"It's hard for me to be up on this podium today," Mr. Mailer, who was there for a protest to shut down BackPages.com, the part of the Village Voice that's been accused of sex trafficking in underage women, "because I've always loved the paper and what it stood for...to see them now, justifying their actions for this profit is heartbreaking."

Mr. Mailer is the youngest son of his father, and in 2005 they co-wrote The Big Empty. Of course, the real irony here is that Norman Mailer loved writing about prostitutes, stabbed one of his wives, and his work isn't exactly for the Female Studies portion of the bookstore. He also wrote a lot about sex with underage women. From his last book, The Castle in the Forest:

Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again!

We can't be sure, but if Norman Mailer were alive today, we think he'd be using the backpages an awful lot himself.

Image via Google News

The independent Manhattan movie house Film Forum has decided to pull its advertising from the Village Voice, citing concerns about Backpage.com, the classifieds site owned by Voice parent company Village Voice Media.

Longtime Film Forum director Karen Cooper told Off the Record that Nicholas Kristof’s Friday op-ed in The New York Times prompted her decision.

“It really held Backpage.com accountable for underage prostitution,” she said.

In it Mr. Kristof described a 13-year-old Brooklyn runaway coerced into prostitution and sold over Backpage.com, whom he called "Babyface," and called for Backpage.com to close its Adult section, as Craigslist did in 2010.

Given Film Forum’s eagerness to show the shows films that depict the tragedies of human trafficking, Ms. Cooper explained,  “it would be a hypocrisy to continue advertising.”

The nonprofit cinema has advertised in the Village Voice since at least 1971.

In July, Ashton Kutcher used Twitter to publicly pressure other Voice advertisers, including American Airlines, Domino's Pizza and Disney, to withdraw from the alt-weekly. In one of a series of editorial articles defending Backpage.com, the Voice had written that statistics distributed by Mr. Kutcher’s sex trafficking awareness group, Real Men Don’t Buy Girls, were incorrect. Mr. Kutcher later announced that American Airlines had pulled its advertising, though the company never confirmed it.

A group of attorneys general has also sent letters to Village Voice Media calling for Backpage.com’s adult serivces to be shut down. Others, including clergy members and Village Voice co-founder Norman Mailer’s son, John Buffalo Mailer, have spoken out against the website through Groundswell, a social justice organization backed by the Presbyterian Auburn Theological Seminary.

The Voice did not immediately respond to request for comment. In a public response to the attorneys general, however, Village Voice Media has said that censorship is not the solution to human trafficking, and that the company effectively monitors the escort listings.

On an unrelated note, Ms. Cooper added that she was disappointed that longtime Voice film critic Jim Hoberman was laid off earlier this month.

Book Riot is a book site for 18 to 34-year-olds. As this article points out, it does not seem to have made up its mind whether it's for adults who like to read, or for adults who hate to read (viz. "Charles Dickens is reigning king of Dead White Guys You Should Have Read in High School, But Probably Just Read the Cliff Notes or Possibly Watched the BBC Mini-series.") Even if it's being all bloggy about it, The Hairpin still rightly assumes that its readers love, say, George Eliot. [PaidContent]

The New York Times has discovered that Barnes & Noble pulled DC Comics from its shelves after the comic book publisher signed an exclusive deal to publish books digitally on Amazon. [NYT]

Another article about "Why writers should embrace Amazon's takeover of the publishing industry." Occupy the publishing industry!  [The New Republic]

Fans of St. Mark's Bookshop sing to save it. [DNAInfo]

An interview with Lauren Myracle, spurned ex-National Book Award finalist. [Vanity Fair]

Julian Barnes, winner of the Man Booker Prize yesterday, discussed the dubious value of the Booker Prize back in 1987. [London Review of Books]

Michael Mailer.

Norman Mailer's novel about a director on the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1950s is now in development as a film, reports The Daily. The novel was originally adapted for the screen by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in the 1980s for producer Elliott Kastner, but it was never made.

Now Michael ("son of") Mailer, a film producer whose credits include Black and White and A Fool and his Money has joined with Kastner's stepson, Cassian Elwes, co-executive producer of Blue Valentine, who received the rights to Didion and Dunne's screenplay when Kastner died.

