Confessions of an S&M Virgin

by Linda Jaivin

  Among the work that I saw on a visit to China in 1994 was a series of paintings by Liu Wei, one of the artists featured in Mao Goes Pop. His series ‘Revolutionary Family’ was one of the highlights of that show: these were portraits of his family members rendered in a grotesque style, with beady eyes and gummy smiles. When I met up with Liu, he was working in a studio in the heart of Beijing. There was no security in the building, and a fairly jerryrigged system of dividing the space into individual studios ensured that there was little privacy as well.

  If anyone had wanted to see what he was up to at any time, they could have.

  What Liu Wei was up to was this: a large series of oil paintings in which naked, grinning women swam through blue, blue seas, their legs opening to reveal their labia, clitoral hoods and vaginal folds spreading like the layered petals of a flower. Big luscious blooms floated on the surface of the water and paddling around the women were men and dogs with their tongues hanging out. The men's appearance suggested the famous pictures of Mao swimming the Yangtze and, in one of the works in progress that I saw, Mao's face, neck and shoulders emerged from the centre of some of the flowers on the water. The paintings displayed a fascinating mixture of grotesquerie, playfulness, wit and sensuality.

  Liu Wei completed his work and shipped it out, without incident, to a show in Brazil. The following series, for which he showed me his sketches, was on homoerotic themes.

  I also spent some time with another artist, Feng Mengbo, whose four oil paintings from the series ‘Video Endgames: Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’ were among my favourite things in Mao Goes Pop.

  Like fellow Gen X-ers in the West, who find the commercial media of their environment at once attractive and repellent, Feng Mengbo is both fascinated by and detached from China's propaganda media. Some of his paintings, done in a style to suggest the peculiar lighting and texture of the video game screen, depict little Red Army soldiers fighting dinosaurs and video game villains with weapons that include Coca Cola grenades. Another series features Mao in his classic pose repeatedly trying to hail a Beijing taxi.

  Feng appropriates the images of propaganda and sets them loose in the past-futurescape of the post-modern now, a place of infinite possibilities. Visions of Communist China's ideological ideal self-image flit and blip across his canvas.

  When I visited him in his Beijing flat, Feng Mengbo proudly showed off his Macintosh computer, keyboard sampler and CD player as well as his collection of ‘industrial antiques’—including a very old electric fan, a gramophone player and both 8 mm and 16 mm projectors. He has a passion for things of both the newest and oldest industrial design. He played me period recordings of operas on the gramophone and fed delicate reels of discarded propaganda films and advertisements into the projector. He and his wife, a novelist who, he tells me, ‘writes like I paint’, marveled at the voice of Mei Lanfang lilting out of the gramophone, and giggled at the images thrown up by the projectors.

  Feng's frenetic canvases and computer artworks are no madder or more bizarre than China's frenzied reality. At the time I spoke to them, neither Feng nor Liu had attempted to exhibit their recent work in China itself. But both artists had passports and could travel with their art. Given how fast things are changing, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they were exhibiting in China as well these days.

  The gradual introduction of law into a system that once relied solely on whim and decree, massive exposure to foreign cultures, and a rise in awareness of concepts like human rights and civil liberties, is slowly spinning China out of the iron clasp of people's dictatorship.

  Now artists may not like the police, and the police may still come and shut down exhibitions. But there's not that sick-in-the-gut, wobbly-in-the-knees feeling that artists as recently as the mid-eighties used to experience when a posse of policemen entered an exhibition room. Now there's anger and annoyance. In some cases, there's also a certain grim pleasure at having been legitimised by the very act of censorship.

