captlychee | No Sex, Please, We're Ballaratish

Many of you will know that, of a Sunday afternoon, I wander, or sometimes trot, over to the Racer's Café on Webster St to join some of the Ballarat Writers in an afternoon of Write Club. Now, the first rule of Write Club is to tell other people about it, so here we are. Anyway, for three hours we write, but I mostly talk about whatever has seized my attention on the day.

Anyway, some of the people have their projects that they work on, but I usually just write whatever comes into my head, since it's difficult to write anytung coherent when you can't see the screen well enough to read back what you're writing. Plus, one could argue stupidly, a bottle of vino doesn't improve matters. Be that as it may, I have lots of 800-1000-word fragments on the drive from these sessions.

Every so often, one of the members of the Club, whom we'll call Stephen Brown, comes up with a good writing prompt, which I then work on over the next week and email off for his and others' critique or dismissal. One of these prompts came from a friend of his saying "i will eat my own mouth". The resultant story, "Stomophage", is too putrid and repellent a piece to see the light of day—but stay tuned anyway, because I may have a change of heart. In the story, the protagonist—a word I use here only because, while it's technically correct, it overinflates the importance of the character hugely—sets out to carve up and eat his own mouth. In preparation he has all his scalpels, pliers, painkillers etc and a bowl to catch his ejaculate.

On reading the story, Stephen had a question: "Is he getting off on it?"
"No, " I replied, "he's just preapring in case he does."

Now, I don't actually think anyone cutting up their own lips, tongue, gums etc and pulling out their own teeth to eat them would get off on it. But people do get off on the weirdest things, so it's possible, and a conscientious and psychotically determined person might well prepare for it with a bowl or something to catch it. In practical terms, a condom would be more useful, but this was only a first draft of the story. (Parenthetically, I doubt there'll be a second.)

Anyway, we were talking about something or other and I proposed that, in the future, the two other people who regularly attend will control the world, and that I've been sent back from 2060 to ensure that that doesn't happen. So it was suggested that I had to write that one.

The resultant tale, which has some stupid title I'm not going to bother to look up, but the filename Brown Town.docx, took me about eight hours to write, then another three to check for typos, spelling errors, brain farts and whatnot, before I could get it into a fit state to email to to the other members.

The story is about a man coming back from a sexually-repressed future dystopia. The first thing he sees is women walking around with their faces bare but their legs covered. He is used to women in miniskirts and false beards. So, of course as it seems to me, he finds these women instantly arousing and expresses his embarrassment about the visible signs of arousal that gentlemen suffer.

The other members' conclusion about this? 'He really needs to get laid.'

I'm certainly in agreement with that. More agreement now than, say, a couple of decades ago. Call it a mid-life crisis. But, is this lack of occupation with sex causing a pre-occupation with sex that is reflected in, or by, my writing?

I'm not buying it. As I aid to the President of Ballarat Writers after she had left comments on 'Brown Town' to the effect that the sex is far too visible, I was creating a dystopia. Somewhere, either on the comments in the documents, or on Facebook Messenger, I said: 'the equation goes something like 'sex=good, therefore no sex=bad, therefore somewhere that's bad because of no sex is a dystopia'. I phrased it much better than that, but I can't find it. Once you have the 'no sex' part of the dystopia, you can just add things to it, and in most of this story I was borrowing from Nineteen Eighty-Four because that's a good model for a dystopia. Everyone recognises it even if they can't quote the source, and how much creative effort was I going to put into what essentially was a one-off joke with limited appeal?

Not much.

But, why is it that people in their twenties, and a woman in her thirties, object to sex, or at least sexy things even if not intercourse, appearing in fiction? Is it part of what Barry Humphries calls 'the new Puritanism'? Or is it that, with questions of sex, sexuality, gender, gender awareness, sexual fluids and fluidity, hashtagging all human behaviour and sexually-transmitted climate change and such, that they are so inundated with sex in its general sense that the last place they want to see any of it is in the one place they can go to escape from it&mdahs;into fiction?

I can only promise that in whatever fiction I may write in the future, there'll be no sex. I can promise there'll be no sex in these posts in the future. Not a single articulate sound referring to sex in any of its multifarious forms will pass the ol' lips—I won't even say 'lips'. This Bowdlerisation of my entire social milieu will take time, with a lot of mistakes and a lot of promises.

I only hope I can keep them.