c h a p t e r 3
The Electric Adventures of
A Novel of Erotic Satire
Chapter 3
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SYLLABUS
COURSE TITLE: Feminist Theory in Modern Culture
COURSE NUMBER: HUMN 150
CREDIT HOURS: 3
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course provides exposure to the purpose and subject matter of Women’s Studies. Specific areas of investigation may include the social construction of gender as pertaining to women, women’s well being, women’s artistic expressions, and the oppression of women by patriarchal institutions, modern media culture, pornography and marriage.
COURSE OUTLINE
- Gender and women’s bodies
- Violence against women
- The differences among us: divisions and connections
- The consequences of sexism: current issues
COURSE COMPETENCIES
- The learner will demonstrate an understanding of the global oppression of all women
- The learner will develop an awareness of the struggles, accomplishments, and worth of women.
- The female learner will develop a greater understanding of herself as a woman . . .
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It was in college that I crossed the line from physical to metaphysical sex (yes, I went to college; not all people who work in the basement mail rooms of advertising firms failed to go to college). When I arrived on campus, already an enthusiastic if inexperienced connoisseur of Femaleness, the sexual bar had been raised high enough that in order to find fantasizational peace, I needed to become a frequent – okay, nightly – customer at Benny’s, a strip club two miles outside of Indianapolis.
At the time, I had had just three actual sexual encounters (with other people), with just one of those, during my senior high school year, resulting in intercourse – a brief and clumsy act which, I decided, wasn’t at all as it had been advertised. There was never any doubt, from the moment I found Benny’s in the phone book of a gas station down the block from my dorm, that I would become a regular. So much about Femaleness was still new and mysterious to me, and the notion of a woman standing naked specifically for my viewing – the mere thought of the deliberateness of that act – would require me to be alone for a few minutes.
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Most of what little I learned during my brief college career was learned outside of class – first at Benny’s, then at the little apartment on Fourth Street that Beth and Guinevere shared (more on that later) – but there were two exceptions, two classes that actually impacted my life and my Inner Life in significant ways. One was Introduction to Computers, which was a turning point in my pre-Alvin life, though not for the reasons you might think. The other was called Feminist Theory in Modern Culture.
It was a course in the Philosophy Department, and I signed up on the belief that I would be surrounded by women. I was right – I was, in fact, one of just two males in the class, and the other stopped coming after the second meeting. But it turned out not to be the comforting dynamic I had hoped it would be.
The instructor was a heavy, bespectacled woman with close-cropped, gray-streaked hair who dressed in baggy dark-colored corduroy pants and oversized sweaters, outfits that appeared to be intended to hide what were clearly large, low-hanging breasts and very wide hips. She was, it seemed to me, dressing to obscure as much as possible the fact of her gender. From my vantage point in the third row, the ploy wasn’t even remotely working. From the first day of class, I was fascinated with the way her pendulous breasts moved under the heavy wool fabric, the way her wide hips swayed despite her deliberately un-swaying manner of walking, the way the prominent roundness of both round cheeks of her buttocks were clearly visible when she turned toward the blackboard, visible even through the heavy layers of corduroy and wool and god knew what else.
I was aware that her large, fleshy curvature was the very kind of body type that is categorically rejected by most male-brained standards of beauty. But I understood even then, at some level, how ironic and self-defeating a judgment that was, given the potential for soft and encompassing pleasure that such a body might offer. I was enamoured of the way her pillowed flesh moved and strained against various points of her armored clothing, straining to announce her curves through her own attempt to silence them. I was fascinated with her attempts to hide her Femaleness – or, more to the point, with the refusal of her Femaleness to remain hidden. Now, as then, I wanted to peek at what I thought – think – might be something like truth: Femaleness, refusing to be fenced in.
In the first minutes of that first day of class, I wondered hopefully whether this fleshly, gray, bespectacled, defensively dressed woman was my new Mrs. McCormick, papers held in front of her chest, demurely hiding herself from me, but only for my own good – and only for now.
I was disabused of this notion minutes later, when she glanced up at the class, her gaze pausing at me and at the other male in the room, seemingly filing us both away somewhere, and then looking beyond us, to the core of our female classmates, and saying mildly: ``We’re going to open our discussion this semester with a two-part premise: One, heterosexual intercourse is, by definition, rape; and, two, that men who engage in heterosexual intercourse are, by definition, rapists.’’
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SWORN TESTIMONY
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING
SEN. MADIGAN: Mister Alvin, in your book, you repeatedly quote from the writing of Steinem and Dworkin and MacKinnon and other femininst thinkers. You seem to be implying some kind of . . . some kind of philosophical connection there. Would you agree?
MR. ALVIN: I don’t know that I’d claim a `philosophical connection.’ I admire their work.
SEN. MADIGAN: Do you believe that admiration is mutual?
MR. ALVIN: I’d guess not.
SEN. MADIGAN: Isn’t it true that Ms. Steinem recently called your book a, quote, `cultural malignancy’?
MR. ALVIN: I believe the phrase was, `pathetic cultural malignancy.’
SEN. MADIGAN: And yet you persist in this bizarre self-delusion that you have one single solitary thing in common with her?
MR. ALVIN: Well, we both think an awful lot about women. There’s that.
c:/mydocs/bennybackground
Benny’s was a converted pool hall, and looked like one, all dark corners and lingering smoke. The dancers didn’t have a real stage. They danced, to the meandering hard-rock ballads popular at the time, in a central area of the floor, a place where the pool tables might once have been. They stripped completely, and each act invariably ended with the dancer lying on her back, grabbing her ankles and pulling her legs open wide, then holding the pose for a moment, both her mouth and her vagina smiling at the crowd. The first hundred times or so that I saw this, I needed to go immediately into one of the graffiti-covered red-metal stalls of the bathroom. The sight of a woman willingly unveiling her gynecological secrets was so intensely erotic to me as to be almost unbearable. Afterward, my mind finally clear, I would sit at the bar and have a coke, watching one or two more dancers’ vaginas smile, before I walked home, quickly, lest the images in my mind lose their sharpness before I slipped into bed.
The Benny’s thing was nightly for the first six months of my college career. My finances suffered (it was two dollars to get into Benny’s, and with tips I would spend ten – making my habit at least as expensive as that of my cannabis-addicted college roommate), as did my classes. Looking back on it now, I should have been able to do the math and predict from the first week that I wouldn’t last to my sophomore year. There are only so many hours in a day, when half of them are spent in such a patently non-academic activity, academics will falter.
