{"id":26002,"date":"2012-12-26T10:30:08","date_gmt":"2012-12-26T15:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=26002"},"modified":"2017-09-25T13:05:42","modified_gmt":"2017-09-25T17:05:42","slug":"checking-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/26\/checking-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Checking Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship\u2014it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography<\/em>. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season\u2019s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian <\/em>by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian<\/em>\u2014Dewey and His Decimal <\/em>by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories <\/em>by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian\u2019s Desire <\/em>by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magik<\/em> by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form\u2014the dimly lit stacks, the librarian\u2019s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera\u2014are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean<\/em> something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.<\/p>\n

Almost immediately, I hit a snag. It is close to impossible to browse a serious library\u2019s collection of porn and porn criticism without getting sucked into big, sexy historical theories. Within an hour of my visit to Harvard\u2019s Widener Library, I was beginning to suspect that smut had been behind the rise of \u2026 everything<\/em>. I discovered that pornos caused the French Revolution, and that the Renaissance really got going when images of hard-core, swan-on-guy action began to circulate among the people. Every pornographer of note, it seemed, was a pop philosopher; every philosopher, a closet pornographer. As for the rise of the novel, of literary realism, this, I learned, was linked to a certain eighteenth-century depiction of a ponytailed dude taking it from behind from another ponytailed dude while the first dude gets sucked off by a chick, who is also taking it from behind from yet a third ponytailed dude, all while another chick\u2014who happens to be wearing a lovely Dormeuse-style cap\u2014rides piggyback on the first dude, which positions her perfectly to flog the third dude, while being orally pleasured from behind by the second dude. The caption to this illustration reads, \u201cA Typical Scene.\u201d According to the pile of books I\u2019d stacked onto my library desk, our story is nothing but the evolutionary history of the Porno sapiens.<\/p>\n

Just as I was letting this thought settle in, I began to hear moaning sounds. At first, I dismissed these as some kind of auditory hallucination, an occupational hazard of reading too much porn. But then I looked around and determined that this particular moaning belonged to a real woman standing a few rows away. To be precise, she was in the process of being properly pinned to the bookshelf by a male companion. After a hasty glance, I retreated to my carrel but can report that the proceedings were, if not quite spirited, certainly forceful\u2014a book fell from the shelf\u2014and that they terminated in muffled resound and a swift escape.<\/p>\n

I was alone again in the silence of the stacks. Never before had the questions of the library sex fantasy been so close at hand yet so elusive. What was the relationship between these library fuckers and what I had been reading? And what was the relationship between the library fuckers and what they<\/em> had been reading? Wasn\u2019t library sex all about harmonizing books with experience, about connecting our unruly and our rule-abiding selves? And, if so, why did I find that the stories told in last year\u2019s library-porn books consistently painted a grim picture of twenty-first-century library sex? Why did many of the best sex scenes in today\u2019s librarian porn take place\u00a0outside of a library<\/em>? <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It wasn\u2019t always this way. Library sex began with high hopes. Long before the era of the public library, stories of sex among books were set in private collections, in secluded humanist studies. The protagonist of Antonio Vignali\u2019s 1526 La Cazzaria<\/em> (The Book of the Prick) examines a collection of raunchy books and manuscripts in a private study as he awaits the arrival of a lover. The presence of smutty works in progress is telling: there is an elegant cross-pollination here. Books inspire sex, sex creates books\u2014and all within the four walls of the library.<\/p>\n

A Chinese Tale<\/em>, a filthy poem published anonymously in 1740 and available on the streets of London for a shilling, introduces Cham-yam, a young lady blessed with \u201ca most inviting Tit, and dainty, \/ As ere seen \u2019twixt twelve and twenty.\u201d She is sitting in her study. After detailing a long, breathless bibliography of erotic books, the poet concludes, \u201cWhat more can heighten mortal Sense \/ Than all this soft Magnificence?\u201d Cham-yam, curious to understand the rise and fall of civilizations\u2014how, in other words, the male passion for sex leads to great wars and upheavals\u2014lifts her naked leg onto a table and gazes into a carefully placed looking glass. There, between her legs, she beholds the secret to understanding the tides of history, \u201cthe World\u2019s great Primum Mobile<\/em>, \/ That Master-piece! That Source of Passion! \/ that Thing! that\u2019s never out of Fashion.\u201d The library sex that follows is understood as an advanced study of history that unifies all bodies of knowledge in the bodies of the people who pursue knowledge.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It took more than two hundred years, the creation of the public library, the rise of women in the profession of librarianship and second-wave feminism for library sex to get serious again, in the 1970s. Although there is no authoritative list of titles from this late-twentieth-century renaissance, serious readers and writers of contemporary library porn consistently cite Bang the Librarian Hard<\/em>, Hot Pants Librarian<\/em>, The Librarian Gets Hot<\/em>, The Librarian Got Hot<\/em>, The Librarian Loves to Lick<\/em>, and scores of other titles from those years.<\/p>\n

