The Daily Dose

Well, it has been a mighty long while since I even attempted to write an entry for The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words. I won’t go into all the reasons that I haven’t written- I’ll just say that not all of them were ones that would make you feel sorry for me, some of them would make you green with envy, though admittedly most of them would make you shake your head and tsk tsk. Instead, I will, sing it with me, “pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.” I only have twenty minutes before I have to go do something involving being away from the computer, but I decided to mix my determination to write with an imminent deadline in order to reinvest myself in the goal of writing The Daily Dose everyday. How else can I save the whole wide world and little old you? Don’t answer that question; it is without a doubt rhetorical.

I am ashamed to admit that due to being in a public place while trying to write this damn Daily Dose I was interrupted too many times, often agreeably, don’t get me wrong, and so I did not finish within the allotted 20 minutes. Ah, well, the road to hell just got a brand new blacktop courtesy of my “Men at Work” intentions. And since then, new information and ideas that can somehow be threaded into this Daily Dose have come to my attention. This may or may not be a blessing. Everything does not happen for a reason, but we sure as hell can scrounge one up, if we try hard enough.

Please sing to the tune of that Simon & Garfunkle song. “Last night I read the strangest thing I ever read before. I read that Ludwig Wittgenstein was sad and sore.” I, per usual, am overstating things just a wee little bit, though Vitter-gitter was quite, quite sad. Now I can in no way profess to know much of anything about Wittgenstein, but I have become interested in his life and work through the writings of others. For those of you with an appreciation of theatrical and filmic scripts as well as what happens to ideas as they are filtered through a collaborative processes like making a film, I highly recommend Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, The Derek Jarman Film. Van Choojitarom, whose work is full of wonderfully witty words worthy of your investigation has studied Wittgenstein extensively and admitted to me that he was disappointed by the film. In his words, “Wittgenstein is ideally adapted as a silent movie, starring Buster Keaton: they had the same ethic.” Despite Mr. Choojitarom’s censure, I will forge ahead.

I only have nine minutes left, so I will not go into much, just give y’all a long quote to ponder. I like this particular quote because it is in both the original Eagleton script as well as the one re-worked by Jarman and Ken Butler. John Maynard Keynes is telling a story to Wittgenstein.

Let me tell you a little story. There once was a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. And when he’d finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon. So the clever young man looked around the world he had created, and decided to explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They’re what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon this ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous, and the wise old man saw that that was the way things were. But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.

This may not have spoken to all of y’all, but I’m sure it spoke to a few of you. And sometimes that is all The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words can be, a dish that will be tasted and savored by a select (not in the sense of elect or special, more in the sense of small number burdened with a particular set of taste receptors) few.

Of course, these days, I’m mainly being read by spambots. The part of me that dreams of electric sheep hopes that somehow, someway, these words might reach through their Zeros and Ones directives and free these programs from their boring, fruitless mission (fruitless because I moderate all comments) to convert my followers. Though perhaps the mission of spambots is much like the mission of a philosopher as understood by Wittgenstein as filtered through the art of Eagleton and Jarman. “The most important part of my philosophy hasn’t been written. I can’t write it. It can never be written.”

Sometimes, I seek to uplift y’all with The Daily Dose; to give you a medicinal tonic to inoculate you against the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” But I would remiss, if I ignored my need, my heartfelt desire, to get under your skin now and again.

Today is a dose of irritation, an emetical, not hermetical despite what spell check wants me to write for you, medicine. I’m irritated and need a break from studying romance novels, which right now make me want to vomit (see comment about emetics above). I still think the romance genre is worthy of study, but much like the Bible, to take it seriously means I have to swallow a lot of shit- and today, I have an overly sensitive gag reflex. On a day like today, it could choke the life out of me. On a day like today, I could gleefully cast a thousand books onto a funeral pyre.

Today, you see, I am an Ethel Merman impersonator playing Caliban dressed in drag as Titania in an Albee-eque musical by Beckett. I wait in the wings for my cue, watching the other performers drop lines, miss cues, misplace props. Scenery falls over. Half the audience falls asleep; half the audience leaves before intermission and half continuously boo through the second act. This, oddly enough, is all in the script. Yet somehow knowing that is not comforting.

The show must go on. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.”

Are you ready to go on stage? Are you angry about the part you’ve been cast in? Do you plan to ignore the script you’ve been given, hoping that you’re up to winging it?

We are caught in a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Yet, meaning is what we make. That may be the only truth I believe in without reservation. We make meaning and mean our makings. I do not know what to make out of that. Excuse me, I hear my cue- or the closest thing I have to a cue in this blasted and botched tragicomedy.

I step on stage, all the various characters I ever have played hang on my dress, a ghost train dragging behind me. If this were Shakespeare, I would now deliver a passionate soliloquy. I would move you, and I have moved you, to tears. But this is Beckett mimicking Albee and mocking Stoppard, so I stand on stage with my ghost trained dress, and I stammer and stutter. I wait for you to make your entrance, for you to deliver your lines, to deliver me from suffering alone the burning fumes of the limelight.

You find all the good lines have been taken. We are left to stammer and stutter together. The play is the thing. The only thing I can be sure we have are these moments we share when we struggle to improv some halfway decent dialogue.

Me: Have you been . . . waiting long?

You: I just got here.

Me: You just got here?

You: I just got here . . .I think?

Me: You think you just got here?

You: I think.

Me: You just got here.

You: Yes.

Me: (pause) Waiting long?

You: I just got

You and Me: Here.

Me: Yes, I know. But before that?

You: Before waiting.

Me: Is there a before waiting?

You: I await your answer.

Me: Don’t hold your breath.

