This piece came about in a strange-ish way, as they so often do. I had fallen down a Wiki hole of truly epic proportions, having stumbled upon the fifty most interesting Wikipedia articles and fifty more.
STOP. I know what you’re going to do, and how much time it’s going to take. Please just open two tabs and dump those links in and come back, or I’ll never see you again.
And I was tearing that shit up, as you can imagine, when I began to wonder, like a tiny woman in an expensive apartment with an early-generation laptop, would I ever have read so much if not for information and smut?
If that sentence seems odd, it’s because it’s a stylistic riff on the late Jack Gilbert’s poem “Don Giovanni on the Way to Hell,” which is both about what the title implies, and also a semi-biographical meditation on a man who has loved women and devoted his life to their ways and bodies and minds. I will quote from it briefly, because he is gone now and the brief flurry of Jack Gilbert quotations in tributes has mostly ceased:
How could they think women a recreation?
Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest?
Only the ignorant or busy could. That elm
Of flesh must prove a luxury of primes;
Be perilous and dear with rain of an alternate earth.
Which is not to damn the forested China of touching.
I am neither priestly nor tired, and the great knowledge
Of breasts with their loud nipples congregates in me.
The sudden nakedness, the small ribs, the mouth.
Splendid. Splendid. Splendid. Like Rome. Like loins.
A glamour sufficient to our long marvelous dying.
I say sufficient and speak with earned privilege,
For my life has been eaten in that foliate city.
To ambergris. But not for recreation.
I would not have lost so much for recreation.
What a glorious thing to have written. And we will return to it, and why it is here, but back to my point about information.
I did nothing but read, all my life, until I began to fall in love, and then I took a bit of a pause to fall in love for years and years and years, and now that I am (Spaghetti Monster willing) done with the business of new love (as though that is a sentence one can write triumphantly, rather than with a tinge of envy) I read again.
But why did I read, so much? I read for the immersion, for the new worlds, for the human experiences, for the empathy, for the glory, for the occupation. I read The Bible to make sense of everything written after. But I also read for information, because books were the way to know things when I was eight or nine or ten. Books were the only game in town, if you were a quiet person with quiet parents on a quiet street. When I was eight, and wanted to know about Vietnam (by which, I should specify, I mean the Vietnam War, and the one that occurred between 1955-1975 in particular, as, not to be irritatingly pedantic, to colloquially refer to said war as “Vietnam” is to do an intellectual disservice to a country that has been around for some time and has more to hang its hat on than an interlude of American military involvement), for whatever reason, I could not go on Wikipedia and spend an hour getting a pretty decent take on the matter. When I was eight, I had to go to my parents’ bookshelf and dig out Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History. They owned the 1983 edition, purchased the year after I was born, and now I have the revised edition in my own library. And so, because I had to read 784 pages, instead of Wikipedia, I know more things. Some of which were likely not true, but I needed the information and there it was.
Again, I say information, because that is how my parents saw it. I have asked them why we were never barred from their shelves, at any age, and they told me that when they had children, they discussed it, and decided the world is a very difficult place, for which the educational system of nice quiet university towns is unlikely to prepare one, and that it would do my brother and I a disservice to keep from us from that information, and the information we would need to live in it.
“Dad, I don’t understand what’s happening to Celie. Can you explain?”
And he could, and he did, or tried to. Parenting, like old age, is not for pussies. And this is not a method for pussies.
I am not here to say that the internet is bad for information. It is the greatest thing ever to happen to information, it is a gift. If you no longer have to read 784 pages about Vietnam to know about Vietnam, that’s time you could spend doing something else. Times change and we change with them. The books are still there, and now you can read them in a Ziploc bag in the bathtub on an electronic device.
But now, done with information, I come to the glory of illicit reading in early adolescence, and to the smutty parts of Jack Gilbert and the zipless fucks and the Philip Roths and the everything else.
Perhaps, now that there is a world of incredible and diverse and wild and free erotica and pornography, it’s not going to be as necessary to find the good bits of your parents’ books, or to sit in the library for hours looking for the same. And perhaps the books with really good bits won’t even BE on your parents’ shelves, they’ll be on passworded e-readers to protect you from the good bits and them from the embarrassment of having good bits to snoop on.
