questionable dignity as we’ve indulged the mesmerism of our own procreation, from the first ejaculation in the fossil record to the cultural history of judging desire to the seemingly counterintuitive question of how to think more (meaning better) about sex. But beyond mere biology, the history of sex has always been paralleled by a kind of mythology defining our beliefs about eroticism and propelling our compulsion to control copulation in all of its dimensions. That’s precisely what Vicki León explores in The Joy of Sexus: Lust, Love, and Longing in the Ancient World (public library) — a fascinating journey to the intersection of science and superstition, exhuming antiquity’s curious beliefs about and practices of such facets of fornication as medicine and matrimony, bisexuality and gender-bending, adultery and pornography.

Among the most intriguing aspects of ancient love was the desire to control desire — in both directions of the dial — enlisting various alleged aphrodisiacs and anti-aphrodisiacs:

When it came to intimacy readiness, Greek and Roman lovers were perennially inventive. They set store by a wide spectrum of aphrodisiacs, some still in hopeful use today, including raw oysters, the fleshy symbol of the goddess Aphrodite (Venus among the Romans). Aphrodite emerged from the foamy crest of ocean waves, which the Greeks saw as a type of marine semen. … These pioneers on the frontiers of sexual virility wandered far beyond oysters, however. Pomegranate juice from Aphrodite’s favorite tree, mixed with wine, scored high with ancient Egyptians and other males in the Middle East. So did lettuce. Although toxic, mandrake root was an evergreen. So was opium as a wine additive.

Many ardent souls preferred lotions applied directly to the male organ — one provocative but now-mysterious favorite was called “the deadly carrot.” Some approaches, however, such as the honey-pepper mix, the tissue-irritating nettle oil, and the cantharides beetle (Spanish fly), gave painful new meaning to the expression “All fired ready to go.”

[…]

Other aids to Venus were added to wine, a social lubricant that provided a one-two punch: among them, gentian and a red-leafed root in the orchid family called satyrion, named for the randy prowess of the mythical satyrs. Roman emperor Tiberius, on the other hand, swore by another exotic tuber called skirret.

As an aphrodisiac, the pomegranate wine cooler had an enthusiastic following around the ancient world.

But that ancient libido had a flipside and often had to be reined in with different concoctions:

Consuming cress, purslane, cannabis seeds, nasturtium flowers, or the ashes of the chaste tree would do the trick. So would that horrific, erection-withering substance, fresh lettuce. In order to maintain sexual vigor, Greek and Roman male diners were careful to combine lettuce with aphrodisiacally active arugula to neutralize it. Or just avoid lettuce like the plague. (On the other hand, lettuce was considered highly lascivious among the Egyptians…)

Mouse dung, applied as a liniment, was a favorite anti-aphrodisiac. So was rue boiled with rose oil and aloes. Drinking wine in which a mullet fish had drowned and sipping male urine in which a lizard had expired both had their loyal adherents.

Nevertheless, taming truly terrific potency required strong measures, like nymphaea, an herb guaranteed to “relax” the phallus for a few days. One writer even boasted that it would “take away desire and even sex dreams for forty days!”

The Joy of Sexus goes on to explore ancient attitudes toward and rites of everything from mystery cults to masturbation to marriage. Complement it with Pixar’s Ancient Book of Sex and Science and the fascinating history of the first sexual revolution.

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Alain de Botton on How to Think More About Sex

“The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.”

“When we hook up with another, in sex or love (or, more rarely, both) we prove that our isolation is not permanent,” Dorion Sagan — son of Carl — wrote in his fascinating history of sex. And yet that very quest to end our isolation has been subject to centuries of stigma and incessant friction with our social values. But it needn’t be this way.

Last week, The School of Life taught us how to stay sane by revising our inner stories. From the same fantastic series of intelligent, non-self-helpy, yet immensely helpful guides to modern living comes How to Think More About Sex (public library; UK) by philosopher Alain de Botton, who has previously given us some sage advice on success, a vision for religion for atheists, and some answers to little kids’ biggest questions.

De Botton writes in the introduction:

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should. Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch. Sex remains in absurd, and perhaps irreconcilable, conflict with some of our highest commitments and values. Unsurprisingly, we have no option but to repress its demands most of the time. We should accept sex as inherently rather weird instead of blaming ourselves for not responding in more normal ways to its confusing impulses.

This is not to say that we cannot take steps to grow wiser about sex. We should simply realize that we will never entirely surmount the difficulties it throws our way. Our best hope should be a respectful accommodation with an anarchic and reckless power.

He later offers a delightfully animated account, reminiscent of Bill Plympton’s classic animated version, of why a kiss holds the appeal that it does:

The pleasure of the moment can be understood only by considering its wider context: the overwhelming indifference against which any kiss is set. It goes almost without saying that the majority of people we encounter will be not merely uninterested in having sex with us but positively revolted by the idea. We have no choice but to keep a minimum of sixty or, even better, ninety centimeters’ distance between us and them at all times, to make it absolutely clear that our compromised selves have no intention of intruding into their personal spheres.

Then comes the kiss. The deeply private realm of the mouth — that dark, moist cavity that no one else but our dentist usually enters, where our tongue reigns supreme over a microcosm as silent and unknown as the belly of a whale — now prepares to open itself up to another. The tongue, which has had no expectation of ever meeting a compatriot, gingerly approaches a fellow member of its species, advancing with something of the reserve and curiosity exhibited by a South Sea Islander in greeting the arrival of the first European adventurer. Indentations and plateaus in the inner lining of the cheeks, hitherto thought of as solely personal, are revealed as having counterparts. The tongues engage each other in a tentative dance. …

Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us — which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced… by a declaration of that desire — a confession which may in itself be so erotic as to render the actual kiss superfluous.

But the true mesmerism of sex, de Botton argues, isn’t even in the physical act itself — it’s in the existential promise that it holds:

The pleasure we derive from sex is also bound up with our recognizing, and giving a distinctive seal of approval to, those ingredients of a good life whose presence we have detected in another person. The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

[…]

Our culture encourages us to acknowledge very little of who we normally are in the act of sex. It seems as if it might be a purely physical process, without any psychological importance. But … what happens in love-making is closely bound up with some of our most central ambitions. The act of sex plays out through the rubbing together of organs, but our excitement is no boorish physiological reaction; rather, it is an ecstasy we feel at encountering someone who may be able to put to rest certain of our greatest fears, and with whom we may hope to build a shared life based upon common values.

Ultimately, sex is a grounding mechanism that reminds us of our own imperfect humanity, and in that imperfection lies the messy richness of being human:

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately. We could age respectably, get used to our privileges and think we understood what was going on. We might disappear into numbers and words alone. It is sex that creates a necessary havoc in the ordinary hierarchies of power, status, money and intelligence.

[…]

We might even embrace the pain sex causes us, for without it we wouldn’t know art and music quite so well. … When every contemptuous but fair thing has been said about our infernal sexual desires, we can still celebrate them for not allowing us to forget for more than a few days at a time what is really involved in living an embodied, chemical and largely insane human life.

Complement How to Think More About Sex with some of literary history’s most beautiful definitions of love.

Public domain images via Flickr Commons

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