The Naughty Bits (12 page)

Though I grew up in a farming community, I can’t say I’ve had much exposure to copulating animals. The closest I ever really came to living livestock was a comically disastrous attempt at cow tipping. (It was 3 A.M., but they were all wide awake and most un-tippable. We left with soiled boots as our only satisfaction.) There was, however, a kid on the next block who had supposedly boffed and thereby offed his pet kitty, but even at the time I doubted the veracity of the rumor. I’ve always been a firm believer that humans are the species to have sex with, at least if you’re a human. But this much I am willing to confess: I did once write a prose poem about having seen rhinoceri having sex on TV. It was a very sordid affair. In effect, the lumbering male put his front legs up on the rump of the impassive female; then out came his enormous, candy-cane red, gnarled, pole-vault-pole-sized schlong (okay, not quite, but it seemed that way), and he started banging away. The female remained motionless. He kept it up, his head rolling around like he was at a Dead show, jerking his body back and forth and frothing madly, foam dripping down his chest. Finally, he shot (presumably) and rolled off her, falling heavily into the dust. She paused, reactionless, then slowly walked away without looking back. Sound familiar?

All these thoughts came back to me when a friend told me I should include an excerpt from Tom Wolfe’s
A Man in Full.
The recommendation came with a caveat: the protagonists of the sex scene were not human but equine. But hey, a sex scene is a sex scene, and I’m no anthropocentrist. To be precise, this scene is not so much hot as humorous (it’s a prelude to the real horse smut that follows), and it is most, most informative. So, here’s everything you weren’t sure you wanted to know about barnyard sex . . .

Snorting, highly agitated, the stallion walked into the stock and right up to the rear end of the mare. The mare began twitching and rolling her head and switching her furled-up tail. The stallion’s penis was now a tremendous black shaft. Suddenly he extended his head and his long neck and pushed his nose into the mare’s rear end, into her vulva. She tried to kick with her rear legs, but the hobble straps prevented it. She tried to bolt forward, but the walls of the stock hemmed her in, and the stable hands held her halter. The stallion kept twisting his head, rooting around in her vulva . . .

The deep voice of Lettie Withers: “Good Lord, Charlie, I thought this was the Bible Belt. That looks suspiciously like oral sex.”

But no one laughed, and no one else said anything. The truth was, they were shocked.

All at once a gusher of yellowish liquid shot out the rear of the mare. The stallion pulled back. His lower jaw, throatlatch, and breast were dripping with it. It was urine, which continued to spew out. The stallion shook his head and whinnied and started back toward the mare, his penis fully erect, but two black handlers had him by the halter and were forcing him back, away from the stock . . .

“What’s going on?” asked Howell Hendricks. “Why are they taking him away?” The other guests closed ranks in order to hear the answer.

“He’s not the stud,” said Charlie, “he’s the teaser.”

“The teaser?”

“Yep. You just use the teaser to get her aroused.”

“And she urinates in his face?” said Howell.

“Yep. Always happens.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Terrific,” said Howell. “Reminds me of when I was in high school.”

from
“The Imperfect Enjoyment”

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER

The earl of Rochester (né John Wilmot) was the greatest lover of the seventeenth century and the naughtiest poet since Aretino. So famous were his charm and lovemaking, that Rochester-like characters appeared in plays on the English stage for over a century after his death. Ah, fame . . . and what better to be famous for?

But the MacDaddy of the Restoration did have a softer side, and by soft I mean not hard. Limp, detumescent, flaccid, droopy, withered, recently spent; in other words, not hard at all.

For even Rochester, apparently, was occasionally felled by that supremely male condition: the quick trigger, followed by the unwilling willie. Though we men rarely talk about it publicly (or even with one another), sometimes when the equipment is really needed, it’s just not up for the task. And normally it happens right when it matters most, when the woman (or man) you adore is really hot to trot, on that dreamy night when it should have all worked out. Alas, such are the vagaries of the male beast. We are fragile things, and, loath as we are to admit it, we actually do have hang-ups. As Woody Allen demonstrated so beautifully in the last skit of
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,
the voices in the brain headquarters should be kept as far away as possible from the men working the turbines in the erection room. Too much desire means too much pressure means too much threat to the ego, and the whole house of cards can crumble under the weight. Not, of course, that it’s ever happened to me . . .

Rochester’s case is about as bad as it gets. A quick spurt and then . . . and then? This is his lover’s question, and his body has no answer. Quite the pickle. But I’ll let you read it for yourself, for the comic value is tops. And see if the earl’s solution doesn’t make you blush.

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms;
Both equally inspired with eager fire,
Melting through kindness, flaming in desire,
With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,
She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.
Her nimble tongue, Love’s lesser lightning, played,
Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed
Swift orders that I should prepare to throw
The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.
My fluttering soul, sprung with the pointed kiss,
Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,
Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done ’t:
Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.
Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,
And from her body wipes the clammy joys,
When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er
My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?”
She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?”
But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh: alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
This dart of love, whose piercing point oft tried,
With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;
Which nature still directed with such art
That it through every cunt reached every heart—
Stiffly resolved, ’twould carelessly invade
Woman or man, nor ought its fury stayed:
Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made—
Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,
Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.
Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore
Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before?
When vice, disease, and scandal led the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets
Who scuffles, cuffs and justles all he meets,
But if his king or country claims his aid,
The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;
Ev’n so thy brutal valor is displayed,
Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,
But when great Love the onset does command,
Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand.
Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,
Through all the town a common fucking post,
On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt
As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt,
Mayst thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away;
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May’st thou ne’er piss, who didst refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend.
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

from
“Pretty Judy”

KEVIN CANTY

There’s a popular conception of the teenage male as a kind of hormonal loose cannon, victim to the changes of his body, seeking satisfaction anywhere, anytime. Literary counterexamples to this stereotype are few; when Holden Caulfield says no to the prostitute in
Catcher in the Rye,
we think of him as an exception, not the rule. But male sexual psychology is more complicated than is typically acknowledged. Interspersed with sexual desire are shame, guilt, and confusion; the urge to pounce is quickly replaced with the urge to run, and our first times are often as painful as they are pleasurable.

