Lesbian posture

Just back from seeing The Kids Are All Right, the lovely new American indie hit starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple struggling to deal with the reappearance of sperm donor Mark Ruffalo in their and their children's lives. It's been getting rave reviews all over the place and pretty much lives up to them, in an American indie not much happens but people spend a lot of time talking about it sort of a way. The magic is in the performances. Ruffalo is disarmingly charming as essentially a bit of a clueless jerk, and you can see why everyone falls for him and is disillusioned by him in turn. And Bening and Moore are utterly believable as the lesbian couple who've been together for so long that they're like a pair of old socks - and then like old socks, they start to get holes. Anyway, it's a film well worth seeing. But that isn't the point of this post.

There's an arch reference in the script to lesbian porn casting straight women to pretend to be gay and of course that's exactly what's happened here. Bening and Moore have clearly worked hard on their lesbian-ness (Bening more butch, Moore more femme) which stretches to costume, hairstyles, make-up (or lack thereof) and posture. Posture? Yes posture. Did you know there was a lesbian posture? No, neither did I. I have met many lesbian women in my time, from a paralympic sports coach to a Grace Kelly-lookalike filmmaker, and I have never noticed that they had a particular kind of posture. But I couldn't help but notice that Moore in particular affected a kind of slump-shouldered slouch that seemed to say "Look how I am not interested in traditional feminine ways of holding myself!" Yes, that might just have been the character. Except that I have also been watching the BBC3 lesbian drama 'Lip Service', which is terrible, by the way. Of the three main leads, all are played by straight women, two make no concession whatsoever in appearance or body language to lesbianism (except when they have sex, during which the body language is pretty conclusive, although the angles of the heads and hands are all slightly off but that's another story) - and the third, "butch" one, has choppy hair and slouchy, affected posture.

Who knows, maybe it is just coincidence. But to experiment, if those of you who are not lesbians will just take a moment to "act lesbian" at your seats... Did any of you do anything weird with your shoulders? Are you sure? Because I'm starting to wonder if we have all internalised some kind of odd belief about the way lesbians stand (or sit, I suppose) which only emerges in straight-acted lesbian dramas.

Too Much Information

Yesterday, reading yet another terrible sex scene in an otherwise well-written novel, I got to thinking, not for the first time, why it is that it is so difficult to write about sex well? And I think I finally thought of an answer that makes sense, which is that sex, ultimately, is just another everyday bodily function that doesn't need to be described at length because everybody who's ever done it pretty much knows what it's like. And yet sex scenes have a terrible tendency to go on and on, as if they are describing the experience to somebody who has no idea what it is.

Consider eating an apple. As an author, you might just say "I had an apple", and everyone is fairly clear on what that means, because most of your readership will have eaten apples before. If you want to make it clear that it's a particular kind of apple experience, you might give a little more detail, such as "I bit into the apple, and the flesh crumbled in my mouth to a dry heap of powdery disappointment." Again, we've all been there. What is totally unnecessary is the following:

The apple gleamed in the bowl, its shiny red and green skin so inviting. I longed to take it, to sink my teeth into its firm yet yielding flesh. I picked it up, its luscious curves filling my hand to perfection, and carried it over to the sink, where I let the long, cool stream wash over it, my mouth watering like the tap itself. Then I opened my mouth wide, feeling my jaw tense slightly in anticipation. I bit. My teeth pierced the apple's skin and all at once my mouth was filled with juicy wetness. Its sweet, sharp tang was so delicious, better even than I had imagined. I moved my teeth up and down, chewing, chewing that melting apple flesh, my tongue wrapping itself around around its liquid goodness. I swallowed, and peristalsis wafted the apple down to my stomach, which rumbled in appreciation.

Writers: as a rule, if you're giving more information about sex than you would do about a meal, then that is TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

Animal Magic

Taking some time out from the first crushes - we will go back to them.

Meanwhile, there's no way around it, this is a blog post about animals masturbating.

It's a response to this (scholarly, and safe for work) piece on the Slate website, which, I promise you, raises interesting questions above and beyond the fantastic line: "some moose can ejaculate simply by rubbing their antlers on bits of vegetation".

Putting aside the prurience and the comedy factor, the premise of the article is intriguing because of the large amount of time that it spends looking at the evolutionary advantages of sperm competition theory, and the almost no time at all it spends considering whether and why animals might have an urge to pleasure themselves in general. I realise that's the point of the piece - that masturbation is not just for fun, but also conveys an evolutionary advantage - and it is very interesting. But it fails to consider that the ability to have fun itself conveys an evolutionary advantage.

I would interpret the data about animal masturbation as follows: it is evidence of the widespread capacity of pleasure in animals, and of how animals will use fairly sophisticated means to seek it out. So the piece says that "both male and female porcupines manipulate their genitals with inanimate objects"; this is tool use, and tool use is the kind of thing that evolutionary biologists wet themselves over because of it being a marker of intelligence and sophistication. If a monkey uses a stick to get itself something to eat, that's front page news. So sexual pleasure is hugely important: porcupines using dildos is a big deal and not just because it's funny; animals don't bother with tools unless it's for something that matters. But because masturbation is about sexual pleasure, the work on it can be reductionist: sexual pleasure must be about sex. I think it's broader than that: orgasm is a visible marker of enjoyment. Similarly, you can explain domestic cats eating themselves into obesity by saying "they evolved as wild animals who didn't know where their next meal was coming from so they eat as much as they can when they can" or by saying "cats enjoy eating". Animals do things they enjoy. (Eating too much and wanking. Sound familiar?) It's all about the joy.

So if we accept that both the purpose and driving force of evolution is survival, we can look at the evolution of pleasure as a mechanism to help us to survive. We know what we need to do to survive because it is pleasant: food, sex, warmth, loving our offspring etc. We know what to avoid because it is unpleasant: hunger, pain, cold, loneliness. The story of evolution is thus the story of pleasure. Pleasure is how we learn what is right for us. A joyful animal is a successful animal. A miserable animal is two steps off freezing to death, starving, or dying without offspring.

Masturbation isn't just about healthy sperm, it's the direct result of evolution working, it's the embodiment of the message that evolution has created: do what feels good. The piece is perplexed on what advantage female masturbation might have, given that females don't have sperm, as if the author can't imagine why it might be to a female animal's advantage to experience pleasure. This may be symptomatic of the writer's inability to link sexual pleasure with any other kind of pleasure. Female animals masturbate because it is important in evolutionary terms to do the things that feel good, because if you don't, you'll die. A clever animal will seek pleasure and practice pleasure, because the appreciation of pleasure conveys an evolutionary advantage in itself. So masturbating reminds you that you enjoy sex and it might be an idea to have sex more often. But not only that, masturbation is a marker of an animal's ability to seek out pleasure for itself, and this is a useful thing to be able to do.

Or to put it another way, masturbation is the meaning of life and a sign of highly sophisticated intelligence.

Enjoy!

Sex

I have just added a document called "sex" to the piece of work I'm developing in Scrivener. Label: "concept". Status: "to do".