by Roy Blount
A doll or a dame is a dullard.
Femme and lass are crass or esoteric;
Lady, I guess, is like colored.
Girl, it is argued, is too much like boy.
Broad is just used for effect.
A bird, chick or frail’s like a pet or a toy;
Tomato connotes disrespect.
Eve the Eternal is too rich and fruity;
Damsel’s as loaded as wench.
For you: add a touch of patootie
To a cross between siren and mensch.
SO THIS IS MALE SEXUALITY
OF THE SUM OF human misery, that part caused by sex research is probably small. But there was a period when I had a hard time, at certain moments, getting Masters’s and Johnson’s faces out of my mind. If you think that God is watching you, it may be limiting but it also lends timbre. To think that Masters and Johnson, in their white coats, are watching just gives you the creeps.
You know what I mean? (Which is like asking, “Was it good for you, too?” And nobody answers. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that writing isn’t strange work.)
Now we have Shere Hite to contend with. She looks a little wasted in the news photos, but that’s because she is on a book tour. (To promote a book you are expected to get it up eight or ten times a day, sometimes in Philadelphia.) It may also be because she is so tired of reading about scrota and anuses.
After a few pages of her book on male sexuality—based as we all know on 7,239 questionnaires filled out (and how) by the type of man who likes to write about his anus and scrotum and parents in questionnaires—I was tired of reading about them, I know that.
The first question should have been, “Do you get off on questionnaires?” The second, “Do you get off on questionnaires alone, or do you also require manual stimulation?” The third, “Is it really necessary for the general public to read your questionnaires, in order for you to get off?”
Don’t get me wrong. I am as prurient as the next man, as long as he isn’t sitting too close. If someone were to tell me, “That photograph lying face down there on the table shows Abraham Lincoln lying naked with John Wilkes Booth and a slave woman thought to be named Elviry,” I would turn it over. If I were told that it was any naked people—with a few exceptions that leap to mind—lying together, I would turn it over. The only movie I ever walked out of on grounds of disgustingness was Pasolini’s Salo, in which Nazis … take my word for it. I sat through all of Animal Lovers.
But I would regret having turned the Lincoln photograph over. If in fact it seemed genuine, I would spread the word—that’s my job—but I wouldn’t enjoy it. I am coming to the conclusion, these days, that there is a lot of stuff I don’t want to know. I don’t want the government to keep me from knowing it; and I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything bad about anuses and scrota, it’s just that I don’t want to know specifically what 7,239 people like to do with theirs.
I like to read about sex as much as the next man, as long as he isn’t making loud noises. But I don’t want to be told by every Tom, Dick, and Harry how it feels to him, and where. I like to read about food, but I don’t want to read a lot of “I like to chew a bite of green peas three or four times and then just let it rest on the very back part of my tongue where it arches up a little and …”
I do not presume to judge this male Hite report as a whole, because I have read only three pages. (In Scribner’s, which is no place to wade through a lot of scrota and anuses.) However, I have taken the trouble to read several of the reviews with care, and I gather that one of the study’s conclusions is that men are tired of being expected to be the dominant one: the host.
Yeah! A woman is never expected to know how to fix the vibrator, for instance—which is why I won’t have one (a vibrator) in the house. We guys get tired of standing like a Colossus night after night, year after year, even if we have a cold. I used to know a little filly down in Raleigh, North Carolina, who wouldn’t let me even start to think I was being dominant enough for her to start getting interested until I had whipped two or three truck drivers and written her a bar-napkin sonnet (always strictly abab cdcd ef ef gg) that caused a certain physiological reaction. That’s tough in one night. I got to where I stopped going through Raleigh.
But then there is this direct quote that keeps popping up in the reviews—Hite’s conclusion that men are oppressed by being “brought up to feel that a vital part of being a man is to orgasm in a vagina.”
Well. Not a necessary part. I don’t guess everybody can recommend it to everybody. I wouldn’t want to have to do it every twenty minutes. There are many, many other things in life. But … did those 7,239 guys think it wasn’t vital? Of course I was brought up to think it wasn’t vital to “fill out” questionnaires.