  Confucius say ‘Criticism creates celebrity’. OK, he never said that, but a lot of other people do when they talk about the Chinese cultural world. The struggle of the first post-revolutionary modernists, the Stars, merely to exhibit and to survive, was so dramatic that they became cultural heroes. Official repression and censorship has made stars of many an independent artist in China. Today the repression meter is still running but at a much lower level. It can be a bit dispiriting. Just think, if you're a painter, you can now pretty much hang a show, and have people come and see it, and maybe sell a few paintings if you're lucky, and then take it down, and get back to work in your studio all without anyone outside regular gallery-goers even noticing. In other words, you can be more or less like an artist anywhere. You could be in Melbourne or New York. Gone are the days when political oppression made every artist a star, when non-propagandistic art welled up from the underground like a revelation, and everyone cared. No one can seriously rue the mellowing of censorship, but there is a certain nostalgia for its side-effects.

  Let me pass on a story that was told to me by a Chinese friend, an artist, about another artist. This may be an apocryphal tale. But like all good urban myths, if indeed it is just that, it still has the pong of truth about it. According to my friend, this other painter, an abstract expressionist, held an exhibition. Not many people came; it was less, shall we say, than the talk of the town. So, what did the artist do? He phoned the Public Security Bureau. Anonymously. Telling them about the show, he alleged that the works on display had a ‘reactionary’ nature. Obligingly, they came and shut it down. He was a hit.

  ALIEN SEX FIENDS

  Lust

  Lust is a word that starts with the tongue and ends with the breath. Lust is a love letter that can't wait for the post. It's a love fax, stamped all over with ‘urgent, for the immediate attention of…’ It is the e-mail of emotion.

  Impatient and greedy, lust has few social graces. It is wilful, naughty, immune to reason, and demands instant gratification. Lustful sex is, in short, the child to gentle lovemaking's responsible adult. It leaves behind the same messes as a child: clothes randomly strewn about the room instead of neatly folded, vegetables left uneaten on the plate. Even the noises that come from lust's room are similar to those of the nursery—there may be tears and shouting, unidentifiable thumps and crashes, explosions of laughter and spells of gurgling.

  Lust conquers all. It has the will and the way. There is no need to set the mood for lust; it brings its own.

  Even ocean temperatures that shrink the average penis to microscopic proportions cannot deter a man in true lust. I had one of my most lusty fucks while paddling in the middle of a bay off a crowded beach on New Year's Day. Half the fun was trying not to: 1) cry out and attract the attention of other swimmers; 2) drown myself; 3) drown my boyfriend; 4) lose my bathers entirely.

  Lust hurts. It's a contact sport. Unlike wussy lovemaking, all tenderness and slippy-sliding, lust bounces around, slams into things and bites. It's just as likely to detonate on a hard chair as a soft bed.

  Lust has no shame. Not until the morning after, anyway. A gay friend of a friend fell in lust with a Swedish tourist at a Sydney pub. In the middle of the night they went back to where the fellow was staying and made wild, raucous love all night. The next morning, my friend's friend woke up and realised with a jolt that they were in a backpackers' hostel and there were five other people in the room. So, my friend asked him, ‘What did the Swede say?’

  He shrugged. ‘Nothing. He didn't speak English.’

  Lust just isn't that fussy about little things like the potential for meaningful communication or long-term commitment. Lust couldn't care less about the Lust Object's long-term plans, bank account, views on films, or, if it comes to that, wife. Lust is a wildcat on the prowl, not a housewife in a supermarket: it doesn't compare prices and cuts, it just leaps on the meat.

  Lust moves in mysterious ways. One friend met a man in a cafe and was driven mad by the way his hair hung dow
n over the top of his ears; by their second meeting, he'd had a haircut, and she lost all interest. Although I have asthma, and can't bear cigarette smoke, I find the way some men roll their own utterly irresistible. Other triggers could be a goofy laugh or the proximity of the top of an upper lip to tip of a nose.

  Lust can strike with old friends as well as new, with previous lovers as easily as the person you've been with for years. With the latter, lustful sex often happens not at night, in bed, but at odd moments and in unusual places, like after shopping, when you suddenly find yourselves naked and rolling around the kitchen floor, lashing each other with shallots and doing the wild thing with fruit.

