Books

The End of Raunch?

This year's sexy books are anything but.

By  Tyee Staff and Contributors, 19 Jul 2007, TheTyee.ca

Sexy nun

Is chaste the new sexy?

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2006 was the year of the raunch, when pole dancing went feminist and "empowerment" became synonymous with a baker's dozen Jell-O shooters and a topless spot in Girl's Gone Wild.

But if this year's crop of "sexy" books is any guide, the backlash is now in full effect. Sure, Porn 2.0 is grabbing more viewers than ever. But with sex so commonplace, people, or at least publishers, are looking for what's next.

This year's sex-culture books feature virgins, men vacuuming and crafty sex toys. And, really, what's less sexy than those?

The Bunny Book: How to Walk, Talk, Tease and Please Like a Playboy Bunny (Chronicle Books)

Sort of like a sexed-up version of The Rules, mixed with a little Swell, The Bunny Book eases you into Heffner-honed advice with sections on grooming, how to dress, and how to hold a drink before delving into the nitty-gritty sex stuff (anal and all). Though you might not want to take the tome out in public (considering the hot pink cover and candy-coloured pages), with illustrations by Annabelle Jasmin Verhoye, it's fine for home-based consumption. The verbiage leaves something to be desired and features an overabundance of words like coochie, tushy and titties, but the advice itself is fairly realistic and not unlike anything you might find in a popular women's mag. Think Cosmo. Believe it or not, Bunnies don't like to weigh themselves, they're big on safety, and they're "hopeful about monogamy" even though they "don't think people are naturally monogamous." Most importantly, they're down with personal choice. They espouse, more than once, that what's right for one woman, may not be right for another. Even post-feminist independent types might find it tough not to get sucked in; after all, you've got to admit, many women still want to be pretty and desired. Of course, even Bunnies aren't ready to admit that their top concern is snaring men. This book tells the sad and oft-repeated lie about sexual (read, slutty) behavior being all about female empowerment, but so what? The Pussycat Dolls: Search for the Next Doll reality TV series did the same thing and it was a huge hit.

Porn for Women by The Cambridge Women's Pornography Cooperative (Chronicle Books)

The cover is funny: a guy tentatively vacuuming an already immaculate white living room. Perfect as a one-panel comic. But not so much for a 90-something page picture book that tackles the subject of "what really turns women on." According to the anonymous group of Cambridge academics who put the book together, women will get hot for photos of mostly fully-clothed men dressed like Tommy Hilfiger models scooping kitty litter, making us chamomile tea, gearing up to crop nose hair, scrubbing and then putting down the toilet seat and telling us that they want to watch figure skating, they want us to eat more cake because we look too thin and they need us to come shoe shopping with them. CWPC, as they call themselves, think that this kind of content is "so provocative, so incendiary" that we should sit down in "a safe place" to read the thing. Hardy har har. They're playing with stereotypes and trying to call attention to a lack of good female-friendly porn, right? Wrong, they're actually serious. An e-mail interview with the group's anonymous "pornspokesperson" reveals that they think these images and words will actually turn women on, based on extensive research. Just don't bring along your sex toys and libido. A Canadian Tire catalogue is more of a turn-on than this crap. If you want to look real porn, check out Jane's Guide.

Virgin: The Untouched History by Hanne Blank (Bloomsbury)

Blank is earnest about her subject and has done her homework about "virgin heritage," from Mary "the most forgettable virgin in history" to the wealthy Christian women who started monasteries to the stars of the teen TV drama 90210. In the book, she makes interesting socio-political comments about the economic value of virgins through the ages as "breeding sheep" in waiting, medical guinea-pigs, mentally-diseased freaks, icons, objects for sex tourism and pawns of religious right conservatives. You'll also be amazed to learn, in great detail, the physiology of hymens, which serve no known physical purpose, and are more like pasta strainers than the skin of a drum. Some are so thin that they won't last a round of childhood doctor-playing while others survive childbirth! Conspicuously missing from the book is historic and current information about Middle and Far Eastern cultures. Interviews with modern-day virgins are also absent. And that's a shame, particularly with the recent proof that U.S. abstinence-based programs are failing miserably. It would have been great to hear from a few card-carrying virginity pledgers, lapsed or otherwise. Their absence actually supports the continued mystique about and objectification of virgins. This book is informative, but a dry read and a tough nut to crack. Maybe it's appropriate that it haunted my bedside table, untouched for months, collecting dust.

