Good Sex Illustrated
By Tony Duvert
1973
First Published
3.68
Average Rating
169
Number of Pages
A scathing view of sex manuals for children and society's hypocrisy of over sex that argues for the rights of children to their own bodies and their own sexuality. Why is pleasure "doubled" when it's "shared"?... Do you really have to cut pleasure in two so that it'll exist? I mean, if it's doubled when there are two of you, then it must be tripled when there are three, quadrupled when there are four, centupled when there are a hundred, right? Is it O.K. for a hundred to share? And if I get used to trying it all alone, why is it that I'll never love anyone again? Is it that good alone and that awful with others? ; from Good Sex Illustrated First published in France in 1973, Good Sex Illustrated gleefully deciphers the subtext of a popular sex education manual for children produced during that period. In so doing, Duvert mounts a scabrous and scathing critique of how deftly the "sex-positive" ethos was harnessed to promote the ideal of the nuclear family. Like Michel Houllebecq, Duvert is highly attuned to all the hypocrisies of late twentieth century western "sexual liberation" mass movements. As Bruce Benderson notes in his introduction, Good Sex Illustrated shows that, "in our sexual order, orgasm follows the patterns of any other kind of capital... 'good sex' is a voracious profit machine." But unlike Houllebecq, Duvert writes from a passionate belief in the integrity of unpoliced sex and of pleasure. Even more controversially now than when the book was first published, Duvert asserts the child's right to his or her own playful, unproductive sexuality. Bruce Benderson's translation will belatedly introduce English-speaking audiences to the most infamous gay French writer since Jean Gênet.
Avg Rating
3.68
Number of Ratings
60
5 STARS
35%
4 STARS
22%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
5%
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Author
Tony Duvert
Author · 7 books
Tony Duvert is a French writer born in 1945. Polemist and champion of the rights of the children to have a right to their own body and sexuality, on which he’s published two controversial books of essays, Good Sex Illustrated (1974), L'Enfant au Masculin (1980), though these themes greatly shape his novels. He received the Prix Médicis in 1973 for his novel Paysage du Fantasie (published in America by Grove in 1976 as Strange Landscape). And in 1978, he published with the Éditions Fata Morgana, two works of prose poetry and short texts: District and Les Petits Métiers.
