Women and orgasm

It was a confluence of items: a spam offer, a book review, and a book, all concerned with women and orgasm, which my online dictionary defines as "a climax of sexual excitement, characterized by feelings of pleasure centered in the genitals and (in men) experienced as an accompaniment to ejaculation." 

The offer in my spam filter promised "She’ll Be Shaking & Begging — Tonight, Make her scream your name." It is not offering a vibrator, but a product that promises to give men an erection that will give a woman an orgasm. Here we are, fifty years after The Hite Report was published and the myth lives on that way to orgasm is via a male erection.

A couple weeks ago, in a review of a new book about Shere Hite and her best selling book, The New Yorker reviewer Margaret Talbot writes, "[The book's] main takeaway was the the  startling revelation that most women achieved orgasm not by means of vaginal intercourse alone—or what Hite, to the sniggering discomfort of many audiences, often referred to penile' thrusting'—but through manual or oral stimulation of the clitoris." (The New Yorker, 3926, p68)

The narrator of Miranda July's popular novel All Fours doesn't need an erect penis—or a male lover for that matter—to enjoy multiple orgasms, although she has nothing against men and their erections. The publisher says, "All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman."

One reviewer called All Fours a female Portnoy's Complaint, which is not fair, but may prepare unsuspecting readers for the reading experience. I remain saddened that there are enough misinformed men apparently that spams like the one I cite can find customers. I'm sorry for the men, sorry for their partners.

Miranda Judy's stories can be "blisteringly good"

Miranda July . . . Miranda July. The author's name sounded familiar. A recent book of hers received positive (?). interesting (?) reviews so how bad can No One Belongs Here More Than You be? Which is why I bought a copy her short story collection at a used book sale.

Miranda July's name was familiar because she is the author of All Fours, her second novel published in 2024 which became a best seller. I might have been more informed about her if I followed movies seriously; she's made a number of well-received independent films, acting in some of them.

No One Belongs Here More Than You, her first book, published in 2007, contains stories originally published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, Zeotrope, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Not too shabby.

The stories range in length from three or four pages (barely a sketch) to almost twenty. Inevitably they vary in interest and effect. Josh Lacey, a reviewer for The Guardian, wrote that "although a few read like experiments that didn't quite work, the majority of the 16 stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You are blisteringly good."

I think that even the experiments can teach (or suggest) us as writers and readers something about other people and reality and that the last story "How to Tell Stories to Children" is a marvel. July tells the story in a series of brief vignettes, each filled with sharp sentences that indicate character and situation: "At the baby shower, Tom's mother walked around with a clipboard assigning all the guests days on which to bring a healthy meal to the new parents. I was called a meal tree . . . ."

The story sketches the lives of Tom, his wife, their child, and the narrator as the child grows to become a college-age woman. Some readers may be put off by July's lack of quotation marks and speaker citations, but their absence lack leaves the page clean and I had no trouble following who was speaking. 

Because the writing and the stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You are so strong, I added July's novel All Fours to my To Read list. Meanwhile I'm rereading a couple of these stories to see if I can see how she does what she does.