As for a social life, I didn’t have one, unless you count worshipping the vaginas of paid strippers. I didn’t know how to make male friends, nor care to, and the women in college were even more mysterious to me than they’d been in high school. Although I was becoming as familiar with female anatomy as your average obstetrician, that sexual part of the female mind – the part I wanted to see more than anything I could plainly view at Benny’s – still eluded me.
c:/notes/mccormick/breasts
I thought often during this time about Mrs. McCormick, that freckled and beautiful study in sexual contradiction: A godly, motherly Catholic school teacher, displaying the shape of her breasts for an eleven-year-old boy.
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SWORN TESTIMONY
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING
SEN. MADIGAN: You know what I think, Mister Alvin? I think this whole nod toward feminism in your book is a masquerade. It’s lipstick on a pig. Your book is pornography, plain and simple, and you’re dressing it up with this notion of some kind of feminist underpinning in a transparent attempt to make it appear to be something more than smut.
MISTER ALVIN: If you say so.
SEN. MADIGAN: You don’t deny it?
MISTER ALVIN: That it’s smut? No, I don’t deny it. I’d say it’s obviously smut. By definition.
SEN. MADIGAN: Mister Alvin –
MR. ALVIN: How do the lawyers put it? Prima facia.
SEN. MADIGAN: I’m sure we’re all very impressed by your legal expertise, Mister Alvin. But what I’m asking you is, aren’t you just using this masquerade of feminist camaraderie as a device to increase sales of this pornographic book?
MISTER ALVIN: I never thought about it that way. I couldn’t care less about sales.
SEN. MADIGAN: (inaudible)
MS. SCHUSTER: Mister Chairman, I have to object again.
CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Senator Madigan, please refrain from snickering at the witness.
SEN. MADIGAN: Mister Alvin, are you really going to deny that this whole controversy over feminism and pornography hasn’t boosted sales of your book?
MISTER ALVIN: Not as much as these hearings have, Senator.
c:/notes/adamnotes/femclass
I wasn’t a good student in college. From the beginning, I missed most of my classes. But I always made sure never to miss Feminist Theory in Modern Culture, though I clearly was unwelcomed there. It quickly become apparent that it wasn’t just the heavy, sweater-encased instructor who resented my presence, but also most of my female classmates, whose impassioned debate with one another never included me, whose only acknowledgment of my presence was the occasional cool sideways glance. It did bother me; I hate it when women don’t like me. But I found the class discussions riveting, and relevant in ways that none of my other classes were. If Benny’s was nightly giving me glimpses of hidden places in the female body, Feminist Theory in Modern Culture was taking me into hidden places in the female mind – places that very specifically weren’t put there for the gratification of men. You know me, reader. Is it such a surprise that that’s where I most wanted to go?
c:/ftmc34
I fantasized sometimes about my heavy bespectacled Feminist Theory in Modern Culture instructor. As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, I outlined one of those fantasies in the book. Yes, it’s that much-discussed scene in chapter six, about the obese Catholic church secretary who seduces
c:/desktop/documents/definitions44
Merriam-Webster.com
Main Entry: but·tock – Pronunciation: be-tək. Also – täk. Function: noun. Etymology: Middle English. Date: 14th century.
1: the back of a hip that forms one of the fleshy parts on which a person sits. (plural: buttocks.)
a: the seat of the body.
b: rump.
c: butt.
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The heavy bespectacled philosophy instructor was an adherent of Andrea Dworkin, the feminist author who was at that time leading a national debate over whether pornography was a violation of women’s civil rights. The Dworkin readings she assigned were brutal in their judgment of society, pornography, sex, and, especially, men.
Whenever the class discussed the readings, I could feel my classmates watching me, waiting, I suppose, for an argument or a tantrum or a roll of the eyes. There were times I felt I should comply, should play the angry male role – some of them seemed very much to want that from me – but I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it. The truth is, I didn’t find as much dislike from the readings as I clearly was expected to. I’d browsed more than my share of commercial pornography back then, before I became immune to it and gave it up (more on that later), and Dworkin’s criticisms of pornography didn’t seem to be describing any pornography I’d ever seen. Her indictment of men as the root of societal evil certainly wasn’t going to get any argument from me.
Also, I liked her artful descriptions of the physiological mechanics of sex, though I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to.
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Dworkin described sexual intercourse like this: ``Unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it.’’ And: ``The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart.’’ And: `` She is opened up.’’ There was a funereal, wounded silence in class as the heavy bespectacled philosophy instructor read aloud from that chapter, as if she were reading accounts of the Holocaust or something, but I had to cross my legs.
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DeXtr: ok I liked the manuscript. Question tho:
DeXtr: why u spend a whole chptr on that 1 woman – `preppy woman’’,
DeXtr: showing her kitty in the strp club?
Gem4U: wondred that too alv – u wrote like TONS about it. Blah blah blah
Alvn: it’s a book about the nature of modern erotica
Alvn: she was symbolic of that change
Gem4U: just flashing some t&p to a bunch of guys? Big deal
Amy69: true, alv. u can see that any time online.
Alvn: but u couldn’t see it any time back then. That’s the point.
Alvn: this was forshadowing how internet would change erotica
Alvn: with regular people, real women, not phony models
Mikey000: I dn;t understand what the strip club had to do w. the internet
Mikey000: or with that preppy woman
Alvn: no, no, it wasn’t about the internet per se.
Alvn: it was forshadowing `civilian’ exhibitionism,
Alvn: which has changed erotica
Alvn: even as the internet has changed erotica – with civilians
MinniMous: didn’t this strip-club thing happen to you in the 80s?
Alvn: yes.
MinniMous: people werent really on the internet in the 80s were they?
Alvn: **sigh**
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I did, in fact, find some comfort in the Dworkin readings, particularly in their re-definition of sexual intercourse. I’d already determined, from my one brief, clumsy high school experiment with that particular activity, that it wasn’t going to be the iconic center of my Inner Life that it was suppose to be. My ensuing obsession with all things female – Mrs. McCormick’s Catholic school tour of her breasts, Mindy’s monologues about her periods, the unveiling of the Benny’s strippers – seemed to encompass everything but actual intercourse.
My own ambivalence toward that particular activity haunted me during this time, haunted me in a deep, fundamental, what’s-wrong-with-me? kind of way. And now, here, suddenly, was this bona fide feminist philosopher, defining intercourse – this thing that I didn’t crave as much as I was supposed to – as the physiological equivalent of a military invasion. I felt vindicated.
