Sex, Porn and Young Adult Fiction.
“In one of the scenes, which was really important to me, one of the main characters, David, the asshole character—well, he’s a player, he’s gotten around, but eventually he gets to have sex… It’s a disaster, physical sex with a girl, it’s not doing it for him. They’re in the dark, and he’s—his whole sexual life has been built on porn. So just to get off, he needs to imagine pornography… [Afterward] David finds himself thinking, “this is it!” When he gets home and he’s going to bed, he’s thinking “I feel great.” But it’s a pose. He didn’t get what he wanted; what he actually wanted was some sort of genuine intimacy. And I think that as far as men are concerned, that felt—I mean it wasn’t an autobiographical moment, but it was a very personal moment. This is where I think men are not being written for, in YA, the phenomenon of guys who in fact truly don’t want to just fuck everything that moves.”
This is an excerpt from a discussion between two Young Adult fiction writers, John M. Cusick and Laura Goode in this new literary blagh, The New Inquiry, which I only discovered from a completely irritating NYT Styles Section profile on it today. Cusick said the above and I have a number of questions here:
The Young Adult novel world is basically just for women and girls, so I suppose Cusick is wise to crack open an entirely new market of boys who have gotten too old for Harry Potter but aren’t yet ready for Portnoy’s Complaint. He’s written a book called Girl Parts, which calls to mind hairless prepubescent pussies and brainless dolls broken into component legs, arms, torsos. So far, so good! Not exploitative or sensationalized one bit. Whatever, my main problem here isn’t with the title, but with the scene quoted above.
Every few weeks a new trend piece is published about the destructive nature of porn on our poor men-folk. After rubbing out too many to some tattooed neanderthal jack-hammering an orange siliconed faux-blonde, their sleepy peens just can’t lift their calloused heads when a real lady is at the ready. And now this trend has infiltrated the world of the Young Adult novel. I literally cannot imagine this ever, EVER being the case. Especially with a horny 17 year old! This kid can’t come because he is too wise, too jaded to the treats of the flesh delivered via internet. Show me a straight 17 year old who can’t fuck a tight little willing cheerleader and I will show you a pervy old writer shaming teenagers for activities HE feels guilty about.
Ah yes. Here’s what the writer says about porn: “I found it really calcified my interests. I imagine that I tried different things for about six months in high school. Followed by 17 years of basically the exact same thing over and over again.”
Seriously? Dude needs to hit some new sites now and again. One can only take so much bukkake. One meaning the guy, since girls fucking love to take it allllllll, give it to meeee, all over my faaaaceee. In any case, Cusick has created a teenage character who can’t get off while fucking a real girl with legs spread wide open because his pornography-drenched brain isn’t turned on enough by it. Fine, I’ll do a little suspension of disbelief here and not imagine what he’s really writing about is a 40 year old man with a shriveled dick. So he’s got this character, the one with the bukkake-bleached brain. This character is not now allowed to simultaneously wish for genuine intimacy and be all sad-face about it. Because he had it. He was fucking that girl, he was pumping away, skin on skin, and yet needed to imagine some naked mole rat pussy just to get off.
This doesn’t compute. And the reason it doesn’t compute is because these guys who are all fucked up due to their porn-addiction DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST. Sure, dudes may wank more than they would admit, but not so much that if they were with some naked chick who was looking to straight up get reamed, they couldn’t perform serviceably.
So, Cusick, trying to infect the world of Judy Blume and the Hardy Boyz with your message that kids should lay off the wanking only comes off as pearl-clutchingly conservative.
