On Your Knees.
Maybe Nietzsche put it best when he declared, "We wish to use history only insofar as it serves the living. But there is a degree of doing history and a valuing of it through which life atrophies and degenerates." Or maybe my favorite burlesque performer and tech goddess, Little Brooklyn, said it better at the SuicideGirls Burlesque Tour a couple of weeks ago, as half a dozen refugees from a Richard Kern photo shoot poured chocolate sauce all over one another: "Jesus Christ! The year 2004 is the equivalent of an Elvis impersonator!"
What's a girl to do when everything's been done before? The answer, of course, is to kitschify history even further. Retro-cool case in point: Nerve's Guide to Sex Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen, scribed by the aforesaid website's former advice gurus Lorelei Sharkey and Emma Taylor. Their previous oeuvre, The Big Bang: Nerve's Guide to the New Sexual Universe, was praised by O, The Oprah Magazine as "ideal for a young adult or your sister who just got a tiny tattoo that no one can see"?a ringing endorsement of hipster cred if ever there was one.
In the case of Sex Etiquette, you can indeed judge a book by its McGraw-Hill health-class- sex-ed-film-inspired cover. According to the popular myth, the 50s were the last time that Sex Made Sense. Under Ike, you wondered about how to get to second base instead of the etiquette of booty calls or what to do if you found yourself at a social disadvantage at a group grope at Grego's.
Yup, there ain't no one leavin' well enough to Beaver any more. Thanks to Hef and Bob and Larry and the Mitchell Brothers (and, in no small part, to Nerve and its parthenogenic love-child, the Spring Street personals network) sex these days has been raised to a level of professionalism that even the hetairai of ancient Greece would have found daunting. Today's lover has problems far more pressing than mere fumbling with bra straps, such as "when's the right time in the relationship to let my beloved in on my collection of peeing pregnant nun videos?" And God forbid you don't do anal or experiment with bisexuality or shave your cootchie so it looks like you're inviting George W. Bush to drop in for another airborne photo op?you're probably doomed to a life of celibacy. How you fuck is who you are. Thankfully, we have Em and Lo to act as our arbiters of taste, informing us with faux highmindedness that, "It is out of fashion to refer to the threeway as a ménage à trois. It is simply so seventies. And French."
Of course, an advice book is kind of a retro idea itself, and putting Sex Etiquette alongside its forbears reads like a timeline of the decline and fall of Western civilization. For instance:
Elinor Glyn's This Passion Called Love, 1925:
"It is true enough that some of the main highways and many of the byroads are heavily picketed at night by cars of all makes?lights out, curtains drawn. But?the attempt to make unlawful this process of spooning might be interpreted as a direct blow at personal liberties. Petting is just a habit, the hallmark of sophistication, the badge of a certain smartness, the proof of an absolute divorce from the so-called foolish staidness of tiresome older folks."
Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, 1962:
"I have yet to encounter a happy virgin. Quite the contrary, I feel that she eventually finds social, religious, and maternal approval quite inadequate compensation for not ever really belonging to anyone, and her state of purity becomes almost an embarrassing cross to bear?she is no longer a virgin by freedom of choice but is instead hopelessly trapped by her own inhibitions, drastically reducing her chance for happiness and/or marriage. An affair represents a whole new set of problems, of course, but to my way of thinking they're healthier."
Em and Lo's Nerve's Guide to Sex Etiquette, 2004:
"It is only the uncivilized lady or gentleman who believes that backdoor friends are always a pain in the ass? The heterosexual gentleman ought to remember that the beauty of the asshole is precisely that it is the great equalizer. If the lady is agreeable to keeping her servant's back door ajar at least once, it is anachronistic and in excessively bad taste to refuse it on principle. In fact, many a pleasant mind fuck (as well as much exquisite prostate attention) has occurred as a result of the gentleman permitting his lady to strap one on."
One can but wonder what literary gems Emily Post would have produced if she had only lived in the enlightened society that produced Bend Over Boyfriend Volumes I and II. The free market of love turns us all into a bunch of whores.
Ironically, that very fact is also why we need this kind of book. We've become so intoxicated with our own permissiveness that boundaries no longer exist. We're all a bunch of naughty little children with vibrators and credit cards. There's some sincerity under all of this tongue-in-cheek (and -asshole) referencing of the past. Em and Lo have discerned that what we really need is some good, old-fashioned discipline. The result is advice that just might get you laid.