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"  A group of young women\u2014ranging in age from their early twenties to early thirties\u2014have gathered in my apartment ostensibly to talk about fundraising for an online magazine, but along the way we segue into a discussion of Girls, Fifty Shades of Grey, Internet porn, the manda\u00ADtory denuding of pubic hair, and all the rest of the phenomena that seem to characterize the present erotic moment. These young women routinely refer to men as dudes and appear to be at ease with casual sex\u2014speaking dispassionately about their experiences, reducing them to amusing anecdotes\u2014in a way that was once seen as more true of men. I find myself wondering whether this has been all to the good, whether some essential frisson has been lost along with the traditional self-consciousness about sex. I think of the film director Luis Bu\u00F1uel&amp;#039;s famous statement, &amp;quot;Sex without sin is like an egg without salt,&amp;quot; which I&amp;#039;ve always taken to mean that sexual satisfaction requires an edge\u2014that without some sort of impediment to bump up against, we risk vertigo-inducing psychological free-fall. What strikes me as truly strange, however, is this: I&amp;#039;m older than these women and should by all rights be envious of their paradise of sexual opportunities, but I find myself feeling sorry for them instead\u2014just as I winced when I watched Girls, finding it as sad as it was funny. I&amp;#039;ve read various defenses of the show&amp;#039;s de\u00ADflated rendering of sexual engagement, and I&amp;#039;m still not convinced that the pivotal scene\u2014in which Adam (played by Adam Driver) masturbates over the awkwardly naked body of Hannah (played by Lena Dunham) to the tune of a vocalized fantasy about her being an 11-year-old druggie\u2014is impressive for its candor so much as dreary in its implications. For one thing, what is so new, much less revelatory, about autoeroticism and a young man&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;wanton absorption&amp;quot; in it? Why on earth would it engage the viewer, as Elaine Blair suggests in The New York Review of Books, more than Hannah&amp;#039;s flustered attempts to connect at all costs, even if that means going along with said fantasy? &amp;quot;We can feel the erotic charge of the scene,&amp;quot; writes Blair, &amp;quot;in spite of its limitations, qua sex, for Hannah. We can contemplate Hannah&amp;#039;s lack of sexual confidence without condemning Adam. We can appreciate, rather than lament, Hannah&amp;#039;s attraction to Adam despite the fact that he is wont to do things like dismiss her from his apartment with a brusque nod while she is still chatting and gathering her clothes and purse.&amp;quot; Related: A Different Way of Thinking About Lena Dunham&amp;#039;s Nudity on &amp;#039;Girls&amp;#039; Can we? Perhaps, if we don&amp;#039;t have our own identification with Hannah\u2014and our own hopes on her behalf for something approaching sexual fulfillment (not to mention a little love). Unless we&amp;#039;re all irretrievably jaded voyeurs by now, on the lookout for the next debased thrill, it seems to me that the erotic context is still potent with promise for many of us, remaining one of the last outposts of the unironic in a culture bent on demystifying every last experience. Or, at least, it ought to be, if we weren&amp;#039;t so set these days on undercutting its power by holding it up to the light and examining it. What, one might ask, happened to the blissed-out dream of sex that came with the Sexual Revolution, the promise of intense intimacy and naked abandon\u2014sex as &amp;quot;the long slide/ To happiness, endlessly&amp;quot; that the British poet Philip Larkin envisioned in his poem &amp;quot;High Windows&amp;quot;? Why does it seem to have been cast aside in favor of a more banal discourse, one bleached of excitement and mystery? Let me make clear where I&amp;#039;m coming from. I&amp;#039;m not trying to speak for the joys of good, old-fashioned sex as against current subversions/perversions thereof. I&amp;#039;m not even sure I believe in such an entity as good, old-fashioned sex. Sexual arousal, to the extent that it takes place in the brain as much as in the body, is one of the most subjective of all pleasures, encoded in highly individualized scripts that contain our psychic histories in the form of charged images