Posted on 02/05/2010 5:45:23 PM PST by sinanju
"For a literary culture that fears it is on the brink of total annihilation, we are awfully cavalier about the Great Male Novelists of the last century. It has become popular to denounce those authors, and more particularly to deride the sex scenes in their novels. Even the young male writers who, in the scope of their ambition, would appear to be the heirs apparent have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors.
(snip)
The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced.
This generation of writers is suspicious of what Michael Chabon, in “Wonder Boys,” calls “the artificial hopefulness of sex.” They are good guys, sensitive guys, and if their writing is denuded of a certain carnality, if it lacks a sense of possibility, of expansiveness, of the bewildering, transporting effects of physical love..."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The gist of the essay is that, while the old lions like Roth, Bellow, Mailer and Updike reveled, often crudely, in the sixties' sexual taboo-smashing scene, the current generation of authors seem quite the geldings by comparison.
Seems most unfortunate, especially considering the massive female appetite for florid erotic potboilers. I dunno, fashionable women seem to persuade themselves that they like metrosexual types but only on the superficial level.
is this a naked-Rino thread?
Jane: You know, I'd never have pegged you as liking the practical type.
Sally: Oh, I like a man who you can kick out of bed and he'll do things around the house. Means there's a point to… well, the rest of him.
Susan: I like a man in a tool belt. It's all just there in a row: sex and mending things. It says: I can fix your system and (in a different voice) I can fix your system.
Cold oatmeal as literature will not long survive nor deeply attract a readership. People won’t put up with boring books. This current crap is an unfortunate fad
If true then the Gen X writer will have a very short lived career because Gen Y is certainly not shy about sexual appetites; often the women are the aggressor in that generation, and casual sex is taken, well, very casually. The world has no need for wimpy men (a kinder word than the one I wanted to use) even if a bunch of patchouli wearing professors thought they needed to breed a generation of ‘sensitive males’ to neutralize the world’s testosterone level, they will have found out too late that there isn’t much demand for such men in the world.
Not that men should be crass or crude, as Gen Y tends towards (perhaps their answer to the ‘sensitive male’ is to revel in sexual slang) but in my limited experience women prefer virility - even if Wikipedia says it virility is “outdated abstraction, impacting negatively on women” (yes, it really does say that).
The best explanation I can come up with is that any male graduate of an MFA writing program has been thoroughly brainwashed by militant campus PC and is incapable of having good sex let alone writing convincingly about it. Then consider the sort of (usually female) characters who dominate the ground floor of the publishing world. Hell! They may be afraid to submit anything involves sex, which is, after all, just ritualized rape, etc.
Just bethink of those whiny-voiced castrati who call up the conservative talk shows... Ewwww!
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