The books in my father's sock drawer were secret. I don't know why they should be secret since they were not obscene books, but rather scientific books about sex. I don't know why a sock drawer is considered a safe and private place. Is it because socks are a displaced symbol of sex, kinky like shoes, like condoms, like feet and toes? Is a sock a vagina? Is a shoe a vulva? Is a foot a penis? I never knew how to think of high heels, except that I grant that they're associated with sex as sex workers know, and often the first venture of a little boy into being as sexy as his mom.
If you want to read the books in my father's sock drawer, here they are. I found and read them seventy years ago:
Kinsey
"Sexual Behavior of the Human Female" (1948)
"Sexual Behavior in the Human Male"
Masters and Johnson
"Human Sexual Response"
"Sex and Human Loving"
Masters
"Human Sexual Inadequacy"
"Human Sexuality"
Krafft-Ebing
"Psychopathia Sexualis"
I haven't reread these books since I was a kid. I don't own them. They were factual, dry writing about an engrossing body of material that was usually denied or kept secret. But it was a lot for a ten-year-old to digest alone. No one knew I read them, not even my brothers. I could only read them when everyone else was out of the house.
Nothing has turned out to be wrong. I couldn't look at a fire hydrant without blushing. But it was all solitary. This set the mode for the rest of my physical life: intense but restrained. Not thwarted but suppressed. High awareness of the need for safety and secrecy.
In seminary when I was forty, a Masters and Johnson workshop brochure came to the school in the mail. It was put in my pigeon hole as a joke, because it seemed to the male sorter that I was the least likely person to be interested, most likely to be offended. I signed up and went. It was what I expected. That was forty years ago. I had been married and had even managed an affair that went nowhere. But the mail sorter didn't know that.
The feminist flames were burning high and I stopped into a women's bookstore where I happened upon "The Story of O." As far as I know, I was the only seminarian who even knew the book existed. I opened it on the way home while waiting for an exceptionally long stoplight and was riveted until all the cars behind me were honking wildly. High-end glamorous S and M, which I was equipped to recognize. Once again high intensity, impersonal, secret and restrained. Very French. No fertility involved. More costumed than nude. Rather like Anya Seton's historical novels in which the heroine rose in the morning with red marks on her breasts. I figured that those castles were flea-ridden. I read them all as a teen.
So now my bookshelves hold survey books, not like Kinsey but rather scraped databanks analyzed, like "A Billion Wicked Thoughts", which revealed to the researchers' surprise just exactly what porn buyers actually wanted. Porn is a separate subject, but the revelation that had me both laughing and turned on was "tentacle porn" from Japan where depictions of the human penis were banned, so authors and artists displaced to tentacles. I ran across it in sci-fi. Once the idea took hold, it was powerfully psychological. That's the other kind of book I keep, the origin of fetishes or the ones that show how intimacy evolves from the awakening consciousness of a child
For a long time I ignored the sociology of sex, the economic parameters, the mercantilizing of equipment, spaces, class and stigma. But then a peripheral conversation with young male sex-workers and the experience of actually being clergy made the issues vivid and personal. I had been a woman ignored as "sexless" but now I wasn't. Power is assumed in religious leaders and that turns people on. Other see clergy as public property. Older women felt free to adjust my clothing, fondle my jewelry, adjust my hair. At conferences middle-aged women invited me to shower with them in a little intimate group. Sheesh. I found it alarming.
Once I began trying to write fiction about sex and the clergy, but it went nowhere, mostly because it kept turning into slapstick. I despise the English irreverent burlesque slapstick about anything meant to be dignified. Neither do I appreciate the more American romance of the nun, that suppressed and sanitized, even medicalized, idea of mystic desire. Already did that in real life. So what else is there?
When my father died, his bookcases dominating every room could be emptied and removed. It turned out that some of them were double-shelved with the back row being paperbacks. These were truckstop porn, evidently from his years on the road. Poorly written, cheaply bound, it was a puzzle that he didn't just throw them away. Maybe he wanted to be found out. Maybe such secrecy is really about the drama of unmasking, the passage from intimacy only with oneself into a larger interaction with others. Was it a displacement from using prostitutes? We didn't think so.
What did it have to do with me? I've never known why I've always felt such contempt for my father. My brothers felt it as well. My mother would never admit such a thing. Incidents stick in my mind but only in the past few years have I figured out that my father's birth family thought that women were natural princesses, beautiful and treasured like my aunt. But my mother's family thought that women were competent, tough, equal to men but careful not to let the men know they were being supported and guided. This binary might be the real dynamics of sex that I carried. Not about the physiology of sex at all -- about gender roles. So now I must read Foucault.
Now I am encaged by time, though an endearing young male sexworker was indignant at the idea that I might be past pleasure provided by someone else. (No interaction. He was in Paris.) His need to make money and my need to figure it all out are both restraints, but maybe that's what keeps us from being disinterested. A bit of a boundary to let things accumulate intensity.
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