and fantasies. The details of these scripts\u2014or &amp;quot;microdots,&amp;quot; as the psychiatrist Robert Stoller calls them in his book Sexual Excitement\u2014are designed to reproduce and, ideally, repair past traumas and humiliations that we carry with us from childhood. But as Stoller points out on the very first page of his book, the phrase &amp;quot;sexual excitement&amp;quot; is itself woefully inexact: &amp;quot;Sexual has so many uses,&amp;quot; he observed, &amp;quot;that we scarcely comprehend even the outer limits of what someone else indicates with the word; does he or she refer to male and female, or masculinity and femininity, or eroticism, or intercourse, or sensual, nonerotic pleasure, or life-force?&amp;quot; I should point out as well that my own tastes have historically run to the edgier end of the sexual spectrum\u2014and, indeed, in some circles I am seen as a promoter of unsavory sexual preferences. I am referring to a lengthy essay I wrote for The New Yorker in 1996 called &amp;quot;Unlikely Obsession.&amp;quot; This piece, which has continued to haunt me from the moment it appeared, was a graphic account of my longtime fascination with erotic spanking and my cautious flirtation with more serious S&amp;amp;amp;M; it also attempted to trace the psychological origins of my interest and to envision a future less tied to this kind of scenario. &amp;quot;The fact is,&amp;quot; I wrote early in the piece, &amp;quot;that I cannot remember a time when I didn&amp;#039;t think about being spanked as a sexually gratifying act, didn&amp;#039;t fantasize about being reduced to a craven object of desire by a firm male hand\u2026.&amp;quot;  If I had ever imagined the reading public was no longer shockable, the reception to what I thought was my carefully considered and psychologically nuanced revelations cured me of that notion. The article caused an immediate stir, the likes of which was impossible to foresee but easier to understand in retrospect. I&amp;#039;d talked openly and in a high-toned forum about matters of the flesh\u2014unwholesome, perhaps titter-inducing matters of the flesh, at that. I received hundreds of letters, was praised and reviled in print for my courage and my effrontery, and eventually discovered that my name had become a form of shorthand (as in &amp;quot;looking for a Daphne Merkin type&amp;quot;) in personal ads. &amp;quot;Unlikely Obsession&amp;quot; was referred to in a recent Newsweek cover story by Katie Roiphe that explored the renewed interest in S&amp;amp;amp;M among younger women, and it was then raked over the coals by Virginia Heffernan in a rebuttal to Roiphe&amp;#039;s piece: &amp;quot;Did anyone read Merkin&amp;#039;s 1996 tale of her unlikely obsession with finding men to whack her and conclude she needed a Nobel Prize for savage honesty and lapidary prose? Not as I remember it. The takeaway was, Something is wrong with Daphne Merkin.&amp;quot; (To which I will only add that Heffernan&amp;#039;s response put me in mind of a remark the journalist Richard Goldstein once made about an infamous sex scene in Last Tango in Paris: &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no unity in people&amp;#039;s fantasies; some of us will always think a stick of butter is for bread.&amp;quot;) Related: Point/Counterpoint: Is Sex Just About the Orgasm? I am dredging all this up in the interest of full disclosure but also to try to provide some perspective on the way we view contemporary manifestations of age-old sexual preferences. Sadomasochistic impulses, whether light or heavy, have been a staple of the erotic imagination at least since people started reading novels, beginning with the eighteenth century&amp;#039;s Fanny Hill and the works of the Marquis de Sade. The nineteenth century saw an outpouring of fiction dealing with flagellation and enslavement\u2014the most notable instance being Venus in Furs, written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whose name the term masochism derives). Closer to our own era are works like Story of O, Nine and a Half Weeks (my personal favorite), and the Sleeping Beauty trilogy, penned by Anne Rice under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. Fifty Shades of Grey, the pros and cons of which have been widely discussed by every journalist with a blog to stand on, is the most recent entry in this genre. The runaway success of the book, which tells the story of an &amp;quot;innocent&amp;quot; college girl&amp;#039;s introduction to S&amp;amp;amp;M by a sexy corporate titan, doesn&amp;#039;t suggest to me anything so much as the fact that, in the world outside of Girls, the collective sexual imagination is kept on a pretty tight leash. By which I mean that we live in postfeminist, assiduously politically correct times that don&amp;#039;t allow for much deviation from &amp;quot;enlightened&amp;quot; behavior both in and out of the bedroom. The transgressive may be part of our daily cultural fare\u2014a little perversion here, a little fetishism there, we&amp;#039;ve seen it all, we take it in stride, we&amp;#039;re all Helmut Newton now\u2014but we tend to file it away silently rather than discuss its significance. The insistence on gender equality, which is one of the legacies of women&amp;#039;s liberation, even for younger women who are otherwise disengaged from its politics, has put the lid on the articulation of desires that don&amp;#039;t speak to a carefully maintained balance of power within couples. This, in turn, has only whetted our appetite for expressions of love-slave desires, abject or unruly though they may be. Then again, it&amp;#039;s the nature of our sexual selves\u2014no matter how see-through our amorous lives might appear\u2014to remain impenetrable in the uniqueness of our references. In other words, the quality of a sexual experience is something known only to oneself, a reality neatly summed up by the question we&amp;#039;ve all either asked or been asked: &amp;quot;Was it good for you?&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s probably easier to get a consensus on any subject other than sex. The very variableness of what we might mean when, for instance, we refer to someone as being &amp;quot;great in bed&amp;quot; is what informs the dismissively mordant German saying my mother used to be fond of citing: Bei Nacht sind alle Katzen grau. (&amp;quot;At night all cats are gray.&amp;quot;) Your idea of a stud might be my idea of a lummox, but the point is: How am I to know other than by trying him out for myself? In &amp;quot;The Forbidden Realm,&amp;quot; an essay in The Best American Sex Writing 2004, the subtitle of which asks, &amp;quot;Why Hasn&amp;#039;t There Been a Great Movie About Sex?,&amp;quot; Steve Erickson makes the telling observation: &amp;quot;Every sexual relationship is so much the calculus of two subjectivities colliding that the sex other people have is too foreign for most of us to even consider, let alone watch, no matter how great the actors look or how well posed their interplay.&amp;quot; The fact that our sex lives comprise a vast collection of secret histories may have suited the tenor of earlier times\u2014the repressive 1950s, say, when women hadn&amp;#039;t yet been liberated from the myth of vaginal orgasm, men hadn&amp;#039;t yet been charged with understanding the complexity of female responsiveness, and everyone kept their deviant tendencies to themselves. But it&amp;#039;s decidedly less suited to the way we live now, in a &amp;quot;milk-and-honey society of free-market sex,&amp;quot; as Philip Roth characterized it in The Dying Animal. These days, the dominant cultural impulse is one of exposure, of uncovering what has previously been hidden from view, whether it is a Rutgers student spying on his gay roommate&amp;#039;s sex life via a hidden camera, or journalists tracking down Anthony Weiner&amp;#039;s show-and-tell e-mails or what exactly transpired in Dominique Strauss-Kahn&amp;#039;s hotel room. And I&amp;#039;d argue that it is our unease with the intractable privacy of the erotic experience that marks the present moment. We&amp;#039;re so used to the performance aspect of experience our digital culture fosters, so used to exhibiting our every gasp for others via tweets, pinning, etc., that we squirm under the burden of intimacy, the way it casts us back on ourselves and our own feelings without the mediation of an audience. In this erotic moment, when we imagine we can know all and communicate all about what creates desire or pleasure, throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into sexual communion, in all its unpredictable singularity, seems dangerous. Then, too, as creatures of this great consumerist epoch, in which desire is relentlessly externalized and airbrushed, we&amp;#039;re wedded to the notion that what is of intrinsic value can be put on display and