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Not News
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| The Taboo of the 'F' Word | |
| By Don_Quixote | ||
| 30 November 2006 | ||
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reproduced from the Sunday Bugle Christmas Books supplement, 26 November 2006 “The Taboo of the ‘F’ word: Deconstructing the Myth” Gervaise Dreadnought published by Hardon Press, 999pp, £9.99 a review by Roger Freely In this, his latest book, Professor Dreadnought has injected a radical new spirit into intellectual life, touching on every aspect of existence, social and cultural, literary and artistic, linguistic and anthropological. Indeed, his thesis not only has a relevance to society’s attitude to sex, but also to cheap home loans and cut-price air tickets. The ‘F’ word of the title is of course fornication, hitherto unuttered in locations as diverse as school classrooms and old age people’s homes. But now, thanks to the author, it can be heard from the lips of attendees at ‘esprits de vivre’, frequenters of Black Masses, participants in BBC Radio Four chat programmes and so on, down the line to the occupants of rugby club shower baths, and ultimately in the playrooms of state-subsidised working class ghetto kindergartens. Professor Dreadnought makes no apologies as he plunges into his fearless, illuminatory, approach to one of the last linguistic taboos. “With fornication we may,” he supposes, “do one of two basic things. We may lie back and think of England, and probably nowadays also of the rest of the European Union. Alternatively, we may do it standing up – thinking, that is – and treat it in terms of logic, philosophy, even thought itself, before analysing the act semiotically. In other words, to put coitalism back into culture where it belongs, nestling among the London Eye, the DVD recorder, the out-of-town shopping mall and the shorter working week. This deconstruction of the ‘F’ word’s myth no doubt has more appeal to people of an intellectual, rather than a nervous disposition, but that has not deterred the author in his mission of bringing his message to the masses by the judicious use of non-academic prose, i.e. few words contain more than four syllables. But Dreadnought’s prospect of fornication - to the disappointment of many of this book’s readers, one might imagine - has nothing to do with pleasure or pornography, desire or delight, stimulation or seduction. To him it has merely become a trope, an interface, on which post post-modernist writers base their creative work. However the feminist view, as reported by the author, is somewhat at odds with this perceived interpretation. Dr Gladys Micklethwaite, Professor of Castration Studies at University College London, avers that sex is merely a symbol of masculine power, and as such is not worthy of intellectual attention. “If the fornicatory act is a means of demystifying sex,” she postulates “it is absurd not to engage in its undoubtedly pleasurable benefits at all levels of society.”: an opinion that gives a nod to the bourgeois origins of ‘the privileging of sex’ when, for reasons of property, privacy and genealogy, the mercantile classes made it private and scarce in order to drive up its value in the erotic stakes. Her observation also points to Freud, who gave sex its twentieth-century location, “locked safely in that most impenetrable of places, the Unconscious.” But those who know where to find the key are able to access and experience the fulfilment it promises, be it in bed, on the kitchen table or, less domestically, on the back seat of automobiles. Such exponents celebrate a sexual utopia, attaching fornication to liberation and thus the dream of a libido which, freed of repression, comes to represent ‘real desire’. The flood gates have been opened: a situation evolves where all gratification, sexual, political, linguistic and philosophical is considered a human right irrespective of a person’s social class. The ‘fallacy’ that the pleasure principle is a protected privilege becomes ‘phallusy’, a word that together with ‘desire’ and seduction’ will soon join the mainstream of the working class vocabulary. In initiating a debate on the taboo that has been the ‘F’ word, Professor Dreadnought has ensured that there will be more to be said on the subject. Indeed, Dr Micklethwaite has been reported recently in the Times Literary Supplement’s ‘NB’ column as having withdrawn her claim that ‘the metaphysical sacred vagina is the centre of feminist philosophy’, advocating instead an exclamatory zeal by way of the slogan ”When we come, the world rejoices with us.” (Roger Freely is a publicity officer at the Durex Institute)
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