Weird Sex - Readux Series 6

From fairy tales to poetry dredged from the darkest recesses of the internet, Readux Books’ Weird Sex series happily lives up to its name. Featuring lovingly presented short reads from Joanna Walsh, Hannes Bajohr, Rut Hillarp and Gregoire Bouilliere, the series explores desire, identity, perversion and restraint in original and enlightening ways.

Particularly interesting is the way in which Walsh and Bajohr examine the impact of modern communication technology on our primal lusts and desires. Throughout the 9 ½ modern fairy stories collected in Grow a Pair, Walsh creates a world in which technology is used to stimulate and satisfy desire. In one story, a woman finds that she can remotely trigger orgasms in strangers by pressing the ‘z’ key on her laptop; in The Princess and the Penis, the title character learns about the facts of life through dick pics sent to her by acquaintances: 'Due to the splendid isolation guaranteed by her social position she had never met a cock IRL and, as there was no Wi-Fi in the palace, she had no opportunity to check the facts'.

Also key to Walsh’s stories is the idea of gender and sexuality as fluid, and dynamic. In her world, dicks grow on bushes, cunts float like butterflies, and tits swim in the ocean ‘like jellyfish’. Characters can choose their genders, while genitalia can exist independently of a body. In The Waiter and the Laundress, a pair of characters 'lacking both primary and secondary sexual characteristics' consummate their relationship using a sock and a potato peeler (a pleasingly Sarah Lucas-esque image). As the relationship develops, the sock begins to fray, while the man utilises increasingly large implements, building up to a power tool.

To combat their growing incompatibility, they create a machine into which sexual organs can be places, anonymously: 'all things that could be frotted were rubbed togeter... where anything soft had its corresponding squeeze, where anything that could be pulled, sucked, spanked or bit was answered by a clamp, vacuum, switch or set of mechanical teeth'. The machine turns out to be 'a great success, which was lucky for the man and the woman for, as no one was interested in sex any more, both the restaurant and the laundry went out of business'.

It is hard not to view this giant, anonymous receptacle for sexual desire as a manifestation of the web, that inchoate, sprawling realm of the id. In Timidities, Hannes Bajohr similarly explores the expression of desire as it appears online. Repurposing text from erotic fiction, youporn video descriptions, okcupid profiles and love songs, Bajohr produces rhythmic, immersive poetry swirling with anonymous sexual expression. The poems reflect the culture of sex forums and porn websites with the energy with which the futurists represented industry. By blending texts from multiple sources, Timidities reflects the amorphous, changeable nature of sexuality, and the opportunities for roleplay afforded by digital communications, in a similar way to Walsh’s fairy stories. This is particularly striking in Monologue, a piece in which Bajohr creates a corporate, singular and anonymous identity from submissions to a love advice column.

Hillarp and Bouilliere use more traditional narrative forms in their contributions, but are no less original in their thinking. In Cape Carnaveral, Bouilliere describes an encounter between his narrator, an author, and a woman known only as 'V'. V is young, of 'elevated social standing', and appears to be looking for a one night stand with the author. However, after walking the narrator through a dark and mysterious maze to her home, a different scenario unfolds, in which V violates her sleeping mother, who is too out of it on tranquilisers to wake, while the author watches. The narrator is horrified, not least by V’s assertion that she did it ‘because of what you wrote’. Bouilliere investigates the idea of writing as voyeurism, an imagination of the perverse and wicked – a carnivalesque world which can explore actions which would be horrifying if actualised.

In The Black Line, Hillarp tells the story of a love affair between a man (a conductor) and a woman (an author), focussing on the dynamics of power, control and possession which develop between two people who equally attract and repel one another. Hillarp is particularly interested in the power of waiting: ‘a period of gestation during which time your desires would consolidate, your emotions coagulate… waiting is creative. It rouses new senses and needs’.

Every aspect of the relationship has erotic potential, as boundaries between the pair are drawn and redrawn. Cruelness and control are reinterpreted, and the woman takes an almost religious joy in submission (an idea which also forms the basis of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission): ‘I could let him master me because his power play wasn’t real, it was only erotic. It didn’t matter which form it took: my submission was all that mattered… that’s why I also derived pleasure from submitting to his will. When other men wanted to force me into things, I revolted against them: they were simply being careless, they weren’t even aware of the erotic potential of the situation’.

Oscar Wilde described a cigarettes as 'the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied'. The same is true of the four volumes which make up Readux’s new collection. Four short bursts of pleasure and stimulation which will linger in the mind after reading, like the scent of sex in a dishevelled bed.