In , veteran feminist Germaine Greer took to the pages of The Guardian ostensibly to remark upon a newly released biography of the 19 th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, but her critique quickly swerved into a skewering of the poet himself.
Greer's greater error was to ignore the political significance of poetry about anal sex. They lived, in other words, before sex was boring. In Rimbaud and Verlaine's world, for better or worse, sex had stakes. It reflected upon a person's social standingβbuilding status or destroying reputationsβand had a decidedly political edge, influencing distributions of power.
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Art that took society to task for its commitment to such matrices of sex and power, as the poetry of Rimbaud and his contemporaries did, was therefore risky and intriguing. That's why, in the poem Greer cites, Rimbaud and Verlaine don't merely write that they like anal sex the poem is far from titillating but that there is something beautiful about it.
The big kink show of the moment, 50 Shades of Grey, seems on some level to have politics written all over it , and yet it is completely unaware of its own political entanglements. Rather than using its treatment of ersatz sexual taboos as a commentary on society, the 50 Shades franchise seeks to literally sell its sexuality as a consumer good, nothing more than a selection from a store by an individual person. Even our modern orgies are expressed in terms of consumption and experience.
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The company's founder, Emma Sayle, described its conception as "a time when 'Sex and the City' had just launched and suddenly there were these girls talking about vibrators on national television. The female sexual revolution thing was going on. It is an extremely low-stakes project for everyone involved. You are using an outdated browser.
