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Overview
In Smut, Murray S. Davis investigates sex in a way that differs from nearly all previous books on the subject. Discarding the simplistic theory of sex as a natural instinct, he sets out to develop new explanations for its universal appeal. Drawing on a wide variety of literary forms, including the work of novelists, poets, and even comedians—and exploring everything from theology to pornography—Davis recaptures sex for the social sciences.
First, Davis examines the difference between sexual arousal and ordinary experience, arguing that arousal alters a person's experience of the world. Positing an erotic reality distinct from everyday life, he demonstrates how different perceptions of time, space, human bodies, and other social types occur in each realm. Davis then asks why some people find this alternation between realities dirty, and offers a periodic table of perversions that summarizes the social elements out of which those who find sex dirty construct their world.
Finally, Davis considers other conceptual grids affected by the alternation between everyday and erotic realities: the pornographic, which portrays individual, social relations, and social organizations being disrupted by sex; and the naturalistic, which conceives of them in a way that cannot be disrupted by sex. Throughout history these ideologies have battled for control over Western society, and, in his conclusion, Davis offers a prognosis for the future of sex based on these historical ideological cycles.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226162461 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 03/04/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 314 |
| Sales rank: | 988,316 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Smut
Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology
By Murray S. Davis
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1983 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-16246-1
CHAPTER 1
The Lascivious Shift out of Everyday Reality
Someone who is sexually aroused experiences the world much differently from someone who is not (and from his or her own world-experience before and afterward). Sexual arousal brings new phenomena to one's attention while old phenomena fade from it; previously minor aspects loom larger in importance while previously major aspects shrink in significance.
In Alfred Schutz's terms, a person's "system of relevances" changes as soon as he or she becomes sexually aroused. Schutz uses this concept to describe our experience of the everyday world in his essay "On Multiple Realities":
But we are not equally interested in all the strata of the [everyday world]. The selective function of our interest organizes the world in both ... space and time in strata of major and minor relevance. ... Those objects are selected as primarily important which are ... ends or means ... or ... dangerous or enjoyable or otherwise relevant to me. [1962, p. 227]
Schutz's concept of a "relevance system" can be used to compare our experiences of everyday and erotic realities, and to account for their disjuction. For instance, it explains why someone who discovers that a same-gendered friend is homosexual is often stunned by the news, for he suddenly realizes that his sexual aspects, whose irrelevancy to their relationship he had taken for granted, may actually have been relevant all along — and vice versa for his nonsexual aspects. (Of course, he could be wrong.)
Whoever moves from everyday to erotic reality, then, experiences a lascivious shift in relevances in the temporal, spatial, social, and physical dimensions along which he organizes his world — a sexual effect analogous to the Doppler effect in physics. In this chapter I will describe this perceptual distortion in each of these dimensions and point out the factors that generate ("turn-ons") or negate ("turn-offs") it.
Time
As far as the experience of time is concerned, sex really is "fun and games." Like a game, sex is an objectively contained interruption in the temporal flow of everyday life. Like fun in a game, subjective involvement is normally confined to the sex act itself. Those preoccupied with preceding or succeeding events are not fully caught up in erotic reality.
But unlike most games, it is often uncertain exactly when sex has started. Erotic reality begins less sharply than it ends, as we shall see in the next chapter. And unlike the closed temporal horizon of most games, whose endings are determined by objective constraints (time, score, course), the temporal horizon of sex is open because it usually ends only when both partners subjectively feel finished.
Men and women, however, often disagree about the precise point a sexual episode starts or concludes. If the term erotic inertia can be used without negative connotations, women seem to have more of it than men, taking longer to get into erotic reality but also longer to get out of it. The phenomenological psychiatrist Leslie Farber observes:
The act of sex, for the male, is a contained event. Its onset of desire, or need, or even compelling urgency, its crescendo of development and its final climax and rapid denouement, constitute a drama of rise and fall. ... His disinclination to linger ..., usually felt and expressed as an abrupt urge to turn his attention elsewhere, to rejoin the world, is not a failure of affection on his part or a wishful repudiation of his larger tie to his mate — although it is sometimes so interpreted by her....
A woman's experience of the act of sex is different. For her the event may be entered into with, or arise out of, desire — though seldom the undistractable urgency men sometimes feel. ... Her inclination, unlike his, is to prolong the denouement of passion in order specifically to mark the relation of sex to the larger affection they share. [1978, p. 184]
Objective temporal constraints are usually distant enough to be disregarded. But they may encroach upon the sex act enough to kill its subjective spontaneity, compressing it into a mechanical activity. The American pornographer Marco Vassi provides an extreme example in The Saline Solution:
"I'm at George's." [Beverly said on the phone.] "I'm coming over there." ... I look at Alice's body and remembered where we had left off. Perhaps I could give it twenty minutes.
It was Swiss. I had to take the entire sexual act and miniaturize it, leaving nothing out, rushing nothing, making it perfect but reducing the scale....
