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One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History by Larry Flynt
Palgrave Macmillan, April, 2011; ISBN-10: 0230105033

Ben Franklin saved the American Revolution by seducing French Women. A gay love affair between President James Buchanan and Senator William King aided the secession movement. Woodrow Wilson’s girlfriend dictated his letters to the German Kaiser. And lesbian relationships inspired Eleanor Roosevelt to become a revolutionary crusader for equal rights. The colorful sex lives of America’s most powerful leaders have influenced social movements, government policies, elections and even wars, yet they are so whitewashed by historians that people think Thomas Jefferson and Abe Lincoln were made of marble, not flesh and blood.

But the truth is about to come out. In One Nation Under Sex, free speech activist and notorious Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt teams up with Columbia University history professor David Eisenbach to peek behind the White House bedroom curtains and document how hidden passions have shaped public life. They unpack salacious rumors and outright scandals, showing how private affairs have driven pivotal decisions—often with horrific consequences. Along the way, they explore the origins of America’s fascination with sex scandals and explain how we can put aside out political moralism and begin focusing on the real problems that threaten our nation.

“Teaming up Larry Flynt with Columbia University historian David Eisenbach seems like an odd match but Flynt and Eisenbach have combined their talents and perspectives to produce a unique book that transgresses the holy empire of American history by providing a serious investigation of the sex lives of the Presidents. Be warned: this is not smut; this is an important and thorough historical excavation of how sex built the White House and our nation.” —Jim Downs, Professor of History, Connecticut College
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir by Susie Bright
Seal Press, March 2011; ISBN-10: 1580052649

Review by Rob Hardy:   Though she has written other books, and has been open about sexual matters (and eager to help others out with sexual issues; she wasn’t called Susie Sexpert for nothing), Susie Bright has capped her previous works now with heartfelt and illuminating recollections in Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (Seal Press).  Bright is one of the people who has shaped current American sexuality.  She was an advisor for (and had a cameo role in) the Wachowski Brothers lesbian-themed film Bound, for instance, and helped found the first US magazine of lesbian erotica.  Though she has produced her own lesbian porn, and was enthusiastically lesbian in her twenties, she has been out as a bisexual ever since she was a teenager, and at 32 she had a daughter and even settled down with a guy.  There is plenty of coverage of her sexual exploits here, and some of the encounters are steamy.  There aren’t enough of them, however, to repay the effort of just flipping the pages to find “the good parts.”  Instead, Bright has written mostly about her extraordinarily difficult upbringing and her years as a youthful activist for socialism.  The time she was behind the counter at the Good Vibrations toy store is here, as is her founding and editing of the magazine On Our Backs, and her heartbreak of letting that effort go.  There’s not much about her advice columns, or her feminist reviews of erotic films, or her current weekly audio program In Bed with Susie Bright, or her website, or her blog.  She’s been busy; this funny, wide-eyed, and poignant memoir is bound to get sequels.

Bright was born in 1958, with parents she now says, looking back, “were far more radical than I am, because of basic changes in their generation.”  Her mother went to college, for instance, and her parents weren’t of the same religion (mother Catholic, father WASP, although both were eventually to abandon the religions of their upbringings), and the parents divorced before that became commonplace.  “They strayed so much further than I did from their immediate ancestors,” Bright says.  “They were better educated than I, but I have had a bigger mouth.  I don’t know who to blame for that.”  She is proud of both parents; both were “braniacs; they were language, poetry and music fiends; they took enormous pleasure in big ideas and the power of word.  They were literary sensualists.”  They had met in college, and years later they agreed that her father had been the only straight man studying classical languages and anthropology, so that by the time Bright “‘came out’ to my parents, it was anticlimactic - together, they’d had far more of a gay social life and witnessed more emerging queer history after World War II than I’d seen in a lifetime.”  The mother, who of course after the divorce took charge of Susie, had serious mental illness and was physically abusive.  Bright is able to begin one paragraph, “The last time my mom tried to kill the two of us was...” and goes on to describe how her mother drove them both toward a frozen river.  A spinout on ice prevented tragedy.  She was to move to Los Angeles to live with her father and attend high school, and while he was a supportive hero through much of her life, she remained on loving terms with her mother as well.  Late in life, the mother sent a message to the father, apologizing for her cruelty during the marriage, and calling him the kindest man she’d ever known.  In response, her father sent a note; “I said that neither of us was perfect, that we were both haunted by our own demons.  I said that we made an incredibly wonderful child, so it must have been worth it, and we could be proud of that no matter what.”  They died a few years ago, but Bright’s book is dedicated to them both. 

