Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong Page A

protesting pornography, trying to make the world believe that people molest little girls because of pornography (rather than that pornography Hour ishes because people want to molest little girls), and in general doing their best to blur the distinction between sex and rage.
    â€œThere is no sex without rage!” they rage. Except sex between women, which is supposed to be pure and perfect, nonexploitive, as heavenly as heterosex is hellish. You’d think they’d never heard lesbians yell at each other, or seen them strike each other in bars. You’d think they had never known a lesbian relationship (like Isadora’s Aunt Gilda’s) where the femme is as oppressed as any fifties wife—and the butch is a female chauvinist pig. Of course, feminists don’t mean to come out on the same side as the Moral Majority when they denounce pornography, but alas they do. And sweet sex, the great unmasker, is dragged in the gutter again. If this trend continues, Isadora thinks, Mandy’s generation will have to unearth sex all over again, like a buried Sphinx.
    She really resents this confusion of sex and rage. For her, what is great about sex is precisely the momentary respite from rage it grants. When even Lowell Strathmore can shed his mask, something constructive is surely at work.
    O sweet sex, Lawrentian waterfalls, Joycean rivers, Millerian springs (so black they are blue, too)—it’s you that Isadora longs for! The whole humid earth opening like the Great Mother’s thighs, the cock rising pinkly, a crystal tear at its tip, the breasts swaying as if to a ballet by Ravel— this is what she tried to write about in her notorious Vaginal Flowers. But the feminists who picketed, and the critics who sneered, and the public who bought to be turned on (but then to disown the sexuality that stirred), preferred to see it all as smut, and keep their masks on still.
    â€œOne does not choose one’s subject matter,” says wise old Flau bert (who apparently said everything), “one submits to it.” Amen.
    How could Isadora describe sex with Lowell to Josh without describing Lowell himself? How could she ever get the flavor of it right? The cock itself was unremarkable—though ample and indefatigable enough. It was the contrast between the straightjacket and the freedom that was so amazing (and so oddly erotic). It was the whole thing—the boyish calling of the wife, the unsexy underwear, the Ben Franklin glasses coming off, the use of the word titties, the nervousness, the fear, the dropping of the mask.
    Back in the States, they met from time to time. Never enough to satisfy Isadora, and never without the most elaborate plans. You’d think they were planning the invasion of Normandy rather than two hours in Fort Lee. Because the fact was that Lowell was so nervous about Discovery that they had to go to a third state. Neither Connecticut, where they both lived, nor New York, where he worked, but New Jersey—where, he maintained, his wife had never been.
    â€œNot even across the bridge to attend some charity function or a horse show?” Isadora asked.
    â€œMy wife is not interested in anything that goes on outside Manhattan or Fairfield County—unless it happens in the Hamptons!”
    Isadora had to laugh—because she knew it was quite true. She and Lowell would have to be safe at the Fort Lee Motel. Who on earth would think of looking for them there? Except that on one occasion, as they were fucking their brains out at that very same motel, there came a pounding at the door, as if the Hulk himself were loose.
    â€œWhere’s my wife?” came an enraged voice. “I want my wife or I’ll break down all the doors!”
    Lowell and Isadora jumped apart. They raced to the door—but the madman was already gone. They heard him pounding on the next door with the same, and then the next, and the next, and the one after that. They looked at each