It’s All About Sex . . .Except SexChapter 17

Key Points

•When authors write about sex, they’re really writing about something else

Quotes for Analysis

•When they’re writing about other things, they really mean sex, and when they write about sex, they really mean something else. If they write about sex and strictly mean sex, we have a word for that. Pornography.

Quotes for Analysis

•“Two of the most notorious novels of that same period of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita are famous for bad sex. Not bad sex as in unsatisfactory; bad as in evil.”

Quotes for Analysis

•You just know that these scenes mean something more than what’s going on in them. It’s true in life as well, where sex can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebellion, resignation, supplication, domination, enlightenment, the whole works.”