But nowhere, to my knowledge, are the tortured psychological dynamics of the teenage male drawn more precisely than in Kevin Canty’s short story “Pretty Judy” from his collection
A Stranger in This
World.
Canty sets up a story line that’s a glass incubator for a boy’s internal conflict. The plot goes like this: There is a retarded girl who lives on young Paul’s block. She’s older, maybe high-school aged, but doesn’t go to school. She spends her time leaning out her bedroom window, calling out to the neighborhood kids who pass by. Hi Paul. Hi Tommy. Hi Ricky. Paul has heard the rumors, but he’s never gone in. One day he notices that Judy’s parents’ car is gone and, fearfully, he goes up her stairs to find her waiting and available. Each of Canty’s lines ups the ante and intensity of their interaction to the point of breakage. But even at the outset you can see the first stage of his thinking, the teenage male’s “Oh my god! Oh my god! She’s letting me! She’s letting me!” that is a function of the early belief that sex is alien to, unwanted, and cordoned off by the very girls with whom we’re supposed to be having it. But with Judy, this belief slowly crumbles. Paul realizes that it’s he who puts up the barriers, he who brings the limits and restrictions into their world. Judy can have sex unproblematically; it’s what makes her feel pretty. Paul is pierced with guilt and self-loathing, and he’s never felt uglier.

For the full effect, you’ll have to read the entire story, and I encourage you to do so. “Pretty Judy” is as forceful and immediate as a fist, and it knows where to hit.

They knelt together on the window-seat cushion, touching at the shoulder and the hip . . . Gradually Paul became aware of her body, her warmth and weight. What would she allow him? A red Volvo passed under the window, a black sedan. His hand reached out, he watched it like a movie, and touched her bare forearm below the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Paul himself didn’t touch her, only his hand.

Oh, Judy said . . . Oh, she said again, and Oh! As he touched her breast through the layers of fabric, sweatshirt and brassiere . . . It seemed to Paul that she was blind to anything but touch, drunk with it. He lifted her sweatshirt and then put his hand on the hard lace of her brassiere, no resistance, only her soft, lost voice, he rolled her onto her side, reached behind her and fumbled with the little hooks until by some miracle her bra came unsprung and her big, soft breasts tumbled against him. Paul felt drunk with himself, with excitement and with panic. He had fumbled in playrooms before, in cars and in the rough grass of the neighborhood parks, girls from the neighborhood who would negotiate a touch, or on some lucky Saturday allow his blind hand to wander in the darkness of their jeans, but this, this plain revelation, was new to him. She wouldn’t stop him, wouldn’t stop him from anything . . .

Later he would think of her in animal terms: she mewled like a kitten, bawled and bucked like a hungry calf, and still later—years after—he would decide that this was because there was so little human veneer to her; that sex and awareness were natural enemies, a battle every time between modesty, a sense of order and embarrassment, and the little kindling flame of desire . . .

Don’t stop, she said . . .

from
Ulysses

JAMES JOYCE

To eat or not to eat—ass that is. In Joyce’s
Ulysses,
Bloom eats it; in a story of mine, one of the characters munches away (I won’t say what this suggests of me and Joyce—we are fiction writers after all), yet my various unscientific surveys have all indicated the same thing: not many men that I know eat ass. I was a little surprised to learn this, for, from what I hear, most women like it—a lot. The body doesn’t have many orifices, after all; you’d think people would want to take advantage of all there are (think of the improvements of going from two martinis to three). But the curious truth is that though most men are willing to fuck any part of a woman’s body—the ass, between the breasts, in the armpit, behind the knee—they still get a little squeamish putting their tongues in the excretory vacuole.

It’s not that I don’t understand—shit gets a kind of bad rap, and the uninformed seem to think that rimming has a lot more to do with feces than it really does (which, by the by, makes me speculate about the hygienic habits of the naysayers). But all trepidation and exaggeration aside, what would one not do to give pleasure? Various Motown hits have enumerated the deserts one might cross, the mountains one might climb for the beloved, so I ask, is licking the anus really so taxing? Anthropology is one long lesson in how one man’s abominable is another’s pleasant. What is unthinkable on one side of the globe is commonplace on another (or in between). So, although you might think that this is a simple sermon on doing all and everything to make your lover happy (granted, there are some people who are not exactly asking for the
spécialité du chef
under discussion—yet), I’m really talking about ethics and perspective. The “inherently” gross is inherent only within a context, and that context can change—like one’s mind. When in Rome, we are told to do as the Romans. In Southeast Asia, you might well eat fried termites. And in bed with your true love? Don’t count it out.