State of sleaze

Susie Bright searches the erotic landscape

by Matt Ashare

THE BEST AMERICAN EROTICA -- 1996, edited by Susie Bright. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 254 pages, $12.

Erotica, and sex in general, has come a long way since the days when Bettie Page was the pin-up of choice. And people like Bob Dole, William Bennett, and Robert Bork -- who just published a polemic against sleaze and smut titled Slouching Towards Gomorrah -- aren't exactly comfortable with where we're headed. Sometimes the ugliness of the contemporary sexual-industrial complex, which includes everything from the soft-focus sensuality of The Red Shoe Diaries to hardcore porn movies and show-all live sex shows as some of its largest assets (huh, huh, huh, he said assets), is enough to make even the hipper elements of our society eager to cross that bridge to the past, to go back to the era of the pin-up girl. As sexpert Susie Bright puts it in the introduction to the new The Best American Erotica: 1996, the third such anthology she's edited, "Commercial porn purveyors are well acquainted with the fact that the smut that sells the hottest today is the material that's nostalgic."

Bright is also quick to point out that there's really no going back in time. She has little interest in examining the evolution of the smut industry or in arguing any cases against Judge Bork. In fact, she opens her intro by flatly declaring, "Erotica is dead." What she means is that the old debate over where the line between erotica (i.e., real literature) and pornography (i.e., evil trash) should be drawn has lost its relevance to anyone but political conservatives or those who'd like to repackage yesterday's pin-up girls as today's quaint and harmless kitsch (i.e., art). For Bright, the only truly meaningful question is "Were you honest? Was it real?" "The sex doesn't always have to get us off," she writes, "but we damn well better believe it had its author by the short and curlies."

Of course, that makes her criteria seem every bit as subjective as Bork's. But as the 22 selections in The Best American Erotica: 1996 unfold, it becomes clear that what she really values in erotica is a sense of adventure, a spark of originality, and -- something that she's always brought to her own work -- humor and wit. The vaguely comic tone is set by the collection's opener, "The Letters," in which a young girl plays an elaborate practical joke on her history teacher. It's written by Eric Albert, a name New York Times crossword-puzzle aficionados should recognize from his work for that paper. The other stories in the anthology run the gamut from gay to straight sex, from cybersex fiction to hard-boiled hyper-realism, from tender to tough. But even the book's harshest fantasy, a gritty S&M vignette by Steven Saylor (writing under the pseudonym Aaron Travis), is leavened by a punch-line ending that takes some of the edge off.

Elsewhere the humor is more overt and pervasive. The book's lone cybersex entry, Doug Tierney's "The Portable Girlfriend," offers a clever and titillating view of man trapped in a virtual relationship with a computer-generated babe who wants commitment from her man ("I don't like it when you turn me off," she warns him). In "The Trade," Lars Eighner cooks up a scenario in which a horrifying sexually transmitted disease turns effete gay men into beer-guzzling, football-watching, ball-scratching heterosexuals. And "His Little Plan Backfired," a horny and humorous story by Amelia Copeland (a local writer who publishes the magazine Paramour), imagines a high-tech chastity belt with some very special arousing features that turn one woman's business trip into a multiple-orgasmic adventure.

Bright does include a few more serious-minded entries. Celia Tan's "Pearl Diver," about a young girl losing her virginity to the spirits of the seas, provides a short and welcome detour into the realm of magical-realism and smooth, flowing prose. An excerpt from Susanna Moore's novel in the cut -- which should have plenty of people eager to read more -- balances explicit sex with a strangely compelling portrait of a mysterious detective who works overtime on one of his cases. And Lucy Taylor's "Choke Hold" is a chilling, noirish story about auto-erotic asphyxiation that might work well as the script for an NC-17-rated episode of The X-Files.

Most of the writers featured in The Best American Erotica aren't aiming to transcend the limitations of "pornography" so much as to blur or simply ignore the imaginary border that separates it from other literature. Add the phrase "I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me, but . . . " to the beginning of Katya Andreevna's steamy shoe-fetish fantasy "The Perfect Fit" and you'd have a perfectly good candidate for a Penthouse "Forum" letter. But the underlying point of Bright's collection seems to be that "good" literature, like good sex, is largely a matter of taste. It was that way back when Bettie Page's naked image was being immortalized, and it's going be that way long after books by Bork and Bright go out of print.