Is it weird that I don't like porn? That I am slightly—and sometimes deeply—nauseated by movies, pictures, and books whose sole function is to give me an erection? That going to strip clubs is, for me, like eating a bug or drinking the bong water? I'll do it on a dare, I'll do it for money—but I won't really enjoy it. Pornographic art, like moralistic art, is too prescriptive for my taste. I don't like to be told how to organize my soul, how to think about exploited workers, or how to, shall we say, enjoy myself. And others.
I tried to grind my way through Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom in college and realized that the patron saint of lit-porn was more engineer than poet. His elaborate scenes read like engineering manuals: A farm boy precisely suspended by leather rigging, being sodomized by a goat while fellating a viscount, his organ tickled by feathers sticking out of the asshole of a servant girl who is balancing a cup of coffee on her back into which our doe-eyed victim will ejaculate before being dismembered or something. It's as explicit as a middle-school joke and as arousing as a Rube Goldberg machine. The Marquis was the purest of pornographers—smut, as a rule, is predictable and mechanistic. He just had the balls to foreground it.
If a cold atheist is the best person to read the Bible as literature, I suppose a heterosexual prude like me is the best person to review Inside Him: New Gay Erotica as literature.
In brief: It sucks.
The volume was edited by Joël B. Tan. (What kind of pretentious twat shoves an unnecessary dieresis mark over his Christian name? Anaïs Nin had an excuse—she was French. But Joël? Püh-lease.) Tan writes, as his kapow! illumination in the preface: "I learned a lot reading these stories! For example, did you know that sex writers afforded their main character's penis three extra inches based on their own hang?" First, that sentence is confusing. Second, it's doubtful. Third, "hang" is an awful euphemism; it recalls hanging and that the hanged get "death erections," also known as "angel lust," which does nothing for my inches. (But it does remind me of the Heather McHugh poem "Goner's Boner": "The onlookers appear/struck dumb. But he—/he's holding sway/against the notion/only good can come.")
The stories are either brutal—there's more rape than I expected in this "hot, literate" erotica—or repetitive. Frequently, they're both and would be funny if they weren't intended to be arousing. A few samples: "His dick Heil-Hitlers from his crotch." And: "He jammed a finger into the wound"—an overfucked asshole—"and waved it around, shaking off drops of blood. 'See?' Two of his friends mumbled, 'Cool,'"—this, incongruously, in a sexualized Middle Earth—"and the others, with startling synchronicity, moaned and fired off a new round of frothy ejaculate." And: "The hunter pulled the unconscious hustler's body closer and pierced him, leaving his torso, arms, and head still in the bag." In case you're wondering, the hunter is a professional—he "catches" three youngsters to sell into slavery for $500 a pop, but only rapes one of them, the big softie.
Against all expectation, there is a story of merit in Inside Him. Its narrator, a pro dom named Harold, begins like this: "I'm doing a number on the husband's nipples when the wife pokes her head in waving a burrito. She says, 'I'm really sorry to bother you, Harold, but I just need to let Glen know that I'm going over to my mother's with Bethie, and I'm leaving this burrito in the fridge." Harold doesn't usually allow interruptions, but the husband (who is having his nipples electrocuted) needs to ask a question. "I remove his mouthguard. He says, 'Thank you, sir,' and asks his wife if the burrito is chicken or carne asada. 'Chicken,' the wife says. Glen considers, then says, 'OK.'"
The story, called "Pasadena," might be called "Disciplinarian's Blues." Its excellence lies in the fact that it isn't about kinky sex; sex is simply the landscape in which the story unfolds. "Pasadena" is about jealousy, aging, and laziness. Beneath its comical surface, it quietly asserts that suburban living is more ridiculous and hedonistic than paying someone to flog you and zap your nipples with a car battery. It almost convinces me. But it isn't even a little titillating.
brendan@thestranger.com
