Good Sex Illustrated (22 page)

—adults: man, 0; woman, 0.

Depictions of the naked body
(photos):

—children: boy, 1; girl, 0.

—teenagers: boy, 2 (anthropometric, back/front, headless, cock reduced to jelly); girl, 2 (the same, genitals invisible).

—adults: man, 1 (it’s the one with the beard); woman, 4 (properly anthropometric, 3. “Artistically” naked, 1).

Reproduction:
28 photos, 44 drawings.

Contraception:
6 photos, 6 drawings.

Erotic Activity:
(images devoted to some practice of pleasure): 0.

Not true: out of the kindness of my heart, I’m going to classify here the
only
photo of (hetero-procreative) intercourse. It’s a naked man lying on top of a naked woman and, since the women is hiding the head of the man with her head, which the arm of the man is hiding, you can’t see their filthy, disgusted faces. You don’t see the rest of it, either, because the photo is cut off… at the waist.

Yes, the world of age 14–16 certainly has changed. The family isn’t a source of pleasure? We’re hiding that. The outside makes you drool with envy? Look, here it is.

It’s like an inversion of the life of the adolescent. Showing some frustrated types these images of freedom, this welcoming outside, without cops, prohibitions, sexual misery, is like photographing a few prisoners on the promenade, washed, decked out and wearing blush to prove to world opinion that people are well treated in concentration camps. I’m exaggerating? I’m having a hard time forgetting certain statistics I cited earlier. From ages 15 to 19, suicideis the third highest cause of mortality. Attempts at it, nonmea-surable. Those thousands of annual deaths, those thousands of near-suicides reclaimed and covered up by the family: does this really evoke hand-kissing, smiles, streets where you meet and talk, a life fall of hope and the right to exist?

And the situations themselves that are photographed, what’s going on in them? Is this really “happiness,” or just a few nice little traps for idiots, orgasm-prisons that impose ten laws in exchange for one permission? Is the adolescent’s withdrawal from society a lack of nerve or one last hesitation before the labyrinth of codes that are going to cut his desire into pieces the moment that he wants to live it?

The family may be absent, but it reigns over the reader—as testified by the tactless address to the parents. A new double game has to be inaugurated.
Let’s initiate a dialogue.

In all the languages of power, that sentence means: time to lure the prey. Lets inform: because
it makes it possible—if not to resolve problems—at least to tackle what they are.
In fact, you’re tackling problems less than you’re tackling who has them—rebels who will have to deal with the police-like barricades of “complete sex information.”

These
difficulties of adjustment,
this
confusion that an immense majority of young people share,
let’s face it frankly, let’s answer the questions posed by adolescence. The first one in the book:
What’s a baby look like at the very beginning of its life, in the belly ofits mother?

Like the parents in volume 10–13 years, the authors’
eyelashes have fluttered imperceptibly
—but here it comes, they’re willing to describe the primordial Egg, with
that indispensable knowledge of the problems of teenagers that they’ve gone to the source to find.
 {
24
}

Does this seem grotesque? There is, however, a direct relationship between the reader’s confusion and the baby in the answers, because the baby is the answer. And, in order to validate it, all information has to be organized around it. First the girl and boy will have to acquire the feeling of the legitimate purpose of the “sex organs,” which produce what’s needed to make the egg; and
there are also external sex organs.
They will be explained the physiology of emissions and ovulation, diseases, periods, the biology of sexual relations, instructions for the way to have them, which can only be used by adults, the
couple-and-matemity,
contraception, pregnancy. They’ll be told what to do while waiting to have the right to these wonders (this is where the “psychological” part of the book starts); the real reasons for this prohibition will be confided to them; they’ll be threatened with misfortune if they don’t yield to it; the big-brothering session ends with a holocaust of deviants; and curtain down.
Once the book has been closed
, conclude the authors,
the adolescent will be directly and personally confronted with the thousand problems that he’ll have to resolve and surmount. These are the indispensable first steps that this work wished to encourage.