Novels (with obvious room for a slew of exceptions on both ends) aren’t even remotely as dirty as they were in twenty or thirty years ago. It was a time when we needed dirt, as a species, without wanting to buy it in embarrassing places, and so when it was given to us by John Irving, or Updike, or VC Andrews (you knew it was coming) or Samuel Delany, in genre fiction or in literary fiction or in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, we grabbed it with both hands and asked for more. And in the pursuit of those two lines, those paragraphs where something was turgid or unbuttoned or damp or pushed against a wall, we read bildungsromans and we read Saul Bellow, and were better for it.
“Look at her, readingThe Group. Does she even understand the psychoanalysis stuff?”
No. She is taking it back upstairs when this tedious adult party is over so she can re-read the bit where he says she barely made a mess and his ex-wife had bled like a pig.
And that’s my only hang-up, really, about how good the world is becoming for young people who want to read everything they want to read all the time, that because the glorious, exhausting, painful desire of being weak with longing for the world of sexuality is going to be blessedly and confusedly more satisfiable for them (oh, not your young people? you have blocking software? OH THAT WILL BE FINE THEN NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT), that one great entry-point into the world of books-for-grownups will be rendered relatively moot.
Me, I love Freedom. I think Freedom is as good as people said it was, and there is no backlash against it in my heart. There are also some really sexy parts. Are my kids going to want to steal Freedom off my bookshelf when I’m not looking in ten years? In the hopes that four hundred pages in a married man will finally touch the part of Lalitha’s underwear between her legs? Probably not. It would be a waste of their time. What a shame.
Why not, then, spend the year you are fourteen reading books FOR fourteen-year olds (there are so many great ones, of course, and more every year), and then getting a fix for your mad hormonal storm by typing three or four keywords into a search engine? I think that may be what people will do. And there is nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. And for queer kids, what a marvelous thing, not to have to settle for the crumbs they were tossed in previous generations (“I’ll just stop reading before these two guys are brutally murdered, but after one of them touches the other’s forearm and the hairs go up.”)
But would I, personally, now have the benefit of being widely and inappropriately well-read and book-mad were it not for the one-two punch of information and smut? Would I EVER have read all of Ondaatje if I hadn’t needed to sit down, dizzy from the idea of imaginary lovers giving me fruit out of their mouths? Would generations of boys (and girls!) be devoted to the universe of reading about other universes had they not desperately needed to imagine that some of them would contain aliens with strange tongues and oddly-familiar breasts?
Probably not. May it endure always. May they always come for the unbuttoning and find that they stay past the remaking of the bed.
Works Referenced:
Samuel Delany, Dhalgren (Indiebound | Amazon)
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel (Indiebound | Amazon)
Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems (Indiebound | Amazon)
Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (Indiebound | Amazon)
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (Indiebound | Amazon)
Mary McCarthy, The Group (Indiebound | Amazon)
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (Indiebound | Amazon)
Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Indiebound | Amazon)
Alice Walker, The Color Purple (Indiebound | Amazon)
Tags: books, flowers in the attic, information, prognostications, smut, vc andrews day
Nicole! This is great. I was such an undiscriminating reader in early adolescence that I picked up one of my dad’s R Crumb collections. I had no idea what was going on in about 80% of it but read it anyway until my older brother saw what I was reading and was like “Uhhhh, Dad?”
I did that too! Reading Dirty Laundry at an impressionable probably had an alarming influence on my sexuality…
My parents NEVER took books from me and I plan to do much the same – hoping, as they did, that if my unconceived children find something that disturbs them, they can talk to me about it.
I remember getting what would have been my first, pleasant borderline sexual feelings from books. I read too old for my entire life and to be honest I think it didn’t do me any harm and may have done me a lot of good. Most of the stuff I was ‘too young for’ just went right over my head anyway.
