December 13, 2007
Reading Fanny Hill Aloud in Gotham


“This was really dirty!” exclaimed one student.

“I know!” another chimed in. “I felt naughty reading it!”

“I had no idea that people in the eighteenth century were so…” the student groped for a word. “Kinky!” she finished.

What part of “premiere work of eighteenth-century pornography” threw you off, I asked. Apparently it was the “pornography” part. They just didn’t believe me.

The text in question was, of course, John Clelend’s Fanny Hill. Published in two parts in 1739 and 1740, the book is a messy, chaotic romp in which genres are tangled as limbs; sexual metaphors run the gamut of the military, the mercantile and the scientific; and the petticoated, perfumed, periwigged characters enjoy lesbianism, voyeurism, group sex, homosexuality, and swinger parties, though not in that order and not without a host of fascinating complications.

A scholar, a thinker and a kinkster such as myself finds this novel to be a dirty treasure trove of emerging notions of genre, gender and sexuality. Unquestionably the book is porn-its narrative more or less gives the bildungsroman of sexual pleasure of a young, poor woman who, through fleshy industry aided by an infinitely regenerating virginity, becomes a young, rich whore/wife-and it contains long, lavish and euphemistically described sex scenes. But it’s also a novel of sentiment, and decidedly emo-laden episodes punctuate the titillating bits; the titular heroine, for example, gets pregnant and miscarries, things you don’t expect in a porn. In usual porn, it’s all pleasure, no consequence. Fanny Hill complicates that scenario.

But the novel is more than a strange jostling oscillation between interior and exterior, between mordant flesh and pornotopian fantasy. It’s also a platform for its author to explore, define, and expound his sexual philosophy: rational pleasurism. For Cleland, as for the French libertines on whom he drew promiscuously, sex infused with love is best, but rampant, pleasurable, and polite sex without love was really very good too. Cleland’s text sits firmly in the eighteenth-century wedgie between reason and passion, negotiating the shifty territory wherein the self gets lost, wherein it’s supposed to get lost, but where you always need to recoup it. Experience the pleasure, Cleland’s text exhorts the reader, but don’t become its slave.

Even more, the book dictates the power of the dick, and in its repetitive narration, reifies the power of pure fucking. While the first volume pretty much centers on Fanny’s slow and emo seduction to the wonderful world of heterosexuality, the second volume takes that het desire as a given, and shows the reader what proper pleasure is by giving example upon example of what it is not. And what it is not, the novel tells us, is flagellation, fetish, anal, or homosexuality. What it is, in short, is straight-up heterosexual fucking. And this, as a scholar and a kinkster, interests me mightily.

We, or at least I, have to ask ourselves whence comes the notion that heterosexual fucking is the norm, and the answer, it turns out for a variety of reasons is the eighteenth century.

Clearly, I think this book is the bomb-diggity for a bunch of reasons, and one of them is definitely that I can’t read it without getting all flavors of frisky. It’s just hott. And teaching it is hott. And because the book is hott, because reading and talking about the book is hott, because of its subject matter and because of current politics, men have a hard time teaching it.

Fanny Hill teaches like a dream, I told two of my male colleagues/mentors. Have you taught it? I asked. Each of them looked sheepish and said, “No.”

Afterward, I thought about their sheepy “no,” why they hadn’t taught the book, and why these towers of intellectual power might have to look at their toes when they admitted they hadn’t. I realized that in today’s academy, women professors have more freedom. We aren’t viewed as sexual predators, despite the increasing number of cases of female teachers seducing their male students. While a man teaching porn could seem a flavor not unlike sexual harassment, at least in terms of the loose definition that harassment creates an environment wherein the student feels uncomfortable, a woman teaching porn seems safe.

The equation, however unfairly, goes like this: Man + Porn = Skeevy. However, Woman + Porn = Empowered. In this inequitable culture, for once the chick comes out on top. We have stereotyped the porn dude as a gold-chain-wearing, van-driving, hot-tub-frolicking, young-girl-exploiting skeevster, despite all evidence to the contrary. At the same time, we have embraced the porn chick as an alternative goddess, striding as a colossus through the patriarchy with her radical self-definition, scattering tiny, tiny men in her wake.

Neither stereotype is wholly true, of course. But what is stranger is that even in the sanitized-for-your-protection ivory towers of learning, the stereotypes continue. I can read Fanny Hill aloud, proudly intoning Fanny’s words on seeing one of her lover’s cocks: “I could not, without pleasure, behold…such a breadth of animated ivory, perfectly well turned and fashioned, the proud stiffness of which distended its skin, whose smooth polish and velvet softness might vie with that of the most delicate of our sex….the broad and bluish-casted incarnate of the head and blue serpentines of its veins altogether composed the most striking assemblage of figure and colors in nature; in short, it stood an object of terror and delight.” My male colleagues, however, can’t. At least, not easily.

Which leads me to one last point of eighteenth-century thought. Aphra Behn, poet and playwright, she upon whose grave Virginia Woolf commands us to leave flowers, repeatedly complains in her preface to her 1679 play The Lucky Chance that female authors don’t have the same liberties male authors do. “I would sum up,” Behn asserts, “all your beloved plays, and all the things in them that are passed with such silence by-because they are written by men.” Then she points out, “such masculine strokes in me, must not be allowed.” Behn recognizes her culture’s double standard-men can be bawdy, but if they used the same words, women were just obscene.

A couple hundred years have passed. Women have linguistic freedoms men don’t. Behn might be pleased with the change. Me, I’m not so sure. I’d like to see a culture where everyone can talk about sex. I don’t think I’ll shut up until everyone can.


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