This invariable formula for sex education manuals is not the result of a twisted imagination. It is, in fact, in perfect keeping with all writings about sexology meant for adults: which is to say that it conforms to the medicalized methodology that “researchers” apply to the description of sexuality. Such a description moves necessarily from the inside toward the outside—from the inner organs to sexual prohibitions, from “the egg” to life in society. In this way, the basis of the Order is asserted biologically. This is, unfortunately, the exact opposite of the organization of events: the sex life of every human being begins with the prohibited and ends with the baby. Consequently, the dangers that threaten the prohibitions also threaten reproduction and the socio-familial order organized around it. It does not seem to be the fact that, on a planet with three billion inhabitants, the fate of the “species” (and species it is) would be compromised if humanity reproduced a lot less; so when a prohibition gives way, what we fear is not a decrease in the production of babies, which can easily be produced, but the simple fact that the reproduction of the exploiting social order is less certain. Bodies no longer obliged to procreate deprivatize, move away from the family-centric mode, liberalize the social roles of Man and Woman, break through the barriers of power and property that transformed each human for each human into an infinitely distanced Other, finally spurn the system of production/consumption that was exploiting the lacks that they now no longer feel. In short, at the far end of sexual freedom, civilization begins, and the society of exploitation dies.

Not only is this not a utopian perspective, but it’s the conscious, nagging fear experienced today by all the guardians of power. And among other things, it is what inspires them to begin reinforcing the existing order by means of liberalise propaganda. “Pleasure,” currently so in fashion, will always be able to be bought by the rich, and little by little this new and very old sector of “services” will be liberalized and structured: brothels (pardon me, “eros centers”); written, photographed, filmed pornography; “erotic” art; sex tourism offering fresh or exotic flesh; vacations organized around fucking; commerce in the-more-wicked-the-more-expensive “perversion,” commerce in extra-marital hookups (personals or private encounters at weekend hotels), etc.—so many things that are only in the cottage-industry phase, and which, no longer reserved only for the upper middle classes, will attract customers from the middle classes in general. This will only be a supplementaryprofit system, based on the frustration that conditions them all. An opportunity, as well, for social promotion: the pretty girls and pretty boys born of low station will negotiate their small amount of capital here, and the demand will be so enormous that there will be room for everyone. As for those frustrated ones who are unmarketable and have no cash, they’ll only be able to envy these consumers from afar, to be zealous about “succeeding”; and to make up for it, finally, with the consummation of a family and children. This will calm them and keep in place for one more generation those prosperities enjoyed by the dominant class.

The medicalization of sex information coincides precisely with that order, which prepares the ground for business, for resignation and for greed. It legitimizes frustrations that create “demand” and consolidates the restrictions that will endow sexual products with value. It teaches that pleasure for free is impossible; society will teach that all pleasures are to be sold. You will have the right to sexualities of expenditure if you first spend to buy them.

The occupation of the body by repression entails two undisputed laws: woman’s duty is to be penetrated, men’s is not to be. For him, confiscation of his anus; and for her, description of her body as a place of “conquest,” the sole thrill of which comes from invasion: cocks open it and babies bloat it. Adaptation of the organ into an inferior-feminine abyss for the organ as a superior-masculine plenum; inner organs as a deep starting point for a path of penetration/impregnation that moves toward the outside.

Let’s go back to the text a bit—I will, of course, respect the strict order of the questions and chapters.
What do the ovaries look like? The Fallopian tubes? The sac that holds the child?
What is the vagina made of? Medical answer:
the vagina comes after the uterus.
First it’s connected to the “baby sac,” and only then to the outside world.

