The Naughty Bits (27 page)

When the question is taken from extreme violence to extreme sex, it loses none of its intrigue. Most of us have indulged, at least in the safety of our own minds, in outlandish sexual behavior and felt the icy burn of its appeal. Much of the porn industry is based on precisely this instinct for sexual tourism. But what if the objective is not mere arousal but a kind of philosophical redefinition of the
Fight Club
kind? What if there was a kind of sexual abjection that you could pass through in order to emerge in nirvana, enlightenment, or at least outside the straitjacket of quotidian boredom?

This is the question raised when the protagonist of Kenzaburo Oe’s 1963 novel
J
decides to become a
chikan
—a groper of women on commuter trains. Oe, a Nobel Prize winner, crafts the philosophical birthing of a pervert with incredible nuance. This excerpt, where J has his first encounter, is one of my favorite passages of erotic prose in the entire history of literature. There are things one can only know through experience; it is up to us to decide whether we dare to do them.

Standing immediately in front of him was a woman of about his age. She was at a right angle to him, and their bodies were pressed together, with her chest, stomach, and thighs fitted to his. J caressed the woman. His right hand moved into the space between her buttocks, while his left hand traveled down her belly toward the space between her thighs. His erect penis was touching the outside of her leg. He and the woman were about the same height. His heavy breath stirred the down on her flushed earlobes. At first J trembled with fear and his breathing was irregular. Was the woman not going to cry out? . . . When his fear was at its peak, J’s penis was hardest. Now it was pressed tight against the woman’s thigh. He shook with profound fear as he stared straight at her chiseled profile . . . If the girl cried out in disgust or fear, he would have an orgasm. He held on to this fantasy like fear, like desire. But she didn’t cry out. She kept her lips firmly closed. Suddenly her eyes closed tightly, like a curtain with its ropes cut falling to the stage. At that instant the restraining pressure of her buttocks and thighs relaxed. Descending, J’s right hand reached the depths of her now-soft cheeks. His left hand went to the hollow between her outspread thighs.

J lost his fear and, at the same time, his desire weakened. Already his penis was beginning to wilt.

—translated by Luk Van Haute

from
Child of God

CORMAC MCCARTHY

It’s a longstanding philosophical (and religious) question what we humans do from choice, and what we are fated—or programmed —to do. I’ve never been a big believer in predetermination or destiny, and even Noam Chomsky’s claim that we are all hardwired for language has always seemed rather implausible to me. When the argument turns to sex, however, I find myself much more available to the idea that we are all born with some basic blueprint—and perhaps even with our particular tastes.

Whether we are natured or nurtured is not an idle question by any means, and the implications change depending on what specific sex practice or predilection you’re talking about. Most people tend to think that sexual extremists, like pedophiles, are born with their leanings (though it is also argued that abuse or child porn encourages them along). With other sex offenders, it’s not so clear. Is one born a rapist, is one led to rape, or is it, in some measure, a matter of choice? It’s hard not to think that it’s a combination of all of the above. Sexual orientation is another tricky issue. It is often thought of as something we’re born with, though there are arguments both ways (thus the Christian Right’s “deprogramming” centers for homosexuals). Atypical tastes, like fetishes or S/M, raise questions of their own. Sadomasochistic play has become quite mainstream, but still I wonder if there aren’t serious players who would say that S/M is not an option but a necessity. Is that necessity inborn or acculturated? Hard to say.

Cormac McCarthy’s haunting early novel,
Child of God,
brings these questions to a head in its portrayal of the mental disintegration of adolescent protagonist Lester Ballard. Lester starts out a little weird, then moves off into the woods by himself and slowly begins to lose it. His relations with the fairer sex don’t go particularly well—to say the least—and he soon learns, at first by accident, that the newly dead are not as hard to deal with as the living, breathing, and resisting. Was Lester born a necrophiliac, or did his disastrous encounters with women and slipping mental health turn him into one? In the scene that follows, Lester comes upon a car where a young, copulating couple have mysteriously died. The possibilities dawn on him gradually but irrevocably. Was he destined?

