Pssst. Wanna read some porn? The short list for the Literary Society’s Bad Sex in Fiction award has been announced. You can also read some longer excerpts, if the short quotes in the first link are insufficiently repellent.
I almost liked this one.
She gave a yet deeper, moaning sigh. Like breathing in he saw the word he had said shiver and expand inside her. Her arms moved now, and flexed: out of here, Venus de Milo. He watched the death-life fill her growingly. She grabbed and caressed him with more muscle, more zest, than ever before. Her long lean arms were spider arms, while her kisses roved and dug.
‘I see it,’ he said. ‘You are the female praying mantis, devouring her mate.’
‘I am. You are. I shall eat every shred of you.’
‘Mouthful by mouthful.’
But nah. The author is just trying to trick me with the spider allusions, but there’s no substance here.
Actually, all of the choices are out of date and obsolete. They’ve all been superseded by one brief tweet on Twitter.
2 minutes of erection is enough to conclude the coitus and fecundate the female. Anything beyond that is perversion, degeneracy and socialism.
— Julia Song (@realjuliasong) November 27, 2019
Mmm-mmmm. Now that’s bad sex.
“Fecundate”?! What language is this?
I never thought of using that in defense of socialism, but damn.
I just googled that-there was a comment that “this Brazilian fascist just converted everyone to socialism.”
Still can’t be worse than the sex scenes in Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovach novels.
quotetheunquote @ 1
It’s English, but spoken by an despotic alien in a ill-fighting human suit. Either that or Ms. Song has a “Word of the Day For Uptight Christian Fundamentalists” desk calendar.
davidnangle @ 2
I Googled this Julia Song person and her Twitter bio reads “Conservative Political Activist/Commentator, Socialism Survivor.” I don’t have a picture of her, but I can’t help but imagine she looks like a frumpish, Quiverful Stepford Wife who agrees with her assigned husband that the clitoris is a Satanic feminist myth and he’s not at all bad in bed. Also, I wonder what socialism did to her? Give her affordable health care? Pay for her education?
Christoph @ 3
I’m stuck behind corporate firewall that keeps me from viewing Twitter (my employers are paranoid bastards), so you’ve got more intel on her than I do. Given that’s she’s Brazilian, I now imagine her kneeling at a candle-lit shrine to Bolsonaro, occasionally kissing his photograph.
2
minutesseconds oferectionpedipalp insertion is enough to conclude the coitus and fecundate the female. Anything beyond that is perversion, degeneracy and socialism.Or maybe:
2 minutes of
erectionthe hectocotylus transferring spermatophores is enough to conclude the coitus and fecundate the female. Anything beyond that is perversion, degeneracy and socialism.(If Ms. Song had English as her first language, I’m sure she would have included “cultural Marxism” )
Frumpish.
I guess we can’t criticize a woman with an extraordinarily bad world view without making assumptions about her looks.
@ Akira MacKenzie
and
Don’t you see how such remarks are problematic? Of course, I strongly oppose Julia Song’s words. But imagining her as having a specific visual appearance or applying to her negative ethnic stereotypes is harmful. We already live in a culture that propagates the idea that nasty people also must have ugly bodies. (How do you think this influences nice and kind people who simply have bodies that are considered as “ugly” according to some arbitrary cultural standards?) And we already have a culture that has way too many problematic stereotypes about people of specific ethnic groups. (Never heard about xenophobia directed towards people from South America?)
Actually, most written sex scenes, whether in porn or in “serious” fiction, are usually pretty bad. It seems to be too difficult to describe such irrational acts and feelings in words. Also, during a lot of time in real sex, the partners’ mouths are busy doing other things than talking, and so heavy dialogue sounds unreal, pretentious and ridiculous. I must say that porn written by women (say, Anais Nin) is often better, meaning, it sounds less silly.
Most filmed sex scenes aren’t much better, but at least they don’t rely only on dialogue. The characters can shut up and not sound so silly.
@7, I was about to remark on that too.
Now I think of it, a collection of English 17th-century porn was the best I ever read. Of course, it was a collection only the best writing of the centruy, that which still survived and was worth reading. But I doubt that a collection of 21st-century porn (certainly not 20th-century) will still be good reading in several hundred years. They just wrote better then, perhaps. About sex, anyway.
Tabby Lavalamp @#7
Yep, looks like the society hasn’t improved that much over the last 100 years. Whenever people disagree with what some woman says, instead of actually discussing the subject, they will refute her words by saying “she is ugly/her body looks some specific way.”
I recently published an article about vintage anti-suffrage postcards. https://andreasavester.com/what-we-can-learn-from-vintage-anti-suffrage-postcards-and-cartoons/ Back then one of the main “arguments” against giving women voting rights was to claim that women who want to vote have ugly bodies.
Note: Of course I think that Julia Song’s words are awful. It’s just that I’m disappointed about the kind of discussion we are having right now.
I’m sorry making those assumption about Ms. Song’s looks. I’ll try better to police that shit in the future.
