What is sexy? May as well ask how long a piece of string is. Few things, it seems, are as flexible and myriad as our attitudes towards sex. And yet – from a textual perspective – it seems impossible merely to ‘have’ it. Either sex is sandwiched between a kiss and cut away to breakfast, a fade out or the end of a chapter, or it’s a statement of some kind. The very fact of our seeing sex says something about it – which gender is dominant? How is this different from other sex we have seen? Is it conservative, or radical? Is it a metaphor?
While these questions don’t pop up in real life sex very often, they are difficult to avoid in a text. Try as we might, what we experience on the stage, page or screen isn’t sex – it’s a cosign for it, and carries a host of issues and associations. The Erotica Project, which starts playing on the 11th of January at the Greenwich Playhouse, is an attempt to put the fun back in sex, to put the sex back in, if you will.
The show itself is a series of monologues – all by women – talking about sex. The majority of them are celebratory, even if what they’re talking about isn’t. Sex is fun, The Erotica Project tells us, good, clean fun. Erin Cressida Wilson, one of the Project’s writers – who has since gone on to write the screenplay for Secretary – said in an interview that, ‘Our agenda was that we had no agenda.’ Wilson was worried by what she saw as a culture of victimisation and blame – especially of women in sex – by both the hegemony and second-wave feminists trying to reclaim it.
In the sixties, Lacan’s radical theories of power and submission had turned sex political. His work, and the explosion of feminism that accompanied it, led to writers like Andrea Dworkin, who posited heterosexual sex as rape. Women who enjoyed it were cuckolds, she argued, unwittingly participating in their own subjugation. Sex, suddenly, had become an ideological battleground – the Flanders of gender warfare.
The Erotica Project is a rebuttal to this conflict, an attempt to place sex in the locus of the everyday – without the subtext, the anxiety and the resentment. The show is predominantly straight, a reclamation not just of sex, but of the penis. ‘I really love men,’ has said Wilson, ‘and I love the phallus.’ And she shares the love; the women on stage talk about – not what sex says about them, or the person they are having it with – but how it makes them feel. And on the whole, it makes them feel good.
There is an interesting assumption at play here. Namely, that Lacan and co. were wrong. The idea is that their academic dissertations – their neuroses – have succeeded in polluting sex; making us feel guilty for having it, or for having it the wrong way. The implication is that sex – before postmodernism – was just sex. It wasn’t something people talked about very much, and when they did, it was the act they talked about – not what it meant as a culture, or a gender, or a metaphor.
But is this how we think about sex? Like a fun hobby? An intense, more pleasurable version of racquetball? It doesn’t somehow ring true. Indeed, if anything, we are talking about sex more, not less – and I don’t know if that means we aren’t enjoying it.
The ideological premise behind The Erotica Project is that sex has been robbed from women twofold. Firstly, in the chauvinist, masculine portrayals that are still the most common and acceptable versions, and secondly by the feminists that said we couldn’t enjoy it without being slaves. Despite Wilson’s avowed intent not to have an agenda, The Erotica Project’s aim is very clear; it is reclaiming sex – good sex – for women.
But – and here’s the rub – what is good sex? Women have been talking about sex for a while now, in a host of different ways. Heterosexual texts by women abound. Be it The Vagina Monologues, Sex and The City, The Bride Stripped Bare or Kathy Acker’s latest provocation, talking about sex is very popular – indeed, you could argue that it is intrinsically popular.
These texts are very wordy; very loquacious. This isn’t Every Woman shoehorned into a narrative framing device – these are stories, characters and ideas. The Erotica Project toys with the notion that dissecting sex – analysing it, symbolising it, etc. – has rendered it sterile. But is it possible that we actually like talking about sex? Is it possible, in fact, that we even get off on it a little bit?
Analysis has copped a bum rap over the years. Too cerebral, it’s said, incapable of marrying its dry theory with the complex web of human passions and physicality. And yet, what is sex but the marriage of the cerebral and the physical? One of the most subjective things there is, surely, to deny the eroticism of the mind is to deny the erotic?
When we see The Erotica Project, we are not having sex as we watch it, and nor are the actors. We are not getting aroused by the nascent possibility of sex held within the show – this isn’t a strip club with a shady back room. Rather, we are getting excited by the idea of sex; by the idea of good sex. And what is good sex? Simply, it is sex that people enjoy, before, during and after. And there is room in that definition for the Lacans and Dworkins of this world, as well as the Jongs, Enslers and Millers.
The real accomplishment of The Erotica Project is its cerebral qualities. The show successfully captures that mercurial term ‘sexy’, and does so in a fun, physical, intellectual way. The idea that deconstructing this somehow ruins it – like a magician revealing their tricks – is a restrictive one. After all, what is sexy? May as well ask how long a…. well, you get the picture.
The Erotica Project is playing at the Greenwich Playhouse from the 11th January to the 6th February, Tuesday – Saturday 8.00pm, Sunday 4.00pm.
