They Still Make Those
The erotic threat of women who read
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Female frogs fake their own deaths to avoid unwanted attention from male frogs. When it comes to human males, my tact is more subtle: I pull out a book and begin to read.
“They still make those?” said the man who sat down beside me at the bar of a pizza restaurant one evening.
I glanced up from the book I was reading to confirm that he was referring to the book I was reading. I summoned a polite smile but didn’t manage more than that. Couldn’t he see I was occupied?
Occupied is not the right word, though. More like absorbed, enthralled—aroused.
“A hardcover, even. Where did you buy that?” This time, the question came from the man sitting on the other side of me.
Confused, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Certainly, this man, who was quite a bit older than I was, must have known that jacketed books still existed—that he could walk into any bookstore and buy such a relic for himself.
“I ordered it from the UK.”
“May I?” he said. Without hesitating, he picked up the hardcover, turning it over in his hand, fingering the spine to see if it was bound together with cloth or glue—all so he could tell me about my book. (Apparently, he had worked “in books.”)
As I watched him fondle my hardcover, I wondered whether he’d noticed the pizza grease splotching the pages. The many dog-eared corners. The anchovies mashed into the spine. A few days prior, I’d gotten the book signed at an author event, but that hadn’t stopped me from underlining sentences I loved, or from taking the book with me to this pizza restaurant, where I’d pressed my greasy fingers against the pages, rained red pepper flakes into the book’s gutter.
I am terrible at taking care of books. Or maybe it’s that I care about them too much to keep them pristine. I take them everywhere. I read books in waiting rooms. On buses and subways and trains and planes and ferries. I read in restaurants and bars and parks. I bring a book whenever I meet a friend, in case they’re late. I’ve never owned an e-reader, mostly because I seem temperamentally disinclined to engage with such advancements in technology, but also because I crave the physicality of a book—the heft of it, the smooth paper, the soft cloth, the sharp edges. An e-reader would be more convenient for many reasons, I know. I could record favorite passages with a simple copy and paste, rather than underlining and then transcribing each interesting fact or stunning sentence. Travel would become easier, my backpack lighter. (I once hauled a stack of ten books while traveling around Ecuador for a month.) Yet I can’t imagine letting go of the sensory pleasure of cradling a physical book. Each one carries the residue of our time together.
There was the day when a book and I got caught in a Louisiana thunderstorm, the fat droplets sloppy as drunk kisses. There was the time a book and I took a candlelit bath together, and it slipped into the steaming water to lay itself across my chest. There was the time a friend mailed me a book and I carried it into the mountains of Alaska, where the book and I were both splattered with mud and rain, and it was only afterward that I texted my friend to ask whether the book had been a gift or a loan. A loan, he texted back.
Each book is a love affair. Some are whirlwind, rhapsodic. Some are slow burns. Some are disappointing enough that I have to break things off before I see where our time together might lead. Which is all to say, books leave their mark on me, and I leave my mark on them.
With library books, I am more careful. I use bookmarks. I avoid eating around them. I do not take them out in the rain.
“But they do need to be handled,” writes Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects. “The pleasure in a book is, or should be, sensuous as well as aesthetic, visceral as well as intellectual.”
There’s a long history of women taking pleasure in books.
When I visited Amsterdam, I went to a sex museum. There—amid the ancient dildos, the boob and butt sculptures, the animatronic flasher and ejaculator—were paintings and photographs of women reading. Some were reading solo, masturbating with a book in hand or lounging topless (or stocking-less) with a book splayed open, their bodies silked with lingerie. Some were reading books while men had sex with them. One painting depicted a scene in which a courtesan daydreams about reading a book while three sailors kiss and finger her.
There were enough of these reading women that it seemed worthy of note. While men wanted to have sex, women wanted to read. Though the peaceful expressions on these women’s faces suggested they were touching the sublime, there was also a trace of subversion. A smugness that belied the actual risk they were taking engaging in such an indulgent pastime.
“Reading has long functioned as the privileged sign of women coming into knowledge,” writes Rebecca Birrell in This Dark Country.
And is there anything more threatening to patriarchy than a woman coming into knowledge?
In a world where a woman’s role has largely been confined to the domestic, books offer escape and abandon. They require a relinquishing of household duties, along with a complete reorientation of attention. This means less attention given to childcare, to chores, and—ultimately—to men.
I’ve lost count of the number of times men have talked at me while I’ve been engrossed in a book. It’s as if they sense my complete rapture has nothing to do with them, and they want to correct that.
A woman reading in public is not an invitation. It is a private room. She does not want a knock on the door. She wants to turn the page with her pizza-slick fingers, take another sip of wine. She wants to gasp with surprise and sigh with pleasure. She wants to get out of the house and do something conspicuously, unabashedly for herself. She may want to be looked at, but she does not want to be interrupted.
This may seem exhibitionist, her pleasure laid bare for all to see. Which is why, when a friend invited me to a reading-in-public event, the idea felt both exposing and exhilarating.
“This is the most Portland thing ever,” my friend said as we propped ourselves on bolsters in a downtown yoga studio. Scanning the room, I surveyed the couple dozen attendees—mostly women or femme-presenting—nestled with their books. Though I’ve never been to a sex party or a cuddle party, the shared intimacy of the evening made me feel as if this belonged in the same category.
For nearly an hour, most people chatted, engaging with friends they had brought rather than with the books that had brought them there. Gradually, though, the noise in the room shifted from a jittery hum to a charged quiet, as each of us began making the awkward transition from chitchat to what we had all boldly gathered there to do: book PDA.
We made ourselves more comfortable. We leaned back. We rolled onto our bellies. We opened our books.
By the time the host made a soft announcement that the evening would soon come to a close, I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. I only knew that my face was a little flushed—from the beer I’d been sipping, probably—but maybe also from the energy in the room, which felt weirdly erotic. Signs of indulgence were everywhere, from the bashful smiles, to the languid curves of lounging bodies, to the cheese crumbles scattered across the pages I’d been reading.
How deliciously scandalous, it seemed in that moment, that we’d been reading, without unwanted interruption—quietly, joyfully—for all to see.
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