It's All About Sex...

The mention of sex and thinking about sex makes almost everyone uncomfortable (I use almost because there are THOSE people out there). It can horrify the young and inexperienced minds of readers or it can send them into fits of giggles. I always find the creativity writers use to describe sex scenes very amusing and entertaining; it seems to me that they can relate almost anything, like such innocent things (beach waves) , into sensual details. I must admit, it is a bit hard to spot the sexual reference in movies when the writer's main goal is try to relay the message as subtly as possible, but it's even hard to see them in books; one must really read in between the lines. 

Foster writes a very eye-opening chapter about sex. He states that as the 20th century begins, readers are learning that sexuality may be encoded in their reading, while writers are learning that they can encode sexuality in their writing. But sexual symbolism didn't just start in the twentieth century; writers long ago learned that they can use sex symbolism in near anything: from crops to beach waves to wooden bowls. Back in those days, writing about sex was most definitely obscene and unacceptable. Censorship was a big deal and many books were confiscated, so writers learned how to write about sex as subtly as possible. Also, many authors were aware of their young audiences so they kept their sexual scenes encoded, where if read around the dinner table, the parents could share an inside joke. 

Foster only covered consented sex between two lovers and self pleasure, but he didn't mention forced sex, or in other words, rape. While reading this chapter, Lord of the Flies kept popping up in my head, mainly the scene where the boys are hunting a sow. It was a scene that was explained in my freshman English class, where it sent my classmates and I into shock. The scene starts out with the boys driven by their hunger for meat and chasing a sow. The author used violent phrases like "and the hunters followed, wedded to her in lust, excited by the long chase and the dropped blood.", "the sow fell and the hunters hurled themselves on her." to suggest gang rape. It was a pivotal scene in the book drawing the fact that the boys were no longer boys, having lost their innocence in this way. On the surface, it was just some boys chasing a pig around, and perhaps out determination and possibly luck, they manage to kill her. But it's so much more. It displays intense savagery and violence driven by lust that makes the reader so uncomfortable he or she realizes that killing the sow means so much more. 

The chapter mentions that Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams might as well be the father of all sexual innuendos in literature. In the book, he offered a completely new way of interpreting literature and demonstrated that readers think of sex more often than they think they do. Based on the article "Dirty Talks and Their Meaning" its author states that the discussion of sexuality in literature is not mainly about the act itself. He writes that writers over time have found ways to "talk dirty" without being explicit at all. Source: Sexuality and Literature- Dirty Talks and Their Meaning

It's funny how in this chapter how Foster writes that authors use other things to symbolize sex while in the following chapter, where he talks about actual literal sex scenes, they almost always stand for something else. He comes to a conclusion at the end of this chapter that if a writer will never present sex in terms of sexual organs and acts; they will much more likely look like "a bowl and some keys". Whereas, if there is an actual literal sex scene it could easily stand for a character's submission to another, rebellion, domination, or even enlightenment. Unless it's not, which then is just straight up pornography.