"It's one of my favorite books of my dad’s," Mr. Mailer told The Observer. "It's an evergreen story and I’m very excited about doing it.

He said that he and Elwes are currently shopping the film to a shortlist of ten directors. "We’re going to aim after the A-List."

“Seventy, it’s an odd age,” Mr. Pfeiffer told The Observer, staring at the younger version of himself, a decoration for his birthday party last Friday night. “But looking at that, it makes it better.”

During his seven decades, Mr. Pfeiffer has donned the hats of West Point running back, gun-wielding soldier, prized beau of big-screen starlets, gruff ad man, inquisitor general for Interview magazine, cocaine rhino on a never-ending Studio 54 bender, liquor-bar owner, liquor-bar fixture, must-cast movie extra (“Needed: actor who exudes panache and loose cash”), amateur twang-guitar troubadour, the face of Winston cigarettes, Charlie Sheen wingman, husband, son.

Yes, Elaine Kaufman’s presence lingered in the clutter of movie posters and between the spokes of mismatched rickety chairs, but the celebration was far from dour.

“The old guys who haven’t been back to Elaine’s since she died are here,” said Bartle Bull, novelist and former publisher of The Village Voice.

“Jackie Kennedy was in the restaurant, and there was a cameraman trying to take her picture,” Mr. Bull said. “Elaine was pissed because she knew Jackie wouldn’t come back if they took her photograph. Elaine went outside, took the lid off a metal trash can and hit the guy’s face, broke his nose and his camera. I used to be a lawyer so I said, ‘Elaine, if you need a witness, I’ll say he attacked you on the street.’ A lot of fun.”

With that, the Elaine stories ended. There were Chuck stories to tell.

“Bad things, with Chuck?” Jay McInerney told The Observer. “Oh man. Just a whole lot of sordid behavior.”

“Hey, Jay, it’s been a while,” the bartender said to the novelist, who was ordering a martini.

“Moved downtown …”

The Observer sat next to Katrina Eugenia, the Playboy playmate who is dating Norman Mailer’s son, John Buffalo Mailer. She’s a recent graduate of the Pratt Institute and her nude pictures appeared in the December 2010 issue.

“Could the help please be quiet!” said a puckish Greek man, stocky like a bowling pin. At the microphone was Taki Theodoracopulos, Mr. Pfeiffer’s perpetual sidekick. He’s been in the trenches with Mr. Pfeifer—well, the all-night coked-up Nell’s-to-Area trenches, if not the actual Green Beret trenches. Mr. Pfeiffer made it clear that his buddy was a war reporter, not a war hero like himself. It’s a profession Mr. Theodoracopulos continues today. He’s the proud proprietor of TakiMag.com.

“Unlike another fat Greek, Arianna,” Mr. Theodoracopulos explained, “we actually pay our writers.”

(Each guest walked out with a pair of TakiMag.com underwear.)    

“I once said that if I hadn’t met Chuck, I probably would have been a whore,” Mr. Theodoracopulos said at the end of a heartfelt roast. “And I think it was Norman Mailer who said in response, ‘Isn’t that a shame?’”

The Observer walked over to Gay Talese and his tablemate Hendrik Hertzberg, the pitcher for The New Yorker’s softball team.

“Have you met Katrina?” Mr. Talese asked. The Observer was mid-nod when he called the 23-year-old model from across the room.

“Gay!” Ms. Eugenia exclaimed, embracing him.

“What a beauty,” Mr. Talese said to The Observer. “Have you seen this body?”

Before he could answer, the 78-year-old writer had an idea.

“Hey, Nate, do you have an iPhone? You should really look at her pictures.”

“Her pictures in Playboy?” The Observer asked.

“Pull them up!” Ms. Eugenia said.

The Observer Googled her and found her pictures on the Playboy blog. She was naked apart from some splatters of red, yellow and blue paint. The three of them were leaning in over the screen. Ms. Eugenia giggled.

“Fantastic,” Mr. Talese said.

Soon Mr. Pfeiffer was back on the microphone.

“We’d chase the three Bs …”

“What are the three Bs?” the crowd roared.

