Working Stiff, by Grant Stoddard

Working Stiff is an embarrassing book to carry around. The subtitle—The Misadventures of an Accidental Sexpert—is in a small enough font that I could hope people passing by my park bench might not be able to make in out in mid-stroll, but the image of a man in business suit sans pants, the name “Grant Stoddard” printed on a white circle covering that certain sensitive bit just south of the midsection…well, it makes it pretty obvious what the book is about. It’s about Grant Stoddard, that is, and about how often in the last few years he’s had sex. You can see another picture of him shirtless on the back cover, this time wearing a furry bomber cap.

Readers of this blog might hope that someday I will be able to wean myself away from books falling under the genre of “memoirs by the hideously self-absorbed,” but (as evinced by the post on How Sex Works posted below), I’m a sucker for any material that’ll make me angry about sex. And this book did make me angry—or, at least, disturbed. This reaction must show that I’m not an ideal member of the book’s target audience. Look at these inside cover blurbs: “Grant Stoddard’s debut is a sex-memoir with a heart: an inspirational true story of how to ‘make it’ in New York, in every sense of the word,” says Jessica Cutler (apparently an author); “Peek under the dirty sheets of Stoddard’s hilarious debut, and you’ll find a brave, moving, and, yes, seductive story of a young man’s struggle to find his way in a strange city, a foreign country, and an unforgettable age,” comments David Goodwille (another random author).

The book pretty much delivers on these blurbs, on one level. In the first few chapters, Stoddard pulls all the stops to convince you, the reader, that he’s just another nerdy bloke who, before his years in the media, had the same lack of success in getting lucky as anyone else. Even in the introduction, this annoying “jes’ folks” streak starts. He’s preparing for his last segment of “I Did It for Science,” the weekly column on Nerve.com for which he would go out to collect novel sexual experiences and write about them, and for this special closer, he’s chosen to literally ‘go fuck himself’—or, more precisely, to have a lady-friend peg him with a plaster-cast of his own penis. “Holding an accurate facsimile of my own member in my hands,” he writes, “it’s hard to believe how little action the thing actually saw over the course of its first twenty-four years. Since then, of course, it’s played a starring role in some of my greatest adventures.” When, a page later, he describes himself as “acutely aware that [he] was at the end of something big,” it feels like Mr. Stoddard (the groaner pun aside) is implying that after his years of randyness described in the text, he’s maybe back to his sweet-old self once again. No need to fear this guy. He’s a nice kid who got involved in some intercontinental oddities, who is none the worse for it.

Except, after the first few chapters, that nice kid starts to look pretty creepy indeed. Sure, until somewhere around pg. 60, we only hear about his working-class English background and his first American girlfriend and such associated adventures. But is it really so strange that the only person he bangs in this period of time is Becky, that American girlfriend? The Americans seem to think so. “You should be livin’ the life, balls-deep in strange ass every fuckin’ night of the week,” a friend tells him, pg. 58, in response to the astounding fact of his hitherto monogamy. Within a startlingly short period of time, this comes to pass. He wins an internet pop-culture quiz on Nerve.com (his future employer) that qualifies him for a night of intercourse w/ Lisa Carver, who had been blogging her sex life. Long story short, Grant’s oral skills (ugh), via Carver’s verbal depiction, get him a reputation in NYC, and before long, again on Carver’s word, he’s landed a job at the website as the manager of the student interns.

From there, it’s a short jaunt to Grant the womanizer, responsible for two interns leaving after failed sexual experiments with him. Soon, he’s started his column, and in the city, things move fast. Flash forward to pg. 125:

“Up until now the “new things” I had tried included having sex with my girlfriend on the subway, product testing a cock ring, Frenching a guy, being an extra in a porn movie, and competing in an amateur stripping contest in front of two hundred drunk and very aggressive women. Six months earlier, I was the perennial virgin, a shy, inexperienced, terribly self-conscious immigrant nerd, destitute and a gnat’s eyelash from throwing in the towel on my American excursion and fleeing home with my tail between my legs. Now my name was synonymous with being a willing participant in perverse sex acts throughout the tristate area. Unbeknownst to me, it became my calling.”

