SEXIS WRONG

world. Although explicit, lavishly illustrated, and readably written,
Joy is comfortably bourgeois, modeled on a cookbook.
In consumerist style, it offers choices of sexual staples, main
courses, and condiments. Legman found the book “cold,”
according to Judith. He certainly would have seen fakery in
its slightly exotic eroticism, in the motif of a menu of boots
and G-strings and fake French-bordello names
for positions. Comfort’s emphasis on freeing
oneself of “hang-ups” in the context of tender,
playful monogamy probably annoyed him
no end. Legman thought sex was serious if
hot business, and the young Legman, any rate,
disdained monogamy.
“Hang-ups” (he would’ve called them fears, distortions, and
repressions) were the whole point: You lived with them and
suffered with them. Legman made a career of confronting
them, and when they were confronted, they revealed not individual
problems but the sickness of the entire culture.
As for oral sex, Joy calls it “the genital kiss,” a term imported
directly from what Legman saw as the hopelessly prudish
marriage manuals of the early twentieth century. For Comfort,
cunnilingus isn’t a delicate psychic tightrope walk or a
most passionate submissive possession; it’s an item on the
menu. What used to be cause for divorce had found a place in
the kitchen cupboard. By the 1960s, Legman did not believe
“more” was the same as liberation.
Although the finer points of oral sex have been graphically described
many times over the years since its publication, Oragenitalism
remains an unusual book. What had not been done
before, and may not have been done since in mass-market
He certainly would have seen fakery
in its slightly exotic eroticism, in
the motif of a menu of boots and
G-strings and fake French-bordello
names for positions.
literature, was this sort of deep thinking—based in introspection
and broad observation—on the psychic undercurrents of
a particular sex act. Only much later would feminists and gayrights
activists again take up questions of psychic power, submission,
and mutuality in the meaning of sex, and this time
from a perspective Legman might well have abhorred. Meanwhile,
a revolution in depicting sex took place, not through
the work of bold writers so much as through the energies of
commercial publishers and porn video-makers. The worlds of
erotica and cultural criticism moved past him.
Gershon Legman spent his whole life pursuing freedom and,
having found his key to the fields, he paid the price. The costs
were isolation, monetary but not intellectual poverty, and
separation by distance from other American folklorists and a
broader popular audience. His ideas were always “out there,”
but as he advised Roger Abrahams, once you were out there,
there was “never any going back.” Then there was age, and
time and culture passing. By the time he died in 1999, all his
big books were out of print, his name at least partially forgotten.
But having wrested his freedom, Legman’s prize was
to work long and intensely on one huge project, unearthing
activities, words, and images that shed light on the problems
of sexual being. The materials he dredged up prove over and
over again how broad and deep the river is.
KEY TO THE FIELDS 67