Dear Love Attorney,
My husband and I are having some trouble with our sex talk. We’ve tried everything: robot voices, other languages, strings of four letter words interjected with ‘my’ and ‘your’. It all falls flat. The sex is fine, but smut talk just really turns me on. Can you recommend a remedy for our boring old dirty talk?
From,
Sick of Clean Talk
Dear Clean Talk,
In my Viennese law school days, my reading group and I would celebrate the Roman god Bacchus every week by stripping down and participating in a full-scale, unrepressed orgy. This went on for about six years, until that blackguard Kensling got infected with the sailor’s disease and ruined it for the rest of us.
But in those six years we never once felt musty in our dirty talk. The secret: being literati, we all had many ways of describing sex, in the style of our favorite books and writers. From Woolf’s free-flowing springing of our unconscious, to the stark, plain style of Hemingway, we had a world of sexual metaphors at our hands, each style working for different ends of mood-production and arousal. Allow me to give a few examples I remember from those youthful encounters:
William Faulkner: “Ramming its sharp tongues through my skin, the multi-pronged fork of my inner devil, coiled up inside the pit of my beating heart like the bastardly serpent banished from Eden’s green and for whom I am grateful, reveals itself to you and me both now (Translation: You’re so hot, take it, yeah, oh god). The molten lust stabs at me and incinerates me and soon consumes me, and now, my metamorphosis completed, my lust then consumes you, and what do we become but clay in the hands of a benevolent and violent god (Trans: Yeah, spank me, spank me). How lucky are we, to sense the secret that old Sartoris will never know again, and maybe never did, except as a tremor, vague in his dark forge, never giving its fire to spill out of the black iron shell that hides and contains so well—not only from the pilferers, philanderers, and society women around him, if not from he himself—the plaintive, painful healing of…(Trans: OOOaaaaoOOOhhhhh!!).”
Science Textbook: “My corona is dilating. Yes. And I observe the vasodilation of your corpora cabaronosa. That’s hot. Be careful, my pubococcygeus can only take mean-sized specimens, but yours may be too large to effectively proceed.
Lewis Carroll: “So kurillum, you dirty nabberjockey. Again, again, asven in the rupolam! Cruluph, cruluph! That’s the paumrigg and forrust. No, forrust, you spreckled knuggler!
Ernest Hemingway: “I finished. It reminds me of the hills of the Elbe river valley, how it glistens like white elephants.”
Sigmund Freud: “Who’s your daddy?!”
There you have it, Clean. What I’ve given you is only an introduction to the possibilities of stylistic literary dirty talk. Other great examples come from Joyce, Shakespear, Sylvia Plath, and Dr. Seuss. It’s the smut talk of ideas, not of the vulgar and unimaginative physical world. Well, I must be going. I have a reunion of my old reading group to attend.
Love,
The Love Attorney
