Musings on the expression of sexuality through dress culminate in a date to which the author wears a new blouse. Observations on the representation of sex in cinema coincide with a date at the movies. Set over a year during which the author renounces penetrative sex in the hope of finding love, each chapter is pegged to a theme with a corresponding romantic date and its backstory. And now a chaste diary? I was intrigued as to whom Hephzibah Anderson's memoir was intended for, and what exactly Chastened was hoping to impart to its readers that The Rules had not already given them 10 years earlier. Yet while I may be excommunicated for admitting that Catherine Millet's infamous memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M left me bored and numb rather than shocked or thrilled, I do believe that, by default of their gender, women's sex diaries have to negotiate inevitable obstacles of taboo, feminist rhetoric and cliché on a route littered with opportunities for self-indulgence. Mine is a greater number than I'd like", while "we all know that the double standard lingers on.W riting about sex is tricky for the female author in a climate that favours brazen Bukowski-esque directness. She knew this might seem illogical: "it had to do with numbers as well - those tallies we each carry around with us, inscribed in our minds because they don't always belong in our hearts), in the faintest pencil lest anyone see them. With hopes more often dashed than fulfilled, she decided to step off the merry-go-round for a year - or at least to continue with some of it while holding back from a leap between any sheets. that it is hard not to wonder occasionally whether it's worth it". A journalist as often in Manhattan as London, Anderson reached a point when she found that "sex and its pursuit seem to have become such blood sports, their rules so confusing. In fact, Chastened contains much more than at first apparent. Some have assumed that Hephzibah Anderson, in eschewing men for a year, donned bedsocks, turned up the electric blanket and slurped Ovaltine with another book against her chest. Told that "what you need is romance,/ Something in pants", she realises that "two feet are ever cold / Four feet are never cold".
"Only my book in bed/ Knows how I look in bed," laments the narrator of Lorenz Hart's terrific "Why Can't I?" (1929 ).
0 kommentar(er)