“Broads, booze and blow!” Mr. Pfeiffer shouted.

Woooooo! the crowd roared.

“Along came the ’90s,” Mr. Pfeiffer continued, “and Chuck got sober.”

Boooooo! the crowd roared.

He calmed them with a pause and a flat, outstretched hand.

“I’d like to mention my father, who was good friends with Elaine,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “They’re not here, but they’re here in spirit.”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

In 1969, the year of the original True Grit, 15 inches of snow fell on New York City, nearly putting an end to John Lindsay's mayoral career. The outer boroughs went unplowed for days, and it was precisely the working-class and lower-middle-class enclaves in the outer boroughs where Lindsay's popularity was in jeopardy. People went nuts, and called for Lindsay's head.

But that's where the similarity to Mayor Bloomberg's recent snow snafu stops. Lindsay was reelected, but not before having to undergo the most tumultuous electoral contest in the city's history, which included a run for mayor by Norman Mailer, accompanied on the ticket by Jimmy Breslin for City Council president. "The difference between me and the other candidates," Mailer liked to say, "is that I'm no good and I can prove it." When Mailer visited Queens to stump for votes, a man asked him how he would clear the streets of snow if, during his mayoralty, another blizzard hit New York. "I'd piss on it," Mailer promised. Nineteen-sixty-nine was like that. It abounded in colorful personalities who took on their environment.

In 1969, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators descended on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, forcing Nixon to withdraw thousands of troops from Southeast Asia even as he implored the "silent majority" to continue to support the war. In 1969, members of the gay community in New York changed their lives forever by taking matters into their own hands during the Stonewall riots that erupted in Greenwich village. Woodstock happened. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. It was the beginning of the end for Nixon and the war.

Plenty of other things came to pass in 1969, good, bad and all degrees in between. The unintended consequences of those events were rife and multivalent, but if you had to sum up that year, and that moment, you would have to say that it was the year of living willfully. People  encountered each other, went into the world, and things happened.  Many of the seeds of the individual protections and  pleasures that we enjoy today were planted then.

Forty  years later, and presidents have to be more careful about breaking the law  (blatantly breaking the law, anyway); blacks, gays and women are  safer and more in control of their own  destinies; crime is down; the streets are not simmering  with rage; people lead healthier lives; our daily  existence is, thanks to the Internet, infinitely more convenient. But even our best public officials live in terror of being shamed and humiliated; we are plagued by war, mired in joblessness, banged around by soaring health care premiums and deductibles (the result of health care "reform"), slaves to the distractions and importunings of our proliferating gadgets, swamped by inarticulable unease.

The 1969 True Grit--about a young girl who hires a tough, hard-drinking U.S. marshal named Rooster Cogburn, played by John Wayne, to help her catch and kill the hired hand who murdered her father-had layered characters and great lines. As a ne'er-do-well, played by a young Dennis Hopper, lies dying on the ground after being stabbed by his no-good partner, he says about the man who has taken his life: "He never played me false until he killed me." The language captures a situation and evokes a character at the same time. How quaint that is becoming.

In the Coen brothers' version, that line has not survived. Nor has Mattie's threat, repeated again and again in rising comedy, to summon her lawyer, "J. Noble Daggett," to her aid. Daggett's name has uncomically disappeared. And the Coens jettisoned the witty bit of repartee in which Rooster Cogburn asks La Boeuf, the Texas Ranger (Glen Campbell), why there is such a little reward for a man who killed a state senator. "He was a little senator," replies La Boeuf, seemingly surprised by a naïve question. In one stroke, you got both men's unsentimentality about money, Cogburn's worldliness and La Boeuf's weakness for whimsical explanations.

The Coen brothers' film is beautiful, all at once cannily real and surreally uncanny, so masterfully paced that it seems more choreographed than filmed. The wintry landscapes are precise illuminations of the characters' desolate interiors. There is something almost Wagnerian about the way Carter Burwell's music and the painterly cinematography together mold poetic meaning--that is, if Wagner had been a pair of deadpan Jewish siblings.

