I have that dreadful flu that’s plaguing so many innocent victims with racking coughs, high fever, and at one point I was hallucinating. So I’ll be in bed for Valentines Day, in the guest room, with a box of tissues popping Tamiflu. And it promised to be the most eventful Valentines Day in years.
It was to begin at dawn with the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock house that’s been closed for forty years and is now open for 24 hours to certain cognoscenti, my friend Kady being one of those. Then home to do the normal Farmer’s Market shopping, and then out again, like a mad person, to the 11 o’ clock showing for the opening of the dirty grey movie. The minute I said “Yes”–to my friend who adored the books and had to be there for the movie–part of me said, “No.” Why did I say “Yes?” I’ll miss Carolina’s yoga class. But, I like pleasing my friends. I’ve never been to a porn flick, and someone else–I forget who–told me creative types are supposed to do one new thing a week. This was my new thing! D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller wrote the dirtiest books I’ve ever read, so I’m not exactly a spokeswoman for the prevailing zeitgeist. And since I’m trying to tell the truth here, I skipped over most of Tropic of Capricorn. The same thing happened with that book about phone sex that had the great opening line, “What are you wearing?” The book was very well written, but I didn’t want to spoil my admiration for the writer by getting to the hard core. I still love DH Lawrence, but dear DH was never about porno but love. And feeling and sensation. Porno is tiring and effortful.
The movie Boogie Nights gave me the absolute willies. I don’t know what’s creepier, a movie like Boogie Nights that’s cloaked in ART with a capital F, as my husband would say; (those huge, sinister phalluses came to me in nightmares for weeks!) or a movie like the dirty grey thing, that I don’t somehow think is going to be portrayed as art, but I’m sure would also give me the willies. I think it’s a romance novel with whips and chains, which is pretty scary in my book.
Plath hit the nail on the head when she proclaimed, “Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face…” I think she killed herself not long after she wrote Daddy. Sure she was crazy, she had the flu in fact, or was getting over the flu and it was a bad one that year too. But she zeroed in on something so basic, so absolutely true about the nature of being a woman and it killed her. But she didn’t dress it up with fancy camera angles and consumer goods. And from what I have read, the dirty movie opening on Saturday and the books, are as much about consumer goods as they are about anything else.
I’m thinking too of the very early Bond movies, the real Bond movies with Sean Connery, who is unbelievably offensive not to mention sadistic. And women were panting over it—my very young self included. When my husband gave our son the movies and he and his friends would sit in the living room watching Connery slapping around Pussy Galore, my grown up self was absolutely horrified, but God the boys loved it! Someone pointed out that the James Bond series were the first consumer goods driven novels.
Today we are so used to the constant interplay between expensive goods and sex we don’t think about it anymore. Sex and Italian high heels are one and the same; Sex and diamond rings are one and the same; Sex and real estate are one and the same.
Sex and consumer items are not the same. They are as different from each other as night is from day. Or pure lust is from pure love.
I have to go back to bed now. I’d love to hear from fans of the movie-telling me I am so wrong, and I don’t get it. Really, I would. In the meantime, Happy Valentines Day.
by 