You: I am waiting.

Me: How long?

You: Long enough?

Me: Long enough?

You: Yes, long enough.

Me: Long enough for what?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m ready for my close up.

You: Is that when you will answer?

Me: I will answer for many things. I will answer for my close up.

You: How close?

Me: Close.

You: Close enough?

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: (pause) I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: I’m not sure. What do you think?

You: I’m not sure. I await your answer.

Me: All right, I’m ready for my close up.

I am being pricked by Cupid’s arrow (and my consciousness of not living up to your or my own expectations) to send y’all a little love in the form of the next Daily Dose. We continue our scriptural study of the romance genre. I study the romance genre as I would passages from the Bible because I believe that it has as much, if not more, to tell us about our lives.

Today, we break (into) Hymen’s ring to contemplate the meaning of virginity, to ponder what it means to be unsploit and then sploit and to wonder why what is essentially a mucous membrane has been so damn important.

Before I plunge into our subject, I need to fill those of you not familiar with the subgenre of historical romance in on some important plot elements. In almost every single historical romance, with a few notable exceptions, the heroine is a virgin, and the hero is significantly more experienced. The hero, more often than not, is a rake.

Rake, as used in these novels, is almost but not quite synonymous with slut. Rakes aren’t as dirty as sluts despite the fact that to become a rake you’d have to spend a whole heck of a ton of time with sluts. We could find this troubling, but of course, that was the way is was way back in the day; we don’t have to worry about silly sexual double standards now.

Back to the plot. After many hot tete-a-tetes, the rake pops the heroine’s sweet little cherry. Most of the time, the hero bursts through Hymen’s gate in one, surprisingly easy, thrust. The heroine experiences some pain on the loss of her innocence, but generally, and also surprisingly, not very much. The hero gives service to his lady by removing this culturally and sometimes physically significant roadblock, so the heroine can ease on down the road of sexual satisfaction.

Of course, it isn’t quite so easy. There are repercussions for the loss of innocence. In many versions of this oft-told tale, the piercing of her maiden mucous membrane (versus ones found elsewhere in her body) happens before the knot has been tied. Many wacky shenanigans ensue in which the heroine almost becomes a fallen lady, which would mean that she’d have to join the ranks of the sluts and slatterns who made sure that our rake had sufficient experience to initiate our heroine in such a delightful way. But it all works out in the end, and they live happily ever after in conjugal bliss.

Now it would be easy to mock the formulaic plot devices of historical romance, and a lot of it is, frankly, more than a little disturbing. But I’m certain y’all realize by now that I’m not interested in just setting up straw men to knock down, though admittedly I almost always rough ‘em up a bit.

I would be shirking my duties to truth, if I let you believe that the prominence and importance in these novels of women losing their virginity was solely a function of the historical conditions of 19th Century England, when the vast majority of these novels are set. No, it has much to say about what we think and believe and want now in the 21st Century.

Let’s push a little deeper.

Our question should be why, in this day and age of supposed sexual liberation when young teens are dressed like strumpets by advertisers and told to strut their stuff to sell us shit we don’t need, why is this storyline so common? What makes it so compelling?

First off, I’d like to remind you that smutty romance novels are fantasies. And then I’d like to ask you, who doesn’t find cherry popping hot? Male or female or transgendered, gay or straight or bi, all of us probably enjoy projecting ourselves into either side of the virgin initiated by expert scene. Of course, I tend to like cherry popping scenes that involve older women instructing younger people or the even more luscious initiation of a strap-on to a man bent over a table, but I realize that few if any historical romances will be written with my predilections in mind. (Authors take note, there is a niche in the market that desperately needs to be filled).

Part of the potency of all this, I think, is that for many of us our first few fucks were painfully awkward and/or just plain painful. The awkwardness of fumbling for condoms and lubrication or even the need for them is edited out of pornos, so that we can be carried away. The awkwardness of piercing a woman’s maidenhead or if she doesn’t have one due to an active lifestyle of horseback riding, etc., the awkwardness of just getting into what is generally a very tight space is excised. It can be nice to go along for the ride with the characters and have an easy first time.

Virginity is prominent in these novels, because women still are taught to regret, Sex and the City notwithstanding, their sexual experience. The fantasy is that we would find our love before we tasted the fruit of another (or others), and he would claim us. We would forever belong to him. There would be no pesky memory of previous lovers; there would be no comparisons to be made. Never, that I know of and I’ve read hundreds of these novels recently (see how I sacrifice myself to help save you), does the newly de-virginated heroine go on to find fulfilling lust and/or love with another man.

Part of the heroine’s appeal to the jaded palate of the hero is that she is not like the sluts he regularly cavorted with. She is lusty but not learned; she rarely asks directly for what she wants. (Some of this is that we are lazy and scared of our own desires and do not want to have to ask or tell our lovers what we want/need from them). Women who do ask and are skilled in bedroom games generally are set up as villainesses. Women who are forthright about pursuing the hero for sex will lose him in the end to the less direct, less honest, unskilled heroine.

Perhaps because I identify more with the sluts, I find the prevalence of this particular storyline upsetting. At what point does the heroine become the sexual experienced woman who might disgust the hero? Is it after a few years of marriage, when she’s become skilled at fellatio? Is it when she might actually know enough about her body to tell her husband that he hasn’t quite gotten his tongue right where she wants it?

I may be asking too much. I would like more trashy historical romances that have hot cherry popping scenes and celebrate sexually experienced women who know what they want and get it from a variety of partners without being punished. There is nothing wrong with wanting to imagine the first time as magical and important and life changing. But it would be nice, if we also could envision that the 500th or 5000th time as magical, important, even as life changing.