But the characters, even Jeff Bridges' almost campily oversized impersonation of Cogburn, exist as pasteboard cutouts adorning the evocative  landscape. They have been stripped of meaningful speech and psychological motives. You can barely understand what Mr. Bridges says, in fact. In the original, Mattie gets the better of a horse-trader by accusing him of passing off geldings as breeding horses to her unsuspecting father. In the Coen brothers' film, she gets the better of the dishonest horse-trader, but you have no idea why since the geldings have disappeared from the script.

The original film was shot in autumn, and the shimmering golden trees, with their descending leaves, hint at mortality but don't stifle you with explicit meaning. At one point, the golden trees serve as the backdrop to Cogburn and La Boeuf, while giant evergreens sway behind some bad guys who oppose them. The two images work to vaguely direct your thoughts and feelings, but you are not oppressed by overt symbols.

The Coen brothers give us not only the explicit wintry landscapes, but fablelike starry skies--The Indifferent Universe--and whirling snow at the beginning and toward the end of the movie--The Transience Of Time. You know the snow symbolizes fleeting time because an older Mattie explicitly proclaims time's transience in the film's final minutes. Physical environment in the Coen brothers' film is like a running caption that fills in for character and dialogue.

In the original, Cogburn tells Mattie about his lonely, loveless life around a campfire, and she looks at him with furtive affection, then goes to sleep as he watches her protectively, with tenderness. Their exchange is filmed in intimate  close-ups. In their version, the Coen brothers have Cogburn tell her, barely comprehensibly, an abbreviated account of his life as they ride through the woods while the camera hovers in a long shot high above them. Cogburn's desperate horseback ride with Mattie to save her life after she's bitten by a rattlesnake has no sense in the remake. There is no connection between them. That's why the Coen brothers shift into fable mode for that scene and portray Cogburn and Mattie looming abstractly against a star-filled sky. No story or character to give the audience? Present them with a symbolic image that they can mentally click on and then link to big meaning.

The point of the starry sky--as was the point of the Coens' stylishly pointless No Country for Old Men--is to present the universe as amoral. It is as indifferent to who we are and to the stories we tell ourselves as it is to our fabricated categories of good and evil. These are themes straight out of freshman lit, but the critics are always mightily impressed when they find them in a Hollywood movie. Still, they might want to take a look again at the original True Grit. There the mingled yarn of good and ill, to coin a phrase, is exposed when you subtly learn that Mattie's father, good man that he seems to be, also treated his killer like chattel. The Coen brothers excised that, too.

Instead you are left with that stunning, slowly swirling snow. It sent me back to 1969, and I wondered wistfully what characters might emerge and stories unfold if it was not  cleaned up within a reasonable amount of  time.

lsiegel@observer.com

Before Wolfe took the podium, Master of Ceremonies Gay Talese had a few words to say about him.

"He's Richmond's gift to New York," Talese beamed, looking down at his old friend.

Gay Talese was referring to the dapper writer's Virginia homestead, where he was raised. When choosing schools, Wolfe turned down Princeton to stay in state at Washington and Lee, where he acquired his life-long fondness for Southern Gentleman accoutrements—the dandyish white suit—that of course he had donned for the gala. 

His daughter, however, chose to attend to Duke University, which served as a major inspiration for Wolfe's last novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. The book delved into the sexual habits of college kids in work hard/play hard academic settings, so when The Observer approached the legendary novelist we couldn't help but ask about that university's most recent claim to notoriety.

Have you heard about a certain Power Point presentation associated with Duke University that's come out recently, we asked?

At first, he denied any knowledge of the scandalous list, but as we started to roll off some details, Wolfe perked up.

"Oh, wait a minute! You're not talking about the girl who... Ha, ha! I've never seen it. Is it on YouTube?"

We told him it was everywhere online.

"I don't know about it really," he said when we asked for his take on the whole scandal that erupted after Deadspin posted the Duke girl's "thesis" that she "researched" by sleeping with athletes. "But it's another sign that sex is getting out of hand. When girls started volunteering their identity as Tiger Woods' girlfriends—they're still popping up. On the cover of the New York Post today there was another one!"