objectively assessed. If we can only zoom in on the grainy reality of sex, enlarge the pornographic images on our computers, we&amp;#039;ll be able to judge for ourselves, see how we stack up. Under the cover of voyeurism, we watch people we envision as being sexier than ourselves, doing sexier things to each other than we&amp;#039;ve ever chanced to try. That carnal appetites work in unfathomable ways gets largely lost in the rush to revelation. It was at college, as an English major during the heyday of the French-influenced deconstructionist approach to literary texts, that I first became fully aware of the more twisted byways of passion, the roads less taken. In cloistered seminar rooms filled with attentive, note-taking types like myself, my eyes were opened to a hitherto undreamed-of philosophy of sex, its lawless nature, and the conviction that societal conventions, such as marriage and monogamy, are the death of sexual love. (De Rougemont: &amp;quot;\u2026is there something fatal to marriage at the very heart of human longing?\u2026 It is obvious that Western Man is drawn to what destroys &amp;#039;the happiness of the married couple&amp;#039; at least as much as to anything that ensures it.&amp;quot;) I warmed to the French writer Georges Bataille&amp;#039;s hip, truth-or-dare assertions about the wonders of transgressive eroticism (&amp;quot;Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death&amp;quot;), even if I wasn&amp;#039;t precisely sure what they meant, and I stayed up late at night in my narrow dorm-room bed reading and rereading the iconic, galvanizing piece of contemporary erotica Story of O. As much as I was elated by these writers&amp;#039; radical, non-white-bread approach to the implicit power play of romantic love, I wondered about the emotional consequences in the here and now. What if you wanted to do something with your life when you weren&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;moaning in the darkness&amp;quot; \u00E0 la O\u2014being flogged or branded with a red-hot iron with your lover&amp;#039;s initials? How did the wish to have children, much less a career, fit into this consuming vision of sexual absolutism? Related: Was I a Female Sex-Addict?  In 2004, I saw a documentary called Writer of O about the pseudonymous author of the book, an editor at the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard. Her real name was Anne Desclos, and the filmmaker Pola Rapaport had tracked down the disarmingly mild-looking 90-year-old provocateur in her modest house outside Paris, where she lived alone with her cat, before she died in 1998. According to her own clipped and elliptical statements in the film, Desclos wrote this groundbreaking (and, depending on your point of view, liberating or horrifying) novel as a form of a love letter to the married man with whom she was involved for many years, the prominent French intellectual Jean Paulhan, who was a glamorous womanizer and an admirer of the work of the Marquis de Sade, and who also happened to be her colleague at Gallimard. I remember watching the white-haired and straight-backed Desclos talk quietly but intensely, her still-blazing blue eyes seeming to look backward without so much as blinking, about her dogmatic belief in love as a kind of secular calling, demanding a complete surrender of self. What impressed me most of all about this brainy and fiercely proud woman, who lived with her parents until they died, was her desperate allegiance to a philandering eminence whose interest she was afraid of losing as she aged, having never seen herself as pretty to begin with (she was 46 when she penned Story of O in a feverish period of a few weeks). How better to embrace the humiliation of trying to keep him than by insisting that there was a delirium all its own to be had in degradation. What&amp;#039;s most curious about this hypersexual moment, filled to the brim with Internet porn, mega best-selling erotica, and the casual nudity of shows like Girls, is that the fugitive spirit of eroticism seems to have quietly escaped through the bedroom window. Where are the extramarital love affairs that were all the rage in the &amp;#039;70s, endlessly described in novels like John Updike&amp;#039;s Couples and analyzed in the pages of women&amp;#039;s magazines? If they exist\u2014and undoubtedly they do\u2014they&amp;#039;re no longer touted as attempts to break free of stultifying marital conventions in favor of a more authentically lived existence. And why do younger women seem so rarely to be the objects of romantic pursuit or breathless seduction and much more likely to be willing partners in what one 23-year-old woman I know refers to, somewhat defeatedly, as &amp;quot;goal-oriented sex&amp;quot;? This same woman muses that &amp;quot;the grand romantic gesture seems dead to my generation. I&amp;#039;ve never had a love letter counting the ways delivered to my doorstep. More often it&amp;#039;s a quick e-mail or text message asking what movie time is best for me.