promotion

or the children of the 1970s, the sexual revolution brought Judy Blume, Free to Be … You and Me and The Joy of Sex, which was covertly unearthed from parental underwear drawers across the country. The flowing line drawings of the shaggy haired, unshaven couple were the source of both sexual awakening and revulsion — mom and dad are doing that?
   In The Position, Meg Wolitzer ratchets up the cringe factor with a horrifying question: What if the lustful lovers in the book were your parents? The novel begins in 1975, as Roz and Paul Mellow publish Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment. The four school-age Mellow children discover the book and are mortified to see illustrations of their parents demonstrating each technique. Thirty years later, a publisher wants to re-issue Pleasuring and everyone in the Mellow family must confront its impact on their life, their psyche and their sexuality.
   From her home in Manhattan, Meg Wolitzer spoke to Hooksexup about hipster parents, ninth-grade consciousness-raising groups, and the secret dreamscape of '70s television. — Sara Eckel

The Position centers on a Joy of Sex-type manual. What fascinated you about that book?
My parents had a copy, and my sister and I read it together. I took the idea of our having seen it to the most extreme place that I could, because I think that parenthood and sex have a very poor relationship. You have to acknowledge that people in a family are sexual, but you don't want to see that. This was the '70s. You had to understand they had their own sexual life, but you didn't want to think about it too much. When we looked at The Joy of Sex, it was the first time we understood what they were doing. The couple in the book looked like they were my parents' age. You could imagine your parents, and it forced you to picture the primal scene.

Do you think that most people who grew up in the '70s have a memory of The Joy of Sex?
I think so. For me, there were two books. The other classic was the horrible Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, which was really obnoxious and sexist and homophobic. The Joy of Sex was more low-key. For most people that I have talked about it with — and pretty much everyone my age does remember it — it seemed so graphic then, but now it's so sweet and sedate, because it's this monogamous couple and they're exploring together.

It's true. By today's standards, The Joy of Sex almost seems quaint.
It was quaint. It was about mutual admiration and perfect respect for each other. They are equal partners. Remember that the woman is this new feminist. She's just come in from The March. And the man has been watching a lot of Alan Alda movies, so he knows how to behave. It was a cliché, and that's what makes it funny and unbearable to look at.

The '70s does seem so comical. We say things like "free love" or "consciousness-raising" with kind of a snicker. What have we forgotten about, beyond the cultural reference points?
I always get a laugh when I tell people I started a consciousness-raising group in the ninth grade. We wrote away to NOW, and they had all these topics like "Orgasm and You." But we just wanted to know things like "When Your Mom Won't Listen" or "Your Room: Should it Be Yours Alone?" That's what we were talking about. But there was nothing for budding feminists at the time. But all of the ideas from that time have been folded in our thinking.

My husband wrote a book about Freud and Einstein last year, and one of the things he's said that I think is really true is that while there is so much Freud-bashing, everyone accepts the idea of an unconscious, even people who make fun of it. People have complained about a similar thing, about young women who don't want to call themselves feminists. This really radical thing becomes accepted into the culture, but they cast out the language.

Now that sexual imagery isn't so sweet, are you worried about your kids being exposed to it?
I would worry if I started to see it bleed into their life or their preoccupations or their language, but I don't see that. Children need their private world. When I was a child, television was like going into this secret landscape that my parents weren't interested in. I would watch I Dream of Jeannie, and go into that room, into that lamp, and it was such an intense experience at the time. That belonged to me. So for my kids, yeah, the world is uglier and cruder, but until they become ugly and crude I won't worry about it.

For all of Roz and Paul's liberalism about sex, their book has scant mention of gay sex. Were they simply products of their time?
I really think so. I deliberately didn't look at The Joy of Sex when I was writing this. I wanted to take pieces of what I vaguely remembered and make up my own thing. What I remember about Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex was this really demeaning thing about lesbians. I think it even said a zero plus a zero equals a zero. It took me a long time as a child to understand what that meant — my sister, disgusted with my ignorance, explained to me. There was an institutionalized sneering toward gay men and lesbians that was oddly acceptable back then. That just hadn't been put in to the picture yet.

Roz says that coupling ages you. Do you think that's true?
Probably. The people I know who are not in couples, if they are looking for someone, are always striving toward something. I don't just mean that couples let themselves go because they don't have to snag someone. People who aren't in couples are more in the world and less in the little world that couples create. Of course, that's often because sometimes the world that they create on their own is lonely.

Holly Mellow has the most severe reaction to the book, even though Holly was the oldest and most sexually sophisticated of the children. Why did she react so strongly?
There is always one person in a family, I decided, who is out of step comparatively. And if you have enough kids, there will always be one kid who will not want to be on the family team. I felt that having everyone be preoccupied with the parents' book seemed wrong, and I thought somebody is going to fall out. Which kind of child would? I started thinking about a girl I knew when I was growing up who always seemed angry toward her parents. She was very pretty and a druggie, and she ended up being in and out of her parents' lives. For Holly, the pleasure of her early sexual experience is hard for her to achieve over time, which I think is true for a lot of people because adolescent sexuality is so gorgeous and tortured. Her parents boasted that you could always have this, so it became something she could never live up to. It's like those Indian finger cuffs that get tighter as you pull. The more she strives to have her own kind of pleasure and autonomy, the less able she is to find it.

Even before the publication of Pleasuring, the Mellow kids noticed that their parents seemed to actively love each other more than other parents, and they felt both proud and unhappy about it. Why unhappy?
Because the ideal parent is a little boring. Children are such narcissists that I think they want their parents to be a little less of themselves, so that they can be set into relief. On the other hand, they would feel a kind of pride that their parents were unique. That's completely true for me when I was growing up, because my mother is a writer. When she sold her first novel, no one's mother did this. She was being published in Esquire and all these really interesting places, and other people's mothers were travel agents or housewives. I understood that this was something to really be proud of, and yet it also took her away from me more.

Did you read her books?
I did, and she had some sex in her first novel. There was a scene of oral sex, and I felt kind of mortified, but I found that you can read selectively. It's almost like keeping your hand in front of your face when you watch a scary movie. I read in and around her work, so I could really be proud of it without having to face what was really in it. It wasn't highly sexual or embarrassing, but it was bold and it was different from anyone else's mother.

Are you worried about your own kids reading your books?
Right now they seem really uninterested. They've read some things, and my older kid's friends are telling me that all these teenage girls are reading a book I wrote called Surrender, Dorothy. It's strange to me. I never realized that my sons would grow up to think of my work at all. Now that it seems to be thrust upon me, I guess they'll read what they want. You can't think about it.  n°

 

To buy The Position, click here.

©2005 hooksexup.com.