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Gem4U: alv I’ll show u a
Gem4U: anytime u want
Mikey000: maybe you should have her fuck some of the customers?
Amy69: yeah that might make it hotter.
Alvn: u guys dont understand anything about literature
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``Entry, penetration, occupation,’’ is how Dworkin describes intercourse at one point in the readings. As the heavy be-sweatered instructor read that passage aloud, all eyes in class were upon me, just daring me to challenge this Nuremburg-like indictment.
But I was pondering an extension of the metaphor: What if I didn’t want to be an invader? What if I just wanted to be a tourist?
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. . . . You’ll keep my secrets, won’t you, Adam-ski? Sometimes I still can’t believe all the stuff I told you!! What is it about you that always made me want to tell you things I shouldn’t?? It was like, whenever I started talking to you, I couldn’t stop myself! How did you do that? Maybe you can find a way to make a living out of that talent some day, though I hate to think about how (haha).
Anyway, I guess I ruined any illusions you had about us girls being these nice, clean, smooth, hairless creatures, hmm? (Specially the `hairless’ part, ar ar. Boy, talk about telling you too much!!) . . .
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Like most people, I didn’t go to college intending to fail it. I had literary ambition once. During my one college year, despite all the vagina-gazing that was occupying my brain, I still fancied myself a potential serious writer. I wrote on a little electric typewriter in my dorm room. After my Depression-era novel sputtered and died, I took a shot at science fiction. I still think I could be good at that, if only my characters would keep their clothes on. I have a knack for imagining times and places that have never been, probably the result of all those countless hours I’ve spent cavorting through the playground of my Inner Life. Science fiction was a step down from my earlier literary aspirations, true, but there are serious people in the science-fiction genre. Think Kurt Vonnegut, I told myself; think Ray Bradbury. Yes, I could envision saying proudly, ``I write science fiction – relevant science fiction.’’
I’ve written a couple dozen science fiction stories over the years. One was entitled ``Martian Summer,’’ about a crew of astronauts who land on Mars and discover proof of the non-existence of God. It was to be a serious allegorical study of modern humanity’s encouraging evolution away from religion, with the destruction of Earth (by religious fanatics) clearing the way, symbolically, for secular humanity’s rebirth on the Mars-stranded ship. To facilitate this rebirth, the two-dozen women in the crew agree to pro-create with their one male crewmate. (All the other men in the crew were killed in the crash-landing. Go figure.) That part started out as a minor subplot, but in the end, the pro-creation scenes ended up consuming most of the story.
I also wrote a piece called ``Kansas,’’ about an Earth man who is plucked up by aliens (from the planet Areola) and flown around the galaxy for a few years, then is taken back home and re-inserted into human society so the aliens can study his interactions there. The idea of the story was to examine all the various ways in which we humans interact, looking at it from the uninitiated point of view of an alien culture. But by the time I finished writing it, the only interaction the aliens were interested in studying was sexual intercourse. (I sent it to the magazine Asimov’s Science Fiction, which sent me back a note declining to publish it and requesting that I refrain from sending any future stories to them.)
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My longest and most ambitious science fiction story was entitled ``The Nudge,’’ about a man (Simon, I called him) who wakes up one morning and discovers he has the ability to reach into people’s minds and subtly affect their actions. He determines that all he is really doing is unlocking people’s hidden selves; he’s ``nudging’’ them, in effect, toward directions they might already be inclined to go, if not for the restrictions of civilization. The metaphorical possibilities were limitless. Think about it: What might employees everywhere be saying to their bosses if they suddenly found they couldn’t hold their tongues? What if we all followed our first impulse when another driver cuts us off? When you get right down to it, isn’t the civility of society little more than a thin veneer of control over the chaos of our most base impulses? And what if there was one mischievous person out there named Simon (as in, ``Simon Says’’ – get it?) who could strip away that veneer with a mere thought?
I was really excited about this one. I had visions of write-ups in Esquire and The New Yorker and The New York Times (all of which have, now, written about
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SWORN TESTIMONY
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING
SEN. RADOGNO: Do you believe sex can be an addiction, like, say, cigarettes or alcohol?
MR. ALVIN: I’m not a psychologist, Senator. I don’t know.
SEN. RADOGNO: You’re not a psychologist, but you’re certainly an expert on the subject of sex. Or at least on the subject of writing about sex. And in your book, you describe, over and over again, various characters who act as if sex is an addiction to them, something they can’t stop doing, even when it starts damaging their lives. Isn’t that true?
MR. ALVIN: You understand that these characters are fictional, right, Senator?
CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Mister Alvin, please answer the question.
MR. ALVIN: I don’t know if sex is addictive, Senator. And if it is, I’m having trouble imagining where you’ll put the warning label.
(LAUGHTER IN THE CHAMBER)
SEN. RADOGNO: Mister Chairman!
CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Order! . . .
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It wasn’t until long after Feminist Theory in Modern Culture (and after I wrote Alvin) that it occurred to me that there was something ethically wrong, in a gender-power sense, with even harboring my fantasies of the heavy bespectacled philosophy instructor, let alone writing about it. This realization came to me more than a decade after that semester was over. It sometimes takes awhile for lessons to sink in with me.
In my defense, I still believed at the time that all fantasy was, by definition, harmless. (This was long before Congress opened my eyes on that issue.) And remember, I did construct the fantasy – in my mind and, later, in the book – to adhere to what I considered to be respectful boundaries. I didn’t even enter her, as you’ll recall, neither in the book nor in the initial fantasy (when the Dworkin readings were still fresh in my mind), but rather I let her whole body settle over me like some pink fleshy cloud of fog, until I finally came, shuddering, within the deep crease between her wide soft belly and the underside of her big low breast.
Still, it’s become clear to me lately that she might very likely define even that Inner Life activity as a form of, well, rape. I could almost picture her scholarly take on it, how a part of her – if only her image, in my mind – was being appropriated, sexually, without her knowledge or consent, and what that meant in terms of the power dynamic between us.
I don’t believe (even now, with all that’s happened) that a person needs the explicit, stated permission of another person to ethically, legitimately find pleasure in thoughts of that person. But at some point I started to understand that the inverse was perhaps true – that if, in fact, another person very clearly wouldn’t, under any hypothetical circumstance, ever in a million years, consent to such a fantasy – if that consent wasn’t something that was even theoretically possible – then the fantasizer has an ethical obligation to leave the fantasizee alone and find a more willing (or at least hypothetically willing) fantasizational partner. Does that make sense?
