Bored by Sex

Not THAT kind of sex. Literature-classroom sex, the wordy two-dimensional substitute for the real thing.

Although I’m firmly committed to the law of chastity, I don’t think I’m a prude. I think it’s possible and at times necessary to discuss sex publicly and that it can and should be done with both maturity and candor. For example, I don’t think youth or adults are well served by chastity lessons that consist mostly of the vague injunction “Don’t do it.” And of course, sex really _is_ part of literature. I once taught a literature class at BYU and noticed halfway through the semester that in one way or another it had come up in every single text (Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, Marx, Ibsen…) we had studied. I finally threw up my hands and facetiously told the class that the chance to read about sex is the whole reason to major in literature instead of math.

But just how much sex do we need to find? In some academic contexts it comes to seem relentless, and also adolescent. And Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse (tee-hee—sex in the Bible!) Between-the-lines lesbian encounters in Jane Austen (ha, ha—sex in the most virginal classics!). Phallic symbols in John Donne’s religious poetry (what an erotically charged blasphemous juxtaposition!). At some point just by neglecting a text’s esthetic, historical, sociological, religious, and linguistic features, we’re pornographizing it, and at its worst, the method starts to reduce all texts to pop-up fig leaves. Pull and titter.

If I became this obsessed with eating (an arguably more central human activity than sex), majored in literature and gastronomy studies, could not stop finding hidden digestive processes in literature to the exclusion of every other feature, and talked incessantly about liberating the suppressed polymorphous desires of my own esophagus, I would rightly be referred for psychological help. The name for this kind of obsessive attachment is a fetish. Collectively, as a culture, we have a sex fetish. Seeing sex to the exclusion of all else relentlessly strips it of the complex human context that makes it meaningful in the first place. It reduces sex to porn. The problem isn’t just sexual excess; it’s sex as mere titillation. Bereft of any meaningful connections to the rest of life, sex becomes a series of mechanical postures, a porn manual.

It’s always been a minority of critics who read sex this intensively (and they certainly have given the newspapers exciting things to report about the MLA convention!) I’m also happy to say that from what I can see, excessively sexualized interpretation has already passed its heyday. Maybe all interpretive approaches become more interesting once the initial flurry surrounding them has died down, and we can see what’s worth salvaging.

In the meantime, I’m bored. Oh, Mr. Literature Professor, can we talk about something else, please?

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Do Honest Questions Aid and Comfort Anti-Mormons?

I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies’ usage
then I began to wonder


II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege

--Adrienne Rich, “North American Time,” from _Your Native Land, Your Life_

Rich’s poem calls me to consider the ethics of speaking into any fierce public divide and the ways the polemics of appropriation can deform what I hope to say. The “political correctness” she describes in the first section shrivels her voice as she notes what she shrinks from reporting “for fear of our enemies’ usage.” I’m very reluctant to use the term “enemy,” especially categorically. I certainly don’t consider someone my enemy simply because he has left or disagrees with the LDS Church. But as I see some of the uses to which those who actively oppose the Church might put our words here, I’m tempted to recoil from those hard and merciful interrogations to which the thoughtful life calls me and to censor myself until I only dimly echo the aphorisms of unthinking consent. On the Internet, how easily our words can fall into the hands of those would concatenate them into inexorable chains whose conclusions we would abhor. It’s not difficult to think of examples, historical and contemporary, of words written and repeated in willful innocence of the ways they have been brandished in bloody triumph over others’ broken bodies and souls, some of which Rich goes on to name in her poem. So, to paraphrase a question once put to Christ, who is my enemy, and what, besides the love enjoined in the Sermon on the Mount, do I owe her? What do I owe the enemy of my enemy who might find himself assailed by my words in my enemy’s mouth? In addition to the obligations to integrity and to mercy that attend all communication, I wonder how to take ethical account of the sometimes bitter public divide between Mormons and anti-Mormons into which our words here now inevitably fall.

My faith and covenants make possible all my inquiry, which I hope to conduct in a spirit of devotion. Although I cannot control the uses to which my words may be put by others, and although I remain committed to welcoming every honest expression of faith or doubt and every sincere question, I hope to foster a dialogue that honors its constitutive faith, even, and perhaps especially, in its most acute, most heartfelt interrogations.

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