Eisen's Six Sex Scenes

Adrienne Eisen’s Six Sex Scenes is a hypertext of short anecdotal narratives invested in physicality, rationality, violence, language, and order. I found the first, “The Rap y” to be immediately playful with linguistic manipulation and slippages of meaning. Here therapy becomes “the rap, the rapy, the rape” and “the rapist” simultaneously. I love the self-awareness, the humor at play in these narratives: “He says we're the only couple he sees who hold hands throughout the whole session.” There’s a tension between physicality “the taste” (being irrational and feminine) and reason (the masculine). In this situation, the speaker really has no voice—she’s being dominated (and sociologically raped) from the beginning by this system of therapy created by men, run by men for men to justify their behavior.

The piece “You Suck” also presents the reader with multiple meanings in language. The phrase “you suck” is both commanding oral sex and insulting the “you” by threatening his masculinity. The humor comes from a combination of the campy rhyme scheme aabbcd, the explicit material, and the ambiguous phrase.

I thought that “Sunday Afternoon” was helpful to look at next to “The Rap y.” Again, we have this strange intimate encounter with men that’s both physical and dominating. While the speaker is being spanked by her father she says, “I can tell there's no blood because Dad's hand runs so smoothly up and down my butt, in between my thighs.” This is so disturbing in its sensuality, sexuality; the speaker complains that she’s too old to be spanked—she’s fourteen and pubescent which makes the act all the more perverted and overtly sexual. The speaker describes the climax and ending of the spanking session as “Every time the belt hits, my arms wrap tightly around his thighs and he groans” and “faster and faster and then, he stops.” Here and in other moments throughout the narrative, the speaker uses the language of sex (possibly rape) to describe the encounter in order to complicate and confuse the dynamic between the two and our own perceptions of what is physically happening. Like Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Walz,” we’re left questioning the health of a particular paternal relationship and the reality of that relationship. The piece makes me ask: how do you code this experience properly with language? It’s so bizarre, physical, unique.

One thing that’s really bugging me is that Six Sex Scenes would never be published in print for several reasons. I think that why “Sunday Afternoon” fails as literature is that its ambiguous “sex/punishment/incest” tension is ultimately too overt, in your face so to speak. It’s hard for me not to simply read the piece as a metaphor for incest which is both uninteresting and expected in its simplicity. Mary Capanegro’s “The Daughter’s Lamentation” is a good example of how to write an incest story (if that even happens in the story)—by its conclusion, through ambiguities and multiplicities of meaning, the reader can’t be certain of anything. Similarly, I think why “My Papa’s Waltz” works has to do with both the overt and subtle violence of the language that creates multiple readings/meanings. I’m suspecting that the quality of writing when it comes to digital writing/art suffers in general, although Shelley Jackson breaks this mold, I think.