Make Your Own Sex Toys: 50 quick and easy do-it-yourself projects by Matt Pagett (Chronicle Books)

If the idea of a furtive trip to the store for cucumbers and bananas makes you squirm, then homemade sex toys may not be for you. Matt Pagett's book is all about spicing up your bedroom bounce with materials found in the home, hardware store, and yes, supermarket. But in the age of Paris Hilton, porn-star memoirs, and ginger-bread-men Kama Sutra guides, the book is hopelessly dated and totally mundane. Full of bad puns and double entendre -- the intro begins with the line "sex is the great thrusting engine that drives mankind forward" -- the book drips with '70s style kitschy taupe and orange graphics. It might make a funny stagette gift, but seems good for little else. To pick one example, from many, would you really want to whittle a wooden willy? Consider the splinter safety cautions. And lots of this stuff is obvious. The "Vegedildo" and "Cell Phone Climax" sections, for example, helpfully remind you to cover your chosen phallic produce or vibrating phone with a prophylactic. Many suggestions don't yield toys at all. One entitled "The Midas Touch" gives instructions on how to guild breasts with metallic craft paper. (This project works for men as well. "You've heard of gilding the lily -- why not gild the willy?" says Pagett.) Why not indeed? The results are an odd reflective glow and a quick trip to the shower.

Stacked by Susan Seligson (Bloomsbury)

In Stacked, Susan Seligson takes a trip through all things mammary. Seligson, a veteran of the New York Times and Salon, among others, is no stranger to the tit wars. For over 35 years she has lugged around her own set of 32DDD breasts and her many stories of life with a giant rack colour this engaging and accessible book. But while Stacked is long on quips -- solid one-liners seem to punctuate every second paragraph -- it is, at times, a little short on insight. The book is full of fun reporting and funny characters, but there is no sense, by the end, that we are any closer to truly understanding our breast-based cultural obsession.

[Tyee]

This list was compiled with contributions from Danielle Egan, Jen Selk, Richard Warnica.

10 Comments:

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  • Allison

    4 years ago

    Interesting article.

    Interesting article.

  • G West

    4 years ago

    Perhaps the move

    Perhaps the move away from raunch is a good think. This article appears in tomorrows New York Times:
    http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/19/us/19sex.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

    I'll quote the first three paragraphs - the link should be active for a week:

    Quote:
    Experts have often wondered what proportion of men who download explicit sexual images of children also molest them. A new government study of convicted Internet offenders suggests that the number may be startlingly high: 85 percent of the offenders said they had committed acts of sexual abuse against minors, from inappropriate touching to rape.

    A study of child pornographers was conducted at the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C.

    The study, which has not yet been published, is stirring a vehement debate among psychologists, law enforcement officers and prison officials, who cannot agree on how the findings should be presented or interpreted.

  • James Burns

    4 years ago

    Appropriate?

    Hmmm... GW I'm not sure I get the connection you're trying to make between pedophilia and sexual intimacy between consenting adults. Are you implying all explicit sexual material leads to criminal behaviour? Given the proliferation of sexual material in all forms of media, and the general trend that violent sexual crimes have been decreasing (although you wouldn't know it given the increase in their coverage in the news), I find it difficult to believe there is an especially strong connection.

    As for the study cited in the article you mention, I vaguely recall a news piece (on CBC I think, but I could be wrong) where a police officer, who hunts down pedophiles on the internet, suggested that the nature of pedophile communities online encourages them to offend. They want new content when exchanging their horrible material so they encourage each other to generate their own. It all sounds rather terrifying, but the news piece was suggesting that the internet was enabling pedophiles to form communities, and that it was their interaction between each other that increased the danger that they would abuse children.

    But really, is it appropriate to bring up pedophilia in comments about an article on sexuality between consenting adults? It equates two very different behaviours, and it furthers the notion that all sexuality is depraved.

  • Mike B

    4 years ago

    "Of course, even Bunnies

    "Of course, even Bunnies aren't ready to admit that they're top concern is snaring men."

    Nice. :)

  • Geoff

    4 years ago

    Administrator

    Typo fixed

    Thanks, Mike!

  • G West

    4 years ago

    James Burns

    I'm not sure there is a connection James.

    In fact there's a lot of debate about the value of the 'study' mentioned in the Times piece as well.

