The Joy (and Sadness) of Sex on the Fringe
Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier
By Eurydice
Scribner
256 pages
by Celia Farber
Originally published January 25, 1999
At a time when sex hysteria has caused the U.S. government to implode, and Bill Clinton swings from the proverbial lamppost as the sum total of our libidinal confusion, sex writer Eurydice (a colleague of mine at Gear) drops a book into the mix that makes furtive sex in the Oval Office seem like a suburban yawn.
Meet America's new ''sexual fringe'' -- blood-letters, vampires, necrophiliacs and people who are "erotically involved with aliens." Then there's your garden-variety doms and slaves, cross-dressers, sex addicts, cybersexaholics, strippers and so on. Eurydice crisscrossed America and came back with a formidable and wholly unforgettable portrait of contemporary sexuality that reduces the national "debate" to inchoate mumbling by comparison. The panorama of sexual proclivities that Eurydice chronicles never relies on the shock value that could so easily propel it. Instead, she guides the reader with a voice of diaphanous calm and uses the transgressions as windows into her real subject, the human soul.
''I found,'' she writes in her conclusion, ''not the darkness stirring behind the normalcy of America, but the normalcy stirring peacefully behind the darkness.''
Only a writer of Eurydice's sophistication would resist the temptation to exploit the hyper-hip sexual noir recently popularized by films like Todd Solondz's Happiness. Where Solondz is content to smirk and declare himself open-minded for having depicted pedophilia on-screen, Eurydice sets infinitely higher standards for the discourse. At every turn, she keeps her eye on the prize, which is illumination, not effect. Astoundingly, the reader winds up understanding the motivation for everything from necrophilia to cybersex. The motivation, tellingly, is always the same: the yearning for contact in a contactless universe and the yearning for a sensation of feeling alive in a mechanistic world.
Eurydice's backdrop -- America's sexual climate today, post-everything -- is the context that makes all her characters come alive, articulating through their extremity the pain of a country that has suffered a sexual blight of epic proportions. My tendency would be to pinpoint the start of the blight at a 1984 press conference in Bethesda, Maryland, where a shady scientist announced that a sexually transmittable, deadly virus had been found. Eurydice rarely mentions the word AIDS. It is simply a given that human sexual relations have been shattered, and her characters are, each in their own mind-boggling way, redefining intimacy.
At times it is touching. Cybersex devotees are in search of a ''fictional form of love'' that allow romance to remain ideal by enacting it in the realm of the virtual. But more often, the portraits feel tragic, like the necrophiliac suburban husband and father who explains that sex with corpses is ''socially harmless sex'' and proudly stresses that he always uses condoms.
Only Eurydice could find, in this world, a cheerful, blond female air-force pilot who matter-of-factly confides, ''Falling bombs are kind of orgasmic. … I've had sex during bombings and it's the best.''
Or a lesbian bloodletter who says: ''I only use a bandage after I feed my pet leech on my arm.'' Or a young man from a solid working-class background who is trying to get SSI disability status by convincing the state that he is socially dysfunctional because he is a vampire.
In each case, the characters are kept buoyant by Eurydice's refusal to disdain them, or to coolly extract only what she needs, and nothing of what she is in the style of Janet Malcolm. Instead, Eurydice falls asleep in an armchair because a cross-dresser has crawled into her bed crying like a baby -- and she deftly and graciously avoids the countless offers to be flogged, bound, sliced, or perhaps have her own blood extracted for a cocktail as her subjects try to win her over to their particular joys.
She doesn't lack a sense of humor either -- as when she deadpans: ''Molly has run into her friend Liz, who happens to be blindfolded and tied by her collar to a side table,'' or, ''Granted, the two spent Valentine's Day at the orthodontist's getting permanent fangs.''
There is, not surprisingly, an overriding lack of apparent arousal here, given that the proclivities are so tightly structured, so methodical, that they feel more compulsive than freeing. ''Even people who fetishize amputees or nail their own penises on planks have ready theories for their proclivities that sound eerily theological and unsexy,'' Eurydice observes.