In high school, Bright discovered sex and socialism.  “I picketed liquor stores selling nonunion Gallo wine; I marched to impeach Nixon...”  She began to write for the underground high school newspaper The Red Tide.  Her newspaper writings were not just political, and one was “about the essentials of lubrication, the benefits of coconut oil, and how even saliva was better than nothing,” getting a response from a male on the paper that he read it and just wanted to throw up; how could she write about vaginas when people were dying in Vietnam?  She left school early, but did manage to get to a high school dance held at the Los Angeles Playboy Club.  She soured on the unreality of Los Angeles: “I could not take one more minute of trying to convince the people of Los Angeles that a worker’s revolution and a complete overhaul of society were a tiny bit more exciting than getting a bit role in a Burger King commercial.”  She went to work as a full-time labor organizer within the International Socialists.  There were blue-collar organizers quoting Marx and Lenin, and enthusiastic coitus with both sexes to help storm the barriers, and Teamsters and other drivers to organize.  The movement, however, was schismatic, and kicked her out; if not, would she still be trying to turn truckers into socialists instead of trying to bring everyone sexual enlightenment?

It was time for her to go back to school, this time to college, and eventually to the “feminist vibrator store,” Good Vibrations, where she loved interacting with customers.  Lost ladies might come in and say something like, “My husband has died and I will never achieve climax again,” or, “The therapist has told me I am sexually dysfunctional and sent me here.”  She was able to make a difference: “Sex education was so powerful because even the smallest effort was enlightening.”  She delighted in the positive effects of what she called “the world famous tryout room.”  She was happy when a couple of former nuns came in, women who had met in the convent and left it because they wanted to live together openly, and had done so for twenty years (“It’s our vibrator anniversary!” one says.)  Bright considered that she herself had had scads of exes, was friendly with many of them, but wants to know how the two women could have kept the relationship going for twenty years.  “I think,” comes the response from one, “it’s just because... we love each other so much.”  Yes, love is the answer, Bright reflects, “But I was disappointed.  I wished they would really figure it out and tell me.”

She went on to found On Our Backs, which she edited from 1984 to 1991.  It featured pornography, leather, fetishes, and celebrations of female lust and eroticism.  It was not in line with the feminism of the time.  Bright has called herself a “sex-positive feminist,” in contrast with the ones who put out publications such as Off Our Backs (note the difference a couple of letters makes) and who thought that pornography hurt women or promoted violence against them.  Bright has always been as unapologetic about enjoying pornography (she edits collections of it) as she has about enjoying sex.  Eventually it came time for her to quit the magazine, and she writes of the difficult decision movingly because she left explicitly to take care of her daughter.  “I did get pregnant unexpectedly.  I spent the first thirty-one years of my life being either a lesbian or a complete martinet about birth control, and all of a sudden, I got sloppy.  It was out of character.”  The worst part was worrying about her temper, about keeping a vow that her daughter would never be hit or have the truth hidden from her.  She called the daughter Aretha, and hilariously her parents both approved, because they knew the name came from the Greek meaning “the very best.”  They knew nothing about popular music: “Only Bill and Elizabeth, of all the people in the world, would respond to the name Aretha with the enthusiasm of the antiquities.”

Aretha seems to have turned out well, and it would be nice to know the details of how she came to terms with her mother’s openness about sexuality and about her past, but the current memoir winds up with Bright, Aretha, and Jon heading to Santa Cruz.  (She met Jon because she needed her tires changed, shortly before she became pregnant, and they continue to be partners.)  There will be more to this story, and I am going to be happy to tune into any next volume.
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (Dutton) by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam
Dutton Adult, May 2011; ISBN-10: 0525952098

Review by Rob Hardy:  We are all familiar now with using the Internet to find things out; stick “Peruvian porridge dancing” into Google and you are sure to get hundreds of hits about that ancient art.  Doing research like this is easy and takes but a few keystrokes.  But analyzing what people are looking for is a whole realm of meta-research, showing peoples’ interest in subjects in ways that have never previously been accessible to researchers.  Everyone knows that a large part of the Internet is devoted to pornography; so why not examine what people are asking to see on PornHub, for instance, to get an idea of their private sexual enthusiasms?  This is the basis for the research within A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire (Dutton) by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam.  Ogas, who has a doctorate in computational neuroscience, had worked as a biodefense researcher, and Gaddam did his doctoral research on biologically inspired models of computer learning.  The insights within this book, often surprising and funny, ought to expand our understanding of what “normal” is, whatever that means.