Anyway, if she’s out there now, and if she’s read Alvin (I’m willing to bet it’s ended up on her syllabus, and not in a good way), and if she recognized herself there, slowly setting her grapefruit-sized nipples down against my prone body, I would at this point ask her forgiveness.
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Alvn: how does darrin feel about the subject?
MinniMous: i dont think he as a single opinion on it
MinniMous: (if he does, he hasn’t shared it wth me)
Alvn: thats amazing to me – how could he not have an opinion?
Amy69: my husband has a strong opinion –
Amy69: but difrent than yours, Alvin. (sorry)
Alvn: really. so he wants it . . . Um . . . ?
Amy69: yep. totally shaved.
Alvn: ug. And you do it for him?
Amy69: seems like a small price to pay for bedtime attention
MinniMous: i think if I shaved mine bald
MinniMous: and walked into the bedroom and dropped my pants
MinniMous: and said `see anything different?’
MinniMous: darrin wuld ask if I’d bought new shoes
c:/notes/bennysstuff
It was early in my one college year, before I dropped out, that I finally gazed wholly, for the first time, at a female Inner Life unveiled.
It was a night at Benny’s like any other – strippers stripping in the central area of the floor, shaking their breasts, opening their thighs, sitting half-naked at the bar between their dances, talking with patrons. I had watched four of the strippers expose their now-familiar anatomies, and I was finishing my coke and getting ready to leave, when four people walked in, three men and a woman – a woman!
Of course, fully-clothed women walked into and out of Benny’s all the time – the strippers didn’t arrive naked, after all, and then there were the waitresses – but this woman clearly wasn’t a stripper or a waitress. She, like the three men with her, was around forty, casually but well-dressed, with an air that said she was educated and not from around here. She and the three men with her appeared to be what at one time had been called ``yuppies,’’ young professional something-or-others, probably from the city, venturing out to a seedy rural strip club for a little adventure. She was apparently with one of them, a tall red-headed guy in khakis, and the other two were pals of some sort.
She wore her brown hair in a short, expensive haircut, and had on a light, loose sweater and new-looking jeans with shiny brown loafers. She weighed 130 pounds, maybe a shade more, with breasts a little small and hips a little wide for her frame, but all within the parameters to make her what most men would call attractive. Her nose was straight in an aristocratic way, her eyes were brown, and her eyebrows notably dark – signaling, I knew, a notably lush garden between her legs.
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SWORN TESTIMONY
SENATE AD-HOC SUB-COMMITTEE ON ELECTRONIC PORNOGRAPHY,
CHAIRMAN SEN. EDWIN REESE, PRESIDING
SEN. RADOGNO: . . . You’re familiar with the issue, on college campuses, of `binge drinking’?
MR. ALVIN: I don’t drink.
SEN. RADOGNO: Okay, but I’m making a broader point here –
MR. ALVIN: . . . I mean, I don’t have anything against drinking, or anything. It’s just never held my interest . . .
SEN. RADOGNO: Yes, that’s fine. My point is --
MR. ALVIN: I don’t really watch television, either.
CHAIRMAN SEN. REESE: Mister Alvin, please.
SEN. RADOGNO: My point is, there is a typical phenomenon, a pattern, in which people – especially young people – once they have some freedom for the first time, tend to over-indulge on things. Like alcohol. Or drugs. Or, perhaps, sex.
MS. SCHUSTER: Mister Chairman, I have to ask where the Senator is going with this?
SEN. RADOGNO: I’m merely pointing out –
MS. SCHUSTER: Are you suggesting my client is some kind of . . . pusher . . . Senator?
SEN. RADOGNO: I’m merely pointing out that some people – young people, especially – can fall into addictions to various things, things that can damage their lives. And in this country today, what young people are being greeted with, more and more, when they get to college, is your book, sir . . .
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A word about pubic hair: When I began my nightly forays to Benny’s, we were at the front end of a disturbing ``shaving’’ trend among women who expose their bodies for a living, a trend that has gotten worse at this writing. Look at old copies of men’s magazines from the 1970s and 80s, and the thing that immediately stands out are the thick, lush, dark, warm, unruly, jungle-like bushes of hair between women’s legs. They would just let it grow, even those who routinely showed their vaginas to mass audiences. But vaginal fashions are like clothing fashions: They change, and not always for the better. By the time I was in college, the women at Benny’s, like the women in Playboy and Penthouse by that time, were starting to wear their pubic hair trimmed short, trimmed to specific shapes – hearts, arrows, flames – or just sculpted into thin, unnatural strips.
It has gotten worse today, to the point that the professional women who pose in commercial pornography are practically – or often completely – bald between the legs. I hate this, and I hope you do, too. Pubic hair is part of what makes a woman a woman, as opposed to a girl. What could possibly be sexually interesting about a bald vagina? Why would any woman who is fully (beautifully, lavishly) developed go out of her way to make herself appear less so? Why turn wine into grape juice? In my opinion, men who are sexually aroused by bald vaginas should be viewed as potential child abusers.
My point is, the trend among professional women toward shaving is part of what initially drove me, much later, to seek images of non-professional women on the Internet who, for whatever reason, are less likely to treat their pubic hair like cheap shrubbery. (I’m hoping, by the way, that the recent clothing fashion trend among women toward dressing as if they just stepped out of 1976 will, ultimately, extend to vaginal fashions.)
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All eyes turned to the yuppie woman when she and her male friends walked in, and the other men in the room – taking in her plain body, her subtle makeup, the red-faced jittery smile on her face as she peered around the dingy room – quickly determined that this woman was a civilian, in the way the waitresses were civilians. This woman, it was clear from the first moment, wasn’t here to take off her clothes, so the men in the room returned their attention to those who were.
My reaction was completely different. What was this civilian doing here, I wondered? Was this their idea of a ``date,’’ a night out with her male friends, the way other people might go in a group to dinner or a play? What was the story? I couldn’t take my eyes off this plain, nervous yuppie woman. I sat back down at the bar and ordered another coke, then settled in to watch them from across the room as they drank, talked and laughed.
As the evening wore on, she would occasionally glance over at the central area of the floor, where the strippers stripped, and would laugh her embarrassed laugh, cover her eyes, shake her head. She and her friends had that look that highly educated people get when they’re out of their element; that arrogant, amused demeanor that says they are studying their primitive surroundings the way an anthropologist studies apes, except they’re doing it for laughs.