&amp;quot; That men are wont to compartmentalize sex and love is hardly a revelation, but now women are doing it themselves, or perhaps doing it to themselves. Related: Leaving it or Having it All? A Closer Look at Women Who Leave Their Husbands for Other Women  Recently I saw a movie\u2014Sarah Polley&amp;#039;s melancholic, lovingly observed Take This Waltz\u2014that reminded me of everything that seems to be missing in today&amp;#039;s sexual climate. It stars Michelle Williams as an aspiring writer married to a cookbook author (played by Seth Rogen). She loves her husband but is bored by him, and then she meets up with a man (played by Luke Kirby) who speaks to all her buried sexual longings. The film makes a case for the elusive nature of sexual ecstasy\u2014its way of bounding out of reach just when we think we&amp;#039;ve caught it\u2014but it makes an even stronger case for our imagination as the authentic erotic domain, capable of lingering over the details of arousal in a way that real-life sex rarely lives up to. I&amp;#039;m thinking of a scene in which Kirby&amp;#039;s character, a free-spirited artist and rickshaw driver, describes in feverish language that put me in mind of no one so much as D. H. Lawrence how he would make love to Williams if and when such a possibility came to pass. The scene is charged with eroticism precisely because it is so untainted by self-conscious irony. Which brings me to the following suggestion: Perhaps it&amp;#039;s time to reconsider the situation, beginning with a reconsideration of D. H. Lawrence, the high priest of antirationalist, transcendent fornication who went from an image of gross indecency to over-the-top datedness in less than 30 years. Lawrence, of course, is best known for Lady Chatterley&amp;#039;s Lover, a novel characterized by overheated and androgynous insights that led T. S. Eliot to remark of its author that he &amp;quot;seems to me to have been a very sick man indeed.&amp;quot; It seems to me, on the other hand, that Lady Chatterley&amp;#039;s Lover, with its mix of wordlessness and sudden dips into hamstrung tenderness on the part of Oliver and expressed vulnerability and fearful excitement on the part of Lady C, speaks with more truth to the original dreams we all have of where sex\u2014or the sensuous experience generally\u2014might take us if the lover in question were responsive enough and the circumstances conducive. Then again, all of Lawrence&amp;#039;s work was marked by his peculiar, almost oracular sexual candor\u2014&amp;quot;Sex is the fountain head,&amp;quot; he wrote, &amp;quot;where life bubbles up&amp;quot;\u2014beginning with The Rainbow, which was banned in Great Britain shortly after its publication in 1915. He was willing to bet his all on klutzy, breathless passion\u2014is passion ever graceful, except in the movies?\u2014in his writing and his life, where as a young man he went off with someone else&amp;#039;s wife, having fallen in love within minutes of meeting her. Although he&amp;#039;s not taught much these days and probably read even less, Lawrence almost more than any writer I can think of took sex seriously\u2014so seriously, in fact, that it lent him a suspicious air in his time and has rendered him impossibly uncool, almost quaint, in our own. Here is one of his many fraught, decidedly unironic, and resolutely uncasual descriptions of sex, which, even in its opening steps, is viewed as a kind of erotic dance to the death: &amp;quot;She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight. She seemed to be destroying him. He was reeling, summoning all his strength to keep his kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss.&amp;quot; Try a little of that on for size, why don&amp;#039;t you, Lena Dunham and Adam Driver\u2026. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a14297/new-sex-generation/>