Ever since Kinsey, scientific research into sexual behavior has been derided and vilified by many, and the findings here will prompt the same reaction from the same crowd.  However, no one is going to be able to argue (as they did against Kinsey) that the data collection points were too small.  Where Kinsey and his assistants painstakingly interviewed one subject after another, the authors had a far wider wealth of data to draw upon.  Here is what they did: “We sifted through a billion different Web searches, including a half million personal search histories.  We analyzed hundreds of thousands of online erotic stories and thousands of romance e-novels.  We looked at the forty thousand most trafficked adult Web sites.  We examined more than 5 million sexual solicitations posted on online classifieds.  We listened to thousands of people discussing their desires on online message boards.”  In other words, these guys have data, and no one is going to be able to argue that the book gives a limited picture of what people do online.  Getting computers to calculate analyses of what people are doing sexually online is brilliant, and it shines light upon the sexual curiosities of men and women.  The authors think that they have new ideas of what makes men and women aroused, but this is a little harder conclusion to draw.  After all, this is anonymous data; if someone is looking at pictures of naked people writhing in custard, one cannot tell if such viewing is being done for laughs, or for curiosity, or for genuine titillation.  So as a picture of online behavior, this is excellent; as an understanding of deep sexual desires, it might have significant pointers for further research, but the conclusions ought to be tentative.

But the data are remarkable.  Guess what is the most popular search word entered into PornHub?  Good guesses are “teen” or “cheerleader” or “breast,” but they are down the list.  Top of the list: “Mom.”  Now, this is not necessarily incestuous or Freudian; after all, you wouldn’t find your mom in such places.  It’s more like searches such as “my friend’s hot mom.”  Though “teen” or “young” are very frequent search words, the searches for mature women are surprisingly frequent.  If you aren’t into moms, you might be into grannies; men are, unsurprisingly, far more likely to search for “youth” than for “granny,” but “granny” is searched for far more frequently than, say, “spanking.”  Not only can the data be quantified in this way, it can be examined for place of origin for inquiries.  Granny searches are highest in Kenya, which has a tradition of having grandparents be the children’s source of sexual information, and England, where some searchers may remember being given corporal punishment by an older woman when they were in boarding school.  Another surprise is that men are more interested in searching for videos of fat women than for skinny.  (Confirmation of this comes from the number of video sites devoted to overweight women, which are far more numerous than those for underweight women.)  Men may generally prefer a woman with a healthy weight, but given a choice, watching a video of a woman with a few extra pounds will beat out watching one with a few less pounds.  It might be that the men are associating fat as a sign of fertility, which makes the woman more inherently attractive.

Another surprise is that men like to look for penises.  Heterosexual men are more interested in penises than heterosexual women; studies watching eye movement show that men will spend lots of eye time on men’s groins compared with women.  Men are very much more likely to include a word like “big” in their penis searches rather than “small,” and countless sites are devoted to big organs, with very few parading small ones.  This might be evolutionary heritage.  Other primates use the penis not just to indicate sexual interest but as an indicator of aggression.  An erection may be a visual signal to mount a female immediately after she has copulated with another male; this leads to the whole arena of sperm competition which is neatly described here.  (This also may be connected with men’s frequent eagerness to watch videos of a bunch of guys in action with a lone female.)  An erection may also be simply a cheery sign of general good health.  Sometimes heterosexual men worry that their own interest in seeing other men’s erections indicates a tendency to homosexuality, but that’s not the explanation.

Women ought to be the ones getting off on looking at porn depicting erections, you would think, and while that does happen (and while women appreciate erections in men to whom they are sexually close), it isn’t the general pattern.  Now that women are no longer repressed and can watch whatever they want, it isn’t the case that they are looking for the same thing as men with a mere shift in the gender of the target.  In fact, women interested in titillation generally aren’t on the web to look at pictures of anything.  The most popular erotic sites for women are devoted to fan fiction, stories often featuring characters found in pop culture involved in romantic or sexual tales.  Men like visuals; women like context, verbal expression, emotion, and a real story line.  Significantly, women also like to make erotica a social engagement; they don’t just read the fan fiction stories, they discuss them online and talk about plots and the thoughts of the characters.  Men do not tend to make their porn watching anything but a solitary activity.  (It may be simply that women are more social; another range of data shows that teen girls swap eighty text messages a day, while their boy counterparts swap only thirty.)  The complexity of women’s sexual response ensures that there will not be a direct female equivalent to Viagra; increase a guy’s bloodflow and bring on an erection, and he is ready to go, but women are simply more discerning and their physical arousal is different from psychological arousal.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts is a hugely ambitious work showing what happens when computers crunch enormous amounts of data.  It is funny on many of the pages because our private sexual behaviors are often odd.  There is plenty of verification of what geeks know as Internet Rule #34: “If you can imagine it, it exists as Internet porn.”  If you don’t know the term “squick,” meaning the kink you just can’t stand thinking about even for others, you will encounter it here along with lots of squicky things, but of course, your squick is not my squick.  Whatever the limitations of this sort of research (most people in the world have no Internet access, and the data here may have sample irregularities, and we don’t know why each individual conducted each particular search), there are mountains of information out there, and Ogas and Gaddam have started mining it in an entertaining and stimulating fashion.  It’s a good start, and only a hint of more to come.
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

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