Sexx Laws; WAS: Patrick twisted my arm so now I'm reading Pynchon's latest

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

            Daniel Julius:
            This is part of what that guy Patrick had to say about AtD:
            "Frankly, something should be said about the sex in this 
             book. Not that I'm a prude, but Pynchon goes a long way
             towards ruining this book with the frequent bedroom
             [...] shenanigans. And it's not that graphic or unusual 
            sexual action ruins a book, but too often the sex 
            seemed gratuitous & juvenile."

You forgot tacky. Like the Great Beast on Page 666 of AtD. Note:

            Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of Charles I, 
            a sect of most pure Puritans. Their central hangup had to do 
            with predestination. There were two kinds. Nothing for a 
            Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast, 
            intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran 
            off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some 
            opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism 
            that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the 
            Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow 
            those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out 
            into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and 
            fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the 
            glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until 
            there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, 
            who, like a ship's master, had been last to go. 

            "What did Richard Wharfinger have to do with them?" asked Oedipa. 
            "Why should they do a dirty version of his play?" 

            "As a moral example. They were not fond of the theatre. It was their 
            way of putting the play entirely away from them, into hell. What 
            better way to damn it eternally than to change the actual words. 
            Remember that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, 
            to the Word." 

            "But the line about Trystero isn't dirty." 

            He scratched his head. "It fits, surely? The 'hallowed skein of 
            stars' is God's will. But even that can't ward, or guard, some-
            body who has an appointment with Trystero. I mean, say you 
            only talked about crossing the lusts of Angelo, hell, there'd be 
            any number of ways to get out of that. Leave the country. 
            Angelo's only a man. But the brute Other, that kept the 
            non-Scurvhamite universe running like clockwork, that 
            was something else again. Evidently they felt Trystero would 
            symbolize the Other quite well." CoL49 pg 128

I've found a very strong tendency in Satire to stretch to the 
boundries [break 'em, if you really want to know] of "Good Taste":

            That which gave me most uneasiness among 
            these maids of honour (when my nurse carried me 
            to visit them) was, to see them use me without 
            any manner of ceremony, like a creature who had 
            no sort of concupiscence : for they would strip 
            themselves to the skin, and put their smocks on  
            in my presence, while I was placed on their toilet. 
            directly before their naked bodies, which I am sure 
            to me was very far from being a tempting sight, or 
            from giving me any other emotion than those of 
            horror and disgust: their skins appeared so coarse 
            and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw 
            them near, with a mole here and there as broad as 
            a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than 
            packthreads, to say nothing farther concerning the 
            rest of their persons. Neither did they at all scruple, 
            while I was by, to discharge what they had 
            drank, to the quantity of at least two hogsheads, 
            in a vessel that held above three tuns. The handsomest 
            among these maids of honour, a pleasant 
            frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set 
            me astride upon one of her nipples, with many 
            other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me
            for not being over particular. But I was so much 
            displeased, that I entreated Glumdalclitch to contrive 
            some excuse for not seeing that young lady 
            any more.

Gulliver's travels into several remote nations of the world
By Jonathan Swift, page 137
http://tinyurl.com/2puufv

Of course, it is the comic thing to do to distort sex towards
exaggeration in Satires, really, everything gets stretched in
these funhouse mirrors. This link goes to the earliest satire
I'm aware of. While not as Scurvhamite concerning Sex as
Swift, exagerrated ugliness is on display under klieg lights 
here, the fun begins on page 132: http://tinyurl.com/27t7m2