In this case, though, one of the apes was studying back. I stared, surreptitiously, for more than an hour, unable to believe my luck, internally giddy with the opportunity to see these two distinct forms of femininity – strippers and non-strippers – collide.
After an hour, a blonde stripper, apparently bored, strutted topless over to the yuppie woman’s table, shaking her medically enhanced breasts and smiling wide. The yuppie woman laughed and held up both index fingers in the sign of a crucifix, as if warding off a vampire, then laughed again, and playfully, with flourish, stuck a dollar bill into the blonde stripper’s g-string while her male friends giggled and clapped. The stripper then bent over and gave the woman a quick peck on the lips. The woman pecked back, then covered her face and laughed some more.
Most of the patrons viewed this as a minor distraction from the real show. But seeing it, I almost lost it there at the bar, fully clothed and touching nothing but my glass.
The kiss sealed it: I would stay until they were gone, lest anything like that happen again. I watched them for another hour as they drank and laughed, the yuppie woman looking over at the floor every now and then and, apparently, commenting to her friends about the women there, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
During one dance by a particularly busty stripper, the yuppie woman laughed with amazement – apparently at the woman’s endowments – and then said something to her male friends while holding both her hands out in front of her own breasts, as if cradling much larger ones than she had.
c:/notes/yppywoman
If only I could have heard what she said. I’ve speculated many times, based on her hand gestures and her facial expressions. It might have been, ``God, will you look at those things?’’ Or, ``You think those things are real?’’ Or maybe, addressing the man who was apparently her boyfriend or husband: ``Hey, (insert male name), how would you like me with those?’’
c:/desktop/documents/mindyyearbook68
. . . You’re the only guy I was able to tell that to, adamski. And this is going to sound weird, but you’re the only guy I’ve ever been able to talk to about, well, um, yea, you know – those. (fine, I’ll just write it: boobs! boobs boobs BOOBS!) It must have seemed to you like that’s all I ever talked about! I guess you could probably write a book about them at this point – ``The History of Mindy’s Breasts’’. Sorry. With most guys, I’m trying to change the subject and keep their eyes from looking there, but with you, I just felt comfortable talking about it (them) (haha). I hope you didn’t mind too much, Adam-ski. I’m going to miss having you as my sounding board on that topic (I mean, those topics, ar ar, ok I’ll stop now). . . .
c:/windows/mydocs/newdocs/yuppie-w
After another hour, the four yuppies pushed back their chairs and rose to leave, all four of them wobbling a bit (they had been ordering drinks at a respectable pace all night). Disappointed, I drained my coke at the bar on the other side of the room and stood up to go home.
But a moment later, I was sitting again, watching.
I remember the whole sequence of events with perfect clarity, in part because I’ve replayed it in my mind so many times over the years since.
The four of them were almost to the door when the medically enhanced blonde stripper, the one who had earlier kissed the yuppie woman, approached them, topless and smiling. All four of them talked to her breasts. The stripper laughed at something one of the men said, and she said something back, then gestured toward the yuppie woman and said something else. The yuppie woman laughed, hard, and shook her head ``no,’’ but the stripper – also laughing – was getting insistent.
There was a dance just ending in the middle of the floor, from a red-haired stripper with pale skin and tightly trimmed orange pubic hair , and I believe I was, at that point, the only patron watching the more subtle show in progress near the door. The yuppie woman’s three male friends were now egging her on toward something, and she was still laughing and shaking her head. The blonde stripper stepped back and began jiggling her own naked breasts, and I distinctly heard her say to the yuppie woman: ``Aw, c’mon!’’
At that, the yuppie woman looked down at her own fully clothed breasts, laughed, and then bounced on the balls of her feet three times, producing a little jiggle under her sweater. She laughed again, and the men with her laughed and clapped.
My erection at this point was straining so hard against the insides of my jeans that I thought I might injure myself.
The dance in the middle of the floor ended, and the red-haired stripper, totally nude, picked up her a few stray dollar bills off the floor and wandered over to the doorway. The blonde stripper was still goading the yuppie woman toward something, and the red-haired stripper joined in. The yuppie woman kept laughing, shaking her head, covering her face.
The other patrons now were looking over, sensing, in their clumsy male-brained way, something sexual happening. It was then that the blonde stripper turned to the crowd and said, loudly: ``Okay, everyone look over here for a second,’’ then stepped aside so everyone could see the yuppie woman standing there.
The yuppie woman was laughing so hard that she seemed not to be breathing properly, as the red-haired stripper said, loudly: ``C’mon, honey, let’s see ’em!’’
c:/mydocuments/wikinotes/wikipedia/Madonna-whore
. . . According to Freudian psychology, such a man will often court women with qualities of his mother, hoping to fulfill a need for intimacy he experienced in childhood. Often, the wife begins to be seen as mother to the husband—a "Madonna" figure—and thus not a possible object of sexual attraction. For this reason, in the mind of the sufferer, love and sex cannot be mixed, and the man is reluctant to have sexual relations with his wife, for that, he thinks unconsciously, would be as incest. He will reserve sexuality for "bad" or "dirty" women, and will not develop "normal" feelings of love in these sexual relationships.
c:/windows/mydocs/newdocs/yuppie-w2
It was at that moment that the men in Benny’s that night suddenly understood for the first time (cretins!) what was going on with the yuppie woman. They started calling out, ``Do it!’’ and ``Take it off!’’ and ``Show your tits!’’ They were, as men so often are on matters of sex, like unthinking dogs attacking food, wolfing it down in chunks, too fast and frantic to taste any of it. The yuppie woman was still laughing, looking around the room at the hooting men, indecision in her eyes. Her boyfriend was smiling an I’m-trying-to-be-supportive smile, but he was clearly not at all sure about this. (Funny, he had appeared to be totally in favor of public nudity earlier in the evening, when it involved women other than his girlfriend.)
The yuppie woman took one more look at the blonde stripper, as if for support, and the stripper responded by pretending she had a top on, and pretending to lift it with both hands.
The yuppie woman laughed yet again, faced the crowd, grabbed her sweater at her waist, and – as my mouth fell open in astonishment – she slowly raised it.
c:/notation/flsher
You have to remember something: This was long before Internet culture made a virtually ubiquitous sight out of public breast-baring by regular women.
