PUTTING A CHASTITY BELT ON SMUT
As we move towards a sex-positive society, there are those who would deny us our guilty pleasures, writes Ufrieda Ho
Don’t spank me for saying this — but political correctness is a mood killer, and hashtags are great for virtue signalling, but not so much for dirty fantasies. Little surprise that it’s the Twitter police who are the preachy control freaks making sex not just vanilla but tedious beige. “A heaving bosom is not your invitation to sex; I wish authors would stop writing this crap already,” some book publisher chastised a few weeks ago on the Twittersphere. Of course it got the likes and retweets of the clicking constabulary.
It was policing, but alas, with no furry handcuffs and, dammit, nobody was being punished! Her tweet was a few dozen Twitter characters that sounded like pontificating; and also sounded the death knell of the deeply misunderstood trashy sex novel.
Call-out culture thrives online, publicly putting people in their place, shaming them to join the herd. In this case it was supervising cleavage and desire; calling for rinsing out your mouth with soap and water for wanting to taste the delicious fine line between permission and passion and literally regulating what’s hot and what’s not. This publisher’s tweet was opprobrium displayed for the social media horde, but it was also finger-wagging reproach meant to slip between the sheets, into the back seat of the car, into the shower and also onto the pages of erotic reads.
It’s the kind of holding forth that has the effect of being a chastity belt, a chaperone at the bedroom door and, worst of all, a dire mangle of the zeitgeist of whatever wave of feminism we’re in now and the rightly unapologetic advancement of gender equality. It misses the point of why smut reads hit the spot. They’re shallow and not afraid to show it — inappropriate even, but satisfyingly effective in getting the job done in the sex-positive society we say we want to embrace.
Guilty pleasures are fantasy, they’re breathless escapism and they exist in the private realm of what’s raw, forbidden, even borderline disturbing. Heaving bosoms and other adjectives written for arousal and celebration of the glories of flesh and skin should be saved from being sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. They are fictions that are deliberately two dimensional; they don’t take shape as real and they’re not meant to stand up to ideology and politics because, Lordy, that would be dead boring.
The heaving bosoms and bodice-ripping scenes of trashy sex novels are caricature and can be downright cheesy. Sure they’re not Anais Nin, who can make a sentence like “… I want to see how I hurt you there …” make you beg for pain.
Nin can remove all connotation of religious ritual with the way she makes a metaphor of “walking over hot coals” sizzle like sin. And praise be for the throbbing alliteration of a DH Lawrence sentence like “…rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to a point of brilliance …” Or you feel, really feel, the exquisite stirring of life and lust when Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes: “There was an awakening even in her nails, in those parts of her body that had always been numb.”
Nope, smut and trashy sex reads are not this, they don’t pretend to be, and it’s why you probably can’t remember a single writer’s fake name put to a few hundred pages of revved-up reading, and all the characters seem to have names like Storm and Angel. These are the quickies of literature, the toilet reads and the novels that you leave behind in guesthouses — or shag shacks. Here vampires and firemen are welcome, so is breaking the rules indecently and, yes, even heaving bosoms as ambiguous invitation can join the party.
So keep your Twitter policing and your ideologies as straitjackets; I’ll take the spanking.