{"id":4341,"date":"2010-09-24T11:25:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T15:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=4341"},"modified":"2012-08-20T07:09:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T11:09:00","slug":"trashy-is-as-trashy-does","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/24\/trashy-is-as-trashy-does\/","title":{"rendered":"Trashy Is as Trashy Does"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"My first sexual fantasy involved my abduction by a composite character made up of equal parts Danny Zucko from Grease<\/em> and the weathered carny who had looked me dead in the nine-year-old eye as he pulled the lever of the Tilt-A-Whirl. The post-abduction details were unimportant. What mattered was the moment of being caught; what mattered was the fact that one moment I\u2019d be navigating the root-torn sidewalk of my street and the next an arm would be around my waist and the world would be set into wild motion.<\/p>\n

The next fantasy I can remember was a lesbian prison gang rape. I appropriated this fantasy not from the wonders of cable TV but from books. My mother was a voracious reader, if not a discerning one. Lining her shelves were the eighties airport standbys: V. C. Andrews, Danielle Steele, and Sidney Sheldon. Every night I sat on my white wicker bed and read trashy novels by flashlight until I began to understand what sex was in those stories\u2014a plot device. Sex, I learned from my reading, was a function of power and nothing more. If one could just wield it properly, one might figure out a way to win a happy ending, or at least a prison protector.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t until age fourteen that I met Seymour Glass and fell in love. I read Nine Stories<\/em> and read it again and found that it left me suffering more sleepless, feverish nights than the carny and Danielle Steele combined. I wasn\u2019t even sure why I related to it exactly. I had so little in common with the female characters who populated Salinger\u2019s landscape\u2014slim, Gentile women in camel-hair coats sunk in noble pain while standing on train platforms in New England college towns.<\/p>\n

There is nothing literary about the pain of a fat, Jewish Jersey girl wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and sitting on a bench in the Livingston mall, eating bagels and smoking cigarettes.<\/p>\n

And yet, boiled down to the metaphysics of the thing, there was my world, a world of persistent discomfort and inappropriate hunger. A world in which perilous desire trembles just under the surface of the polite world. Seymour kisses the arch of a small foot and moments later puts a bullet into his brain. Eloise, drunk and heartbroken, kills her daughter\u2019s imaginary friend. It was a world of sensual details and dangerous, irreparable moments.<\/p>\n

I first read Nine Stories<\/em> and felt the nakedness of being recognized in my loneliness. Desire wasn\u2019t a narrative device with a neat payoff; rather, it was an ocean of longing that unfolded toward an ever-receding horizon. The book got inside me in a way that changed me irrevocably and, conversely, felt like it had been there all along. And that, I imagined, would be what having a lover would feel like. <\/p>\n

Trashy novels encouraged me to employ sex as a strategy. But it was ultimately Salinger who made me want to fuck. <\/p>\n

Jillian Lauren is the author of the memoir <\/em>Some Girls: My Life in a Harem<\/a>. Her novel<\/em>, Pretty, will be published by Plume next summer<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first sexual fantasy involved my abduction by a composite character made up of equal parts Danny Zucko from Grease and the weathered carny who had looked me dead in the nine-year-old eye as he pulled the lever of the Tilt-A-Whirl. The post-abduction details were unimportant. What mattered was the moment of being caught; what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[911,910,909,179,912],"class_list":["post-4341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-department-of-sex-ed","tag-danielle-steele","tag-j-d-salinger","tag-nine-stories","tag-sex","tag-trash"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTrashy Is as Trashy Does by Jillian Lauren<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 24, 2010 \u2013 My first sexual fantasy involved my abduction by a composite character made up of equal parts Danny Zucko from Grease and the weathered carny who had\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/24\/trashy-is-as-trashy-does\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trashy Is as Trashy Does by Jillian Lauren\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 24, 2010 \u2013 My first sexual fantasy involved my abduction by a composite character made up of equal parts Danny Zucko from Grease and the weathered carny who had\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/24\/trashy-is-as-trashy-does\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-09-24T15:25:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2012-08-20T11:09:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/ninestoriessalinger_blog.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"270\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"417\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jillian Lauren\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Jillian Lauren\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/24\/trashy-is-as-trashy-does\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/24\/trashy-is-as-trashy-does\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Jillian Lauren\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/c4885b21630d3e6b6fc6d9188000f2df\"},\"headline\":\"Trashy Is as Trashy Does\",\"datePublished\":\"2010-09-24T15:25:13+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2012-08-20T11:09:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/24\/trashy-is-as-trashy-does\/\"},\"wordCount\":530,\"commentCount\":13,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/09\/24\/trashy-is-as-trashy-does\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/ninestoriessalinger_blog.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Danielle Steele\",\"J. 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