It started when I mentioned Cynthia Heimel’s humorous book, Sex Tips for Girls. She includes a six-page section on how to give a blow job.
And then Ellen mentioned “fellatio” in a comment: the comment disappeared. I found it in the trash; I rescued it. It disappeared again; I rescued it again.
In the post, I mentioned the censorship of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was banned until 1960 in England.
D. H. Lawrence is one of my favorite writers, but now he’s my favorite writer, because I’ve been banned!
I may have used the other f-word on my blog before, but perhaps i just said the “f-word.” I wrote more graphically about sex only in the context of Cynthia Heimel’s books.
Ellen said in her comment:
“I hated doing fellatio on Jim. It was humiliating to me. I disliked Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly. Never read The Group or Fear of Flying. Never will.”
Ellen, I think fellatio is more a guy thing. There were the oral sex scandals of the ’90s: Bill and Monica, and Hugh Grant and a hooker. This “news” was a major invasion of privacy. However, I preferred not to read about it with my morning coffee.
And now a few thoughts.
Yes, this is old-fashioned, possibly mawkish but.. Isn’t face-to-face sex more personal, more romantic? Can’t we just make love? Can’t we look each other in the eye?
The thing that astonishes me about Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus is Phaedra’s virtue. Though she has fallen scandalously in love with her stepson Hippolytus, her behavior is decorous. She has neither flirted nor made sexual advances. Pining away of love, she confides in the nurse and the chorus, displaying a Trollopian enthusiasm for the hunt, never adverse to adopting a hunting metaphor, since Hippolytus hunts, along with his favorite goddess, Artemis:
God, how I long to set the hounds on, shouting! And poise the Thessalian javelin drawing it back - here where my fair hair hangs upon the ear - I would hold in my hand a spear with a steel point." -- David Grene's translation of Hippolytus
Love and death: here they are again. Phaedra’s nurse propositions Hippolytus behind Phaedra’s back on her behalf. As you can imagine, this does not end well. With a few exceptions, at least one character dies in each Greek tragedy: here there are two. But there is a widespread literary trope in Western literature of killing off sexually active women. In 19th-century literature, the sexually active woman usually dies (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Edna Pontellier); in Hippolytus, the virtuous woman who does not act on her sexual desire dies.
Phaedra censored herself; Euripides censored his play. Censorship may be the wrong word here: I don’t know if literary censorship existed in fifth-century Athens. But this version of Euripides’ play, according to an ancient source, is a rewrite of his original Hippolytus, which was so explicit that even the Athenians were shocked, In this lost version of the play, Phaedra aggressively proposes to Hippolytus. This disturbed an audience of people who blithely paraded around festivals waving giant penises.
Euripides’ metamorphosis of Phaedra into a sad woman doomed by Aphrodite may have been a business decision. Writing is a business, after all. Though, again, I don’t know if tragedians got paid. But rewriting is in itself a statement about art and/or money. Euripides always teeters on the edge of going too far with his intense psychological portraits and descriptions of violence. But it is difficult to imagine him going too far with his first version of Hippolytus, because this one also goes too far.Hippolytus is one of Euripides’ most disturbing tragedies, and they are all disturbing. In Hippolytus, Phaedra is the heroine, the most sympathetic character. And she wouldn’t have died if Aphrodite hadn’t considered her collateral damage.
I don’t have access to any books that address the issue of censorship in ancient Greece, but there has been much censorship in Western culture. Skipping far into the future from fifth-century Athens, most of the great 19th-century Russian writers were exiled, with the exception of Tolstoy, though they were usually allowed to return. Even gentle Turgenev was exiled, but he actually preferred Paris and Baden-Baden.
As for Russia in the 20th century, it was a bloodbath, or at least a keep-your-head-down culture. Pasternak won the Nobel for Doctor Zhivago before the book was published in Russia: it was first published in Italy in 1957. And The Master and Margarita, written in the late 1920s and early ’30s, was not published in Russia till the ‘60s, and that in an expurgated form.
In the 20th century in the U.S. and England, Lawrence, Joyce, and Henry Miller saw their best books banned. It wasn’t just Lady Chatterley’s Lover: the censors also banned Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love.
By the way, the women in Phaedra’s family all make poor sexual choices. Her mother, Pasiphaë, fell in love with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur, and Phaedra’s husband, Theseus, deserted her older sister, Ariadne, on an island (he had promised to marry Ariadne, but then marries Phaedra). And, for the record, the French writer Colette seduced her stepson and had a longtime affair with him. I wish I hadn’t read that biography! But there were no repercussions. She was known as the French Phaedra.
“These are stupid times, intertwined bombast and bullshit whipped to a fine fizz.” – John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia
What could be more pertinent to our times than this bitter quotation from John Gardner’s Jason and Medeia (1973), an epic novel in verse? Gardner’s retelling of the classical myth reflects the politics, literary eclecticism, and feminist issues of the 1960s and early 1970s – and now our own. As a power couple, Jason and Medeia are a failure. Jason is a brave hero and a spellbinding storyteller; she is a powerful witch, an adoring wife, and devoted mother. Madly in love with Jason, Medeia committed nefarious deeds, including murder, to help Jason achieve his questionable heroic goals. Without her magic, it could not have been done. And she has not wavered in her love for him.
Jason is now an ambitious politician having a midlife crisis. Midlife crises come earlier in antiquity, with a shorter life span: Jason was perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties when he decided to leave Medeia to marry a princess in a prestigious family. This power move was a very bad idea, because men and women have equally bad ideas, and few couples make worse decisions than these two.
Poetry is not Gardner’s forte, and this novel is far too long , but that quotation haunts me. It is just one damned stupid thing after another in the 2020s. In the twenty-first century, the greatest challenge is climate change, which is barely addressed, despite the rising temperatures, pollution, wildfires, droughts, storms, and water shortages that will eventually kill the planet.
Politics is not my field, and I read as little about it as possible. But here are some amateur observations: the red states are like mini-republics, with an agenda to ban books, cut funds to education, promote guns, even recommend that teachers arm themselves, and ignore an uptick in Covid cases (the evidence is found in the waste-water).
Some of the censorship issues are almost too cartoonish to believe: two Moms for Liberty in Florida called the police to report “porn” in a high school. The porn proved to be a Y.A. fantasy novel by Jennifer Armentrout, Storm and Fury, in the school library. Since the fantasy novel is about gargoyles, it is impossible to take this incident seriously. But one of them compared the book to Playboy, and demanded the arrest of two school librarians. No arrests were made that day.
Now if they could harness that energy to ban guns, I’d join them.
As Donald Barthelme said, “Succeed! It has been done, and with a stupidity that can astound the most experienced.”