Eurydice's access not only to the facts of these people's sexual lives but also to the essence of them is the book's overriding triumph. She presents herself as a kind of sexual anthropologist to whom nothing is shocking, and the result is a degree of trust that even allowed her to stay in the room while a sex addict demonstrated his addiction on a woman. Eurydice, camera-like, catches what really matters: the look on the woman's face, the feeling in the room. As bleak and desperate as her characters often are, Eurydice anchors the book with her own essence -- that of a modern woman wonderfully free of the sex negativity of the feminist vanguard, but one who also has studied the classics and who still believes in the sovereignty of romantic love.
America's sexual fringe is not really the point of this book -- it is America's sexuality, period, as refracted through its extremes. But Eurydice is at her best when she takes on the more pedestrian problems that plague our sexual identities. Writing about the devastation of sexual harassment hysteria, she warns: ''We now risk losing a vast dimension of existence: the body language through which women and men suggest and manifest wonder, tenderness, defiance, arousal, delight. Lust is not only a physical but a discursive urge, a wordless eloquence.''
When Eurydice writes: ''For me, sex is a blackout of meaning,'' I feel that she is raising a new flag for women, in this age of boundlessly sexist notions about women's supposed sexual passivity. Only in that blackout can we hope to relocate the notion of women as sexual beings, which has been so tragically lost in the neo-feminist stampede for sexual hygiene in the workplace. Human sexual desire has been driven underground, as is bound to happen in an age of hysteria and persecution. Eurydice's underworld, ultimately and ironically, seems more human than the fluorescently lit brutal world up here, where all human yearnings have been reduced to pathology.
American culture, which shamelessly glorifies and manipulates sex as a panacea, has simultaneously glorified and lauded the Puritanical repression of sexual desire and sexual expression. Where else in the world are you able to view MTV-style "public service messages" that sell safe sex to teens with a soft-core format? Where else does sexual identity -- male, female, gay, straight, bi, trans, celibate -- so thoroughly define the individual?
In this culture it's not surprising that the voice of clarity belongs to an outsider. Eurydice, the author of Satyricon USA, has fashioned a truly insightful look at the conundrums, contradictions and kinks forming the rich, steaming stew of American sexual culture. Modeled after the first-century Roman Petronius' supposedly metaphorical memoirs, this Satyricon takes the reader across a rather sordid landscape where sex is commodified, tabulated, celebrated, hidden away and, most pathetically and most very truthfully, mistaken for love.
Born in Greece, Eurydice ran away from home at age 14, headed for Hollywood stardom. She made it as far as New York's Greenwich Village. Academics was her refuge and she became a perpetual student, accumulating scholarships and degrees to forestall the alternative -- life in the American workforce. Somewhere in there, an award-winning novel, f/32, was published and translated around the world. Eventually, Bob Guccione Jr. lured her from the ivory tower, and Eurydice found herself writing the wild side, first for Spin and now as Gear magazine's monthly sex columnist.
What sets Eurydice's viewpoint apart from the usual catalog of titillation and prurient self-conscious shock is as complex as the subject matter. Liberally dosed with epigrams from such disparate sources as Wittgenstein, Sappho, current movies, Goethe, Whitman, strip-club customers and Shakespeare, the text plunges into the sexual worlds Americans have created. While visiting familiar territory for anyone with experience, vicarious or otherwise, Satyricon USA also visits some startling places from which we have heard few voices. From mortuaries to the military, from the Vatican to outer space, Eurydice elicits stories from people who live in sexual spaces most of us do not even imagine exist. Her personal involvement with her subject and her sources allows Satyricon USA to become a document that reaches beyond the S&M dungeons and strip-club runways.
Vicarious thrills are few, however. Whatever Eurydice brought to the subject, whatever it cost her intellectually and psychically to immerse herself in these worlds, the impact of the book is shattering. Where else might we read the tender lamentations of a quiet, LA Goth-girl necrophiliac as she demurely explains her rituals?
"I don't see my sexuality as a violation of the dead; I see it as a gift to them. Because we value longevity and health so much, the dead are untouchable in our society, like lepers. We're afraid to associate with them because we're afraid their death will rub off on us... I feel my life confirmed when I kiss a dead man..."