Of course, even then, there was no shortage of visible breasts out there – at strip clubs, in magazines, on videotaped films – but those images were, almost always, of paid professionals, women who showed their breasts for the same reason that waitresses served food: it was a key component of the job description. This was long before you could tap a few keys at a machine in your living room and see the gleefully offered breasts of countless women who look like – who, in fact, are – just like the women you see in your everyday life, doing it for myriad reasons of their own.
I suppose that, had I crossed paths with the stripping yuppie woman years later than I did, after those exhibitionist cultural floodgates had already opened, it wouldn’t have had such a tectonic effect on me. She might have been just another float in the endless parade of naked civilian flesh that is the reason so many people browse the Internet, the reason so many fortunes are made there – the reason (let’s be honest) that you’ve bought this book.
I didn’t know then that women, many of them, wanted to take off their clothes for us. There was really no way to know that before. The yuppie woman was my earliest clue to it. That’s the reason, I suppose, that I still wake up some nights hard as granite, remembering her tense and breathless smile.
c:/misc/flashernotes/wiki/notes7
Exhibitionism, known variously as flashing, apodysophilia and Lady Godiva syndrome,[1] is the psychological need and pattern of behavior involving the exposure of parts of the body to another person with a tendency toward an extravagant, usually at least partially sexually inspired behavior to attract the attention of another in an open display of bare "private parts" — i.e., parts of the human body which would otherwise be left covered under clothing in nearly all other cultural circumstances.
A research team asked a sample of 185 exhibitionists, “How would you have preferred a person to react if you were to expose your privates to him or her?” The most common response was “Would want to have sexual intercourse” (35.1%), followed by “No reaction necessary at all” (19.5%), “To show their privates also” (15.1%), “Admiration” (14.1%), and “Any reaction” (11.9%). Only very few exhibitionists chose “Anger and disgust” (3.8%) or “Fear” (0.5).[4]
c:/windows/mydocs/newdocs/yuppie-r
From my seat at the bar I could see her navel, then her rib-cage. When she got to her bra – pink and shiny, with a floral design on it – she paused there.
The mindless male hooting in the room rose an octave.
A moment later, the yuppie woman hooked her fingers under the bra and lifted, peeling the sweater and bra up to her chin in one smooth motion. Then she stood there, laughing soundlessly amid the noise, her small, pink-capped breasts exposed to at least fifty strangers. They were angular breasts, more oval than round, with the flesh rising a bit around the tips. Each areola was puffy, like a cushy pink lifejacket encircling each erect nipple. Such nipples, I had learned from my scant sexual experiences, were more sensitive than nipples encircled by flat, untextured areolas (areoli?).
She stood there like that, breasts basking in the smoky air, for probably three seconds – three seconds that have lasted fourteen years, for me – before bringing her sweater back down like a slamming door, then laughing amid the applause.
c:/notes/nudge-clrnce
``What would you do if you could influence people with your mind?’’ I asked Clarence, not too long ago, while we were both sorting the mail.
``What makes you think I can’t influence people with my mind?’’ he answered.
``No, I mean if you could control their minds – or just, well, nudge them toward doing things they wouldn’t normally do?’’
``Well, let’s see. There’s this young, beautiful guy on the fourth floor – He laughed, and then said, ``No, seriously, I think I’d start with the
``Um. The
``Yes. I’d force the leaders of
``Okay,’’ I said, ``That’s great, but I mean, what would you do in your everyday life? How you make the people around you act?’’
``Hmm. Well, obviously, I’d want them to be nicer to me. And to each other. I’d eliminate racism. I’d make people in suits be nicer to the panhandlers, and give them more money. I think I’d go over to the state Republican headquarters, on
``I dunno,’’ I said. ``Yeah, I might make people be nicer.’’
Clarence looked hard at me for a moment, and then said: ``You’d make women take off their clothes, wouldn’t you?’’
``No!’’ I scoffed.
``You would! You’d totally make them all strip! That’s what this is all about!’’
``No!’’ I insisted, looking furtively around the mail room. ``Jeez, Clarence, keep it down!’’
``God, Adam, you’re such a pervert!’’
c:/windows/mydocs/bennys-notes
The blonde stripper, energized by her little victory, aimed at a bigger one. As the yuppie woman continued laughing her embarrassed laugh, the stripper faced her, put her own hands on either side of her own g-string, framing the small triangle of fabric like it was a picture, and said, in a loud, high-pitched voice: ``Meee-ooow!’’
The crowd, as they say, went wild. The yuppie woman laughed her hardest laugh yet, so hard that she doubled over with it, holding up her hands and shaking her head ``no’’. The blonde stripper smiled wide and nodded, ``yes,’’ then turned to face the crowd and – glancing once more to make sure the yuppie woman was watching – slowly peeled her g-string down to mid-thigh, revealing her tightly trimmed brown-haired vagina. The red-haired stripper, already naked, stepped next to the blonde-haired one. They stood there side-by-side for the crowd, running their fingers along their vaginas – brown pubic hair standing next to orange – and both looked at the yuppie woman, who was now laughing so hard I thought she might faint.
c:/wikipedia/pubichair/wiki/ruskin
. . . It has been alleged that John Ruskin, the famous author, artist, and art critic, was apparently accustomed only to the hairless nudes portrayed unrealistically in art, never having seen a naked woman before his wedding night. He was so shocked by his discovery of his wife Effie’s pubic hair that he rejected her, thinking her freakish and deformed, according to his biographer. . . . ``Ruskin had it [the marriage] annulled because he was horrified to behold upon his bride a thatch of hair, rough and wild . . . He thought her a monster.’’[1]
c:/mydocumentsnotes/yppiewoman47
The crowd was yelling so loud (``Puss-see! Puss-see!’’) that I could no longer make out anything the strippers were saying to the yuppie woman, but they continued talking to her, goading her. Her graceless red-haired boyfriend smiled a panicked smile and glanced at the door, then tried to smile some more. He didn’t want to be unreasonable about this or anything, he just didn’t like the idea of his yuppie girlfriend’s vagina exposed to a roomful of uneducated strip-club patrons – that kind of activity was for a different type of woman, after all – but he had become blessedly irrelevant by this point. The yuppie woman’s attention was on the two strippers – both stroking their own short-trimmed pubic hair now, and pretending to ``me-ow’’ – and at the brute sound of maleness coming at her in pounding waves. She had a wild, alive look in her eyes that I saw once in someone about the bungee-jump for the first time.
c:/notes/femprof/prosttution
In a whole semester of Feminist Theory in Modern Culture, I spoke up just one time. It was during a discussion about what the heavy bespectacled instructor called ``the sex-trade marketplace,’’ which appeared to encompass not just prostitution but also pornographic magazines, erotic literature, non-erotic but ``male-centered’’ literature, the modeling industry, the music industry, professional sports, and certain aspects of prime-time television. She didn’t mention strip clubs – a notable omission, in my view, given that there was one right up the street from the campus building where class was held – so I raised my hand.
