San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Books:Author unpacks her sexual journey in “Want Me.”
Art critic John Berger famously said, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” In her luminous new memoir, journalist Tracy ClarkFlory picks up where Berger left off. ClarkFlory creates a hall of mirrors in her looking and watching, and unpacks the implications on both personal and social levels.
ClarkFlory covered the sex beat for earlyaughts websites, reporting on everything from pickup artists to adult entertainment conventions to the sets of porn shoots. She grew up steeped in the Wild West of protointernet chat rooms, “Girls Gone Wild” and HBO’s “Real Sex.” At age 15, she had watched hardcore porn before experiencing her first kiss. As a young, middleclass, hetero cis woman, she was often plucked to wade into the culture wars, defending socalled “hookup culture” as empowering and enthralling. ClarkFlory plumbed her own experiences as evidence, but, as she writes, “I swarmed with contradiction . ... I was a bona fide sex writer who sang the feminist gospel of sexual pleasure — but my personal life made me feel like an impostor.”
She was sowing her wild oats but rarely experiencing pleasure herself, as she was more consumed with playing out what she thought men wanted from her. She sought to substantiate herself through claiming her own sexual autonomy, but as she admits, “There was always a fantasy of some boy watching and wanting me, making me better. Making me whole.” As so many young women learn the hard way — by virtue of their mere existence — when it comes to finding ground under the feet of their sexual selves, “There is only impossibly shifting terrain: game but not too game, sexy but not too sexy, desiring but not too desiring.”
ClarkFlory is a funny, bighearted writer, and she examines herself and her subject matter from every angle. As a memoirist, she puts herself under the microscope and applies the same unflinching investigation she applies to the sexual landscape she analyzes. She retrospectively interrogates her own contradictions, like the time she brought home her favorite porn star from a bar and failed to see him as a person but merely as his projection. She recounts graphic experiences not for prurient voyeurism but to understand her motivations at the time. Why, for example, when her mother was dying of cancer was she seeking rough hookups?
“There are so many ways to hurt,” she writes, “but I chose sex. I chose men.” As a cultural critic, she seamlessly weaves in theory and research from phenomena spanning the orgasm gap (the yawning gulf of climax experienced between men vs. women in heterosexual pairings) to the differences in sexual performance between genders.
To call “Want Me” a sexual comingofage story is to give it short shrift; this is a book of insight, both cultural and personal. The author’s journey concludes with an ecstatic integration of past and present sexual selves, voices that don’t contradict but converse. We get the feeling that this isn’t the end, but another step along the road. As she writes, “You arrive and arrive and arrive again.” We watch ClarkFlory watch herself, and it is majestic to behold.