Where else could one listen to a Cincinnati surgeon/satyr justify his long string of conquests as his own self-confidence begins to crumble around him?
"Without this pursuit of sex, I'd be celebrating my suburban death right now. Sex is a validation. Maybe I do it so people will say, 'You're a good guy, you fuck well.' I know my work goals 12 years ahead. I know the 10 days I have off in the next two years. With sex, I'm allowed to be unpredictable. My daily life needs an element of chaos."
Unafraid to make judgments and unwilling to pass by a subject, Eurydice has fashioned a mirror in which both reader and author are reflected. Satyricon USA is a text in which source and subject and audience all may find ourselves connected by strands of longing, of desire, of yearning and even of love that are tangled and contradictory, that are strong and dark and deep and fragile and, often, incredibly sad.
Advocate/Weekly: What brought you to write about sexual culture in the United States?
Eurydice: Fate. I wrote a novel called f/32. It was a story about a vagina, long before anything like it was done. I went to India for two years. ... I was in the desert with a maharajah shooting a documentary on possessed women, women possessed with variations of Satan. I got a telex from Boulder telling me the book was going to come out. I got really sick in India and came back to Brown [University] and started teaching on the strength of my academics and thought my life would go on as a professor. Then, I got a call from Spin magazine where a friend from Brown was the editor-in-chief at the time. I go have lunch with [former owner] Bob Guccione Jr. ... He saw the book had a sexual content, so there it went. He gave me a job as a staff writer, quite extraordinary, because ... I had never read any nonfiction nor planned to. But, hey, I thought, anything beats having to teach forever after. I'm young enough to ride this train.
The first piece I wrote for him cost him $300,000 in ads and also his most consistent advertisers. The Army, Ford Motor Co., I forget who else, said if I ever published again in the magazine they would not advertise in the issue I was in. That article became a chapter in [Satyricon USA], the bloodletting, the lesbians cutting each other and what not ["San Francisco: Blood Simple Babes"]. There were some really telling photographs of these people. I don't think advertising executives read but they saw those photographs. So, I had this monthly paycheck but wrote very little for Spin. The second thing I wrote was the piece on the Vatican, which is now in the book ["American Abroad: Virgins at Heart"]. The Catholic League denounced me. I was very sincerely an innocent going about having no clue what the rest of the world thought about things. I thought it was obvious. I mean, everybody knows about the Catholic Church.
I got an offer from Scribner's to make a book out of this sort of thing. It was a good enough advance, I thought, OK, I could do it on the side and do my own fiction. It would be a great way to finance my own work, but it didn't work out this way. I got completely consumed by this project. It became Sisyphean, an albatross.
Advocate/Weekly: Can you describe the journey this project required of you?
Eurydice: It was a very exhausting, seemingly endless journey psychically. In some ways it was very satiating. I have been very much an adventurer in my life, very much a traveler. After this, I was ready to pull back and become a misanthrope. What it took to get people to speak about things that were so private ... was to become them, to become one of them, to speak their language, to enter their world. Very often I moved into their houses. I would meet them and I would stay with a member of their community.
I would have to tap the same impulses. I would have to share with them my understanding in myself and my own related memories, something as extreme. It was a very difficult and confusing and time-consuming project. My soul became their soul and became more and more weighed by their questions and impasses and needs.
Then, when I would separate, I would come out of that world. I would have to put it aside because I felt as if I couldn't even breathe on my own anymore. And then I would go back and transcribe everything. We're talking about tape upon tape upon tape, hundreds and hundreds of hours. I had like 900 pages of this book. Then I would have to cut and paste, get rid of people, combine characters, and try to be very true to them. Then there was a state where I realized where I would have to have a character that would kind of represent me but it's not really -- otherwise it would not be readable. So, then I came back in as an "I," as a narrator, and became judgmental where I had not been judgmental before. That was for me, personally, the most difficult and upsetting aspect [of the project].
Advocate/Weekly: Most journalists would struggle to keep that "I," those judgments out of a text, to maintain the facade of detached observation, and you're telling us it was a struggle to inject that judgmental point of view.
