Lad Lit



Slate has a fun article here about the lads at Maxim and their attempts to write something besides leering captions to semi-nude pictures of B-list Celebrities. The funniest part concerns the reading tour for Felix Dennis's book of self-help-by-way-of-The Fountainhead-style poetry:

Dennis is supporting A Glass Half Full with a reading tour (info at www.felixdennis.com) of England and the States, dubbed the "Did I Mention The Free Wine?" tour. The idea is, if you show up to hear Dennis read his poems, he pours you copious glasses of expensive French vintages from his private collection. The crowds have overflowed, which the tour organizer attributes to "real enthusiasm" for Dennis' poems, adding that most people attending "had never been to a poetry reading before." Now, hold on a minute: I'm no lab scientist, but I dimly recall from sophomore Bio the notion of thorough controls for one's experiments, and I might humbly suggest that Dennis run controls both for his poetry and for his wine. I'd recommend a simultaneous poetry tour named, perhaps, "Did I Mention There Is No Free Wine?" and another, omitting poetry entirely, called simply "Free Wine."

I'll have to remember this stuff for when I go on tour.

What strikes me as funny about the writing these guys do is how divorced it is from sensuality or human connection--how, indeed, masturbatory it is. Take the sentence "She was perfectly happy to take me directly inside her, and I was equally happy to comply." Leaving aside whether it's possible, in an intimate moment, to take someone inside oneself indirectly (a whirligig of hoses and pipes leap to mind, as does Lorena Bobbit), say the sentence out loud and ask what it reminds you of. It sounds like a customer service transaction:

Phone attendant: I'll be perfectly happy to get you the window seat on that flight, if you'll make your reservation now.

You: I'd be happy to comply. (Actually, you'd probably just say "sure" or "great" but this is literature. You're supposed to be more articulate than the average bear.)

The imaginations of lad authors tend to founder when it comes to actual sexuality. But even their notion of masturbation seems isolating and uninspired. One of the authors says he can masturbate to anything. I hate to think what that includes, but apparently it doesn't include actually thinking about the image in view or the fantasies it evokes. It's all the same. For Maxim's writers and viewers (I refuse to call the consumers of a magazine whose longest article is 25 words a reader), masturbation is less about indulging in a fantasy about sex with an imaginary partner (whose image may be in front of you or in your mind's eye), than it is about just finding an image and jerking off in front of it. Maybe that's why they're happy with photos that, though suggestive of nudity, never reveal nudity. Actual nudity would be a bit too carnal--all that fur and genitalia, what would they do? They don't want to project themselves into the picture, which would risk contact with the person the picture represents. They just want to stare. Their penises, and the rubbing thereof, are as much sexuality as these guys figure they can handle.

How boring. How self-limiting. How willfully ignorant. How sad.

Posted: Tue - August 10, 2004 at 03:22 PM        

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