Reading Sex is a very good book about erotica, not pornography. Erotica was a varied genre that included novels, poems, and satire, though I thought that genre was more strictly about particular forms than contents and that, therefore, it cannot be both prose or poetry or some sung ditty at one and the same time. It does not help that Karen Harvey does not sufficiently situate erotica in broad literary cultures. Erotica depicted bodies and sex through metaphor, innuendo, and jokes and was not sexually explicit. Its authors avoided raw depravity, preferring instead to trigger regulated responses, and even gave intellectual pleasure to polished society by way of learned allusions. Harvey works hard to maintain a border between erotica and vulgar pornography, while accepting slippage. But it is too porous at times. Bawdy roosters in the Beggar's Benison or Hell-Fire Clubs read both erotica and pornography before getting down to the night's debauchery. There are fine lines between risqué reading, basement smut, and innuendo, and erotica is tangled up in them. It seems to me that Harvey never quite adequately distinguishes a set of definitions or rules for what makes one piece of writing erotica and another pornographic.
Reading Sex exemplifies the plus points and problems that can crop up when we decipher society and culture through texts and images. Most erotica authors published anonymously, and we also know little about actual readers. Harvey's informed guess is that they were middling men and above, polite people in the main. A pointer is the sort of classical, medical, scientific, and geographical knowledge needed to grasp erotica's gags, puns, and insinuations. The market was urban for the most part and maybe metropolitan only. Erotica's turf was the male club and coffeehouse. It would be nice to be surer about who read it. Evidence is threadbare, to be fair, but Harvey believes that it is more revealing to know who was thought to read it. Not everyone will be satisfied by this, not least because of her handling of the one recorded reader. Thomas Thistlewood jotted down seven words in his Jamaica diary after giving an erotic poem to a friend. He is “more typical of erotic reading” (76), Harvey notes: but how can she be sure? He treated erotica like everything else he read: one reading spanning seven words is all we have. And he handed round the poem to a network of male mates: one is mentioned. It is a shame that although claims are made about readership, Harvey did not trawl through diaries and letters from the polite milieus where she locates erotica's readers. This would have given us better senses of erotica's potential to be read and shared.
Ironically, Harvey is on safer ground speculating, situating erotica in middling walks of life. Here male sexuality was toned down because the libido was limited by politeness in homosocial settings. Man-made in many ways, erotica still said more about women. It was female bodies that were key to unlocking gender-sex differences. Erotica zoomed in on uniquely female attributes and processes—menstruation, pregnancy, breasts, all meaning fertility. For a long time now gender and sexuality have been trapped inside tight linear narratives. Harvey's is the latest subtler interpretation that mixes things up. She splits Thomas Laqueur's one-sex/two-sex shift into flexible parts. Understandings of bodies and gender coupled old and new, sameness and difference. In erotica, women were sexualized in representations of conception, penetration, and desire. Female desire was both gentle and heated, scary and healthy. Representations homed in on points where gender and geography merged, situating eroticized female bodies in sexualized locations that were appropriately dark and deep—caves, grottoes, groves, and shut rooms, all metaphors for female bodies and parts. These were feminine sites for sex, sanctioned spaces where men called to take pleasure in passion that was productive because women were also imagined as fertile lush land. Male fertility was also commended and politicized, because it promised to reproduce a nation at a time when war called for more manpower.
Sexual spaces were shared in erotica, but the balance of power in them was complex. Women never had the upper hand; they always waited for men, who chose when to visit for sex in spaces they did not own. Gendered configurations of sex were signified in male movement: men ranged over female bodies, entering them in strong strokes. Women were traversed from top to toe and depicted in overlapping architectural and topographical metaphors where body-as-land was crossed and entered. Sex in erotica concerned male might and female surrender, sometimes freely given. Men also moved women around to show off healthy strength and sexuality. Women elevated this burly positive sexuality through touches and looks. Sex was pleasurable (another potshot at Laqueur here). The senses combined for pleasures, but these contacts followed gendered norms: women felt pleasure within the male-made gender order and at the same time bestowed healthy heterosexuality upon men's bodies.
This is a clever book, but maybe too clever at times. Harvey extrapolates a lot, sometimes from thin evidence. There are strange-sounding statements: “The difficulties in demonstrating visually a tree and shrub engaging in penetrative sex highlights the limits of the tree-shrub analogy for heterosexual sex,” for one (93). Others are over-the-top: men threw “frozen women onto beds” for sex “while women remained absolutely still, if not unconscious” (197). There is also some clichéd writing—a lot of soaking, saturating, and drenching—“sex itself” was “drenched in femininity” (173). This is to say that sometimes Harvey seems to want to be shocking and trendy (there is a rare example of a leading university press allowing an author to use an expletive unnecessarily). She often assumes something rather than demonstrating and explaining it, like audiences, for instance, or erotica's impact on society. Nor are there enough readers or buyers here for secure contexts and responses. There are many more metaphors, however, more often than not grounded in close readings, but not tangible all the same. When all is said and done, erotica does not come alive in the hands of enough people. We needed to learn more about authors, sellers, prices, print runs, readers, and what else they did apart from reading sex.
Harvey says right from the start that erotica is symbiotic, feeding off culture and events but shaping them too. But there are not many times when we see how erotica influenced, except for figuration or good guesswork about polite people who enjoyed erotica as well as the landscaped walks and balls of urban Renaissance England. The latest science, Enlightenment, enclosure, empire, cartography, voyages to the earth's edges, worldwide trade, teeming cities, Grub Street, and more all affected erotica and gave it topicality. But we could count on the fingers of one hand the times when erotica is shown to have affected anything on this long list. So Reading Sex could have benefited from more contact with context and the other side of symbiosis when erotica impinged on society. That said, it is a very good book that breaks new ground and is never dull. Harvey gets the better of Laqueur, but courteously. Her main achievement, I think, is to complicate understandings of sex and gender three centuries or so ago. She has given other scholars much to chew over.