Seven minutes, first vaginal caresses; eight and a half minutes, lick clitoris with tongue; twelve minutes, penetration; fifteen minutes, accomplish six variations from behind; seventeen and a half minutes ..., penetrate to deepest upper point; now, two and a half minutes to ride ..., she responds, she moans, she cries out, the vegetative tremors begin in my spine; nineteen and a half minutes, and throw open all the switches, pump pump fuck fuck whee whistle bang bang whoosh, and come. Huff huff. [Vassi 1976a, pp. 93–94]
As in such games as boxing and baseball, the objective time within the boundaries of the sex act is divided into rounds or innings. The subjective experience of the duration within these temporal subunits differs from the experience of the duration between them. Within each round, the partners exhaust the possibilities of some preliminary sexual activity (like fellatio or breast play) before moving on to the next after a brief break.
Erotic time must be synchronized more closely than everyday time. Each participant must continually try to harmonize his or her personal sexual rhythm with the partner's, during both the active periods and their interludes. Making music together (Schutz 1964, pp. 159–78) and sustaining good conversations (Davis 1973, pp. 180ff) are among the very few other activities that depend on time sharing so crucially. As soon as one partner's rhythm gets out of phase with the other's, they must readjust it immediately; otherwise accelerating disrhythmia will soon shatter the entire experience.
Certain periods of time are more likely than others to generate erotic reality. A person passes through intervals of these eroticizing times during the course of a day, a week, a year, even a lifetime. Although the hormonal cycles that help produce these periods may be regular, the interference between cycles of different lengths would make entrance into erotic reality an almost random disruption of everyday life if its generation were left solely to biology.
For this reason all societies smooth out the temporal flow of everyday life by regulating the occurrence of the erotic episodes that interrupt it. Some societies prescribe the times for intercourse in great detail:
According to Eliezer the Great [in the ancient Jewish Mishnah] "the duty of marriage enjoined in the Law is: every day for them that are unoccupied; twice a week for labourers; once a week for ass-drivers; once every thirty days for camel drivers; and once every six months for sailors." [Quoted in Cameron 1976, p. 22]
Our society merely attempts to restrict sexual arousal to the vague temporal ghetto we call "bedtime."
One of the first to comment on the prevalence of this custom, the seventeenth-century English satirical poet Samuel Butler, speculated in his Notebooks that it was responsible for the most serious social problem of his age (and perhaps of ours):
These children that are begotten in the day are commonly born in the day, and those in the Night by night: for Nature for the most part keepe's a Punctuall account of time: and that is one reason why more are born in the Night than by Day, when men are commonly diverted by many other occasions. And in great Cities men are often in Drink before they goe to Bed which Makes the Children they get prove soe foolish. ... [Quoted in Atkins 1972, p. 349]
Bedtime can be an eroticizing time because it occupies the residual period that remains after the duties and diversions of everyday existence are over. Its time horizon is infinite enough to allow the copulators to couple at their own pace, unrushed by the external deadlines of daily life.
Bedtime usually occurs at night, when many of the rules required for more formal daily interaction are suspended. The darkness that envelopes bedtime obscures the visual distortions of the close clinch of intercourse, the behavior that is more embarrassing when seen than when felt, and the inappropriate involvement (or lack of involvement) with one's sex partner or his/her parts. Bedtime occurs during the change-over from one day to the next that temporarily liquifies the solidity of everyday reality, producing the same fearful freedom of all transitional periods. Finally, sex is related to the other activity associated with bedtime: sleep. Besides reducing consciousness of everyday life, going to sleep provides a convenient utilitarian pretext both to begin and to end the sex act. It is not by chance that one of the main euphemisms for fucking in our society is currently to "sleep with."
The period preceding bedtime, when most social institutions are shutting down for the night, is also an eroticizing time. In a popular song sung by country and western artist Mickey Gilley, this time period itself is observed to amplify the erotic reality generated by otherwise low-power faces and physiques:
Don't the Girls all get Prettier at closin' time.
Don't they all begin to look like movie stars....
When the change starts taking place
It puts a glow on every face
Of the fallen angels of the back street bars....
[Knight 1976]
Other periods are supposed to hinder the formation of erotic reality. Uneroticizing times in our society include "daytime" ("At least pull down the shades!"), "worktime," ("Stop fooling around: we've got work to do!"), and "mealtime" ("Now? How nauseating! Besides everything'll get cold.").
These temporal prohibitions against sex, however, are so weak in our society today that they are more honored in the breach. In fact, some people prefer to intensify their experience of erotic reality by socially violating these obsolescent norms while sexually violating each other. In The World of Sex, Henry Miller describes his daytime sexual adventures:
Occasionally I would pay her a call in the middle of the day. I always had to proffer the excuse that I came to hear her play. ... If I took a seat in the corner and listened to her attentively she might stop half way through a sonata and come over to me of her own accord, let me run my hand up her leg, and finally straddle me. With the orgasm she would sometimes have a weeping fit. Doing it in broad daylight always awakened her sense of guilt. [1965, p. 57–58]
Gospel singer Lou Rawles describes a sexual encounter while working:
It was exciting, first of all because it was wrong — in the back seat of a car during a thirty-minute intermission between singing "Jesus Loves Me," which was like our opening theme song, and "He'll Never Let Go Your Hand," which was our closing song.
