The Naughty Bits (23 page)

Balls are fine, though we prefer to call them Motchies, as in “Hey, no teeth on the Motchies!” whereas breasts can now be referred to either with the Middle English “paps” or our new-and-improved “Sha-Shas.” The anus, long neglected, so-called hole of either bung or ass, is now the Feep, a name we hope will not remain obscured in darkness. Finally, for that great idiomatic oversight, the clitoris, so mysterious to most men (and some women) that it has barely evoked any nonclinical sobriquets (the ludicrous “love button” and the most ironic “little man in the boat” notwithstanding), we offer Stalgon the Imperial or the Twee, depending on your mood. We sincerely hope these new designations serve all your conversational and interrogative needs.

N.B.: The excerpt that follows, from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic
Breakfast of
Champions,
concerns itself with female anatomy and its popular slang. We provide it as a point of cultural reference.

A wide-open beaver was a photograph of a woman not wearing underpants, and with her legs far apart, so that the mouth of her vagina could be seen. The expression was first used by news photographers, who often got to see up women’s skirts at accidents and sporting events and from underneath fire escapes and so on. They needed a code word to yell to other newsmen and friendly policemen and firemen and so on, to let them know what could be seen, in case they wanted to see it. The word was this: “Beaver!”

A beaver was actually a large rodent. It loved water, so it built dams. It looked like this: The sort of beaver which excited news photographers so much looked like this:

This was where babies came from.

from
The Kama Sutra

VATSYAYANA

The
Kama Sutra
is the greatest sex manual ever written. Compiled in the fourth century from texts dating back to 800 B.C., its depth and breadth are staggering. With chapters on, among other things, scratching, biting, squeezing, caressing, screwing, fellating, relaxing, seducing, meeting your wife, meeting other men’s wives, pandering, prostituting, breaking up, making up, making better, and making bigger, it covers all the sexual bases, plus a few you might not have known about—for example, can you name the eight different types of marks that can be left with fingernails?

The diversity of sexual practices in the
Kama Sutra
reflects the great number of Indian subcultures from which its compiler drew his information. In some regions cunnilingus and fellatio are common, in others forbidden. In some places men dress as women and work as prostitutes; in other places there aren’t prostitutes at all. Sodomy tends only to take place in the south, whereas in the north the women don’t even like to kiss. Finally, “in country villages” and in Koshala (a matriarchal society), women like violent sex and dildos and often hide a multitude of young men in their quarters to “satiate [their] desires, either one by one, or as a group.” Is that what they mean by the wisdom of the ancients?

Among my favorite sections is the one on penis enlargement. The surest technique seems to be that of taking the hairs of the shuka insect, mixing them with oil, and then rubbing them on the penis for ten consecutive nights. When the penis swells, its owner should sleep face downward on a wooden bed with a hole to let the perturbed member hang through. Various cooling mixtures are then employed to ease the accompanying pain, and once the man feels okay again the swelling endures for life. Sounds good, right? But before you run off to depilate your backyard shukas, take note: the
Kama Sutra
advises that all techniques for increasing penis size be learned from an expert.

The excerpt that follows is taken from the section on the stimulation of erotic desire. It divides all potential players into six categories, depending on the size of their equipment. What’s marked is the attention given to the pleasure of the woman as well as the man—a concern we don’t expect to find in centuries prior to our own. But the
Kama Sutra
is just as much for her as for him, and even cites a source as saying that a woman needs to have an orgasm in order to be impregnated. I think the continued propagation of the species during the Victorian period in England disproves the theory, but hey, you can’t knock its intention.

Man is divided into three classes, viz. the hare man, the bull man, and the horse man, according to the size of his lingam [penis]. Woman also, according to the depth of her yoni [vagina], is either a female deer, a mare, or a female elephant. There are thus three equal unions between persons of corresponding dimensions, and there are six unequal unions, when the dimensions do not correspond, or nine in all . . .

There are also nine kinds of union according to the force of passion or carnal desire, as follows: A man is called a man of small passion whose desire at the time of sexual union is not great, whose semen is scanty, and who cannot bear the warm embraces of the female. Those who differ from this temperament are called men of middling passion, while those of intense passion are full of desire. In the same way, women are supposed to have the three degrees of feeling as specified above. Lastly, according to time there are three kinds of men and women, the short-timed, the moderate-timed, and the long-timed; and of these, as in the previous statements, there are nine kinds of union.

