Thoughts on John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
I appear to be having a spot of friends-only lately, but such is life.
I'm reading Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland right now; it's sometimes published under the title Fanny Hill, but the former is the correct title. Basically, it's eighteenth-century British smut, was actually banned at several points in several places, and for its time, it's pretty explicit. To the jaded tastes of this early twenty-first-century critic, who's used to blunter and less delicate words for people's naughty bits, a lot of Cleland's verbiage is reminiscent of bad smutfic written by a thirteen-year-old virgin who's never been kissed but is nonetheless fantasizing about Beautiful Perfect Romantic Sex. Let's face it: there's a limit to the number of ways one can describe wieners and boobies and hoo-has. There's also a limit to the number of ways one can attempt to describe orgasms (as anyone who's had one knows, it's not a sensation that lends itself easily to verbal description).
The other thing that interests me, and perhaps this is my prurient worse nature showing through, is that despite Fanny's life as a prostitute, not much of the sex is really envelope-pushing by today's standards. (Which is rather interesting, because people will do with whores what they won't with someone they're not paying.) There's some sexual activity between two women, which is of interest to me for obvious reasons, and I'm sure that to the readership of Cleland's day this was indeed quite subversive and shocking. (I wonder what was less shocking: the fact that women slept together, or the fact that some things women do together were described in print. The eighteenth century wasn't as prim as it's given credit for.) There's also a scene involving what we would now call group sex, and some voyeurism, but in terms of bizarre fetishes, weirdness, or even a good honest flogging, it's pretty vanilla. That said, it doesn't surprise me that there was a huge controversy and an obscenity scandal surrounding this book; it is, basically, pr0n.
Also, there's a point in the second volume of the novel wherein Fanny, through the vicissitudes of fortune, winds up in a bawdyhouse along with two or three other girls, who are all well-treated by Mrs Coles (the madam) and have their pick of the customers, the right of refusal, etc. (Insert Eddie Murphy as Velvet Jones here: "My hoes are happy hoes! Just listen to them sing!") And this struck me, at first, as almost a feminist spin on prostitution. (I'm not sure whether/when/under what circumstances prostitution can be a feminist act, to be honest; it is a thorny question.) But then, if you consider it more closely, when sex is commodified, it's the person who chooses his or her sexual partner who appears powerful, both sexually and economically. The prostitute, then, is reduced to an object. And in a patriarchal society, such as eighteenth-century England still predominantly was (though they were starting to grapple with that), the person doing the choosing was male. Ultimately, then, I think Cleland's set-up is rather idealized and says more about male desire than about the realities of prostitution at the time; sure, it's tempting to pretend that the girl enjoys her work and hasn't been forced into it (whether literally, physically forced, or through various circumstances deprived of other viable options) and that she'd have sex with you even if you weren't paying her. But it remains, in the final analysis, pretense.
If you want some compare-and-constrast material, you might try reading Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue in conjunction with Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; it's also a novel about a mid-eighteenth-century prostitute in England, but it's darker, grittier, and has a more authentic female perspective.
If, on the other hand, you clicked on the cut hoping that, for once, I would actually talk about my sex life in here, or looking for fap material, you deserved to be confronted with my long, boring digression about eighteenth-century British literature. :D
I'm reading Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland right now; it's sometimes published under the title Fanny Hill, but the former is the correct title. Basically, it's eighteenth-century British smut, was actually banned at several points in several places, and for its time, it's pretty explicit. To the jaded tastes of this early twenty-first-century critic, who's used to blunter and less delicate words for people's naughty bits, a lot of Cleland's verbiage is reminiscent of bad smutfic written by a thirteen-year-old virgin who's never been kissed but is nonetheless fantasizing about Beautiful Perfect Romantic Sex. Let's face it: there's a limit to the number of ways one can describe wieners and boobies and hoo-has. There's also a limit to the number of ways one can attempt to describe orgasms (as anyone who's had one knows, it's not a sensation that lends itself easily to verbal description).
The other thing that interests me, and perhaps this is my prurient worse nature showing through, is that despite Fanny's life as a prostitute, not much of the sex is really envelope-pushing by today's standards. (Which is rather interesting, because people will do with whores what they won't with someone they're not paying.) There's some sexual activity between two women, which is of interest to me for obvious reasons, and I'm sure that to the readership of Cleland's day this was indeed quite subversive and shocking. (I wonder what was less shocking: the fact that women slept together, or the fact that some things women do together were described in print. The eighteenth century wasn't as prim as it's given credit for.) There's also a scene involving what we would now call group sex, and some voyeurism, but in terms of bizarre fetishes, weirdness, or even a good honest flogging, it's pretty vanilla. That said, it doesn't surprise me that there was a huge controversy and an obscenity scandal surrounding this book; it is, basically, pr0n.
Also, there's a point in the second volume of the novel wherein Fanny, through the vicissitudes of fortune, winds up in a bawdyhouse along with two or three other girls, who are all well-treated by Mrs Coles (the madam) and have their pick of the customers, the right of refusal, etc. (Insert Eddie Murphy as Velvet Jones here: "My hoes are happy hoes! Just listen to them sing!") And this struck me, at first, as almost a feminist spin on prostitution. (I'm not sure whether/when/under what circumstances prostitution can be a feminist act, to be honest; it is a thorny question.) But then, if you consider it more closely, when sex is commodified, it's the person who chooses his or her sexual partner who appears powerful, both sexually and economically. The prostitute, then, is reduced to an object. And in a patriarchal society, such as eighteenth-century England still predominantly was (though they were starting to grapple with that), the person doing the choosing was male. Ultimately, then, I think Cleland's set-up is rather idealized and says more about male desire than about the realities of prostitution at the time; sure, it's tempting to pretend that the girl enjoys her work and hasn't been forced into it (whether literally, physically forced, or through various circumstances deprived of other viable options) and that she'd have sex with you even if you weren't paying her. But it remains, in the final analysis, pretense.
If you want some compare-and-constrast material, you might try reading Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue in conjunction with Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure; it's also a novel about a mid-eighteenth-century prostitute in England, but it's darker, grittier, and has a more authentic female perspective.
If, on the other hand, you clicked on the cut hoping that, for once, I would actually talk about my sex life in here, or looking for fap material, you deserved to be confronted with my long, boring digression about eighteenth-century British literature. :D