Book Review - Page 2

 The 23 essays in “Best American Sex Writing 2004” offer a vast range of intelligence, humor, insight, and often, dismay.  Sex remains one of the most polarized subjects in our national discourse: we saturate ourselves with it and then tell ourselves and everyone else how evil it is.  Kind of a problem, that.  What happens to desires we harbor but won’t admit to?  Chris O’Brien reports on the snarl of wealth, debt, and compromise that followed Gary Kremen’s successful lawsuit over the domain name Sex.com.  Turning a profit in the seemingly lucrative game of Internet porn is more difficult that it would appear, Kremen learns.  “By then,” O’Brien says, “he is already stepping over the lines he’s drawn for himself.”  Pop-up ads, fake links, and selling e-mail addresses become just part of a predatory game one must play to stay in the black.  There is this pervasive uneasiness in the story, as porn stars and their agent-boyfriends slip in and out of hot tubs, liquor is poured, and house music spins.  Good writing, there: the heir to the Sex.com domain walking the many rooms of his unfurnished mansion, from on-site sex parties to negotiations with salesmen and advertisers, all without losing the creeping feel of being shackled.

It gets lighter.  In “Have Yourself a Horny Little Christmas,” Cole Kazdin walks us through the sexually supercharged world of advertising, describing the holiday catalog of Abercrombie & Fitch: “…the first sweater doesn’t show up until page 122 and by then,” he suggests, “you’re too tired from masturbating to shop.”  He describes one layout as “…four giggling topless coeds, tanned and blond, sprawled across a plaid blanket in the woods, pulling down the boxer shorts of a freshly scrubbed muscular guy, with a Cheshire cat grin…”  Grins just kind of naturally happen in such situations.

Erica Jong is here alongside other top voices on the erotic including Peter Landesman and Camille Paglia.  In an excerpt from his book, “Skipping Towards Gomorrah,” sex-columnist Dan Savage bolsters the underground economy of New York City by individually renting the time of a high-end call girl and her “straight” bodybuilding boyfriend.  “Okay, speaking of freaky,” he muses after an unsettling introduction to muscle worship, “I’m the gay client, you’re the straight escort.  You had an orgasm, I didn’t.  Why were you turned on by what we were doing?”

The reply: “I guess humiliating other guys makes me horny.”

Expect uneasy, occasionally disturbing, scenarios as well as a few thrills along the way.  The Down Low, Viagra for women, sex trafficking, Internet dating, and strippers seeking Union rights: it’s all in there.  Part social science, part political commentary, and part just smart fun, “The Best American Sex Writing” makes a good addition to the bedside nightstand.

Reviewer Jason A. Zwiker is a freelance writer in Charleston, South Carolina.

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