Bang the Librarian Hard<\/em> is a case in point of this earnest libertine revival. After a dirty interlude with the school\u2019s coach on her office floor, librarian Samantha turns to the man and says, \u201cHasn\u2019t your attitude toward libraries and librarians changed in this past hour?\u201d Samantha is a proud activist, a progressive. Her passionate approach to library science also makes a strong impression on the conservative head librarian, an older woman who hasn\u2019t benefited from women\u2019s lib. There is a poignant cultural moment when Ms. Gustafson turns to Samantha during a threesome and says, \u201cI\u2019m so grateful to you, my dear.\u201d After a great deal more shagging, on a pile of noncirculating books and on a marvelous secret bed that flips out of the stacks, Samantha rises to the post of head librarian\u2014Ms. Gustafson retires and founds an NGO dedicated to \u201csex counseling for undersexed older women.\u201d After a celebratory roll in the hay, Samantha muses on her triumphs and on history.<\/p>\n

Head librarian<\/em>, she thought. She was so fucking proud of that … She was going to be known as the best fucking librarian in Madison High School history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was also the era of the road-tripping sexy librarian, the picaresque heroine. Remember Lynn, in Waldo Beck\u2019s 1974 The Lusty Librarian? <\/em>After fornicating with a prudish American college town she responded to her critics by traveling to Spain and fornicating with a hotel mariachi band. With Lynn, and her cohort, there was a confident sense that the library had set them free. Even on the road, they were sexy librarians.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s library porn lit is a totally different story. An inferiority complex has crept into the books\u2019 marketing divisions, as evidenced by the anxiety-laden description of 2008\u2019s The Librarian\u2019s Naughty Habit<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Though not quite a classic on a par with The Librarian Loves to Lick <\/em>and lacking the studied innocence of Horny Peeping Librarian<\/em>, The Librarian’s Naughty Habit <\/em>is easily the finest account of sex and the circulation desk that we at the Olympia Press can legally do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gone are the boasts of being the law-bending revolutionary, \u201cthe best fucking librarian\u201d: the best that can be said of contemporary library porn is that it\u2019s legal<\/em>. Another recent title, Lucy the Librarian<\/em>, is a good example of this year\u2019s gloomy mood. In Lucy<\/em>, we read of a \u201cpleasantly plump\u201d public librarian and her tryst with a mysterious reader. The book dishes up American-size portions of the genre\u2019s conventions: the outsize appetites of repressed book lovers, the S and M underpinnings of the Dewey Decimal System, the librarian\u2019s uniform, and, of course, transgressive screwing in a semipublic corner of the shelves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But a closer look at Lucy<\/em> reveals a zeitgeist of anxiety. In a lot of recent library-porn lit, sex is set against an anguished backstory. Lucy, we learn, is a woman of her desperate times. She hasn\u2019t had sex in two years, ever since her boyfriend left her for a woman who works in \u2026 the video industry. When Lucy tells another librarian of her plan to linger after-hours to do \u201conline research\u201d\u2014an excuse for a rendezvous in the stacks\u2014her library colleague tartly replies, \u201cYou know the porn\u2019s blocked, right?\u201d The joke is supposed to be on the coworker and, by extension, on our culture of video porn. Lucy\u2019s very real encounter in the stacks is the modern library\u2019s attempted rejoinder to the loneliness of life online. The physicality of the library space is presented here as a concrete alternative to the interminable virtualness of contemporary erotic imagination. It\u2019s the last argument for the library\u2019s continued relevance as a space and of the subversive potential of books\u2014both of which are, ironically, called into question by the very existence of Lucy<\/em>. This book, like all recent library-porn books, cannot not be found on any actual shelf in the real world. It lives exclusively in virtual space.<\/p>\n

Existential anxiety has become the central theme of these books. In a 2010 book, Ava Delaney\u2019s The Librarian’s Love<\/em>\u2014not to be confused with its precursor, Delaney\u2019s 2011 A Librarian\u2019s Desire<\/em>\u2014Erica, a weary librarian, suddenly encounters an old boyfriend in her section of the stacks. In graphic detail we learn just how \u201ca nearly extinct flame is rekindled in the Paleontology section.\u201d The threat of extinction has become a mainstay of recent library porn: again and again, the neglected love life of the librarian is a stand-in for the doomed state of the library generally.<\/p>\n

According to our porn books, the library, once a hothouse of eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site. But somewhere on those shelves there\u2019s still a memory of when books were really subversive, when being a libertine was actually about Voltaire and freethinking, and young girls were guarded from the corrupting influence of novels. The fantasy of awakening the librarian is also a fantasy of awakening the subversive power of the book, of excavating life from a dying cultural monument\u2014or else scratching a bit of graffiti on it.<\/p>\n

The library sex fantasy has, in other words, entered an apocalyptic period. \u201cThrow me on my back in the dark room with the microfiche,\u201d says the narrator of \u201cChecking Out,\u201d the final story of 2011\u2019s Nympho Librarian<\/em>. \u201cFuck me amidst the relics of a world that progress threw away.\u201d And in the eyes of the next generation, whose view isn\u2019t sweetened by nostalgia, things look even bleaker. In another story from Nympho<\/em> we overhear the devastating comment of a brash young paramour\u2014a boy with no memory of a world before Google\u2014as he pinions his elder librarian mistress to a shelf of Russian lit (\u201cnot a section of the library that received many visitors\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cI like your hair down like that,\u201d he says, \u201cit makes you look abandoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Avi Steinberg is the author of <\/em>Running the Books<\/a>, a memoir of his adventures as a prison librarian, recently out in paperback.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship\u2014it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles 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