``What about strip clubs?’’ I asked, in a voice that I hoped sounded detached and scholarly.
The heavy instructor, hearing my voice for the first time ever, blinked at me for a moment, then said: ``That’s prostitution. We’ve already covered that.’’
``Prostitution?’’ I asked, again my most scholarly, academic-detachment voice. ``But what about when it’s just stripping? When there’s no sex? That’s a different thing than prostitution, isn’t it?’’
``No,’’ she said, in a tone that left no room for further debate. ``It isn’t.’’
c:/desktop/documents/
. . .
``Lie back,’’ she said. He did.
``Close your eyes,’’ she said. He did.
She lowered her great form over him and he felt the various parts of her settling heavily and warmly onto his prone body. He was unsure which parts they were. The soft embrace around his hips, he thought, must be her inner thighs; surely that was her great bosom now encompassing his face and upper chest. He felt soft flesh ensconce his hard cock, but which soft flesh, he couldn’t know. Her belly? Her thigh? Her arm? Or perhaps the nether-regions between her legs? He lay there, under a hot soft avalanche of flesh, feeling her acres of skin engulf him.
His cock now found a deep, warm crevice, its embrace luring him toward orgasm. He didn’t know if this crevice was The Crevice, or some other part of her.
``That’s it,
He came, hard, still wondering exactly where it was he was coming, though it was no longer anything more than a mildly intriguing academic question. The roiling, rolling pleasure that shuddered out from his groin and through the rest of his being now made the question irrelevant. He was coming while ensconced in her big, wide, round, soft, beautiful womanhood, coming atop or against or within some hot velvety cove in her multilayered landscape. Where it was, exactly, no longer mattered. He was strolling a broad hot sunny tropical beach that extended as far as the eye could see; he could lay down his towel and lie back his body and let the sun encompass him at any spot in the sand, any spot at all, and feel as good as it was possible to feel . . . .
c:/notes/stripclbnotes12
The yuppie woman laughed one more small, calm laugh, a laugh tinged with finality, as if she had made a decision and that was all there was to say about the matter. Then she was no longer laughing – just smiling, the invincible, icy-calm smile of someone who has crossed a daunting line and found it not to be so daunting after all.
Mrs. McCormick’s smile!, I thought.
She lifted the bottom hem of her sweater, just enough to expose the snap of her jeans, and then she did an amazing thing: She looked up at the room and gave a small movement of her eyebrows, raising them in a bold question. The crowd, again, went wild, but this time it had been her intentional doing, like turning on a switch. It was as if something instinctive had kicked in.
Flushed with power, glacial smile still sitting quietly on her lips, she pulled the sweater back down over the snap, covering it up, and a low, painful moan rose in the room.
Then, after considering the thing a moment, like a trainer deciding what trick the dog should do next, she lifted the hem of the sweater again, and again the crowd exploded at the sight of the snap. She let them stare at it a moment, then, apparently deciding she’d like just a touch more volume, she ran one finger along the denim stitching over the zipper, down the gentle mound of her crotch once and then back up. The sound rose. She liked it – there was no question about that for anyone who looked at her eyes at that moment, as I was doing.
She undid the snap and held it there in her thumb and forefinger, then looked expectantly at the crowd.
The sound was unlike anything I’d heard before or since. Her icy, controlled smile basked in the thunderous noise. (Her graceless boyfriend’s smile, meanwhile, was a faint and impotent echo of itself now, a petrified little curved line on the frozen face of someone whose long-held understanding of an orderly universe has just been shattered. He had been gleefully staring up other women’s vaginas all night, but now his panicked smile said, Oh, god, she’s not really going to do this?)
Now the yuppie woman – still smiling her small, perfect smile – pulled open her zipper (more volume from the crowd), hooked her thumbs on either side of her waist (still more volume) and pushed downward (a brief, sudden lull, followed by an explosion of sound). Jeans and panties (light purple) were suddenly bunched just above at her knees.
I had been right about the quantity of her jet-black triangle of unshaven pubic hair: It was curled there between her legs like a soft, sleeping cat, thick and luxurious. She now looked down at her own vagina, then looked back up, held her arms out to her side, turned in a slow, relaxed circle until she had spun all the way around, allowing the crowd a good ten seconds to understand it, before pulling her pants back up – casually, no hurry, like getting dressed in the morning.
Then, vagina tucked safety back in its bed, she gave a little wave to the room, blew a kiss to the blonde stripper, and turned to walk out the door at her own speed. Her boyfriend and his two friends lurched awkwardly after her, as if in shock. The crowd had lost all semblance of civilization. Even the strippers were hooting. The yuppie woman, and only the yuppie woman, had controlled the moment. I watched her until the last sliver of light was gone from the edge of the closing door, so I know: That icy-calm smile never left her face.
c:/nomatch
I just now realized something:
Her panties didn’t match her bra. They weren’t a set.
Because she’d had absolutely no notion, as she’d dressed that morning, that she might close the day by undressing for an audience.
Pardon me, I’ll be right back.
c:/notes/alv-trnscrpt106
Alvn: women in the room – any of you ever strip?
JaneyX: i’ll strip for you, alv. taking it off NOW
Alvn: no, strip 4 real, in front of a crowd? like at an amateur nite?
MinniMous: Had a fantasy about it once, when I was in h-school.
MinniMous: Remember I told you about it back then,
Alvn: I still remember it every nite before I go to sleep, min
MinniMous: ar ar
JaneyX: Showed puss? (in the fantazy?)
MinniMous: Yep. And everyone cheered. but I couldn’t do it for real.
Gem4U: i could
MinniMous: surprise surprise
Gem4U: i was in a wet-t contest in daytona once. Won
Mikey000: gem, really?
Gem4U: got great nips – ask
Alvn: She does have great nips
MinniMous: what was it like – all those men staring at yor boobs?
JaneyX: I bet it was a turnon?