Though Michael Moorcock’s ‘Gloriana’ at 13 was probably a bit far. BDSM, Bestiality, Pedophilia and Rape To fix The Woman’s Inability To Orgasm ho! Wow, was that not the book to read as a sexually precocious young teen.
My husband’s mother was a head-teacher, and he read Let’s Go Play At The Adams, which had been banned from his school library. His mother warned him about the content and he was glad for the warning, because it allowed him some cushioning.
“Gloriana.” I first came across the book when working my part time job shelving at my college’s library. I never did read the whole thing but I read snippets and.. yeaaah. Color me titillated.
It is well and truly filthy. You’d have to be the most kinky person alive to not find something in there that made you squicked. But as we’re talking about the pwer of the transgressive and the value of the impossible and unnatural fantasy…
My strongest memory of the book is Gloriana traipsing down in the the Beast Rooms, desperate for an orgasm, and nearly getting there with some grotesque wolf/ape thing but at the last minute… no!
You’d have to try very hard not to find a kink that wasn’t covered.
I would say it was the first properly sexy book I read. I’d read some fairly tame romance (all heaving bosoms and delicate maidenheads) but Gloriana was… it was both titillating and appalling and something about it just got me.
Oddly enough, my uncle gave it to me. In retrospect, that’s a bit weird. But, mind you, he was a big believer in kids reading ‘too old’ for them AND he thought Moorcock was a legitimate genius. And people forget how full of that stuff Sci-fi and Fantasy of that era was! I mean, ever actually read Heinlein? There’s a book where his self-insert mary-sue MC goes back in time and fucks his own mother.
I can’t remember a time without the internet, really, but I do remember that Anne McCaffrey wrote porn before she wrote about dragons. I had a copy of Get Off The Unicorn. It was _fantastic._
(Intensely foxed, bought on the sly at a used book store, paid for by my father, much loved and with a dragon on the cover, CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT TITLE.)
WHAT? I want! I read Dragon Riders of Pern as a young person. And it was a little “too old” for me. (Only because of the Dragon mating / non consensual human sex) I was actually just thinking of that while reading this. My dad gave me the series because I like Sci-Fi and I’m sure he forgot all it contained.
I just wanted to say that I love you for bothering to write this out: “When I was eight, and wanted to know about Vietnam (by which, I should specify, I mean the Vietnam War, and the one that occurred between 1955-1975 in particular, as, not to be irritatingly pedantic, to colloquially refer to said war as “Vietnam” is to do an intellectual disservice to a country that has been around for some time and has more to hang its hat on than an interlude of American military involvement).”
I really do. Now onto reading the rest of this.
Oh man, okay, so some of my illicit readings varied from re-reading parts of Mists of Avalon over and over, “She Who Remembers” by Linda Lay Shuler (that got passed around 7th grade homeroom) and.. anime fanfiction. Yes, thank you internet for that last one. o_O
Oh so this is where I wanted to ask y’all’s opinions. My mum forbade me from watching/reading things she didn’t approve of, and my dad didn’t bother disapproving of anything (although he did take the R Crumb book mentioned above away from me) and in fact probably showed me some things I wasn’t ready for (by accident most likely). It seems like forbidding doesn’t really work except to make the kid want to read it more, but how do you get between that and not even noticing what your kid is reading? With the BBs, I want to make sure I’m there to “explain” or guide them towards understanding the way I want them to, but how do you do that with books? Did anyone’s parents do something like this?
I think about this a lot, too! Jumping on mostly to get alerts if other people have good advice, but I think my mom did reasonably well at this. What helped was that she was a big reader, too, and read most everything I read. I don’t recall her ever forbidding a book – I’m going to have to ask her if she ever did. She made a lot of book recommendations and so she may have been subtly steering me toward adult books that weren’t too above my maturity level.
Although once she tried to check out the nuclear-holocaust book “On the Beach” for me from the library, but mistakenly checked out some other book that must have had a really similar title about some virginal woman every dude wanted to sleep with. It was quite … intriguing, though I was really confused about when the nuclear war was going to kick in.
