In the third semester of my MFA, I’m writing a long essay on sex as storytelling. If you know my poetry, you know I’m interested in writing sex well, especially as ecstatic experience and divine revelation.
With that in mind, I added William Gass’s On Being Blue to my booklist. At our summer residency in Asheville, several students in my cohort recommended it, and it kept coming up in conversation. I was told, half-jokingly, “You should read it—it’s got a lot of sex in it.” I was intrigued. I loved the title, and the promise of Gass playing with sex and language and color—all these embodied things that seem to get us closer to the sublime.
I made it to the beginning of chapter two before I had to put it down.
What stopped me wasn’t discomfort with erotic content—it was the casual, aggressive misogyny in the depictions of sex. The images were jarring: scenes of rape, sexual violence involving multiple perpetrators, and references to “fucked girls” tossed out in offhand, comical ways. The tone wasn’t condemnatory or even particularly aware of what it was doing. Just women’s bodies, abstracted.
I turned to the front page to look at the publication date—1976—and I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t until eight years later, in 1984 (incidentally the year I was born), that women in all 50 states could legally buy a car without a male signatory. Gass is a white male author working within the literary establishment of his time, and there’s a certain kind of smut characteristic of the 1970s that this work taps into. Filmmakers like Russ Meyer were in the collective consciousness, and women’s bodies were frequently used as common fodder.
It struck me that this wasn’t mentioned when it was being recommended to me at my residency—that this is what writers today still think of as the sex writing canon. As I was reading, I felt a wound opening up in my chest. I have not experienced sexual abuse, but this sexual violence towards women was very clearly aimed at all of us. It is the casualness with which he describes such violence towards my body that hurt me. It’s the casualness that makes it mean.
I searched online to see if anyone had made some similar criticism of this book, and found it fairly lacking, so I might be out on a limb here. But I get triggered every time, even if I’m not surprised, by sexism and racism I encounter in American literature. It can feel like a minefield as a reader. I will be reading, my spirit and heart opened fully to this thing that I adore, and then bam—an explosion—a passage that carries the message that the wholeness I believe about myself is not true. That it is okay to blow my body apart. I then have to deal with the pain and shock of it, and spend my time stitching myself back together.
It seems particularly relevant for me to interrogate my own triggers around this subject because of my essay, and even more because of my upcoming novel. In it, my narrator has a lot of sex, and some scenes might be triggering for others. The novel explores how sex can be empowering for women because it takes back control of this narrative Gass perpetuated. Instead of being fucked, she is the one doing the fucking. But ultimately what my narrator realizes is that being fucked or fucking are both losing games. The real salvation comes from love.
It’s impossible to control others’ triggers. I once was in a session in which a woman was triggered to tears by silent meditation, which for me has literally been a life-saving practice. And yet writing about sex requires a kind of vigilance. Not because I am afraid of the material, but because sex has been used in literature and in life to dehumanize. I hope that the handling of sex in my book serves as a ground for healing rather than separation. May we as writers treat any topic of sensitivity with just that.