Too cool for sex

Philip Roth é bastante elogiado e bastante criticado pela sua obsessão sexual. Na geração dele, o sexo tornou-se compreensivelmente o assunto mais urgente, dado o novo clima de liberdades. Os romances de Bellow, Mailer e Updike são quase invariavelmente libidinosos. Outros tempos. Passada a revolução sexual, chegada a epidemia sexual,  instalados o enfado, a ironia e o cinismo, temos agora romancistas americanos desoladoramente assexuados. Procurando algum comentário a esse estado de coisas, escrevi no Google «too cool for sex» e encontrei um belo artigo de Katie Roiphe no New York Times: uma autópsia sexual de Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen e David Foster Wallace. Excertos, antes de umas breves notas:

(...) At this point, one might be thinking: enter the young men, stage right. But our new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex. (...)

The younger writers are so self-­conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced. (…)

They are good guys, sensitive guys, and if their writing is denuded of a certain carnality, if it lacks a sense of possibility, of expansiveness, of the bewildering, transporting effects of physical love, it is because of a certain cultural shutting down, a deep, almost puritanical disapproval of their literary forebears and the shenanigans they lived through. (…)

It means that we are simply witnessing the flowering of a new narcissism: boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of “I was warm and wanted her to be warm,” or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world. (…) 

Compared with the new purity, the self-conscious paralysis, the self-regarding ambivalence, Updike’s notion of sex as an “imaginative quest” has a certain vanished grandeur. (...)