A few minutes later I'm standing up there singing in front of five thousand people and I look down and there was white all over the front of my blue serge pants. The dudes ribbed me to death about that for a month. ... [Fleming and Fleming 1976, pp. 193–94]
Since temporal prohibitions against sex were weaker before and after the nineteenth century, the eighteenth-century novelist Henry Fielding could portray the attempted seduction of Tom Jones during dinner in a scene that would become the celebrated centerpiece of Tony Richardson's twentieth-century film:
Now, Mrs. Waters and our hero had no sooner sat down together than the former began to play this artillery upon the latter....
First, from two lovely blue eyes, whose bright orbs flashed lightning at their discharge, flew forth two pointed ogles, but, happily for our hero, hit only a vast piece of beef which he was then conveying into his plate and harmless spent their force. ... Many other weapons did she assay; but the God of Eating ... preserved his votary; ... for as Love frequently preserves from attacks of hunger, so may hunger possibly in some cases defend us against love. [1963, pp. 429–30]
Two variables complicate the transition from unerotic to erotic time: desire and availability.
A person must harmonize the various biological, psychological, and social pressures that put him "in the mood" for sex, not only with one another but also with those of his potential partner. Adding to the difficulty are the different biosexual rhythms of each gender, the different psychosexual rhythms of each person, and the indefinite sociosexual rhythms of our society. Moreover, the sexual "expectation" demanded by social rhythms often interferes with the "spontaneity" demanded by biological and psychological rhythms, for one partner or both.
Once a couple establish their own rhythm for having intercourse, it becomes normative for them. One partner may interrupt it occasionally for physical problems. ("Not tonight, dear — I have a headache"). But whoever interrupts it too frequently is accused of having "psychological problems," which are much lower status. (Consequently, real psychological problems are often disguised as physical ones, especially those with no external symptoms. Despite growing suspicions, one sex partner can never prove the other has no headache.) The mid-1970s TV soap opera spoof Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman! began with a five-week hiatus in Mary's conjugal sex life — much too long, she thought. Thus this program unwittingly disseminated a social norm about how long one partner may suspend intercourse before the other begins to attribute this lapse to troubles with motivation or the relation.
Even if both partners are in the mood for sex, each may find himself or the other unavailable for it. Consequently each must harmonize his own availability with his partner's. The possibility that each may not know his partner's availability when planning his own creates a fourfold scheduling problem often extremely difficult to resolve. The French author Pauline Réage describes how two lovers overcome this obstacle to the temporal integration of their erotic and everyday lives:
They met two or three times a week, but never during vacations, and never on weekends. Each of them stole the time they spent together from their families or their work. ... They did not have a full night together. All of a sudden, at such and such an hour agreed upon ahead of time — the watch always remained on the wrist — they had to leave. ... It was already a stroke of luck that he had been able to get away at all. Otherwise she would have waited an hour and then come back the following day at the same time, the same place, in accordance with the classic rules of clandestine lovers. ... The idea that they would have to return home gave a special meaning to that stolen time, which came to exist outside the pale of real time, in a sort of strange and eternal present. [1973, pp. 3, 5, 7, 8]
As connoisseurs of love, the French have even institutionalized a trysting time for adulterous lovers, setting aside the period between the end of work and the beginning of dinner, which they call "de cinq en sept" (from five to seven).
Finally, the two partners must harmonize both desire and availability. When desire for sex is mutual, neither may be available; when availability for sex is mutual, neither may desire it. (As more partners are added for various levels of group sex, the difficulties of getting everyone together increase exponentially.)
Considering the obstacles, one wonders how two people ever manage to copulate at all. The love affair maximizes mutual desire but not availability; marriage maximizes mutual availability but not desire. Prostitution has traditionally compensated for the scheduling deficiencies of both:
The fact that the single man turns up [at a brothel] mostly after eleven P.M. is testimony in itself as to why he came.
He has taken a girl on a date, wined and dined her, enjoyed her company, been turned on, made the eternal overture, and she has responded with some unflattering excuse such as: "I have to go home and wash my hair."
His ardor for her dimmed, but his appetite not sated, he takes out his black book and calls his favorite madam, and for less money than the cost of his evening out in most cases, can discharge his desires without any hassle. [Hollander 1972, p. 176]
Space
During erotic time, one's experience of the spatial expanse of the everyday world shrinks drastically. The boundaries of consciousness contract to room, bed, and body; whatever lies outside these concentric spatial zones of awareness — Where is her husband now? Is the door locked? — cease to be matters of concern. A character of Marco Vassi's The Saline Solution describes this cosmic contraction during intercourse thus: "I am being fucked. I am being fucked. There is nothing in the world but being fucked" (1976a, p. 21).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Smut by Murray S. Davis. Copyright © 1983 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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