I, too, searched for her with Google, where the excerpt from her author page at the hardcore right-wing site Human Events has a typo: surely “Featured on OANN” should have been “Featured at ONAN”? After all, Onan’s sin was precisely that he didn’t fecundate his brother’s widow!
I was reminded of someone else who has extremely negative views about sexual activity for pleasure, Judith Reisman. As you can see from the WikiP page, she is a real piece of work.
e.g.:
My word of the day is “bioinfecundation”, which I’m assuming exists and I’m assuming is used in contrast to “medical infecundation” or, better, “medicoinifecundation”.
:rubs hands:
Yes, now I’m ready to write literary sex scenes, my pretties. I am ready. Smithers! Fetch my amanuensis!
I think (subject to correction by the earlier commenters who already drew to your 9:54 AM comment) that what is problematic (certainly to me, and I assume to them) was not that you made those assumption(s) about her looks, but that you made any assumptions about her looks. E.g.. Andreas Avester wrote “they will refute her words by saying ‘she is ugly/her body looks some specific way‘” (my boldface). The points are (1) that how her body looks (be it “ugly” or “beautiful” or any other visual/esthetic descriptor) is entirely irrelevant to whatever statements her mind may have made or her mouth uttered, and (2) that particular kind of irrelevance is far more often applied to women (by people—not necessarily but I think mostly men—who wish to “refute her words” without actually engaging with the words or the thoughts they express, and who equally wish to diminish her fully human status).
Owlmirror @ 14
Reisman has postulated a physical mechanism to account for the dangers she ascribes to pornography: when viewed, an addictive mixture of chemicals (such as glucose sic) which she has dubbed “erototoxins”, floods the brain, causing harmful influences to it.
Huh? Why are these “erototoxins” only released when viewing porn as opposed to any other method of sexual arousal?
I have no idea what she may look like but I can not help but wonder what kind of abuse she has experienced that would have helped her to arrive at such negative anti-human attitude.
uncle frogy
He saw the word? And it shivered?
Are we sure this wasn’t written by a chat bot?
I don’t make up this shit, I just report it.
Another sentence in the same section on WikiP:
leerudolph@#16
Yes, this is correct. I meant that any assumptions about any person’s looks are a problem.
@#16
In addition to the two reasons you just mentioned, there’s one more—a desire to silence the victim. For example, even in 21st century pretty much every women who advocates women’s rights hears the same words said about her: “She must be so ugly that no man wants to fuck/marry her, otherwise she wouldn’t advocate feminism.” Of course, words like, “She’s young, beautiful, and earns money with her looks; therefore she cannot possibly be smart and educated,” can achieve the same result. Women don’t want to hear such crap about themselves, so they stay silent in order to not attract attention.
@LyleX:
I noticed that particular phrase as well. Hackery. I mean:
“Breathing in” is an experience comparable to seeing something? Or is “breathing” something that parasites do immediately before they shiver and expand inside someone?
What, exactly, is like inhalation here?
If it wasn’t written by a chatbot, it was written by someone taking some very, very powerful medication. Heck, maybe it was written during the onset period of general anesthesia:
@1 quotetheunquote
“Fecundate”?! What language is this?
English. Just a form that has died out among native speakers. Julia Song may not be a native speaker and simply pulled the word from a dictionary. I have done the same in French.
It’s old-fashioned of me, I know, but I find even a two-minute coitus to be going too far on only the ſecond date!
unclefrogy@#18
Here’s what has happened with me often enough. I write some article in which I defend LGBTQIA+ rights. Let’s say I write an article in which I argue that same sex marriage should be legalized. People in the comment section: “I wonder what kind of child abuse the author must have gone though. Nobody who has had a happy childhood turns out so twisted and perverse. What we are reading here is produced by a very sick mind.” Instead of addressing my arguments in favour of gay marriage, people wrote comments about how I must have been abused and raped. (For the record: I wasn’t abused as a child in any way, nor have I ever experienced serious sexual abuse, only the usual catcalls and some groping.)
Anyway, Julia Song’s ideas are very unhealthy, so I do suspect that she might have experienced something bad in her life. But speculating about what kind of abuse some other person could have experienced that could have lead them to write whatever they have written can easily turn problematic.
jrkrideau @#24
I knew the verb “fecundate.” Sure, it is rarely used, but I knew the meaning, and the word choice didn’t feel that odd for me. I’m a polyglot, I speak 6 languages, so maybe I was familiar with this word from some other language, thus the word choice didn’t seem odd for me also in English.
I knew the word, too, but I’ve only seen it used as a technical term in plant biology.
Here’s a thing about so-called “victims of Socialism”… In my experience they usually fall into one of three categories…
1) People who are wealthy, or at least rich. What they mean when they call themselves “victims of Socialism” is that the Socialist government and economy made it almost impossible for them to indulge their greed. They couldn’t become even wealthier, therefore they felt oppressed, because they couldn’t exploit labor and capital to concentrate as much wealth as possible into their own hands.
