Verbal Sex
My dayjob, when I had one, was teaching medieval languages and literature, specializing in Old and Middle English. My favorite Middle English work and the one I emphasized in my publications was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an alliterative Arthurian romance written in the late 14th century. Why was that my favorite? Well, it “looks” gorgeous, written by an unknown master of visual description, almost (anachronistically) cinematic in its technique, and it sounds gorgeous–the Gawain-poet has few peers when it comes to the use of meter and other aural effects. But what I really liked were the famous seduction scenes.
Among the pastimes (whether in real life or merely in literature) of the high and late medieval aristocracies was luf-talkyng (in French, daliaunce). That is to say, verbal sex. In a world where religion permeated every aspect of life and privacy was almost impossible to come by (this is before the invention of the hallway) and folks were almost never alone, the poems of the troubadours were essentially songs of sexual frustration. People were, so it seems, forced to get it on with words, not deeds.
The classical literary example of the luf-talkyng phenomenon is the three seduction scenes in SGGK. For those who missed out on the sophomore Brit lit survey, the chateleine of a mysterious magical castle thrice enters the bedroom of her guest, Sir Gawain, each time (for nefarious purposes not clarified until the end of the poem and not really clarified even then) trying to get him to have sex with her. Her husband is out hunting, she has sent the servants away, and she has bolted the door so that no one can pass through the room on the way to somewhere else. She is the aggressor–she flatly tells him that he is welcome to her body (although some modern critics can’t bear to believe she is that blunt)– and for an assortment of reasons Gawain has to refuse her overtures with courtesy. He can’t take her up on her offer, and he can’t just tell her to fuck off.  Their three “conversations” are exercises in power exchange–there are, for example, references to bondage and rape fantasies. In the real world of the Middle Ages, power rested primarily in men, but in the literary bedroom it’s woman on top, although here there is more than a little bit of bottoming from the top. As Gawain gets hornier and hornier, his syntax gets more and more convoluted, until finally the third morning when the lady enters his bedroom with her “snowy white hills” on display, Gawain’s “heart” swells and then he “melts” with joy as does she. Shows what some well-chosen words and a gander at “snowy white hills” can do for a man.
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So, about six hundred years after Sir Gawain did his swelling and melting, verbal sex is back in fashion, this time facilitated by intersection of the internet and its illusion of privacy (ask Mark Foley how private it really is) and the mobile telephone and the AIDS epidemic. Verbal sex works for me and for many others just as it worked for Gawain and the lady of the castle. (It didn’t quite work well enough for the lady, but then Gawain had the Virgin Mary on his side–only she kept him from ripping off the lady’s skimpy attire.) There truly is nothing new under the sun.
There was one non-electronic form of verbal sex I used to enjoy greatly. When I was with a (male) friend at a restaurant (preferably one outside of New Orleans where the waitstaff was not made up of my students) or at the gate lounge at an airport, I would gleefully relate stories of my sexual adventures just loud enough so that people nearby could hear me if they strained a little bit. I would get a kick out of seeing all the guys on the edge of their seats, while their wives pulled them back and gave me the hard eye. I guess that made me a verbal exhibitionist. Given the raison d’etre for this blog, I guess I am still a verbal exhibitionist….
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A bit of a postscript about SGGK–
There are two ladies at the magical castle–the wife of the castellan and a mysterious older woman. They are described in a passage with balanced and intertwining details. The young lady is fair, more beautiful than Guinevere, and has a nice rack. The old beldame is a hag, swarthy, bleared, short and thick-waisted with a fat ass. One semester I had a student from Aleppo, Syria, in my class. This student was in my office morning and afternoon. I ascribed his assiduous attendance at office hours to a struggle with English, but perhaps I was wrong about that. When I read his paper at the end of the term, I noticed something interesting. Much of the paper was devoted to an appreciation of the beauty of the lady of the castle whom he described as fair with a large and beautiful bosom, short, and with a thick waist and large buttocks. He had failed to follow the syntax of the descriptive passage and did not realize that there were two very different women involved (one young and beautiful and the other old and, well, not at all beautiful). In short, he had unknowingly conflated the two descriptions and produced what was apparently his (probably culturally determined) dream woman–snowy white, large-breasted, and zaftig. It struck me then like a bolt–this is why he was in my office every time I turned around, for what am I but exceedingly fair, with large, “snowy” breasts (one gentleman friend calls them the Alps), short and most definitely thick-waisted and large-assed–apparently from a Syrian point of view (and no other that I know of), I am a hottie. Virtually all men are attracted sexually by appearance, but exactly what kind of physical appearance is a turn-on is largely a cultural construction.
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