Gem4U: sort of
Gem4U: Its just nip. i show nip and these guys go nuts. a little pathetic
Alvn: yes it is.
c:/desktop/ypp-wom3
In the years to come, I fantasized many times about the yuppie woman. I sometimes tried altering the memory – making her go further than she actually had, having her peel her panties off completely, having her lay down and spread her legs and part her vaginal lips for the crowd, having her nuzzle and lick the nipples of the blonde and red-haired strippers, having each of them take one of her small pink-capped breasts into their mouths while she slipped her fingers over her own stiff clitoris in up into her vagina, all with that wicked womanly smile carved into her face – but nothing worked. All my attempts to enhance the memory only diminished it. That one brief, unobstructed view I had gotten of a female Inner Life – a genuine woman, a non-professional, standing naked from navel to knees, arms out, smiling calmly and inviting all assembled to gaze at the plush triangle between her legs, doing it for her own reasons and no one else’s – was perfect, and couldn’t be duplicated or improved upon by me, now matter how many times I unpacked the memory and tinkered with it.
c:/alvnotes/binge
DALLAS (AP) – An Associated Press analysis of federal records found that 157 college-age people, 18 to 23, drank themselves to death in the past seven years.
The analysis found that victims drank themselves well past the point of oblivion, with an average blood-alcohol level of 0.40 percent, or five times the legal limit for driving.
College students on average drink only a little more than adults in a typical week or month, said Sean Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at the
The analysis found freshmen at greatest risk, with 11 of 18 freshmen deaths occurring during the first semester.
c:/notes/adam78
After the yuppie woman, my trips to Benny’s began to drop in frequency, duration and pleasure. The strippers were as bold and naked as ever, but nothing they could do now, no matter how explicit, it seemed, could compete in my mind with the brief images of the yuppie woman’s nipples, her pubis, her smile. In seeing this non-stripper strip, some huge truth had been exposed to me right along with that thick black bush: the female Inner Life was real – far more real than any of the strippers I had gotten to know so well. This, I decided, must be what born-again Christians feel like when they suddenly discover what they think is Truth.
As for my fantasy needs, the bar had been raised again, seemingly right out of reach. Naked professionals suddenly weren’t stirring me like they used to. The realization of this frightened me. I was like the heavy drinker who, after a time, could pound down a six-pack and still not feel the buzz. The constant, non-stop erection that Benny’s had initially guaranteed was suddenly intermittent. I started cutting my visits short, staying just long enough to see if any ``civilian’’ women would drop by again (none did). I began fantasizing about the fully clothed waitresses, the only women in the place whose clitoral hoods I had not seen lifted. I started regularly talking and joking with the familiar dancers, sometimes forgetting – for brief, empty moments – that these were naked women who would show me their internal folds, the loveliest place in the universe, in exchange for something as inconsequential as money. I was no longer focused on their labias; I began to notice, to my astonishment, that their voices alone were becoming my primary fantasy material.
c:/notes/femprof-thoughts41
That, and my thoughts of my heavy bespectacled philosophy instructor, whose persona seemed to reside as far from Benny’s as it was possible to be in every way – except late at night, in my mind, when she lowered her guard and her eyeglasses and her great fat breasts. How she and Benny’s were connected in my Inner Life I wasn’t sure, and I’m still not, except that I came to view them as sentinels standing at opposite ends of an avenue called Femaleness. I wasn’t especially welcomed at one end of the avenue, and the other end was open wide to me (metaphorically speaking – and, well, literally speaking), and yet more and more I found myself drifting away from the latter and toward the former.
c:/desktop/documents/mindyyearbook08
. . . There’s something else, and this is important, Adam-ski: I always thought you were cute. I mean, in that way, you know? I don’t want you to think that just because nothing ever happened between us that I didn’t think you were cute. I did. And if it hadn’t been for our friendship, . . . I mean, you know. Do you know what I mean?
The thing was, it was so important to me, having those talks. I didn’t want to do anything that would have ruined that. You were such a good listener, such a good friend, and I needed that more than I needed another boy groping at my boobs (Ha! I wrote it again!).
So that’s why nothing ever happened. But it’s important to me that you know that I did find you cute. And I know that some very lucky woman out there (probably LOTS of them!) will find you cute also. Another prediction, young Mr. Schakowski: in college, you are going to have women ALL OVER YOU!
c:/notes/mydocs/collegenotes-alv62
Once, at Benny’s, near the end, I got into a casual discussion with one very hippy, low-breasted dancer, while sitting at the bar, about politics (she was a Republican, as I recall, though politics doesn’t interest me). I realized only after she left that she had been dipping her fingers into her g-string and absent-mindedly playing with a few wiry strands of pubic hair during our whole conversation. That I had not noticed this would be roughly equivalent to a cat not noticing a mouse turning sommersaults right in front of him, and it bothered me deeply.
I knew it was time to stop visiting Benny’s when I walked in one night just as one of the familiar dancers – a petite, short-haired brunette with small, stony nipples and a thin, dark strip of public hair trimmed to the shape of an arrow, helpfully pointing the way to her clitoris – was lying naked on floor before a dozen men. I whistled good-naturedly, like the regular patron that I was, and she laughed and called to the crowd: ``Like he doesn’t see it every goddamned night – he’s seen my pussy more than I have!’’ I laughed along with everyone else, but the remark stung for its offhanded accuracy. I left early that night, without visiting the red stalls, and I didn’t return.
c:/notes/mydocs/collegenotes-alv66
My point in relaying all of this is to explain how it was that I ended up writing The Electric Adventures of Alvin, the book that has ruined my life. It was because in college, in my frenzied addiction to Femaleness in all its myriad forms – the jiggling strippers, the scowling professor, the smiling yuppie woman with the pink bra and the purple panties – I developed a tolerance that I would spend years trying to overcome. I finished the feminism course, and I cut myself off from Benny’s, but the damage was done. Not only wasn’t a six-pack enough to get a buzz anymore, but a whole bottle of whiskey wouldn’t do the trick. (Metaphorically speaking. Alcohol, like drugs and, for that matter, food, doesn’t hold my interest one way or the other. My only vice is estrogen.)
I understand now that, in those first months of freedom in college, my Inner Life was severely damaged, exposed to moments that could render all future fantasy inadequate. Years later, married and in love but still searching for something, anything, to recapture the electricity of those moments, I would find solace in a glowing green computer screen, in the secret words of women everywhere – and, finally, in writing that god-forsaken book.
Full Text / All Chapters < > To Chapter 4
I am seeking a literary agent or publisher
Contact: alvinpart2@yahoo.com