2) They’re opportunistic liars (basically grifters who realized they could make more money by pretending to support the Right than the Left)
3) For some reason, they’ve unquestioningly bought in to the Capitalist lies about Socialism because they don’t consider themselves working class… they consider themselves to be Temporarily Inconvenienced Millionaires.
4) I guess ignorance of what Socialism actually is could count as a category, as well…
Now, I will grant that I know absolutely nothing about Julia Song, let alone her personal finances. I’ve only heard about her just now… through this post. So I have no idea where she falls amongst these categories, but I do genuinely believe she’s in at least one of the first three. I don’t really think she falls in the fourth category because she’s a public figure, with access to actual facts directly at her fingertips, so ignorance would not really work as an excuse. Unless, of course, it’s willful ignorance, but that just puts her into one of the first three categories, again.
I’m honestly not sure of any more categories. I find it very hard to believe that there genuinely are “victims” of Socialism in the way that there are victims of Authoritarian Dictatorships, Feudalism, Fascism, or even Capitalism. For one thing, Western Capitalism has never actually allowed a smaller country to attempt Socialism… we in the US especially like to go in to that country and straight up shut it down, often installing a fascist dictator instead, because Capitalism needs fascist dictators to keep itself alive. For another, the whole concept of Socialism basically rules out any economic victims, as it were, given that literally everyone is covered in a truly Socialist system (of course, the exception to that would be a Socialist system set up without an eye to Intersectionality, hence why I often like to say “my Socialism will be Intersectional or it will be bullshit”; if we can’t guarantee Socialism to the most oppressed amongst us, we can’t guarantee it at all).
The Twitter replies show a hell of a lot of examples of people who somehow think that “Socialism” is synonymous with Authoritarian Dictatorships, despite the two being… like… very much opposite. A lot of the people who responded to her tweet talk about how much they hate Socialism, but then when listing everything they supposedly hate about it, it’s all a bunch of stuff that’s actually Authoritarian and Capitalistic in nature. It’s actually quite sad how uninformed people are about what Socialism actually is.
I’m not going to comment on her tweet about sex, though. I don’t really have anything to say about it… or those blurbs, either, other than… yeah… they all deserve that award…
It amazes me just how this woman is able to reduce sex down to a joyless, mechanical act of reproduction that entirely ignores and even denigrates the pursuit of pleasure, particularly the female’s. That’s some The Handmaid’s Tale level nonsense. Also, I’m not sure where she’s getting this “socialism” garbage either. Considering that billions are a made in sex-related industries, I would never associate the desire to prolong sex and have an orgasm to be “socialist.”
EDIT: ..orgasm with “socialism”
@Andreas Avester:
I took that as saying she is worshipping a shrine to get country’s anti-socialist president, not specifically because she’s South American. People say the same about fundamentalists with a trump shrine.
Nathan @#29
The idea is that a socialist country cannot be economically prosperous. You need capitalism to create innovation, produce goods, etc. Thus all the people living in said socialist country are going to be poor, starve, and be victims of socialism. Basically, those who talk about the “victims of socialism” are imagining people like citizens of North Korea.
Note: I’m only explaining what some people mean when they talk about the “victims of socialism.” Personally, I’m in favor of socialism.
It’s interesting that Song thinks having sex too long is socialism. Recently online Marxist Aimee Terese was not amused when a Twitter poster called The Star Trek Communist posted a photo where the hammer of the hammer and sickle was replaced with a vibrator.
http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2019/11/17/aimee-terese-vibrators-are-symbols-of-capitalist-alienation/
timgueguen @#34
Ouch. Here we have it, another person who opposes to people having fun in the bedroom:
This is so damn wrong. Vibrators are great. And not only for solo activities, you can also use them as a couple. Many women need clitoral stimulation to get an orgasm, so you can hold a vibrator against your clitoris during sex. Or you can put a vibrator inside your butt during sex. That feels great. Or, well, there are plenty of options really.
Besides, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with masturbating while you are alone.
But Brasil has never been socialist!?
#18 (unclefrogy) & #26 (Andreas Avester):
I would normally agree with the points made in (26), but in this particular case, I don’t think unclefrogy was out of line in wondering, since her Twitter bio says she is a “Socialism Survivor,” and she often tweets vague references to her past victimization (“God knows what I had to go through as a woman in a highly impoverished and violent society.”), which openly invites such speculation. She’s under no obligation to fill in the details of course, but her tweets betray a deliberate attempt to induce people to imagine what she must have suffered under socialism. If Song just stuck to “socialism bad because X, Y and Z,” then wondering about how she formed those ideas can be problematic. But her schtick is “socialism bad because it made me suffer,” so wondering how she suffered is on the table because she put it there.
Ridana @#37
I didn’t imply that unclefrogy was out of line in this particular case (because of all the reasons you listed). I just said that, in general, this line of thought is risky and one should be extra careful when making claims about what another person must have experienced in order to develop whatever attitudes they have. Such speculation can quickly and easily escalate into something really problematic.
“her kisses roved and dug” HER KISSES ROVE AND DUG!?!?
frowns