Okay. I guess it isn’t vital to orgasm in a vagina, and I have been a fool all these years. I guess I just took too much for granted.
BUT I DO KNOW ONE THING. That is the nastiest term for fucking I ever heard.
I’D RATHER HAVE YOU
I’d rather have you than all Europe,
Including Paree and Madrid.
I’d rather pick you than Lamour up
Back when Lamour was a kid.
Rather have riches or fame or debauchery?
Now, cherie—
I’d rather have you.
Rather than two
Of anyone other,
Rather than Daddy and rather than Mother—
Rather than living in Hono-lu-lu,
Rather than being immune from the flu—
I’m here to tell you that I am one who
Would rather have you.
I’d rather have you than Virginia,
And I mean the state not the girl.
I’d rather have everything in ya
Than everything else in the world.
I’d rather have you than a million
Dollars, racehorses or friends.
I’d rather have you than Lillian—
My wife—and her stock dividends.
Rather than owning three Porsches, all new,
Rather than knowing exactly what’s true,
I’m here to tell you that I am one who
Would rather have you.
DON’T BE RAMBUNCTIOUS AROUND YOUR GRANDMA, SHE’S A LITTLE TIRED THIS MORNING
What in heaven’s name is strange
about a grandmother dancing nude?
I’ll bet lots of grandmothers do it.
—Sally Rand at seventy-one
Night is when the grannies dance,
Late toward dawn when juniors sleep.
Quietude and greys enhance
A nude grandmother’s dip and sweep.
In heaven’s name and heaven’s eyes,
Nothing’s strange; what would surprise
Us here where none see Grandma bare
Is taken on its merits there.
Saints beam out from glowing bushes,
Cherubs twitch congenial tushes,
Hermits turn from festive fasts
To view the old ecdysiasts.
Naked as the day, they’re borne
Up through negligees of cloud.
How life’s made you isn’t porn.
They’ve transcended “well endowed.”
Bobbly dancers, or thin as fans,
No body stemmed or globed the same.
Every mother’s mother sans
Stays, stockings, station, shame.
How transported Larchmont’s Mrs.
R. Coles Trowbridge, Sr., is! Is
There a soul back home who’d know her?
Grannies samba, wheel and soar,
Spin, unwind, then gather, knitting
In the altogether fitting
Gram finale curtain: rich
In folds without a single stitch.
One more time! The Granny Ramble!
Stirred-up unborn lambkins gambol!
Wide-eyed stars neglect their twinkles!
Gran
nies show them all some wrinkles!
Then they slide down pearly ramps
Back to unsuspecting Cramps
Or (if he’s gone, he’s up there crying
“Encore!”) one more hour of lying
Solo. Then … get up, get clad,
Get peevish, restless, rattled, harassed.
“Grandma,” people say, “looks sad.”
She’s itching to be hoofing bare-assed.
THE TIMES: NO SH*T
THE OTHER DAY I was interviewed (Interviewed, were you?) by a large newspaper (Out with it: which one?), the New York Times (That large, was it?), about Humor (Well now), and one thing I said was, I like writing for Soho, here, because I can say shit.
I had never been interviewed by the Times before, and perhaps I got carried away. The next day, I saw Absence of Malice, noting in particular the scene where Sally Field tells the woman whose suicide she will cause, “You’re not talking to me, you’re talking to a newspaper.” And I began to wonder. Should I have said what I said to the Times?
I don’t suppose it will appear in the Times, whose policy continues, I believe, to be as follows:
All the news that’s fit
To print, and that ain’t shit.
The Times has printed Shiite, and Johnny Wadd, and I myself have used—by no means sniggeringly—a penis (Elvis Presley’s) in the Book Review. But in a sports column I wrote a couple of years ago, the Times (after graciously tracking me down at my in-laws’ house to explain that it was, after all, a family newspaper) changed jockstrap to glove.