And with that another man in a suit pulled at the wisp-haired white-suited writer, and Tom Wolfe went back into the crowd.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Out of nowhere in Rick Moody's new novel The Four Fingers of Death, there is a gay sex scene involving two astronauts flying on a rocket ship to Mars. "There was a sharp stabbing sensation, sort of how I imagine it must feel to find your innards impaled on a pike," Mr. Moody writes. "This was the Big Bang of interplanetary sex." The scene goes on for almost 10 pages, ending with the line, "The two of us breaststroked around the capsule, attempting to swallow the afterglow of our profane and inadvisable entanglement."

Most striking about Mr. Moody's scene is the lack of restraint. Mr. Moody is not alone. Two thousand and ten has been a summer of strange, dirty sex in American fiction. Writers are dealing with the topic in all its awkward, gruesome and (one hopes) lascivious detail. Fictional sex in 2010 is as unhinged as Norman Mailer's apocalyptic orgasm. Forty years after the old guard's fictional promiscuity, the mere presence of sex in fiction has long ceased to be interesting. Authors now focus less on the social implications of writing about sex and instead on the thematic possibilities of the act itself.

This summer's novels run through the entire spectrum of possible intercourse: missionary, ménage à trois, bondage, torture and every variant in between. In all instances, sex is not an aesthetic decoration, a superfluous indulgence or a signal of an author's bravery; it drives plot and defines character. The scenes are highly stylized in erotic, often gritty language: the 18-year-old performing oral sex on a music executive old enough to be her father in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad; the virile Sam Sheppard's extra-marital affairs in Adam Ross's wonderful debut, Mr. Peanut; Benjamin Israelien's tongue cleaved to the clitoris of a woman impersonating his mother in Joshua Cohen's Witz. The sex scene, as it becomes more and more pornographic, paradoxically shifts from hormonal to metaphorical. The dirtier the sex, the more essential it is to the story.

Take Bret Easton Ellis, hardly a prude. In Imperial Bedrooms, he writes one of his most troubling depictions of sex, but also his least gratuitous, to the extent that the scene allows us to better understand Clay, his antihero. Clay gives two young prostitutes-a boy and a girl-cupcakes laced with laxatives. "Smeared with shit," Clay recalls, "I was pushing my fist into the girl and her lips were clinging tightly around my wrist and she seemed to be trying to make sense of me while I stared back at her flatly, my arm sticking out of her, my fist clenching and unclenching." Far from sex for sex's sake, Clay is finally enacting the physical violence that he has wanted to perform on his fellow characters since we first met him in 1985's Less Than Zero.

It is no accident that many of the writers offering the most unreserved representations of sex have expressed anxiety about the state of the novel and of publishing, particularly the increasing digitization and consequent simplification of language. Gary Shteyngart in his excellent Super Sad True Love Story interprets this directly through the juxtaposition of Eunice Park's Gchat-speak emails with the long form prose of Lenny Abramov's diary entries, creating what is, essentially, a critique of technology-mediated writing. Lenny's jarring eloquence-"She must have sensed just how much her youth and freshness meant to me, a man who lived in death's anteroom and could barely stand the light and heat of his brief sojourn on earth. I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human"-is mirrored by Grace's crude e-chatter-"I met this old, gross guy at a party yesterday and we got really drunk and I sort of let him go down on me."

If Mr. Shteyngart asserts the threat of technology's stunted sentence structures to oversimplify language, Jonathan Franzen in Freedom expresses the reverse of the notion. Sexual desire in Freedom is unhinged in emails, phone calls and instant messages, but in practice is often adolescent or tame ("It was fine, having sex with him"). When really pleasurable intercourse occurs, it is as vulgar as the digital version of the act. Patty and Walter, the novel's central troubled couple, finally throw caution to the wind after two decades of polite lovemaking, but Walter's newly minted experimentation in bed (actually, on the floor) is prefaced as "the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist's." Still, "instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement, she was giving forth large screams."

Sex in fiction is, more and more, a device through which authors experiment and take risks. A participant in the second highly pornographic scene in Mr. Moody's book unknowingly sums it up quite succinctly: "Would I be coy about a device that's all about turning the tables so that what's wrong is right," Mr. Moody writes about a decidedly different kind of device, "and what was bottom is now top?"

