“The sexual narratives we absorb in youth are formidable, formative”: What’s Your All-Time Most…
“The sexual narratives we absorb in youth are formidable, formative”: What’s Your All-Time Most Erotic Book?
At the New York Times, two great writers answer a great question. Anna Holmes picks Forever, the Judy Blume book narrated by curious, thoughtful 17-year-old Katherine, that ruined the name Ralph for me… forever:
For those of us who came of age in the AIDS-anxious, post-second-wave 1980s, extracurricular education about human sexuality focused on the female form: the nudie magazines and racy college comedies that introduced us to sex were populated by the voluminous breasts and carefully groomed pubic mounds of a million heterosexual male fantasies; young women were the observed, not the observers. Blume took this sense of curiosity and desire, this male gaze, and upended it, making it legitimately, unapologetically female. (For those of us who treated the book as a sexual talisman, Blume’s description of Katherine’s first glimpse of an erect penis was alone worth the price of admission.) Behind that innocent-seeming girl on the cover of “Forever . . . “ was a human being for whom the pursuit of pleasure was a potent force — as vital and acute as that felt by any young man from “Porky’s.”
Francine Prose gives a hat tip to one of my favorite short stories about sex (Stuart Dybek’s “We Didn’t”) and names the Bible as the source of that powerful childhood fascination, “before I had any experience against which to measure what was on the page. Everything was abstract, mysterious, potential.”
I have no idea how I learned to decode the language of the King James Bible, but somehow I understood what it meant when Potiphar’s wife tells Joseph, “Lie with me.” Or when David sees Bathsheba bathing. Or when Abraham “went in unto” Hagar and she conceived. I was mystified by Noah’s sons covering his nakedness, and by the Sodomites asking Lot to bring out the visiting angels so they could “know” them. But I knew it was hot.
Coincidentally, the first two books that came to mind when I saw this headline are Summer Sisters, another Blume joint (that scene where Caitlin and Vix are so stoned that they start hooking up with each others’ boyfriends; damn), and Many Waters, the Madeline L’Engle book I most want to revisit because it’s simply so weird, and so totally sexual: all of those descriptions of how the Nephilim were “too big” for the human women they had sex with, the Sandy/Dennys/Yalith threesome-waiting-to-happen. I read both of those books in sixth grade, and I doubt I’d find them erotic today, but I mean, look at that book cover. I’ll be Yalith, you know? I’m fine with that. I’m very fine with that. What about you guys?