  I admit that lustful sex can have its drawbacks. There are, for instance, all those bruised shallots. Even more annoying, you can't always find your underwear afterwards—even when you're sure you remember which part of the Botanical Gardens you were in when it came off. Then there are all those buttons that have to be sewn back on. There are the painful burrs that can lodge in your backside when you fumble around in the bushes, the broken plates when you can't wait to clear the table, and the soaked towels and toilet paper when you get carried away in the shower.

  And then there are those telltale lovebites, and your speechlessness when your mother looks at your neck with concern and asks, ‘Are you all right? Have you had a tracheotomy?’ (That, Scout's Honour, is a quote from my mother.)

  But the advantages, well, they speak for themselves. I'll give the last word to a gay couple I know, who, when asked what was the secret to their still-hot fifteen-year relationship, answered, ‘No vanilla sex.’

  Why I Love Younger Men

  ‘Young boys are my weakness,’ sang Kate Ceberano, ‘I just like the sweetness.’

  I know what she means. It's not that I dislike older men. Why, some of my best friends are older men. But when it comes to lovers, give me a twentysomething any day. Preferably every day.

  I know what you're thinking. You're thinking hormones. You know that old saying about women in their late thirties and men in their early twenties both being at their sexual peak? Well, it's true. And God knew exactly what She was doing when She made us this way.

  For one thing, younger men are like good batteries—they've got plenty of stored energy and are easily recharged. For another, they're still excited about the fact that they're actually having sex; they're appealingly eager. More adventurous than Dr Livingstone, more experimental than a laboratory full of scientists, they are willing to go where no man has gone before (or so you should let them think), and test any hypothesis. Having only recently hung up their skateboards, younger men can easily handle frenetic, prolonged activity—they don't cark it from heart attacks before you've even had your first orgasm. In younger men, the spirit is willing and the flesh is strong.

  We offer them more than matching sex drives. There's our experience, for one thing. Men appreciate experience in a woman—so long as she's not their own age, that is. Then they get jealous and worried.

  By the time we've hit our late thirties, we're either fairly confident in ourselves and our careers or we're in therapy. So when they tell us about their fears and ambitions, we have no need to compete. We're unreservedly sympathetic. We've got all the time in the world to listen. Especially if they're tickling our nipples with feathers or feeding us strawberries at the same time.

  Besides, whether they're fretting about the size of their pecs, or agonising over whether they're going to be able to get a ticket to the Pearl Jam concert, or wondering if that retro-style nylon shirt was really worth eighty dollars, the dilemmas typically faced by a younger lover are a piece of pavlova compared with all the trauma that an older man's mid-life crisis inflicts on everyone around him.

  There is the question of how to meet younger men. It helps if you roller blade or go to heavy metal concerts—at a Metallica concert I attended, an entire row of adorable eighteen-year-old Satanic cultists kept taking time off from their head-banging to turn around and smile at me. (Unfortunately, my girlfriend thought we should leave before our eardrums liquefied, so I never got to explore the potential of that particular subgroup.) You can find younger men in op shops, at art gallery openings, cafes, clubs or pubs, particularly when there's a grunge band playing. If you insist on one who bathes regularly, can the grunge option.

  When listening to music with a younger man, by the way, it's better not to mention that you remember when Meet the Beatles was first released.

  At the risk of being beaten round the head by packs of older men holding much-thumbed copies of The Second Sex, I'd venture that younger men also tend to be more feminist-friendly. Back when older men were little boys, they knew that they were better than little girls, and that only they could grow up to be astronauts and doctors and politicians and other important people. They had to unlearn all that in a hurry when feminism swept round, and some were better pupils than others.

  You might argue that even today the vast majority of younger men are still unreconstructed yobs who think they're the only ones who know how to change a light globe. Still, there are increasing numbers of younger men who understand that there are times, like when a woman's made up her mind to do some repairs around the house, that you just have to keep your mind on the cooking and refrain from advising on which screwdriver she should use.