My mom only forbade one book that I remember–Catcher in the Rye. She said I wasn’t old enough yet (at 12). When I finally read it (around 16), it seemed really derivative and dumb, because I’d read so much other YA angst. We had a good conversation, though, about why it was so shocking when she was a teenager, and why she had wanted me to wait until I would empathise with Holden. I just waited too long, I think.
I was mostly allowed to hide in my room and read whatever, and I definitely hid books I didn’t want to talk about. But I was glad for that measure of independence and space to explore my own feelings and ideas–otherwise, I was a Good Kid and never really rebelled. So I think there’s a balance between being ready to answer questions about Celie honestly and giving kids some space to work things out with themselves.
My parents put the dodgier books on shelves I couldn’t reach, or in their bedroom. If I wanted to read something, I had to ask them for it and then they’d tell me ‘this has this stuff in it, are you sure?” and sometimes I’d say yes or no. I was an open reader, so if they saw me reading something they thought was too old, they’d sit down and talk to me about it, and tell me to talk to them if I found anything too disturbing or that they didn’t understand.
I wouldn’t worry though. In my own (limited) experience kids brains just… skip the stuff they aren’t ready to understand yet. And if you give kids a pretty good grounding in analysing their intake and surroundings, they do a lot of self-explaining. Like the rape thing in Gloriana, as in my post above. I knew that was wrong, and I knew it wouldn;t work because my parents had always had honest conversations about things around me, so I just rejected the idea.
I read Atonement far, far too young. Mother caught me putting it back on the shelves and I told her ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, I skipped the bit in the library, and the bit with the rude note.”
Such a great question. I’m actually emailing this link to my dad, and asking him this very same thing. My mom was never a forbidder, really – except once, when she wouldn’t buy me Then Again Maybe I Won’t when we were on vacation with my grandparents, because it mentioned wet dreams in the blurb THANKS A LOT PUBLISHERS – and my dad was very much like Nicole’s parents: “If it’s there, read it.” I will report back if he has any wisdom (although he’s currently being fancy in NYC, so I don’t expect the wisdom will be quick in coming).
I never even thought about being forbidden to read things. I guess my parents just never really thought too much about it because I was overall a good kid. (They never punished me either. And never had to harp on me about hw/grades, because I put all the pressure on myself.) I’ll have to ask them both now and see if they remember anything. I mean, I read It the summer going into 7th grade. That was a little weird, but nobody stopped me.
Growing up, my sisters and I were always encouraged to read, and not really banned from anything. Books my mom felt were not of sufficient literary value (Sweet Valley High for me, VC Andrews for my sister) were allowed, but we couldn’t buy them – we had to borrow from friends. As for objectionable content, I can remember two instances: I started reading my dad’s copy of Ball Four, which mysteriously vanished after he saw me reading it; and lots of pages from Jaws disappeared after my mom realized I’d started it.
JAWS. That was one that I read the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books version of – they lived at the cabin and, after hearing my dad say (a lot) that “Condensed books are for condensed minds,” I decided to read a non-condensed version of both Jaws and one of the LaVyrle Spencer romances that were always in there when I was about ten or eleven. HOOOO BOY were the Reader’s Digest readers missing out.
I still don’t know what I missed in Jaws!
My parents didn’t restrict any of my reading materials, which was pretty amazing considering that they were fairly strict in other ways. I think it was less intentional freedom on their part, and more…benign negligence? Peak VC Andrews was during my adolescence, so I’m sure those books just looked to Ma like all the other YA crap I read back then (and, uh, now). Probably, if they’d had any idea just how much smut I was reading they WOULD have started to screen my books – it just never occurred to them that their baby girl could be reading and enjoying “naughty” stuff.