This is the vulva. And the clitoris,
which is very sensitive
to contact
during sexual relations.
But the exterior of those relations is the devil, for the adolescent; and the authors, under pretext of calming fears, are more than happy to draw up a list of them: two pages on the hymen and the dangers of losing it, concluding—it is time—with a sentence in which you can very vaguely deduct that when it comes to virginity the hymen isn’t important.
Can you become a virgin again? Do you lose your virginity the first time you have relations? What is artificial defloration? Can certain sports lead to rupturing your hymen?
(answer: certain sports are
blamed
for it, but these
accidents
are extremely infrequent.)
Can a man always tell that a girl isn’t a virgin any more?
There are hymens with small holes and hymens with big holes, so some “men”
wrongly
believe
that a girl isn’t a virgin; this is an indication of how little value should be attributed to physical virginity…
Yes, that vague little sentence actually does have a very clear meaning: the only sure merit is virginity that is not only
physical.
It doesn’t trick you when you put your finger on it and you know what you’re buying.

Now that we know the function and the organ, let’s keep “going out of” the body. We have to live with it, which isn’t easy:
What’s metritis? Salpingitis? Does the vagina get irritated the first time you have relations? What’s an ovarian cyst? A fibroid? Aren’t there diseases that are considered a disgrace?

Isn’t this information unnecessary for girls and boys who are excessively healthy, albeit virgins? No, because they must follow the revelation of the great mysteries in the ideal order:
gonorrhea
page 40, and
should you remain a virgin?
page 152. First learn what’s good (reproduction) and what’s scary (diseases). And now, let’s talk about the pleasures of being a parent.

But wait, first eleven pages on periods, their periods and their misfortunes—last station of the cross. If they are painful, tell yourself in no uncertain terms that they have to be taken care of, there are effective medicines,
when they’re serious enough to have an impact on work every month.

And here comes Sexual Relations. Yes, I know, it’s only Dad and Mom shown from the chest up, and that
instinct that pushes a man and woman toward each other
—pushing them so expertly that they always fall in the same order, Dad on top of Mom. {
25
} The question that provokes this disclosure about “sexual relations”:
how do you make a child?

Then the text takes an interest in additional phenomena. Can you screw for pleasure? A bad question, too direct: it doesn’t allow for a hypocritical answer, and even “yes-but” would seem too extreme. You’ve got to word it:
are sexual relations only for reproduction?
That way there’s still a chance of making the selfish mind of the teenager open to seeing conjugal life as a paradise; and the answer is:
no, sexual relations are not only for reproduction.
Well, can they be for nothing? Come on, let’s not get off track:
it’s true that man and women form a union not only for the purpose of having a child, but
—man-and-woman? not only? but?—
added to that notion of reproduction
—added?—
is the notion of pleasure. Without seeking to give the other pleasure, there can be no deep satisfaction in it.
So, if you’re making a child, you add an effort to it to prevent either partner from grinding his teeth? At least it’s clear.

But how do you seek to give
the other pleasure
—with binoculars? With a pendulum? A detective? Put an ad in the paper offeringa reward to anybody who’ll bring pleasure to my wife? And can’t he get the pleasure himself, this
other?
Is there something keeping him from it? Or someone? Yes? Why?

There can be no sexual relations without the penis being introduced into the vagina.
The theoretical, puritanical/pro-birth sex act becomes the focal point of sexual relations, just as “the egg” was for the organs. The questions are going to delineate the objections to this restrictive ritual, the responses will justify its pattern, immortalize it by ossifying the roles, fears, inequalities and failures that are the result of it, in order, finally, to make them part of the Nature-of-Men and the Nature-of-Women.

Passages from the orgasm-prison:

For a woman, sexual foreplay can be a source of pleasure that is superior to the pleasure of the act itself.
 {
26
}

For her,
the start of relations often entails a feeling of guilt. The fear of pregnancy can lead to a distressing sense of inhibition as well.

Surveys have
always shown that female orgasm was more difficult to achieve than that of males, as if women needed to surmount a host of inhibitions before achieving the full development of their sexuality.