I don't like Katie Roiphe. Let's start with that up front. Even less do I like the way she frames her discussion of the way contemporary male novelists write about sex. To be honest, I'm not even sure what her point is.
Let's back up. Feodor (not his real name, but you all know who I mean) sent me a message on Facebook on the article linked above. He wanted my take on it, so I took a gander, and I have to say that, as someone who teaches literature, she offers to her readers no sense that contemporary authors, writing in a different time, a different social and cultural setting - postfeminist? hardly - might have a different agenda, including presenting male sexuality as more ambivalent.
She has sense enough to frame an earlier generation of male novelists in the context of their times. The three men she references the most - John Updike, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer - were, indeed writing at a time when the literary floodgates were only beginning to open, thanks in part to the 1960 court decision that D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was not obscene. These men also were writing for and from a generation of men living in the midst of changing mores, changing cultural values. The kind of uber-virility they describe - the notion of sex as an adventure of personal discovery, or its opposite, just a way to pass the time - certainly captures what was, even then, a dying ethos. I am unimpressed with her claim that the sex in Roth's later novels is a failure of writing and nerve; perhaps it is a confession that the older "set" or "frame" just doesn't work anymore. Foster Wallace's confession that he just doesn't "get" Updike's approach to male sexuality should be a clue that the whole frame of reference has shifted.
I find nothing wrong with contemporary male novelists showing a bit more ambivalence toward sexual subject matter. Of course, one problem with the idea that this is, indeed, happening is the survey of contemporary novelists is not only incomplete, but precisely for this reason it fails to take all sorts of expressions of male sexuality in to account. T. C. Boyle, for example, isn't shy about writing about sex in a fun, if somewhat idiosyncratic, style. He is conspicuously absent from her survey of contemporary authors, probably for that reasons.
Even if she is correct that contemporary American male authors are more ambivalent in their descriptions of male sexuality, there are several questions one needs to ask. First, would a more direct, old-fashioned, "virile" approach serve the literary needs of the story, the character, the overall effect the author wants to present? In Mailer, Updike, and Roth, we have men writing at a certain time, presenting characters whose many obsessions, including sexual obsessions, they tackle with a kind of vengeance. They drink in all life has to offer, or at least try to, dealing with the emotional consequences either much later or not at all, depending on both author and story.
I think a scene from my favorite Roth novella, "Goodbye, Columbus" makes my point. In it, the lead character, a middle-class recent college graduate Neil Klugman, falls for a wealthy Radcliffe student. In the course of their romance, they struggle to find a way to connect, including sexually. At the end, their most satisfying coupling, at least for Neil, comes on a ratty, dirty couch that is hidden away in the attic of Brenda's house. Now, this could mean that, for Neil (and perhaps, by extension, Roth) thinks the only sex that is good is sex that is something hidden away, dirty. Or, it might be possible that this is a narrative point Roth is making - about class, about the unbridgeable gulf that even sexual intimacy cannot close - rather than something about sex itself. That was my take when I read it.
In any event, the presentation of sex by contemporary American male novelists might just be the result of changing times. The kind of sexual adventurism celebrated by the older novelists in question was a part of that time. Yet, the fruits of that adventurism have proved to be far less liberating than used to be imagined. A new generation of men might just consider a more thoughtful approach to sexuality something worth exploring. All the same, this flight from (descriptive) sex in some contemporary novelists might also be seen as a flight from real intimacy as the kind of detached, occasionally humorous, definitely ribald descriptions of hyper-sexuality in older male novelists.
A recent commenter claimed that sex is nothing more than lust. I couldn't disagree more, and find such a truncated, limited view of the possibilities of human sexuality to be silly. While the kind of madonna/whore syndrome Roiphe assigns to Mailer certainly creates its own set of issues, one can detect the same neurosis in her description of characters who would prefer not to be sexually intimate. A healthy sexuality includes a willingness to open oneself to all sorts of emotional connections with one's partner; sexual adventurism, including adultery, troism, even masturbation, if it is worth anything at all, creates emotional dangers as much as it does physical pleasure. Characters unwilling to take that risk are fleeing from real human intimacy as much as Zuckerman sitting and watching in a detached way as a young woman masturbates with a vegetable.
In any event, I find it ridiculous to compare authors from a different time - and American forty years ago, even twenty, was a far different place than it has since become - and comparing any art form from one period to another, even on the kind of flimsy criteria Roiphe sets up in this essay, is a fools game. The article in question reveals far more about the author's mind-set than it does anything about sex and American novelists.
Virtual Tin Cup
