Gay Talese
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Thy Neighbor’s Wife, by Gay Talese, is a nine year labor of love, literally. For in the novel Gay Talese recounts the personal recollections and adventures of nine years worth of research on the sexual mores, practices and pornography in America. The book basically focuses on two central themes. The first is how hard it is to have sexually explicit material published in a country that possesses a censorship-based society. The other central theme is the adventures and attempts of various individuals to lead sexual lives of greater freedom. The book chronicles the tales of a variety of famous people (Hugh Hefner) and ordinary ones (like Sally Binford, an apparently inexhaustible female sexual dynamo). While Talese gives us painstaking detail throughout the book, especially his descriptions of Hugh Hefner and the Playboy mansion, there are no erotic scenes. Instead, we are given accounts of the social history of pornography, the history of book and magazine banning in the United States, and a very interesting political and cultural look at the sexual utopian communes that evolved since the 19th century. This analysis will discuss various aspects of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, including its depiction of masturbation, repression, pornography, adultery and the old morality that fostered sexual repression. A brief conclusion will address some of the limitations of Talese’s odyssey through American sexual liberation.
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to her, he knew that his willingness to share her with another man marked the end of his possessiveness of her, his jealousy and deep caring,” (Talese, 1980: 81).
Talese’s work also gives a detailed examination of the history of book and magazine banning in America. He allows us to see the often vague and confusing pornography laws that were on the books in America. He shows us one of the reasons for such sexual repression and censorship in America regarding pornography stemmed from laws that were made in the 1800s. For example, the 1957 obscenity law still had much in common with the Hicklin decision of 1868 (an English law), “The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall,” (Talese, 1980: 107).
Yet, in the late 1960s with all the political and civil unrest in America, Americans were becoming more sexually restless. The lead fictional hero of 1968n was the chronic masturbator in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, further Screw magazine was published which was the antithesis of Playboy in a sense. It depicted four-star generals mounting each other after
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1837
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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