He knelt there staring at the two bodies. Them sons of bitches is deader’n hell, he said.

He could see one of the girl’s breasts. Her blouse was open and her brassiere was pushed up around her neck. Ballard stared for a long time. Finally he reached across the dead man’s back and touched the breast. It was soft and cool. He stroked the full brown nipple with the ball of his thumb . . . Leaning over the seat he took hold of the man and tried to pull him off the girl. The body sprawled heavily, the head lolled . . . He could see the girl better now. He reached and stroked her other breast. He did this for a while and then he pushed her eyes shut with his thumb. She was young and very pretty . . . [She] lay with her eyes closed and her breasts peeking from her open blouse and her pale thighs spread. Ballard climbed over the seat.

The dead man was watching him from the floor of the car. Ballard kicked his feet out of the way and picked the girl’s panties up from the floor and sniffed at them and put them in his pocket. He looked out the rear window and he listened. Kneeling there between the girl’s legs he undid his buckle and lowered his trousers.

A crazed gymnast laboring over a cold corpse. He poured into that waxen ear everything he’d ever thought of saying to a woman. Who could say she did not hear him?

from
The Old Testament

I think it was Umberto Eco who said that he dreaded reading the Bible as a teenager, until he discovered how much sex was in it. He had a point. As early as 2 Genesis, God says, “It is not good for a man to be alone” (a belief I’ve long subscribed to), and he makes first the animals, then Eve. I’d rather not comment on the order of these events—the implications are clear to those who want them to be clear. I’d rather point out that Adam gets a partner in Eden faster than most of us would at a sex addict’s convention.

And such is the nature of the Bible as a whole: couplings are common, incest omnipresent, and innuendo aplenty. The Good Book does not lack for good parts, especially the Old Testament—you just have to sift through endless lists of progeny and litanies of the scourges inflicted on the Israelites to get to them.

Take the story of Abraham and Sarah (originally Abram and Sarai), the second sexually active couple in Genesis. In the course of a few chapters, Sarah, while pretending to be Abraham’s sister to protect him, gets abducted into Pharaoh’s harem (bad Pharaoh, bad Pharaoh), proves herself to be Abraham’s half sister, gets released, then gets taken into Abimelech’s harem (who is warned by God not to go near her), gets released, convinces Abraham to have a baby (Ishmael) with the maid Hagar, and eventually has a baby with him herself (Isaac). So much happens so fast in the Bible, that reading it for naughty bits is like trying to distinguish body parts in scrambled adult channels on TV. If your attention wavers for even an instant, you risk missing the enchilada.

Amid all the wham-bam sex tales in the early books of the Old Testament, the most interesting involve Lot and his daughters. Lot, you’ll remember, was the one man in Sodom that the Lord decided to save from the fire and brimstone. So he sends two angels to Lot’s house to warn him of the destruction and give him instructions for getting himself and his family out of Dodge. Now the inhabitants of Sodom were not called Sodomites for nothing, so when they see the two male angels— certified hotties—going into Lot’s house, they want a piece of the action. “Both old and young, all the people from every quarter” circle around Lot’s house, banging on his door, calling, “Where are the men which came in to thee this night? Bring them to us that we may know them.” Among the fabulous euphemisms for sex in the King James translation, “to know” is one of my favorites. I envision a mob of sex fiends hemmed in around Antonio Sabato Jr., screaming, “We want to know you, we just want to know you.” You get the point.

Lot realizes he has a difficult situation on his hands. So he goes out to the throng, locking the door behind him, and says: “I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.” Here is a good example of what can transpire in the course of a few biblical words. You scan the line, scan it again, and say to yourself, In place of the angels, did Lot just offer the crowd his virgin daughters to do with what they will? I mean, being a good host is nice and all, but that seems a bit extreme. The mind reels—not unproductively—at what would befall the innocents if they were cast to the awaiting wolves.

