Topical Guide 286
Mark Dorset
Sex: The Individuality of Desire
Sex: Reticence versus Openness
Sexual Euphemism: Hot Dog as, Roll as
Lorna tried to convince herself that Andrew’s failings didn’t matter, that she was imagining some and exaggerating others, that he really was good enough, but the truth struck her on the night when Andrew made love to her, on the back seat of his car, a Chevrolet. To be fair, her expectations may have been too high. Lorna was a nineteen-year-old virgin who in the last two years had spent approximately twenty-six hundred hours scrutinizing sexual performances of great diversity and sophistication and replicating them, in ivory, with painstaking exactitude. Though she didn’t yet know what she liked, she knew much about the art. When she decided that tonight might just as well be the night, her imagination summoned all the couples she had carved, all their frozen moments of sex. Lorna came at Andrew as a flame licks at tinder, and if Andrew had noticed that Lorna’s eyes burned brighter than his, that her breathing was quicker, her hands were hotter and bolder, and if, when she took his penis in her hands and inched herself toward him so that just the tip touched her, he had taken the time to notice her luscious concupiscence, then he would have cried out, “Oh, Lorna, take command, burn me up, consume me.” But Andrew didn’t notice any of that. … A thought crossed Lorna’s mind: if there’s a medal for this, he’s determined to get it.
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 7
It is often said that the classical period consigned [children’s sex] to an obscurity from which it scarcely emerged before the Three Essays or the beneficent anxieties of Little Hans. It is true that a longstanding “freedom” of language between children and adults, or pupils and teachers, may have disappeared. No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute. And the boisterous laughter that had accompanied the precocious sexuality of children for so long—and in all social classes, it seems—was gradually stifled. But this was not a plain and simple imposition of silence. Rather, it was a new regime of discourses. Not any less was said about it; on the contrary. But things were said in a different way; it was different people who said them, from different points of view, and in order to obtain different results. Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name; the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis” in The Will to Knowledge
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