And Sports Illustrated once turned my crap to baloney, and Esquire my fuck to forget.
Actually the j word, the c word, and the f word were none of them mine, but had been spoken to me by some interviewee or other. Which is what I was the other day, for a few minutes, in the eyes of the Times. What if I am quoted in the Times as saying that I like to write in Soho because I can say feces?
I believe there was already one fuck in that issue of Esquire. So, okay. I doubt that Joe McCarthy, the old Yankee manager, ever said, “Forget a duck,” but it has a certain ring I guess. But baloney? In fact, the crap, which I attributed to a basketball coach in whose mouth butter wouldn’t melt, had been pronounced by him as “shit.” I had done years of clean work for Sports Illustrated, and I thought I had a crap coming. Especially if it was marked down from a shit. But no.
I am reminded of the World War II correspondent who was on a ship attacked by Japanese planes. He saw a sailor run out onto the deck—which was burning and strewn with parts of his buddies—and shake his fist at the strafers and yell, “You fucking Japs!” Aware that no such expression would make it into his paper, the correspondent filed it as “You damn Japs!” The copydesk changed it to “You darn Japs!” Today, of course, it would be “You darn good industrialists!” and properly so.
I am no coprophiliac (or “shithead”); I do not feel the need to say it (note the impersonal pronoun) over and over. But if I am rattling along and a shit crops up and I have to start thinking, “I mean stuff, I mean do-do, I mean, …” then a voice in the back of my head starts chanting, “You can’t say shi-it, you can’t say shi-it, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.” These inner embarrassments take their toll.
An interesting sidelight to the interview of me (Back to that again): it was held in the Van Dyck diner, across the street from (Yes, yes) the Times. And a man two booths down objected when I raised my voice in criticism of Ronald Reagan. (Reagan has a terrible sense of humor, but he is so secure in it that no one has been able to get his goat. I proposed taking an expedition all over the country, if necessary, in pursuit of a Goatgate.)
This man two booths down began to shout, “Get out of here with your bullshit! I don’t want to hear your bullshit!” In other words, people can say all kinds of shit all around me, and I—who am being interviewed by the New York Times, and who am expected to be mightier, day in and day out, than the sword—am too often reduced to staff or, just maybe, excreta. It isn’t fair.
In Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer, referring to himself as “he,” observed: “He had once had a correspondence with Lillian Ross who asked him why he did not do a piece for The New Yorker. ‘Because they would not let me use the word “shit,”’ he had written back. Miss Ross suggested that all liberty was his if only he understood where liberty resided. True liberty, Mailer had responded, consisted of his right to say ‘shit’ in The New Yorker.”
Since then, there has been a shit or two in The New Yorker, and other publications have eased their dung restrictions. Newsweek recently quoted the Sunday Times of London as saying shat—a more elegant word, especially when imported, than the present tense.
But of course every freedom carries with it certain responsibilities. For one thing, there is the risk of running shit into the ground. So many people cry “Holy shit!” in movies these days that it has come to be like “Zounds!” Perhaps, then, the Times practices a wise conservatism. If anyone ever does say shit in the Times, that person will resound across the ages.
And although the word is a very comforting one to many people, we should not forget that there are cultures—Nice Southern Methodism, for instance, in which I was reared—that take shit even more literally than they do, say, Adam. The best policy to follow is perhaps the one enunciated by my daughter when she was seven, and had to be careful around her grandmother: “I never say fart in front of anyone until I’ve heard them say it first.”
So why didn’t I think of that, before saying shit to the Times?
After this appeared, a reader named Mark Sloane sent me an astonishing clipping from the September 22, 1975, issue of the Times. On that day in history, it would appear, the Times reported that an Englishman named Lord Reith had spoken in his diaries of “‘that bloody shit Churchill.’”
Later, the Times printed the story on humor for which I was interviewed. In it, I was referred to as “an amusing Georgian.”
Shucks.
