Sex is fascinating. I love reading about it, and thinking about it, and I am especially fascinated by the way it is both extremely private and individualistic and also inevitably attached to a larger world of cultural and political norms and beliefs.* And this delightful little erotic picaresque is a wonderful example of exactly that. Indeed, although the book is a kind of chronicle of Tillman’s sexual experiences, the emphasis is really on the circumstances of the various encounters — it’s not a particularly graphic description of the sex itself.
There’s a lot of arguing these days over whether sex is liberatory or not (see, for instance, Michelle Goldberg’s recent review of “The Case Against Sexual Revolution”), most of which is sort of tedious and annoying, and I can readily imagine this book being used as evidence for either side, because it’s not at all polemical, which makes it, unfortunately, more vulnerable to varying interpretations. And the sex in this book is not always great and fun, and not always desired or even consensual. But also: it does not particularly define the protagonist’s identity. It’s one aspect of her life among others, one kind of experience among many.
I don’t want to fall into my own trap of polemicizing about the book, because really, one of the things I admire so much about it is that it resists the urge to offer up larger meanings deduced from the various things it describes, and allows readers to draw their own conclusions. In that way, it’s quite distinct, I suppose, from auto-theory, except insofar as not providing a theory is its own sort of argument, but let’s leave that alone.
The point is: the book is great, check it out.
*For more on this, see especially, Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women;” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public;” and Kathleen Lubey, What Pornography Knows.
Kasia Reads 