Good Sex Illustrated (27 page)
It goes without saying that all these differences have no importance—but they have the misfortune of concerning a market element that is as secretive as it is overvalued. The incredible anxieties that often result from this provide the daily bread of sexologists-counselors; I hardly dare say, their fortune.
It’s amusing to note that the very serious and excellent
Human Sa Anatomy
by R. L. Dickinson reported a story about a 34-cm cock: it was attached to a boy of 15.
Back cover
A child’s cock getting hard. (…) This isn’t an object of desire or an organ of pleasure (…) It’s a cute cock, but we don’t get to see the rest of the child—because being able to would turn this medical, public-spirited document into something immoral, indiscreet and against the law: a face and an erection at the same time, being too human an image, are called pornography.
First published in France in 1973,
Good Sex Illustrated
gleefully deciphers the subtext of a popular sex education manual for children produced during that period. In so doing, Duvert mounts a scabrous and scathing critique of how deftly the “sex-positive” ethos was harnessed to promote the ideal of the nuclear family. Like Michel Houllebecq, Duvert is highly attuned to all the hypocrisies of late twentieth-century western “sexual liberation” mass movements. As Bruce Benderson notes in his introduction,
Good Sex Illustrated
shows that, “in our sexual order, orgasm follows the patterns of any other kind of capital… ‘good sex’ is a voracious profit machine.” But unlike Houllebecq, Duvert writes from a passionate belief in the integrity of unpoliced sex and of pleasure. Even more controversially now than when the book was first published, Duvert asserts the child’s right to his or her own playful, unproductive sexuality.
Bruce Benderson’s translation will belatedly introduce English-speaking audiences to the most infamous gay French writer since Jean Gênet.
“A writer criminally undertranslated and consequently barely known in the primarily English-speaking areas of the world… Duvert is one of the more significant and idiosyncratic contemporary French fiction writers. He’s also one of the most mysterious.”—Dennis Cooper
distributed by The MIT Press
ISBN-10: 1-58435-043-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-043-9
Table of Contents
Introduction by Bruce Benderson
The Sexual Order and What It Serves
The Principle of Sex Education
This Is Where He Will Learn the Role of the Father...
To Live Happily, Live Castrated