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Supervert Picks
There is nothing wrong with shock value, the same as there is nothing wrong with a rollercoaster ride. Critics who dislike shock tend to dismiss it as superficial or gratuitous, and in response artists try to justify it by saying that shock has consciousness-raising value, that it wrenches bourgeois minds from their ruts of thought. And yet, though this justification may have been pertinent in about 1920, does it really mean anything today? After all, bourgeois minds currently feed on a steady diet of shock jocks, trash television, net porn, video voyeurism. The shocking and the taboo have become the rut, and about the only thing left that would truly give bourgeois minds a prod is prudery. That being said, one of the interesting things about the pervasiveness of shock — about the ubiquity of the extreme, to coin a paradox — is that, as our minds become less sensitive to the violence of shock, it enables taboo material to be explored with greater sensitivity and depth. It used to be an act of bravery just to say "fuck." Now it's nothing, and if you want to talk about fucking, you'd better have something to say. Ironically, the very prevalence of shock thus becomes the rebuttal to its superficiality or gratuity. It's not enough for an artist just to fling a fetish in your face. You've probably seen that fetish before — hell, there are probably entire web sites dedicated to it. So if an artist wants to work with a fetish now, he has to approach it the same as Flaubert approached adultery or Dostoievski approached guilt — with thoughtfulness, insight, sensitivity, seriousness of purpose. And that is precisely what distinguishes the best texts in Susannah Breslin's collection of short stories, You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?. Known to web readers for her now-defunct sex blog The Reverse Cowgirl, Breslin writes of things that ought to be shocking — midget porn queens, incest, cannibalism, self-castration, mannequin fetishes, forniphilia (figure that one out!). And yet, as you read through the slim volume of stories, you find that if you're shocked by anything it's the absence of shock value. Breslin flings nothing into your face. To the contrary, she has a way of making you forget your face and your every other part by drawing you into the mind of a character. She has a knack for articulating the human dimension of deviant behavior. The pathology of a fetish is not its obvious sexual aspect — say, a boyfriend who loves a mannequin, as in the story "Mannequins" — but rather the alienation that it instills in the heart of a relationship: you can't help but feel for the girlfriend who becomes jealous of the mannequin. In that sense, the story is not even about sex so much as it is about love. The best of Breslin's stories all accomplish this same transformation — they direct your attention from the weirdness of a certain physical behavior to its implications for the emotional life. To risk a sexist cliché, a male reader can't help but wonder if in part this is the result of applying a woman's sensibility to subject matter that has hitherto been the exclusive province of male writers. When Sade, Miller, or Burroughs write about sex, it tends to sound like a deviant football game. The emphasis is on the clash of bodies, athleticism, endurance, brilliant positioning, heroic performances that achieve libidinal extremes. There are orgasms as improbable as the successful completion of a Hail Mary pass. Conversely, when Breslin writes about sex, the emphasis is on self-scrutiny, insight, even revelation. Compare Burroughs' homoerotic hangings, where the author's interest lies plainly in the description of a convulsing body swinging from a rope while its semen traces an arc through the air, to Breslin's wife who becomes a lamp to please her husband. (That's forniphilia — a fetish for transforming people into furniture.) Precisely because the wife is immobilized, the focus of the story is not her body but her mind — not her lack of motion but her depth of emotion. While there are several stories in You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? that don't quite attain the same level of psychology and artistry, these are offset by the maturity and poise of the volume's best stories: "Hey Doll," "E Is for Eunuch," "Mannequins," and the title story, a particularly strong profile of a pornographer gone bad. It is tempting even to call this last story "Portrait of the Pornographer as a Young Man" since Breslin traffics in epiphanies that, sexuality aside, suggest the early work of James Joyce. Currently the author claims to be working on a novel set in Porn Valley, California, and if this novel fulfills the promise of these stories, then perhaps one day soon pornography will be lucky enough to have its Ulysses too. Email this page to a friendTell someone about Supervert Picks - You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? at supervert.com. (Email addresses are not recorded or used in any way.) Your name
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