Thankfully, the angels intervene. They pull Lot back into the house and blind the Sodomites pressing against the door. Then they facilitate Lot’s exit, with wife and daughters in tow, but, in their flight across the plain, Lot’s wife makes the mortal mistake of looking back (like many of us toward old relationships) and is turned into a pillar of salt.

Yet the saga of Lot and his daughters is not over. Having fled to the town of Zoar, he eventually becomes afraid and moves himself and his daughters to the mountains. Apparently it’s a little underpopulated up there, and his daughters begin to despair of ever getting nookie. The older says to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of the father.” Ah, the old Get Dad Drunk and Have Him Impregnate Us trick—pretty sneaky, Sis! So on consecutive nights the daughters get Lot schnookered and go lie with him (again, a nice euphemism, though not as good as “come in unto”). Lot, the sod, doesn’t seem to notice either time. Eventually each of his daughters gives birth to a son.

Now, mind you, all this has happened in the first twenty pages of the Bible (at least in my edition). This is some kind of book. By comparison, the first twenty pages of
Best American Erotica 2000
contain nowhere near as much sex and only a fraction of the scandal. True, conventional erotica tends to have more adjective-heavy descriptions of sex than one finds in the Holy Book (the Song of Solomon is the exception, as we will see), but for sheer quantity of nudge nudge, the Bible is up there.

By and large, the Old Testament is a very weird document, full of bizarre and rather unsavory tidbits that the New Testament tried to smooth over. Even God himself had to be rendered kinder and gentler the second time around, for in the Hebrew books he was forever casting plagues and famines down on the people, and insisting on himself as a “consuming fire” and a “jealous God.” In Isaiah 3:16–17, for example, the “haughty” daughters of Zion with their “wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go and making a tinkling with their feet” will be smote down by the Lord, and he will discover their “secret parts.” Ooh. Best take off those bangles before it’s too late.

But my favorite Old Testament oddity occurs in Deuteronomy 23:1, where, in a list of all those who will not make it to Heaven, it is written: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” Rum thing, not only do you have to go through this life without the priviest of privies, but the gates of Paradise are closed to you to boot (and the fact that you can sing a decent falsetto is pretty minor recompense). Yet the intrigue of this passage doesn’t end there: why, in fact, are the memberless or the crushed-testicled not welcome into the New Jerusalem? Interesting question. There are numerous medieval theological debates about whether angels eat and drink, piss, and shit (and where it goes if they do), but I’ve never heard anyone ask if they screw. Yet here is evidence that the celestial nightclub serves up more than just juice and cookies. Perhaps this is not the venue to reinscribe us in thirteenth-century scholastic arguments, but the point is still intriguing: if it was just sex the elect were after, the penis would be enough. But if the balls are also necessary, this suggests a certain import to the physical male orgasm itself. To my mind this complicates Aquinas’s notion that the postprandial material discharge of angels is only a vapor (but not a flatulence, mind you); for even if we agree that angel excretion is but gas, what are we to do with angel jizz? I’m sure Aquinas would have said it was some kind of noumenal hand lotion.

Even in the briefest of introductions to sex in the Old Testament, no account can ignore one of the most erotic, exquisite texts not just in the Bible but in the whole history of Western literature: the Song of Solomon. In all the reams of biblical interpretation, this is the text that has received the most treatment. The reasons are twofold: the Song of Solomon is sufficiently explicit to be embarrassing to the antisensuality of the later Christian Church, and thus required extensive backpedaling. This is the obvious, confessed reason so many monks spilled their ink on its pages. The other, only slightly less obvious, is that it is very fun to read, and decidedly arousing, especially if the only other thing you’re reading is Samuel and Jeremiah’s accounts of the punishments visited upon the wicked.