In my other life as a reader of pretentious literary fiction, I came across a Paris interview with the poet and memoirist Mary Karr that you might find interesting. It’s not fully available online, but here is the excerpt I find particularly a propos:
KARR: When I started Cherry [her memoir of her adolescence and sexual awakening], I realized there were no words to describe an awakening female libido. Boys have these childlike words like chubby and woody, but the parlance for female genitalia and female desires is too porno.
Looking at an early draft of Cherry, I said to myself, Oh my God, you’re superimposing a forty-year-old woman’s libido on a twelve-year-old girl. It seemed perverse. Like it’d inspire pedophiles to think that every young girl was Lolita. Eventually I realized I’d misrepresented the experience. A twelve-year-old writing a boy’s name on her notebook over and over doesn’t want to get boffed into guacamole. She wants the boy to bring her a valentine and put it in her lunchbox.
INTERVIEWER: It’s a different kind of longing.
KARR: It’s as powerful as a sexual urge but it’s not so genital. It’s somewhat about being seen – what feminist critics might call a longing for the male gaze. Being looked at in this culture invents you as a woman long before you’re getting laid. It was about love more than sex – about beauty, desire.
This last bit of hers was an epiphany for me, though I wonder if it won’t be controversial, considering how many feminist women I know will disclaim ever having Cared About Men, even as teenagers.
Que pensez-vous, commentariat?
It is porn talking. But nowadays, most boys view porn before, or as, they begin to experience sexual desire.
What PhDork said. I don’t think what happened between the 8th grade and 12th grade versions of the boys/men Cimorene is discussing has to do with language so much as it has to do with porn, along with a general sense of entitlement. Boys at my school didn’t talk about masturbation, at least not in front of the girls. But they still expected girls to put out, and more specifically act out/fulfill the male desires, by high school. We didn’t even have the internet yet back then, but every boy had a secret stash of magazines under his bed.
Well… not to be pedantic but isn’t saying “it comes from porn” and “it comes from language” kind of the same thing? They’re both cultural factories of meaning, and they feed each other, in some ways, don’t they?
It has to be more than porn. Or I guess it’s that porn has filtered down to affect many different aspects of culture, and one of them is language. I mean, I watch a lot of movies, but I haven’t absorbed and reproduced the way the movies/fiction I consume in my own life the way consumers of porn reproduce pornography’s tenets, right? I know that sounds like an argument against the adverse effect porn has had on our culture, but it isn’t exactly. I DO think that porn has created a culture that makes masculine sexuality violent, but there has to be something different about porn as opposed to other movies. Perhaps it’s that I don’t have an orgasm every time I watch an episode of House M.D., so I don’t so deeply associate the show with pleasure. But maybe it’s also that we don’t have an adequate vocabulary for sexuality, and that’s a vacuum that porn fills. If that space was already filled with a language of mutual pleasure, respect, etc, rather than the objectification and misogyny that is the language of pornography, then perhaps porn wouldn’t have quite such an intense and immediate effect on its audience.
I mean, why is it that porn has changed sex so rapidly and so deeply in a way that, say, science fiction hasn’t changed anything? Could it be that non-porn fiction uses a vocabulary that is similar or identical to our everyday vocabulary (“hello, how are you? please pass the salt. oh I’m so happy or sad and am driving a car now!” etc) whereas porn uses a vocabulary that is decidedly not everyday language you use in math class; when the consumption of porn coincides with the reality of all these new feeeeeelings, perhaps the language of porn (suck it bitch!) gets used to articulate those not-yet-processed-or-processable feelings?
We can’t talk about porn w/o talking about language. Definitionally, we can’t talk about anything w/o language. Language of course shapes everything. I think you’re right, Cimorene, that porn fills a vacuum that would better be filled with more honest, constructive language that’s just too damned embarrassing or confusing (or perhaps even beyond language, in some cases?). Two other things: porn has the allure of the forbidden-but-not-impossible (delicious!), but–unlike scifi–is something that pretty much everyone has a visceral experience with. Everyone wanks, but I have yet to time travel or party on a holodeck.
And I’ve had some wine, but “hello, how are you? please pass the salt. oh I’m so happy or sad and am driving a car now!” totally cracked me up. Which was nice, in the midst of all these horrible reminders that a lot of men want to hurt me (or at least don’t care if they do).
Good night, it hadn’t occurred to me that vocabulary for sex is either scientific or dirty (harmful, forbidden, slangy, shock inducing). Playground talk that morphs umcomfortably beyond the playground with too many men. There don’t seem to be any ‘love’ terms for sex – no middle ground. One might envy the animals, who don’t get screwed up by their own language.
recognising that there isn’t one model for how boys and/or girls develop sexually, I do kinda fall into Karr category (maybe not completely).
I remember when I was about 12 I began to look/watch more closely at things that I found invoked a newer feeling/emotion that made me feel good (it was the good butterfly feelings in my tummy, the way my skin would tingle especially my neck and thighs). I didn’t have a vocabulary for what was going on, or why I felt this way.
I did understand about sex, where babies come from and how they are made, and my mum was straightforward about physical and physiological development during adolescence. But I couldn’t place what was going on, and because this wasn’t talked about openly in the same way that boys would talk about what was happening to them, I felt I couldn’t speak about what was going on. Especially when I began to feel *that* tingling in more personal places.
I found that, especially in the case of wanting to watch/look at boys, I wanted to be included and valued and looked at by the boys. So I continued to play sport with boys but it became the informal organised variety after school or on the weekends because it’s about that age that sport is sex-segregated where I’m from. The boys would look at me, include me, and value me when I was playing sport with them, that to me at least, this could be transferred off the sporting pitch. And in part it was, especially hearing about how they spoke about their sexual development.
It took a while to work out that what I desired wasn’t quite what I was getting from playing sport with the boys.