Huh. There’s a lot to pick apart there. Note his “perennial virgin” comment, which is nutty, if only for the reason that during his entire time in America, he was consistently having sex. It seems to me that he doesn’t exactly have a lot to complain about. Can someone who is “terribly self-conscious” immediately switch over to become someone who is comfortable with his name being used in a sex column? Can we concede that there might be a subtle difference between the terms ‘destitute’ and ‘horny’?

The weirder part of all this, though, is that last comment about how the lifestyle of being a “willing participant in perverse sex acts” had “become [his] calling.” This sounds very much like something out of my undergraduate college viewbook, and the dissonance of the tone with the subject matter is striking. Nice people, when speaking of ‘discovering calling,’ will mention things like “helping underprivileged youth,” or, “performing needed services.” But what we’ve witnessed is how a young man has gone from moving to America specifically for his girlfriend, Becky, to being something of a roving deviant. There are attempts at ironic self-consciousness in all of this; he is willing to admit how strange a thing it is for him to have women wanting to experience him, merely by dint of his minor celebrity. By pg. 152, we are offered an awkward depiction of his perfunctory deflowering of a virgin who offers herself to him, just to get the old sex thing out of the way. He finishes the deed quickly and goes to sleep to avoid discussing his sub-par performance. “Not long ago,” he muses, “I had been in her position. But somewhere along the line, I’d allowed myself to feel deserving of the hype and become a menace to women everywhere.”

For the rest of the book, Grant dodders from place to place, wittily commenting on everything he sees. And he sees a lot—orgies, ‘Leather Camp’ with the bondage crowd, LA. Eventually, he gets fired by Nerve.com for infringing on his contract when he attempts to turn his column into a TV show. The book’s ending is rather weak, a depiction of his aimless days waiting for VH1 executives to turn him into a brand as he docilely complies. When that falls through, he’s excited to return to Manhattan to see what he might become, this time. Fin.

I suppose it’s hardly worth mentioning, but to me the strangest aspect of the book was its wan amorality. I could call it that, or cognitive dissonance on the part of the author, who too many times repeats that he has never had a one-night stand, despite copious quoted evidence to the contrary. After growing up in Sioux County, IA, where God is real and sexual actions are thought to be moral actions, I have an inbred inclination to think that any suffering that Stoddard has experienced is merely a natural outcome of his wrong actions. But then I shake my head and repeat to myself, “They’re different actions, Dave, not quite wrong,” a hundred times, still leaving myself deeply unconvinced. It’s weird, because even after my framework for condemnation has been stripped away, I still love to do it. Damn you, Grant Stoddard, and your liberal New Yorker-ness!

I guess Stoddard’s not the only one around here suffering from some brain frissures…

How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do

How Sex Works is a new book by Dr. Sharon Moalem, first released in April of this year. I should say up front that it’s pretty good. I’m putting that disclaimer at the beginning of the review, because, despite being consistently informative and entertaining, it’s the type of book that is also pretty vulnerable to dismissal and pooh-poohing by any number of people. As I read it, I tried to decide who might hate it more: humanities scholars of sexual history, or conservative cultural watchdogs? Camille Paglia, or William F. Buckley? my sister, or my father? At the same time, I had to entertain the possibility that it might offend none of them. After all, for a modern sex book, this is about as un-kinky as they come. All the content is delivered with the timbre of a doctor, not an entertainer. By which I mean, I’d feel okay if almost any of these paragraphs were spoken to me by a man readying himself to feel the lumps in my testicles. As a writer, Moalem is lucky to have a white-hot topic; his styling equilibrates everything it touches to an easygoing lukewarm.

The book begins, like most nonfiction bestsellers, with an introduction. It is worth skipping. It reads like an advertisement for the book, with question after question of exciting topics that will be answered in the following pages. A quote: “Can women, like men, ejaculate? What’s the point of having pubic hair, and what happens to pubic lice when you get a Brazilian wax? And why, unlike almost all other mammals to most other mammals, do most human women outlive their fertility by decades?” (pg. xi) Answers to these questions are not suggested until Chapters 1&2, 4, and 8, respectively. You need to buy this book to find out, is the not-so-sneaky implication.