A couple of weeks ago on the op-ed page of The New York Times, Camille Paglia declared Americans sexually dead. Some months before that, the essayist Katie Roiphe declared male American novelists literarily dead in the description-of-sex department. Just about a year ago, the critic Cristina Nehring published a book, The Vindication of Love, declaring Americans also sexually dead-as well as erotically, romantically and literarily.

What all this means is that, finally ... Americans are growing up about sex! For what these women really seem to be complaining about is that sex is no longer treated as though it were some momentous experience that is sacredly separate from the rest of life. Three cheers for that.

In fairness to these unhappy bedfellows, they all have different benchmarks for when sex was fun and fulfilling. Ms. Paglia laments the waning of "the elemental power of sexuality" that she found in the "sexual revolution" of the '60s, those lusty days when the Rolling Stones made their "hypnotic recording of Willie Dixon's 'Little Red Rooster,' with its titillating phallic exhibitionism, throbs and shimmers with sultry heat." She also misses "the humorous sexual candor of both men and women during the agrarian era." Ms. Roiphe complains that novels by male American writers nowadays lack the exuberant sex scenes that you found in the work of Roth, Mailer and Updike. Ms. Nehring yearns for a return to the good old days circa 1100, when Abelard lost his senses (and his testicles) over Heloise. In a mostly favorable review of Ms. Nehring's book, Ms. Roiphe writes with mild revulsion that "for most of us love [i.e., sexual love] is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary." Clearly, for these women, any moment before our moment was a time of sexual happiness.

But they bump heads when it comes to agreeing on anything about the sexual qualities of the past. While Ms. Paglia blames the "priggish" '50s for ushering in a new age of sexual repression, Ms. Roiphe longs for the days of Portnoy's Complaint, The Time of Her Time and Couples, an age that had been ushered in by the '50s. (Let us bid farewell to Ms. Nehring, who in her calls for emotional "derangement" sounds suspiciously like a rich girl on a permanent vacation.) While Ms. Roiphe celebrates Saul Bellow's evocations of sex (perplexingly, since he never once came close to writing an explicit sex scene), Ms. Paglia celebrates the Dionysian "sexual revolution" of the '60s, which Bellow reacted to with a kind of vatic disgust.

As Updike himself once wrote, "Nothing in history sinks quicker ... than people's actual motives, unless it be their sexual charm." Adjust that to "nothing in history sinks quicker than how people actually conducted their sexual lives," and you have the chief problem with pronouncing, so generally, on sex, still the most hidden thing we do. Ms. Paglia and Ms. Roiphe aren't writing about life; they are writing about cultural representations of life. As anyone knows who has read about conservative culture warrior Allan Bloom's unrestrained private exploits, there is a whole world beyond what we read about the world.

Does Ms. Paglia really crave a return to that rollicking "agrarian era," when men and women could return from a 16-hour day in the fields and really get down to it, night after frenzied night? Has there ever been a historical moment when the mass of adult humanity did not spend most of their time not having sex, when life was not (fill in the historical blanks) largely "a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary"? Elsewhere, Ms. Paglia speaks glowingly of the "ribaldry chronicled from Shakespeare's plays to the 18th-century novel." But surely this posturing academic knows as well as anyone that behind the ribaldry was the daily horror of children forced into marriage and lords of the manor raping their servants when they weren't busy raping their wives. Or is the right not to be fucked to death yet another contemporary falling away from "the elemental power of sexuality"?

Let's, however, stick with cultural representations for a moment. By now the weary caricature of the "priggish" '50s has given way to the reality of a decade that saw the rise of beat culture, cool jazz, interracial romances, and the widespread enjoyment of marijuana. It was the age of Kinsey, when sex was, underneath the Rockwellian surface, as polymorphous and plentiful and perverse as it had been in ancient Roman times. Postwar periods are always times of appetites loosened and unconstrained by the absolute permissiveness and horror of war. Ms. Paglia could at least watch a couple of episodes of Mad Men.

