i think her message is essentially, men are impotent and when they aren’t, they’re misogynists but hey, at least they know how to fuck. great k8 roiphe.
parts were terrifying
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.
like, really terrifying:
This generation of writers is suspicious of what Michael Chabon, in “Wonder Boys,” calls “the artificial hopefulness of sex.”
She doesn’t give one good alternative example, doesn’t consider any counter-arguments, just basically says (with little evidence) that men are all assholes, especially the narcissists ‘as common among novelists as brown eyes are in the general population’ (ha) and then the article ends.
My biggest objection, and i understand that it is a tenuous one, is the calling to task of fiction writers for being morally irresponsible. look, i think philip roth writes hilarious but retarded sex scenes, but jesus. some people are idiots about sex, and it is funny + revelatory to read about it! we are supposed to be as horrible as want in fiction (i thought that was why ppl wrote fiction? heh) or in non-fiction! it’s supposed to tell the truth! i dont want dumbidiots like katie roiphe condemning people without explaining to us either what she does want (just like sex!) or showing us an example of something better.
she concludes that sex is so absent and so pathologically dealt with nowadays that we should— we should?!— look back at roth and mailer and updike with a twinkle in our eye, with a nostalgia for jackhammering or something.
what about the possibility of “doing a better job” or “hope”? I agree that there needs to be more writing about sex and better writing about sex and when you think about it there is a ridiculous, ridiculous dearth of sex in literature considering it is essentially the driving force of HUMANITY FOR GOD SAKES but rather than whine about the poor fucking beta male attempts at it that exist right now in the tone of some disappointed NYU student at brunch with her girlfriends, maybe you should offer some of that artificial hope that you whine is lacking, because ya know what, some of us still believe. and as sad as it sounds when benjamin kunkel says he wants to throw away his penis— ha!— it strikes a nerve, a chord, a penis, whatever. it rings true! and that is the point. we should aim for truth-ringing. does benjamin kunkel seem kind of annoying and remind me of too many men i’ve ‘dealt with’ and does he fall into solipsistic wormholes that make me want to puke? Yes. But that probably just means that he is doing something right. That he is being honest. Do I want an alternative ‘sexual narrative’ to emotionally respond to? Heh. Yes goddammit. Yes. Please. But that doesn’t mean I am going to quit reading, quit searching, quit pointing out when things are good, quit working to take matters into my own hands (no pun intended although, wow), or that i think a viable solution is to write a bitchy little condemnation in the ny times under the banner of cultural analysis.
