Sugar In My Bowl by various women 2 Reviews in one!
 
This starts when I read "The Devil At Large" by Erica Jong. It is about Henry Miller. If you don't know who either Erica Jong or Henry Miller is then there is no point in reading much beyond this. Sorry.
 
I was surprised to read Erica Jong taking up cudgels on behalf of Henry Miller. Yes, you read that right. It's funny how you can read something and it is not until years later that someone points out the obvious.
 
Henry Miller is an unredeemed writer. Look at all those "Top 100" book lists and you'll be lucky to see him mentioned. He is conspicuous by his absence everywhere. Except in Erica Jong's estimation. Henry Miller is unredeemed because he wrote about Sex (with a capital S). He wrote about sex in an explicit way. His novels were banned for around 30 years and are still banned is schools throughout most of the western world. Yet millions of copies of his books have been sold. "Ha!", you might say, they sold because they were full of sex. Yes, that may be true but it's not the whole story.
 
Erica Jong mentions that in one of the classes she teaches on English Literature her students, after working their way through the required reading list, always remark about how much sex there is in older works. She points out that it was the Victorians who gave us our current distorted view on sex. You can also work out that as soon as the Victorians removed sex from literature, an industry sprang up to meet the sudden demand for the forbidden fruit. That industry we now refer to "the porn industry".
 
Anyway, if you know who those two people are it is a good read. It is intelligent, honest and thought provoking. It sheds light on Henry Miller's life and work and indeed who he was outside of the infamous novels. She not only defends his stance on sex and women but also puts it in a wider context so you can understand why she sees his work and both groundbeaking and prophetic.
 
Interestingly both od them think that not much has changed. Henry Miller is quoted as saying that in terms of sexual attitudes and mores the western world has actually gone backwards since the sixties. Also, lets not miss  how the sixties is painted by the media in these "enlightened" times.
 
 

At the end of that book was a blurb about all the other books she wrote apart from the one that made her famous. I saw a recent one called "Sugar In My Bowl" which was a collection of essays that she edited. The collection of essays is about "real women write about the best sex they ever had in their lives".
 
So I read that. It was NOT like the current deluge of women porn on Amazon that has phrases such as "his throbbing member" or "her hot pussy" scattered over a bare framework called a story. They do not sell in their millions over many years I  might point out.
 
The many accounts of real or imagined sex or of no sex at all that make up this collection are both touching and illuminating. It is like a kaleidoscope of colour compared to the monotone image of sex that is broadcast via the media in all its forms. This in turn lead me to an interview by an American female journalist and a French single woman talking about sex. She says that in her world (Paris) if you date a man you have sex as soon as you can. Within an hour at the most you are on your way to either your place or his place. If the sex is good you may consider attempting a relationship or not. That was the rule. She said that when she had dated Americans they went on several dates to dinner and the movies and the man never touched her and she wondered whay was going on. She was incredulous to discover that on an "American date" the women do not have sex on the first date because that would mean they are sluts, but they may give the man a blowjob. "An unreciprocated blowjob! unbelievable", she says. She was surprised and shocked to discover this repressive attitude towards women in America.
 
When you take into account that the most pervasive culture in the West is the American culture and I guess if you knew who Henry Miller and Erica Jong are, then you can see that indeed we haven't come very far.
 
The constant repression of sex in our culture has given us the now all pervasive world of porn and its rendition of naked womens' bodies being purely for sex. Womens bodies are sexualised in advertising, movies, tv, fashion, you name it and if there is a woman's body in the picture it is sexualised. Recently, here, we saw bathing suits for young girls being advertised with padded tops and I'm talking about 8 year olds. I honestly think that in our culture it is now impossible to see nakedness or sex in anything other than that repressive context. The irony is that implied sex is used against us daily in every advertising image we are confronted with yet real sex is banned!
 
We take all this for granted and our moralistic christian outlook is considered normal, yet, without its constant judgemental glare how else could we even have a porn industry? And look at those christian establishments, what have we seen in them over the last few years when it comes to morality?
 
We have no problem understanding what happened when they introduced the prohibition of alcohol in the US. I'm optimistic that we also see the sense in the legalisation of marijuana. And yet we are blind when it comes to the repression of sex.
 
Ponder on this, when Cook first came to the Pacific and before those damned missionaries came, the locals would have sex anywhere at any time irrespective of who was around but would only eat in private! The locals were both shocked and outraged at the sight of the English people eating in public. While the English were shocked to see them fucking all over the place.
 
Sandwich anyone? ( )

A collection of short stories and essays by an impressive list of accomplished women writers, who prove that they can write about sex and do it well. Props. ( )

This anthology was different than I expected. I admire the effort but was left rather depressed. My "feeling" is that sexuality is very oppressive to women. Each author struggles with competing concepts around sex. Why is sex such a measure of one's sense of whether their character is good or bad? Some of the contributions reveal the sickening idea that sex is a commodity rather than an innate, natural human behavior like drinking water, eating and sleeping. What tangled webs we weave! We are all PRODUCTS of sex yet it is the most confounding minefield we have constructed, torturing brilliant authors contributing to a woman's anthology. Arrrrgggh ( )

I got a very strong sense that this book had no real idea what it wanted to be, Some of the pieces were about the writers' best and worst sexual experiences, some were examined writing about sex as a woman, some were coming-of-age stories. It's as if Jong gave out a multiple-choice assignment on the essays (and some are actually short fiction) and then didn't arrange it in any particular order. The pieces feel rushed, too, and very underedited. Which is too bad -- the concept was promising, and I like a lot of the writers.

Standouts were J.A.K. Andres on her six-year-old daughter's new-found relationship with her vagina, a thoughtful essay by Min Jin Lee about writing sex as an Asian woman, and a really excellent piece by Meghan O'Rourke about having to live up to the romance of her parents' marriage. But honestly? That was about it. I'm disappointed. ( )

Thought this was a book of essays but fictional short stories. Didn't seem any more "real" than romances. ( )