Whatever the reasons, I’m glad of it. I was grateful for whatever freedom and independence I could get in those days, and the smutty stuff was the closest I got to sex-positivity.
my parents let us read whatever was on the bookshelves – i read a lot of danielle steele and reader’s digest condensed books when i was 10-12. i got mary higgins clark and vc andrews from my older sister, but she liked scarier books than i did.
the only real memory i have of a book being ahead of me was actually an Alanna book, YA fantasy, where she gets her period. that was the first time i had heard of that phenomenon, but it was useful information.
i burned through pretty much the whole fantasy section of the town library – adult side – by the time i was in high school, and we know how racy a lot of that stuff can get.
my parents were pretty ok with us reading sexy stuff and even scary stuff – but tv was strictly supervised. i think honestly though, that was because my mom didn’t like the simpsons or married with children, and didn’t want to second-hand watch it. not really a problem with books!
My parents figured, if we didn’t understand it, it would go over our heads. If we did understand it, we were the right age to be reading it, whatever it was.
That seemed to work out really well for us.
I’m pretty sure my mom gave me a racy romance novel when I was like 12 on purpose, so that I could have sexy feelings but in a way that was parent-sanctioned. I think I still have the book under my bed somewhere. Books were one of the main ways that I learned about sex, from “The Mists of Avalon” to “Fear of Flying” to “Gone With The Wind” to this INSANE very sapphic book about a Scottish teenage witch who was burned at the stake (and written by a woman who is purportedly the witch reincarnated. “The Heart Of The Fire” By Cerridwen Fallingstar. BUY IT Y’ALL) but I’ve never even thought about the fact that my children won’t likely have that kind of literary introduction to sex, whether they like reading as much as I did or not. Now it feels like a worthy parenting goal in some ways.
The Heart of the Fire? AAAAHHHH! THAT’S the book I’ve been trying to remember for years and years!
Was there a section where the protag and her girlfriend figured out cunnilingus by pretending to be nursing kittens? Or am I thinking of the wrong book?
I really love this piece so much!
I have hope still for future readers (even if the books have tamed down too much), and this is why: even though all of that and more is available after a few clicks on the internet, it’s almost too accessible that way. When I was 12, 13 and started re-reading those passages as you describe (as you describe so well in fact! so accurate), I didn’t know what I wanted. Going online and finding really smutty fanfic or even outright porn would not have been on my radar, and wouldn’t have satisfied me in the same way. I wanted those tiny pieces in the midst of a normal book, so I hope the next generation gets the same.
ETA: the internet was very much around when I was that age, so I’m sure I did stumble across some stuff, but the stuff in the books was still better.
My mother never restricted what I could read, but I was fairly self-censoring as a kid myself, knowing what Jesus would and wouldn’t want me reading. I sneakily read most of The Flame and the Flower when I was twelve or so and felt horrible for it naturally, but it was sort of a gateway drug in that it made me more likely to read a bunch of Nora Roberts romance omnibi (and V.C. Andrews) in middle school, but it wasn’t until high school and, like, 1984 that I really realized that hey, I can read whatever I want and that’s good and I should do that and there’s so many things I want to know about.
Of course my first introduction to fanfic was akin to that scene in Saved! where Mary types “Gay” into Ask Jeeves. Which scared me off fanfic for awhile. When I was a teenager our home computer was much more monitored than the contents of my bookbag.
When I was a freshman in high school, I went straight for the source (sort of) and went to the local university library to read all the books about sexual fetish and BDSM. So much fun!
I think the “endless Wikipedia reading” phenomenon covers a lot of the same accidental-trivia-gathering that having to read 700-page books provided in pre-Internet times. Obviously this is a double-edged sword, but the ability to contextualize things and immediately stumble upon different points of view is powerful–with the caveat that there are some RIDICULOUS opinions published on fancy-looking websites.
I remember looking up “rape” in my student dictionary as a tween, because it kept coming up in things I was reading but I had NO clue–I think I thought it was a particular sex act?–and then deciding I would underline the word “rapier” and use it in conversation for the next few days just in case someone somehow noticed my dictionary had been opened to that page (which, what?!). All that to get a one-sentence definition.
When I was in 4th grade, my dictionary wouldn’t fit inside my desk (because I bought the big one, I guess? not surprising), so I kept it on top of my desk. It always laid funny, and would flip open to random pages and never quite sit flat. So I got made fun of for “reading the dictionary,” because it was apparent that the book was actually used sometimes.