    As to your other point, I'm just not sure. Clearly pedophilia is not new per se. But, if there is an increase in the phenomenon now - at least partly as a result of the 'private' availability of sexually explicit material on the internet - then it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suggest the increasingly 'sexualized' nature of art, books, the media and advertising could also have an effect on the behavior. That's all I was thinking of when I brought it up.

    Interestingly enough, I happened to have the TV on last night and came across that American network show where a reporter sets out to entrap young men who are using the internet to hook up with minors. The curious thing about the two characters he 'caught' and then interviewed last night is that they were naive, young (in their 20s), and concerned about their ineffectiveness as sexual beings: Hence the desire to meet a young girl (also naïve) for sex. They seemed to feel that their inability to 'hook up' in more conventional ways made them somewhat less valuable as human beings.

    In a highly sexualized culture...well, it didn't take much imagination to see how they might have begun to feel that way. The kind of pressure cooker that modern culture seems to promote would be, for young people with a degree of sexual inadequacy, significant – don’t you think? So there’s the connection – if raunchy is on the way out, maybe it’s a good thing.

  • James Burns

    4 years ago

    Culture

    I don't know if it's highly sexualized culture so much as how sexuality is portrayed in the culture. Here sexuality most commonly appears in advertising. It is used to sell stuff. Massive amounts of pornography is also easily available for free through the internet. How that shapes attitudes toward sex is hard to say. The best I can do is compare it to another highly sexualized culture, but one very different, and that would be Cuba.

    Cuba has virtually no advertising, and no pornography. But as many Cubans have told me, their favorite pastimes are conversation and sex, and not necessarily in that order. I haven't met a Cuban, male or female, who has had a difficult time "hooking up". And Cuban attitudes toward sex seem to generally be far more relaxed, open, and confident. On average they just seem more comfortable with their sexuality. It's just a normal fun thing to do. Apparently sexual crime is very rare in Cuba, and I suspect that has something to do with their attitudes toward sex. That said they are behind the times on homosexuality, but that too is changing rapidly in a positive direction.

    Here many people seem to be distinctly uncomfortable about sex, or they conversely are thrilled by what they perceive as its taboo-breaking nature, and some even revel in degrading sex. It's like sex comes with all this extra complicating baggage. I can also certainly see how, given that here we are bombarded by messages that sex depends on beauty, money and fame, that many people feel sexual inadequacy, because they lack those things that would enable them to "hook up" according to popular culture. I suspect that popular culture also influences who people would consider to be acceptable sexual partners. I guess that means some people are just *ucked, but not in the way they want.

  • G West

    4 years ago

    Interesting thoughts

    So perhaps it's the commoditization of sex - and its enhanced 'status' as a means of measuring or marking one's place in the culture that is the problem - not the actual intimacy and sharing of experience. What kind of a role does birth control play there?

    Given the pc explanation of how the pill got us to today in Canada and the States, does Cuba provide a different example?

    Sounds about right to me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts about the Cuban experience. I suppose that's something else they'll be holding against Fidel...

  • James Burns

    4 years ago

    Contraception in Cuba

    All contraception is freely and easily available in Cuba without parental permission. The same goes for abortion (on the other hand, Cubans also have access to extensive maternal support services for pregnant women, and mothers of infants). Thanks to their preventative focused health care system they have one of the lowest rates of HIV/AIDS infection in the world.

    Another interesting thing: They have freely available and quite an extensive network of sex therapists. Basically these are like drop in clinics where individuals or couples can go if they are having any kind of concerns or troubles related to sex. Apparently the training to be a sex therapist in Cuba is equivalent to a clinical psychologist. Cuban TV even has a comedy sitcom set in a sex therapist office called "Punto G" ("G Spot" in English). Although the most popular programs on Cuban TV are baseball, Brazilian soap operas and the many flavors of CSI, all commercial free of course.

    But don't get me wrong, life is very difficult there. The embargo has a devastating impact on daily life, and political control is far too tight, even if it is largely in reaction to American terrorism.

  • Reader11722

    4 years ago

    Raunch 'books' will be censored soon

    This is all about the First Amendment. Let's not follow the gov't down the path of censorship. After all, censorship is becoming America's favorite past-time. The US gov't (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like "America Deceived" from Amazon and Wikipedia, shut down Imus and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings. Free Speech forever (especially for books).
    Last link (before Stark County District Library caves to pressure and drops the title):
    America Deceived (book)

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