Sex and the Literary Mind

Vanity Fair (the magazine, not the hefty book that was turned into a frothy movie) is a worthy read, no? If not a worthy read, it is at least a worthy look with all its slick and pretty pictures. The nubile girls in seductive poses certainly nudges at a sexual innuedo that transpires directly into its articles.

Today, I cracked open the latest Vanity Fair to find a lollipop-sucking Lolita seductively glancing over her heart-shaped glasses. Given the content of the article following it, this famous image from Kubrick's Lolita posits the lollipop as something much more explicit. The article was about the history of fellatio.

Of course sex sells. This was probably only the third Vanity Fair article I've read from beginning to end. I usually find the cutesy prose peppered with oblique literary references hard to stomach, but I ate up this article nonetheless. To give credit where it is due, the article poses some interesting questions:

Why is it a blowjob? The proper technique does not involve blowing, but an action similar to what one performs when consuming a lollipop. And why is it a job? As if implying it is a service in exchange for a fee (ie prostitution.) And lastly, why do we say things "suck," when in sexual terms, it should be a high compliment? When we get to the root of things, etyomology is rather fascinating. (Bad pun.)

But Vanity Fair, a magazine that has published naked girls on its cover, finds itself too classy to get into the tawdry details. The tone of the article shifts betweeen scholarly and point-and-giggle, but don't expect to find anything in the vein of "The Ultimate Question Answered: Spit or Swallow." Although I doubt anyone thinks of Philip Roth when they hear "blowjob," the article managse to reference not only that venerable American author, but also Vladmir Nabakov, Leonard Cohen, Don DeLillo's Underworld, the Kumasutra, Leonardo DaVinci, Jack the Ripper, W.H. Auden, Robert Crumb...My head was spinning with the incessant name-dropping. Amazingly, the article spends more time talking about Philip Roth than Deep Throat.

I could never quite figure out the exact readership of Vanity Fair. With its wildly diverging content (from Paris Hilton to the Dalai Lama to Prada), the magazine always seemed a publishing paradox. It sticks one foot in the world of serious journalism and another in the frivolity of celebrity, somehow balancing the two to a measure of class and status in the publishing world.

ETA: Did I really just write an entire post on Vanity Fair and oral sex? And sound incredibly pretentious while at it?Oh my god. I need to find better uses of my time.