TO LIVE IS TO CHANGE
At a great distance, William Barrett’s memoir may look like one of those reactionary outbursts that so often occur when one’s idealism has withered with age and one’s knee has lost the power to jerk liberally.
After all, in the course of his text, the author manages to cancel the subscription of his youth to both Marxism and literary modernism. …
If his logic is correct, then we should be ready to die for anti-communism.
—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
SHEE-IT. THAT AIN’T NOTHIN. If my logic is correct—and you better not say it ain’t and I hear about it, because me and Doyle Cathcart will come over there and beat the pure shit out of you. If my logic is correct, we should be ready to kill anybody that says anything smart-ass about General Westmoreland.
And you’re listenin’ to a man who used to get on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ass for bein’ a tool of the interests.
Shit yeah, I knew old Sartre. I remember the night before I graduated the Sorbonne, he come over to my table in the Deux Magots and said he’d heard about me, did I want to help him write a leftist screed. “I doubt it’d be ‘leftist,’” I snapped. I could reely snap in them days.
Cause I had been raised in a household where we strangled Spanish priests. That’s right. Believed in assassinatin’ anybody in America who’d ever been as high as cabinet-level. Saw Trotsky as an agent of the Big Railroads. Advocated the nationalization of mom-and-pop stores.
Yeah, I was born in Greenwich Village one night while my momma was trying to get the floor so she could demand less shilly-shallying at a Com’nist bomb-throwin’ meetin’. They threw them round, cannonball-looking bombs with the fizzy fuses, like you used to see in the cartoons. My momma could throw one of them things twenty yards. Yeah. And my daddy, he knew Emma Goldman before Maureen Stapleton was born. In the summer they’d go to Provincetown and do modern art.
Nude theater. Hell, I was in my first nude theater when I was three months old. Crawled out on the stage wh
ile Edna St. Vincent Millay was just as nekkid as a jaybird bein’ mounted by Eugene O’Neill in a cutaway swan suit, and my diaper slipped and the audience loved it. My folks, why they threw off their clothes so they could run out from the wings and grab me, but the audience made ’em leave me out there. Course O’Neill got the red-ass and stomped off. He wasn’t no modernist, no more’n Sartre was a leftist.
By the time I was seventeen or so, I had composed an anti-Wall Street opera that lasted two and a half hours and had only one note in it, sung twice.
And acourse as the years rolled on I was right there at the barricades on everything, right on up through colored rights, Veetnam, Abstrac’ Impressionism, and antinucular. I took all the right stands and said all the right things and wrote poems that I defy anybody to this day to explicate. I was writing stuff that made Ezra Pound’s Cantos read like “Dan McGrew,” and at the same time throwing sheep’s blood at Nelson Rockefeller and doing more acid than Timothy Leary. I had my hair down to my ass and was sleeping with a gunrunning Guatemalan nun and an auto-parts sculptor from Chad and was writing long letters to The Nation in defense of Alger Hiss because he was guilty. My ex-wife was organizing hookers in Nuevo Laredo, my son was doing out-of-body travel in New Guinea, and my three daughters were down in Angola with a Cuban brigade.
And then one day I was listening to the weekly Forty-eight Hours of Rage broadcast on this underground Maoist radio station I pick up—I believe it was an Albanian reggae group singing a song against Adlai Stevenson—and eating some tofu I’d bought at a Whole Grain Weatherpeople rally and making some nonobjective silk-screens for the Debourgeoisization of Poland Committee, and somehow something jist, I don’t know, I just sat down and said, “Fuck it.”
You know. I mean, maybe Warren Beatty got a movie out of it, but where had it all gotten me? Where had it all gotten the world? And I turned on the TV and there was this preacher, Brother Luther Bodge, he was saying “Brother, if you have not found the light, you had better leave off your un-American ways. You had better move on down here to Sudge, Arkansas, where for the furtherance of this gospel I will sell you a lot in my Closer Walk Developments and soon as the Com’nist-inspired interest rates go down you can build yourself a nice house, and meanwhile you can vote against the forces of godless atheism and shout Hallelujah!”