Damn 4th graders.
This is the best story, and is so in line with my own experience of 4th grade that I’m surprised it DIDN’T happen to me.
I’m just going to pretend that pussies means cat and no, parenting human children isn’t for cats. Or is it? No.
“Mom can I sleep over at Sophie’s house tomorrow? Everyone cool is going to be there and everyone’s going to make fun of me if I’m not and I’m going to die if you don’t let me go.”
*stares*
*lashes tail back and forth*
*licks paw*
“MOOOOOOOOooooom why can’t you be a normal human parent?”
“…that one great entry-point into the world of books-for-grownups will be rendered relatively moot.” I am inordinately worried about this, too. Now that you’ve brought it up.
I think Nicole is right in that the wide accessibility of information about sex/sexuality and of erotica/pornography will be helpful to the emerging adolescents. What I also think is helpful is the wider accessibility of information about ways in which one’s sexuality might not fit various norms, and about how that is okay.
But I would like to say something in praise of encountering sexuality through books (which was my path as well). One: bodies weren’t porn-star-perfect in the books I read (eg. one Nigel Tranter book featuring steamy pubic hair scenes). Two: I encountered enough awkward and unintentionally hilarious sex scenes among all the steamy stuff to realise that sex in real life can also be awkward and unintentionally hilarious. There’s obviously the equivalent stuff on the web, but it’s not as easy to find.
Really good point about the unintentionally hilarious ones, but I actually think the internet will be more helpful for that as well -I am very grateful not to have learned what Real Grownups think is the height of Hot Sex through the medium of the goldfish scene in Lace, for example. The internet tends to be bigger on “different people like different things and that’s ok”, whereas in a book the protagonists almost always have their kinks align.
I just sent this to everyone I care about. It is so ON POINT. Also, it makes me want to go out and hug a library.
Can Hug A Library Day be a thing? Our branch had their one year anniversary party yesterday and it made me SO HAPPY that yes, I just wanted to hug it. Libraries!
my parents let us read whatever was on the bookshelves – i read a lot of danielle steele and reader's digest condensed books when i was 10-12. i got mary higgins clark and vc andrews from my older sister, but she liked scarier books than i did.
the only real memory i have of a book being ahead of me was actually an Alanna book, YA fantasy, where she gets her period. that was the first time i had heard of that phenomenon, but it was useful information.
i burned through pretty much the whole fantasy section of the town library – adult side – by the time i was in high school, and we know how racy a lot of that stuff can get.
my parents were pretty ok with us reading sexy stuff and even scary stuff – but tv was strictly supervised. i think honestly though, that was because my mom didn't like the simpsons or married with children, and didn't want to second-hand watch it. not really a problem with books!
I don’t recall my parents restricting my reading. My memorable smutty book experience was finding a copy of The Valley of the Horses on a shelf in our back room, flipping through it and finding… I think the scene where Jondolar ritualistically deflowers a random girl? I’m pretty sure that was before my dad was like, “Oh yeah, Clan of the Cave Bear, here’s my copy, go at it” in junior high.
I’m pretty sure he never read past the first or second book, because otherwise I do not think he would have been so blithe about me reading them in my very early teens, given that I eventually got BORED with how often they were stopping to have oral sex (“exchange pleasures”) by the fourth book. (Part of me cannot believe I was just taking those books in to school, too.)
Oh and my best friend’s mom got us into Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels and Michael Crichton around sixth grade or so, and I just remember my mom being fine with it, apart from wishing I were reading something with more literary substance. Crichton had more sex than Cussler, but I liked Cussler’s storylines way better.
“it would do my brother and ME a disservice” Fight the good fight, please!
WHEN IS JUDY BLUME DAY
Because if you’re going to write this post then we need to talk about Summer Sisters. Because that dish soap thing IS SO TRUE.
As someone whose parents used “internet blocking software”, I can freely assert it did not stop me from reading illicitly. You’d be surprised how easily that class of software can be defeated, just by looking at a different class of websites and/or using a brand-new spanking browser your parents have never heard of. Cheers!