I'm vacationing with my family in Beaver Bay, Minnesota, this week, and I can't stop sniggering. I'd like to think that working at an intelligent magazine about sex would make me more mature about these things, but I worry I've moved in the opposite direction. Now I'm the one at the party to screech about this porn star's labial trimmings, or that wacky fetish with balloons; the one shrilly insisting that tongue piercings are for blowjobs and giggling like a female Beavis whenever a sexual euphemism pops up into conversation i.e. Beaver Bay, MN.
I assume there are real beavers here on the shores of frigid Lake Superior, but I haven't seen any. I wonder if the residents have any inkling of the sexual impropriety of their town's name the all-female Beaver College in Pennsylvania changed its name to the oh-so-Socratic-sounding Arcadia University last year after enduring loads of mockery from David Letterman. I doubt that the word "beaver" is such an issue here. I mean, this is Minnesota the home of such practical things as Betty Crocker, the Jolly Green Giant and Post-It Notes. As Lorrie Moore once wrote about the Midwest, "There were gyms, but no irony or coffee shops. People took things literally, without drugs." It's so true: you cannot underestimate the power of literal-mindedness in the middle states. Besides, people don't really sit down and discuss sexual matters in Minnesota, or in my hometown of Fargo, North Dakota. If they do, it's innocently biological or quirkily sideways. For instance, "Didja hear that Judy Olafson had a real bad Caesarean?" or "Boy, those gals at Hooters are really something, doncha think?" I have a little theory that all the Scandinavians that immigrated to the Great Plains were the pinch-lipped, immobile-hipped cousins of the notorious cavorting-naked-in-snowdrifts libertines that were left back in Europe. With little sex and no irony, how could Minnesotans ever perceive Beaver Bay to be anything other than an inlet for those industrious semiaquatic herbivorous rodents? In fact, I'm sure the residents of Remer, Minnesota, (pronounced "reamer") don't even blink twice.
My mother might seem like the exception: last year, at a family wedding, she became hysterical when telling me that I had given her "a real beaver shot" when my dad innocently dipped me on the dance floor. (Maybe it's not just blond hair or blue eyes that runs in my family, but the genetic predisposition for a snorting, derisive giggle.)
Still, my parents, born-and-bred-Midwesterners, are pretty discreet about sex and just a little grossed out by my line of work, I think. They are good liberals, and generally supportive of almost anything their daughters do (although my mother asked me recently, "Can one of my daughters not write an essay about her vagina?" managing for once to avoid the raunchier synonym). But I've sensed their small discomfort with this magazine's sexual open door policy. Every time my mother checks out Hooksexup, the featured piece seems to be about anal sex.
And a part of me can't blame them I'm a Fargo girl at heart, and sometimes I can be kind of a prude. My shame will pop up at inopportune moments, like when a nice relative is asking me about my job, and I start spewing cerebral theories about sexuality, gender politics, emotions, love all worthy topics! only to transform, in the middle of my lecture, into a sweaty man in a raincoat, exposing myself to third graders. (After all, a "smart sex magazine" in New York is just another beaver mag in Fargo, doncha know.) There are times at my desk, after hours of brainstorming synonyms for "sticky," when sex starts to seem like vigorous tooth-brushing or an activity even more selfish and depraved, like vigorous flossing. During our editorial meetings, I'll channel the crotchety spirit of Andy Rooney ("What's the deal with these bondage people? Do they realize how ridiculous they look? And doesn't that latex deprivation suit get clammy?"). At these grumpy moments, I believe that the North Dakotan in me is alive and well, and she's saying: Do it if you must but don't talk about it.
But then there's the other part of me, the part I hope is ascendant: the one that insists that raunchy, adventurous honesty is a good thing. Our detractors complain that Hooksexup takes the "mystery" out of sex; but sex isn't a fuzzy, mystical experience to be referred to at a respectable distance, like Yahweh or something. If we surround sex in secrecy and distance, we inevitably glamorize it, and that can lead to trouble: namely, disillusionment about pleasure, and misinformation about where to get it. Dealing with sex honestly and without repression can shed a little sunlight into an area of our lives that can sometimes look like a darkened, mossy, heavily forested glen (filled with beavers). Even as a Fargo adolescent, I could tell that the more I dissected sex from poring over my best friend's parent's bootleg of The Devil in Miss Jones to secretly reading Wifey as I babysat the less scared and more excited I felt for the actual event. Perhaps I'm just one of those people who compulsively needs to know all of the answers on the pop quiz days before. I hate being caught unprepared; armed with information, I can feel more free to relax and have a good time. Then again, maybe I've just applied the aforementioned practicality and literal-mindedness of my ancestors to my sex life, turning the healthy sunlight on the one topic Midwesterners actually prefer to keep in the shade.
So, call me the love child of the frozen tundra and pro-sex feminism, or maybe the Lutheran Church and South Park. And what's wrong with that? I mean, I don't want to be EagerBeaver1975, earnestly discussing my poodle fetish in some AOL chatroom, but I also don't want to be the kind of girl who can't get a good belly laugh out of a name like Beaver Bay (and I didn't even mention the burgs of Moorhead, Fertile, Gaylord, Mounds View, Embarrass or Climax!) I think these opposite poles in my brain keep me in proportion. Oh, the hell with it. In the end, maybe I am just a Midwesterner after all: all I want is to be well-balanced.