After that, we get the biology textbook material about girl parts (Ch. 1) and boy parts (Ch. 2), along with Cosmo-level discussions of special topics, like tampon history and penile fractures. (Even Moalem can’t reduce the discomfort of the penile fracture discussion, by the way. “There can be a loud cracking or popping sound, and serious pain. […] I will never forget the first time I came across a penile fracture. The patient had tried to masturbate with a metal vacuum cleaner tube—while it was hooked up and turned on.”) In the section on Lady Bits, there were plenty of little factoids I found interesting, but when I called them over to Holly, my wife, she was usually unimpressed. I’ll assume that the astute readers of this blog already know most of that pertinent information. In the part concerning Man Bits—a topic I can more rightly claim basic competency—a similarly wide range of unknown facts were presented. Did you know that most mammals literally have a bone in their penis, the baculum? Did you know that the promiscuous queen bee mates with untold many male drones, whose penises pop off after ejaculation and are left for the next midair mounter to pull out before thrusting in? What about the UCSF study showing a 500% sperm count increase in men who stopped taking hot baths?

Well, I didn’t know these things. That’s the charm of such a book. Ch. 3 told me stuff I didn’t know about the biology of attraction (special topic: the role of scent); Ch. 4 about orgasms and ejaculation (ST: academic controversies over female ejaculation); Ch. 5 about gender development and differentiation (ST: gender identity disorder); Ch. 6 about biological theories on homosexuality (ST: homosexuality in animals—apparently rampant); Ch. 7 about sexually transmitted infections (ST: take your pick); Ch. 8 about birth control (ST: Casanova’s fancy condoms, made from rendered sheep gut); Ch. 9 about…not much (warm, fuzzy wrap-up material).

Any criticisms I might offer, then, are not for lack of content. The more pervasive problem is the lack of coherent vision. When he’s offering out facts and trivia, Moalem is in his element. He did his homework. In academic terms, he’s done a ‘literature search’—i.e., the preliminary background reading needed before he can delve into his a project of his own. But the book never adds up to any more than that. Maybe that’s for the best; when he tries to offer up some social commentary, the results are disconcerting. Look, for instance, at the passage concluding a discussion of modern plastic surgery (pg. 96):

Obviously, as with any cosmetic surgery, a well-informed adult ought to be able to opt for such a procedure in consultation with her doctor and others close to her, as she chooses. But the skyrocketing rate of cosmetic surgery does beg the question: when have we gone too far in pursuit of perceived physical ideals? Perhaps, when girls as young as ten years of age feel compelled to undergo labiaplasty to even out their labia minora.

This is an uncomfortable example of information-age rhetoric. The moral framework is firmly put in place with the first sentence—the use of the word ‘obviously’ is far from incidental. The second sentence then pretends to give a thoughtful little nugget, which is OK only for those who can’t see that this is the opposite of thoughtful; this is perhaps the most banal comment that could’ve been chosen, given the topic. But the real kicker is that last sentence. Is it ironic? An attempt at humor? It might make sense if it followed a story about such a narcissistic 10-year-old, but no such context is given. This looks instead like an attempt by a man innocent of philosophy to do simply what he has been trained to do: to give a prescription, following a diagnosis. The only problem is, there’s no paper from the medical literature to help him out on this one, so the effort to parrot thoughtfulness goes far awry. We quickly move to the next topic.

It's likely that the entire quoted text was just a throwaway attempting to make a fluid transition from one topic to the next. But I can’t help thinking that there’s something endemic of our era in this book. Science here is enshrined as the end, as the ultimate debate-settler. If you have a question, there will be an answer; it’s only a matter of time and study resources. I am reminded of Tom, the scientist from Updike’s Couples, to whom there are unknowns, but no unknowables. That’s more or less the attitude of this book, as well as of its probable target audience. After all, you only need to visit Google for quick, easy answers, with maybe a side-jaunt to Wikipedia. (The chapters of How Sex Works can be read in any order with very little strain, just like web pages.) The next day, around the water cooler, you’ll have something interesting to bring up to your colleagues. Isn’t it amazing what Science has found out now? Those honeybees are goddamn incredible!

I worry that after reading such a pretty good book, some people will be less imaginative and less curious than they were before reading it. We might be fooled into thinking that a succession of facts and trivia allows us to understand how sex works; when all the uncertainty and chaos are dismissed, the constructed world all too easily reduces to order. What you get in a scientific work on sex is necessarily a cartoon, a radically simplified caricature. This can be helpful and informative, as I claim How Sex Works is. But it’s far from the entire picture. It doesn’t fully explain “why we look, smell, taste, feel, and act the way we do,” as the book’s tagline claims. Literature hasn’t had all of its topics wrested away just yet.