Sex Drive by Stephanie Theobald

Author:Stephanie Theobald [Theobald, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783526833
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2018-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Back at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, a few of the Chinese delegation are paying attention to the dreary sex movie, although most slump in their seats, flicking through their smartphones. Some get up to take pictures of the Asian figures having coitus in the cabinets. It must be strange coming from an ancient civilisation where sex was once so sophisticated and now you end up in Ted’s academy watching two unattractive Americans from the 1970s humping away. None of the Chinese speak English, so it’s hard to know what they think.

I cast my mind back to Betty’s fantasy Rolodex and her insistence that fantasy focuses the mind. ‘The dirtier, the filthier the better,’ she said. I remember feeling shocked when she reminded the room that you are allowed to think of anything you want in your head. The idea that some thoughts are too unfeminist is absurd and I will stand up for fast-food Xhamster wanks, even though sometimes I do feel grubby afterwards. Back in the 1980s, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin brainwashed women into believing that all porn causes violence against women. This idea is as uninformed as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eighteenth-century claim that masturbation is a form of rape because you can have your way with any beauty ‘without the need of first obtaining her consent’.

Another of the yellow films cranks up and Robert and I watch a wife joyfully stroking her husband’s limp cock. ‘You know the weird thing about this place?’ he whispers. ‘It’s a sex institute and it feels completely unsexy.’

I decide to search for something a little more titillating. So I walk upstairs and wander through a musty library maze, glancing at original 1960s pulp fiction: Bitch in Rubber by Clive Bedford, Share My Spouse by Dr Guenter Klow. In a more academic section there are two different editions of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers as well as The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and a large Freud and Foucault section. I emerge into another chilly room filled with dusty boxes of VHS video cassettes and spools of Super-8 film. A porn magazine from 1992 is stuck in one of the boxes. A naked woman in leg warmers is on the cover. I open it and read, ‘His cock was as hard as granite and slick as grease.’ I like the fact that Ted McIlvenna takes sex seriously, but I wonder if maybe he shouldn’t sort through his collection a bit more selectively.

In another room piled high with overflowing boxes and crates I stumble across a plastic bag filled with a series of beautiful drawings and watercolour paintings. The paintings are mainly of naked green female nymphomaniac aliens with Veronica Lake purple hair. But they’re painted as if they’re part of an art deco ad for the front window of Tiffany’s circa 1932. The lightness of stroke and delicacy of colour contrasts impressively with the explicit sexual poses. I realise these drawings are by Alexander Szekely, the same artist whose frolicking lovers adorn the Institute’s hallway.

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