As for Ms. Roiphe's golden age of novelistic sex, it lasted about 20 years. Instead of indicting contemporary novelists for their weak and "ambivalent" treatment of sex, she might want to go back and read Twain, Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, none of whom ever portrayed sex graphically. True, they would have run up against the enforced prudery of their day, but the lack of sex hardly diminished the power of their writing. Anyway, you would look in vain for graphic sex scenes in literature from the Hebrew Bible through Homer and Ovid and up to Les Liasons Dangereuses-a novel entirely about sex that is entirely devoid of graphic portrayals of sex-phases of culture when, for the most part, the idea that explicit depictions of sex should be censored would not have occurred to anyone. Would Ms. Roiphe accuse Homer of "ambivalence" for not describing sex between Paris and Helen?

To use a nice '60s term, Ms. Paglia, Ms. Roiphe and their ilk seem to be the victims of false consciousness. For them, the gold standard of happy sexuality is the throbbing mores introduced by the sexual revolution of the '60s. But the '60s presented human sexuality as a fairy tale, in the same way as American culture tends to represent most of human existence as a fairy tale. The '60s packaged, commodified and commercialized sex-it made sexuality unreal. The result is our present situation, where the obligation to have sex, and to have great sex, and to have sex all the time is broadcast at us night and day. If anything, the tentativeness with which contemporary writers treat sex is a subtle protest against what has now become something like an ideological line we all have to toe. Unlike the Paglias and the Roiphes, these writers have not been suckered by the caricature of human sexuality purveyed to us over the last half-century.

Hooray, finally, for our liberation from sexual liberation! Contrary to Ms. Paglia and Ms. Roiphe, sex now is so available, now so much not a big deal, that it is nearly continuous with everyday life. No wonder, then, that our novelists depict it so off-handedly, so mundanely, if they depict it at all. (Just as Jack Kerouac never approached graphic portrayals of sex. But, then, he was not, like Roth, Mailer and Updike, neurotic, repressed and shrewd about creating an audience.) The great benefit of this sudden Greekness of ours is that rather than write about sex, our male novelists can at least try to take on everything else that happens in our human existence around sex. Can you imagine The Great Gatsby written by Philip Roth? It would be The Great Cocksby, and nobody would ever make it out of bed, let alone out of West Egg and into Manhattan. His special field of operations is what makes Mr. Roth a major writer with minor preoccupations.

What is strange is to see women writers hitching up their pants and swaggering around, calling for "elemental" sex and frank portrayals of sex, and "deranging" sex in the same way as men of a previous generation did. They are like D.H. Lawrence in drag. From my phallocentric perspective, just about every bad thing in history was caused by men who could not work out the right relationship between themselves and their penises. (I certainly haven't: We have reached an "understanding.") Having experienced the social transformation of their gender in their lifetimes, these women are now, like some sexual Emperor Jones, speaking the language of their former masters and accusing men of failing to live up to the naughty-boy standards of yesteryear. Too bad that for all the changes of the last several decades, the vagina still can't get a word in edgewise.

editorial@observer.com

A few summers ago, with the advent of Petney--the Jitney-comparable branch of Pet Taxi--pet owners traveling east by no-dogs-allowed means were afforded the option of sending their dog solo safely on the Petney. Now, in the wake of the spring auction scrambles, Hamptons-bound cargo is tending toward the aesthetic rather than the canine. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that over 1,200 Hamptons residents will have their personal art collections gophered back and forth from city to Hamptons between Memorial and Labor Day weekends. The boom of art shuttles--some have been servicing the same clients for 18 years--owe their success to a seasonal population afflicted by one or all of the following issues: confusing works of art for decorative party napkins--"You're fixing up a place and you've got the right flowers, or right dishes, and so on. Sometimes the right artwork is appropriate;" pathetic social pandering--"We've been asked to run [art] in very quickly because certain people were going to be there;" and excess beyond square footage--"We're talking about collectors who have more works than they can put on the walls in their various homes."

A handful of art-shuttle companies--yes, this is their sole business function--are surveyed in the article, including the Long Island City-based Atelier 4 which offers a weekly "Flex-Shuttle" package that will deliver your Warhol from East 72nd Street to East Hampton for the ripe price of $495. Unless you don't want Andy canoodling with your neighbor's Matisse nude, in which case there is an exclusive service which begins at $1,050 per trip. But remember kids, you can take the Koons out of the city, but you can't take the city out of the Koons.

cmalle@observer.com