Even the most liberal of persons betray a puritan streak when they
attempt to denigrate "pornography" by claiming that it is but
a pale reflection of reality. This is to confuse Literature with Life.
In actual fact, there is simply no substitute for a good dirty book.
In the first place, sexually stimulating literature appeals to a
separate and distinct kind of sexual experience: masturbation. And lest
anyone think that the monologue of "self-abuse" is inferior
to the dialogue of copulation, let him or her read Masters &
Johnson, who have discovered that the orgasm produced by oneself is
more intense and physiologically satisfying than the orgasm produced
with the aid of a colleague. This is not to debunk the pleasures of
mutual comfort, but to emphasize the undeniable value of solitary vice
and its worthwhileness as well as, rather
than in lieu of, those games that require two (or more) players.
In the second place — and this is far more important if we wish to
appreciate the differences between Art and Reality — pornography
is preeminently a verbal or linguistic mode of experience. Situations
in themselves are barely provocative without the rhetoric of indecency,
be it coy or crude, and even the hardest-core photographs fail to
sustain their arousal-capacity for as long as can a blunt obscene
utterance. As Gore Vidal points out, "Words are words, and gropes
are gropes. And it's nice to be able to render a grope into words. A
grope can never render unto itself what words can do." The
licentious literature that survives the test of time may be as
elaborately decorous as John Cleland's Fanny
Hill or as explicitly detailed as Henry Miller's
Sexus, but in either case the lubricity is
achieved primarily through the skilful manipulation of words.
To illustrate the verbal essence of much that is erotic, let me examine
a selection of lewd limericks and bawdy ballads, a genre whose
raison d'être is clever word-play, with
a stimulation that is often more cerebral than sensual. "The
Sexual Life of the Camel," for example, demonstrates a fondness
for language and a hieroglyphical imagination:
The lesbian limerick is so scarce as to be perhaps nonexistent. There
are a few rare appearances of lesbians in limericks such as the one
about Khartoum, but I have never read one involving two women as the
primary subject. The masculine fantasy behind the form cannot tolerate
such a proposition, and invariably portrays a dichotomy of penetrator
and penetrated. The focus in gay limericks is upon anal intercourse, of
which the following are three of my favourites:
Well buggered was a boy named Delpasse
From the depths of the crypt at St Giles
Historical personages sometimes find their way into limericks, most
pointedly in this one by W.H. Auden:
The bawdy barrack-room ballads produced during the two world wars are
not so respectably suggestive as those composed for more intellectual
pastimes, and their forthright frankness too often precludes their
being written down for posterity. Nevertheless many that have been
collected have a surprisingly high gay content amidst the rampant
heterosexual rutting. Take for example the first three stanzas of
"The Young Harlot of Crete," a famous serial-limerick:
When the Nazis landed in Crete
Our subversive young harlot of Crete
In a small brown-paper parcel,
In search for a new sensation,
No less appealing in its clever word-play and visual absurdity is this
more modern limerick, somewhat more rude but still tasteful in
appealing to the intellect:
Is stranger than anyone thinks.
At the height of the mating season
He tries to bugger the sphinx.
But the sphinx's posterior sphincter
Is all clogged by the sands of the Nile,
Which accounts for the hump on the camel
And the sphinx's inscrutable smile.
There are a fairly large number of limericks with specifically
homosexual themes, but unfortunately many of them are essentially
homophobic. The classic is of course the one set in Khartoum (again a
sort of conundrum):
Who, instructing a novice cocksucker,
Like an elephant's hips;
The father of the limerick form, Edward Lear (who was probably
homosexual, largely repressed), wrote only one peripherally gay
limerick, about a transvestite:
Took a lesbian up to his room,
About who would do what
But since Lear's time the gentle tone has been replaced by something
more vicious, as in this limerick:
Who seldom, if ever, stood still;
In his Grandmother's gown,
Still in the field of essentially anti-gay sick humour, but at least
more humorous (and with an explicitness unknown to Lear), is this dire
warning:
Liked boys for no tangible reason.
Cured him of sodomy
Note the cleverly oblique way of alluding to what happened.
Grew steadily flipper and flipper.
With fragments of glass
The Church comes in for a good deal of satire, and not surprisingly
there are about half a dozen limericks that exploit the rhyme of Sodom
with Wadham College, Oxford; for example:
Who talked about God and such things;
Was a boy in the choir,
By all of the lads in his class,
"Now the novelty's gone,
Came a scream that resounded for miles.
Has Father Ignatius
It is difficult to date most limericks, but it seems possible that the
earliest ones with this rhyme allude to Robert Thistlethwayte, the
Warden of Wadham who was charged with sodomy in 1737 and who fled the
country.
Who approved of the folkways of Sodom,
Have a very poor head
Are most highly thought of today;
Are not my sort of lechery,
Barrack-Room Ballads
Here is an intriguing excerpt from "In Mobile
[Alabama]":
Whose fucking was far, far too fleet.
With a length of old brass
This young harlot had to compete
Who were using their poopers
Was led to fifth-column deceit.
Her trade she expanded,
and another, from "Life Presents a Dismal Picture":
Oh, they teach the babies tricks in Mobile.
And by the time that they are six
"Barrack-room" may not be a strictly accurate description of
such ballads, for a good many of them reflect the all-male company of
sailors, as in this limerick:
For the forty-second time,
Brother Bill has been deported
For a homosexual crime.
Wrapped in a mysterious way,
Is an imitation rectum
Grandpa uses twice a day.
And on "The Good Ship Venus" ("Her mast was a towering
penis") there are not enough women to go around for the crew, so
gay appearances are made by the skipper and the cabin-boy (that
limerick has several variations) and in several others:
Who seduced a respectable sailor.
He worked out the bail,
This last limerick hints at something not generally acknowledged about
the nature of erotica in general: in so far as virtually all
"pornography" is written or sung by males for male readers
and listeners, there is something inherently
homosexual in such literature. Regardless of
the overtly heterosexual guise of its content, it grows out of the
context of men being naughty together, for
the purpose of mental mutual masturbation. The central image of most
limericks is not a cunt but a cock — usually a giant one —
and females are present, if at all, merely as an excuse for Priapic
self-glorification and comparative preening. It seems to me that
erotica itself often usurps the place of the female which society
demands as the mate of the male, and the goal of the creators (and
quasi-creators as readers) of erotica is to become as completely self-
sufficient as the lad in this limerick:
He couldn't have been worser.
With all the crew
Amid cries of jubilation,
In a wave of spunk
Whose prick was so long he could suck it.
As he wiped off his chin,
Copyright © 1998 Rictor Norton
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