But on this last head there is a difference of opinion about the female, which should be stated. Auddalika says, “Females do not emit as males do. The males simply remove their desire, while the females, from their consciousness of desire, feel a certain kind of pleasure, which gives them satisfaction, but it is impossible for them to tell you what kind of pleasure they feel. The fact from which this becomes evident is, that males, when engaged in coition, cease of themselves after emission, and are satisfied, but it is not so with females.”

This opinion is however objected to on the grounds that, if a male be a long-timed, the female loves him the more, but if he be short-timed, she is dissatisfied with him. And this circumstance, some say, would prove that the female emits also.

But this opinion does not hold good, for if it takes a long time to allay a woman’s desire, and during this time she is enjoying great pleasure, it is quite natural then that she should wish for its continuation. And on this subject there is a verse as follows: “By union with men the lust, desire, or passion of women is satisfied, and the pleasure derived from the consciousness of it is called their satisfaction.”

The followers of Babhravya, however, say that the semen of women continues to fall from the beginning of the sexual union to its end, and it is right that it should be so, for if they had no semen there would be no embryo.

To this there is an objection. In the beginning of coition the passion of the woman is middling, and she cannot bear the vigorous thrusts of her lover, but by degrees her passion increases until she ceases to think about her body, and then finally she wishes to stop from further coition.

This objection, however, does not hold good, for even in ordinary things that revolve with great force, such as a potter’s wheel, or a top, we find that the motion at first is slow, but by degrees it becomes very rapid. In the same way the passion of the woman having gradually increased, she has a desire to discontinue coition, when all the semen has fallen away. And there is a verse with regard to this as follows: “The fall of the semen of the man takes place only at the end of coition, while the semen of the woman falls continually, and after the semen of both has all fallen away then they wish for the discontinuance of coition.”

Lastly, Vatsyayana is of opinion that the semen of the female falls in the same way as that of the male.

—translated by Sir Richard F. Burton

from
Fear of Flying

ERICA JONG

When
Fear of
Flying
first came out in the early ’70s, it articulated a growing sense among women that the popular conception of female sexuality—demure, delicate, deferential—didn’t cover all the bases. Women were recognizing and embracing their own sexual power as never before, and Jong’s best-seller gave a voice to the transformation.

A generation later,
Fear of
Flying
would continue to inspire women at certain stages of their sexual development; it also, from my own experience, helped them communicate to the boys around them just what was going on. I was given a copy in the early weeks of a relationship in my sophomore year of college; little did I know at the time that she intended it to be a textbook, and I was a remedial student. Its famous concept— the zipless fuck—is a metaphor for sex without context, without complication, between preferably unacquainted individuals who share no language but touch, get to the business, and then get out of each other’s lives. No fuss, no muss. But my girlfriend of the time wasn’t trying to get me to bonk her and get lost; she saw the greater implication in the book that, at times, sex should be able to be a purely in-body experience (with all the psychology that implies), devoid of any intellectualizing or problematizing. She didn’t want to separate the emotions out of our coupling; she just wanted me to shut up and get to it.

The reason the zipless fuck is so appealing, of course, is that most fucks are pretty damn zip-full. Very few women I know—or men even— would want anonymous sex all the time. The foibles and bumbling around zippers and socks and condoms and all their metaphorical equivalents in the psyche are what make sex more than just a release of fluids. Sex can make us weak, and weakness can make us beautiful. But of all good things we can sometimes get enough—even of care and compassion. The zipless fuck was a call for un-PC sex—but un-PC sex dictated on a woman’s terms, not in the conventional way men had been having it for millennia.

So what I learned most from my girlfriend of sophomore year was how sexy an assertive woman could be. From that point on I realized that assertiveness and sexual self-awareness normally went hand in hand. I will never forget the first time we went to my dorm room. I had “decorated” it with a chaos of “found art” oddities of every shape and form; upon opening the door, her first and only words were, “I could never, ever, have an orgasm here.”
Fear of Flying
had left its mark: dome feminism, 1; Jack décor, 0.

A grimy European train compartment (Second Class) . . . In the window seat a pretty young widow in a heavy black veil and tight black dress which reveals her voluptuous figure. She is sweating profusely . . . The train screeches to a halt in a town called (perhaps) Corleone. A tall languid-looking soldier, unshaven, but with a beautiful mop of hair, a cleft chin and somewhat devilish, lazy eyes enters the compartment . . . He is sweaty and disheveled but basically a gorgeous hunk of flesh, only slightly rancid from the heat. The train screeches out of the station.