  These men are the sons of feminists. They absorbed such principles as male-female equality along with their mother's milk. They are first-class younger men. First-class younger men create complicated and tasty African and Indian dishes for your delectation, read Jeanette Winterson, and understand that your work comes first. They wouldn't dream of asking you to sew on a button; if you're getting on really well, they might even make you a shirt.

  Of course, all younger men eventually turn into older men. The main problem with older men, besides lower testosterone levels, suspect ideology and reduced decorative value, is that they act like they're desperate to be younger men again. They drive fast red cars that no real younger man could afford, wear ‘sports’ clothing that no real younger man would be caught dead in, and chase after younger women, which is fine because if all the younger men are dating us, then the younger women have to have someone. But if men will be boys, better catch them the first time round.

  Come Again?

  The writer Blanche d'Alpuget once revealed that, when she was seventeen, she made love to a Polish fellow twenty-one times in three days. They stopped, she wrote,‘only to bathe and eat rye bread, csabai and cucumbers’.This declaration, or confession, or boast, or whatever it is, raises all sorts of questions. Like, why did they eat only hard, phallic-shaped foods? Would they have made love less and taken breaks more often if they were munching on soft round things like pan-crust pizzas or tomato and bocconcini salad? Were bathing and making love entirely exclusive activities, and if so, why? Did they just sleep together or did they ever sleep?

  More intriguing is the statistical issue. Twenty-one times in three days works out to an average of sex once every three hours and twenty-six minutes. But who's counting? And why? Personally, I've always found that once I've passed the six or seven mark, it all becomes a bit of a blur. How did they keep track? Tallying up used condoms? Carving the proverbial notches on the bedpost? Lovebites up the thigh, rationed at one per session?

  The precise quantification of pleasure may seem odd but it's hardly unusual. After all, one of the most common terms for getting a root is ‘scoring’, and there can be few words more baldly numerical than that. (There's a lot to be said about the confusion of sporting and sexual metaphors—in addition to ‘scoring’ there's ‘making a pass’,‘getting to third base’,‘hit onto’ etc.—but that's another subject.) Many people could tell you exactly how many lovers they've had, down, in some cases, to the nearest decimal point. Frantic teenage dry-humping on the parental sofa can figure in at anywhere from 0.33 to 0.99.

  There's another number that readily fascinates us, and that is the Big O count. Women can usually cite their
personal best on the multiple orgasm front. And perhaps it's just the men I know, maybe it's the nineties, but it seems to me that these days I hear more bragging about how many times they've made a woman climax than how many times they've made it with women, full stop.

  But what does the magic figure of twenty-one actually tell us? Once every three hours twenty-six minutes could mean twenty-six minutes of lovemaking and three hours of csabai and rye ingestion. Which is not a put-down—eating is our second most sensual diversion. ‘We were at it for hours’, however, is ultimately more suggestive of grand passion (or great playfulness) than ‘we did it x times’. Time, after all, is the other major quantifier. And while sometimes a quickie hits the spot, short is not necessarily sweet.

  In one of my favourite erotic stories, William Kotzwinkle's ‘Jewel of the Moon’, it takes no less than thirteen months of foreplay and slow stroking for the protagonists to come to climax but, when it happens, it's cosmic. Back to Blanche. If we're talking three hours consummation and twenty-six minutes consumption times twenty-one, and the man was over eighteen, well, I'd like to become acquainted with another number—his mobile. Oh, but that was some years ago, wasn't it? Never mind.

  Perhaps one of the reasons that we tend to describe sexual activity in such literally calculating cant—how many, how long—is that we're afraid if we try to articulate it in other terms we will end up sounding like pop songwriters or bad poets on the one extreme, or pornographers on the other. Lovemaking may be one of the commonest experiences, but it's not the easiest to which to give voice. As Shakespeare put it in one of his sonnets, ‘Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.’