TW Column by Emily Toth
Sex, Menstruation, and Other “Unsuitable” Topics
My first censorship—a rite of passage, to be sure—left me bloody but triumphant.
Long ago, in the mists of the 1970s, my pals Mary Jane Lupton, Janice Delaney, and I met for a fateful Bloody Mary breakfast. Within an hour, Mary Jane was looking into her goblet, twirling it around in the mid-morning light, and saying, “Why don’t we write a book about menstruation?”
It was madness, but we hopped on the red wagon, as one did in those heady days. Soon we were meeting monthly in Janice’s study, with its red walls, and exchanging drafts and jokes about our sacred and taboo topic. We wrote chapters on menstruation jokes (“Red Humor”), on famous menstruators in history (“The Menstrual Hall of Fame”), and on the menstrual products industry (“From Rags to Riches”). We recognized that witches were simply menopausal women whose bones shriveled because they didn’t take calcium. We cackled a lot.
At first, editors wouldn’t touch our book. Our beloved agent Elaine Markson reported that publishers couldn’t decide whether our subject was “sexy or disgusting.” Even Jack Kerouac’s former love, editor Joyce Johnson, couldn’t or wouldn’t take us on. But E. P. Dutton finally did and published The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, edited by the courageous Marian Skedgell.
The book created a—I was going to say “splash,” but of course we preferred “stain.” It was reviewed in Newsweek (“this book on the curse is a blessing”); it was excerpted in Ms. and Playgirl. We were savaged on radio shows and lauded on TV shows, where I even appeared with Dick Clark. He said I was a funny cookie.
In those days, books mattered, and there was embarrassment and glee and finally my first (sort of) banning. Dutton sent me a copy that had been returned to the publisher by the Waco, Texas, public library as “unsuitable.”
We were thrilled.
By then I’d started researching Kate Chopin, whose novel The Awakening had reportedly been banned in 1899. I read it, as did everyone who wanted to read a banned book during the heyday of the Sexual Revolution. It didn’t have graphic sex by today’s standards (no thighs, no fierce engines of lust, no grassy knolls). As I found out through later research, it hadn’t been banned, either. Copies had indeed been removed from library shelves in St. Louis, Kate Chopin’s hometown—but that’s because they wore out.
I’ve also devoted research energy to Grace Metalious, the scandalous author of Peyton Place (1956), which had a favorite backseat line: “Is it up, Rod? Is it up good and hard?” In the 1950s, that was the boys’ favorite line. Now, my female students tell me, it’s theirs.
As for me, I haven’t exactly been censored—that is, denied the chance to publish my lurid musings, if I had any—but I’ve been muzzled in interesting ways.
When I wrote a Philadelphia Inquirer review of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, including her term “zipless fuck” to describe the guilt-free sexual experience, I found it in print as “zipless copulation.” I felt slimed, and my friends said I must have a really dirty mind.
Later on, the Inquirer cut my mention that a friend of the novelist Evelyn Scott was a homegrown Copernicus who thought the world “revolved around his penis.” The Inquirer editor, Carlin Romano, laughed his head off and then said they couldn’t print that in a family newspaper.
I’ve also run into the family newspaper rule for my Ms. Mentor advice column in the online Chronicle of Higher Education. My alter ego Ms. Mentor, an academic agony aunt who gets her hauteur from Miss Manners, receives etiquette rants and queries from academics, some of whose language is quite colorful. Ms. Mentor had to learn the taboos: nothing too suggestive about sex, no mention of boogers, and a certain word was allowed only in a phrase from the poet Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Ms. Mentor still hasn’t quite got the hang of it. One reader recently wrote that her slacker student was no doubt up in his attic “wanking” instead of reading. Ms. Mentor changed that to “becoming intimately acquainted with himself,” but it wound up in print as something like “not studying”—which is just as well. Thanks to my editor, I know you can always trust readers’ imaginations.
Every good writer has to take charge of censoring herself. If Fannie Flagg ever considered having a lesbian sex scene in Fried Green Tomatoes (1987), I’m glad she didn’t do it. For her mainstream readers 25 years ago, a roll in the hay for Idgie and Ruth would have seemed graphic and jarring. In fact, the word “lesbian” is never mentioned, but their Boston marriage is absolutely clear to today’s readers, who cherish the two women’s love for each other.
My department chair today wouldn’t blush if he mentioned The Curse—as mine did 30 years ago. The Awakening is read by ninth graders, and Peyton Place is more often called “a classic” than a “dirty book.”
Sure, something’s lost when we don’t have a sense of taboo, when it’s hard to find opportunities to be wicked in print. But that’s okay with me. I’m older, riper, maturer, and I kinda don’t give a fuck.
Publishing Information
- The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation by Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth (E. P. Dutton, 1976). Published in paperback in 1977 by Mentor Books. Revised edition published in 1988 by the University of Illinois Press.
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin (H.S. Stone & Co., 1899).
- Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious (Julian Messner, 1956).
- Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1973).
- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (Random House, 1987).
Emily Toth is a contributing writer at Talking Writing, where her column “Nothing but the Toth” appears regularly.
See her occasionally colorful Ms. Mentor column in the advice section of the online Chronicle of Higher Education.