Eurydice: On a very superficial level, I found I was betraying these people, that I was betraying a certain trust and confidence by even printing what they said and by in some way, in any way, commenting on it. I did not like myself for doing it.
I found that I had to have a kind of common ground with the average reader, keep that consistent throughout, and then very subtly change my point of view in the hope that I would also shift the reader's point of view into becoming more accepting and open. That was extremely difficult, perhaps because I don't believe that there is a norm, that there is an average, anything except statistics and statistics are very temporary. Right now we feel a certain way about whatever, about homosexuality; 10 years ago we felt different; 10 years from now we may feel differently. None of that is normal.
It made me become personae, in the plural. It was not fiction. In fiction, it is very easy to do because it's kind of accepted, everyone knows what you're trying to do unless you're Philip Roth or something. I found limitations in nonfiction that are not acknowledged in public that much -- you've got to mold the truth as much as we mold it in fiction -- with much more respect and with many more obvious limits because everything that is in quotes is in quotes. But, outside that, you have to mold your material so that it becomes the convention of a book, a readable article. Reality is not at all readable or simple. I'm still not convinced that the result is up to par. I think that my own misgivings, my own tendency toward multiplicity and openness and complexity shows through despite my efforts to control everything and might have hurt the end result.
Advocate/Weekly: Have you maintained relationships with any of the people you met?
Eurydice: No. I couldn't. Many of them wanted to, but I felt that I couldn't do justice to the book if I had personal contact with these people. There are quite a few people, half a dozen, who became acquaintances or even friends, but I ended up not writing about them because of that.
That was a line I drew from the beginning. I won't write about the people I slept with, I won't talk about my own -- I give tiny little hints here and there just to show that [the character] is not uptight. I did not write about my own partaking of any of these sexual [encounters] -- I wanted to keep myself very much the observer.
Advocate/Weekly: What about the material that didn't make it into the book?
Eurydice: A lot that I didn't write was equally memorable as the stuff I did write. I stayed with a Mennonite family and an Amish bishop's family. I talked to Hassidic lesbians and transsexuals who had the same Hassidic clients every day in the meat-packing district [of New York City].
Some stories were too much. I stayed with a coven of witches, people who used witchcraft for their own sexual purposes. I tried to trace the story of a family, the sexual experiences of three or four generations of a family. But all of those were either not full enough to justify a chapter or they were too esoteric or they were boring.
Advocate/Weekly: The book's title is Satyricon USA. In what ways are these uniquely American stories? Is this part of a series? Are you going to do Satyricon France, Satyricon Japan....?
Eurydice: No, no, no. There is a specific sort of inconsistency, a schizoid relationship with sexuality in America that I haven't met anywhere else. Somehow at the same time, this is the most liberated and the most repressed nation and each person has both facets within -- there is a lot of judgment and self-hatred. At the same time, there is so much room for self-expression, experimentation and all kinds of little communities and worlds.
There is so much judgment and emphasis placed on one's sexuality. In Europe, people who are into S&M are into S&M. You and your spouse buy a few toys and bind each other and that's it. But you don't join a society, pay your dues, go to the clubs. And that's because it's fine, it's a fun thing to do, and that's the end of it. Here, it becomes almost a religion.
Sex very easily takes the place of community, faith, race, all of the things that elsewhere are one's defining aspects. India is a very repressed society but, in a way, is also very free under pressure. The women are never anorexic or bulimic or have psychological problems of the magnitude you find here. People are very open sexually... and according to the community, can have orgies or whatever, sexual holy days. All of that is considered normal. There is freedom and there is freedom. American freedom, in all its greatness, can be very confusing or restricting or painful sometimes.
Advocate/Weekly: What do you feel you accomplished with this project?
Eurydice: I don't know. It wouldn't be mine to know, to decide. Perhaps 20 years from now I could answer that question. I know what I tried to achieve. I tried to put together a book on a subject that is sensational, superficial and transitional as sex really is in America today and make it as much of a classic, a long-lasting portrait of a moment of time in a place, as I could. In the process, as we do year after year in life, I found out more about who I am and what I am not capable of so I won't try it again.
