Lady Chatterley's Lov-ah...Is a Huge Dick

I'm reading Lady Chatterley's Lover on my commute, I'm very into the whole, 'dead white guy' genre, and it's one of those ones you should read. Right?

So through the whole thing I've been totally on the side of Connie's eponymous lover, the studly grounds keeper, and against her husband, the Proust spouting imperialist cripple. I mean, Lawrence makes it pretty clear who you're supposed to like, it's not rocket science.

HOWEVER! This morning Mellors (studly grounds keeper) went off on a RANT about all the ways women can be horrible in bed which encompass every single sexual encounter he's had.
Mellors and I are no longer cool, I don't care how many times he bathes himself in the wood on a spring morning!

Here's the list of ways women can suck at sex, as I see them, followed by a doozie of of a racial epithet!

1. The 'old fashioned sort' who don't want sex but will lie still and take it and then be nice to you afterwards. He hates that.

2. The kind of woman who pretends to like sex but doesn't. Doesn't like that either.

3. Women who love sex and foreplay but won't let you come inside them. Unnatural!

4. Women who can't come from sex alone and need to get themselves off. The worst kind, they're 'a hard sort'. He uses 'beak' to describe their vagina's like 8 times.

5. Women who are dead inside.

And, drum roll please.....

6. Lesbians. "I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really a Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul wanting to kill her."

Uh, totally not the worst part. Here's how he ends the conversation, "I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who'd really come naturally with a man (meaning when he comes) except maybe black women, and somehow, well, we're white men: and they're a bit like mud."

Yikes Mellors! When Connie goes to visit her family in Venice she should totes stay. Both of these dudes SUCK!!!

Lady Chatterley's Luv-ah!

Hehe, I was watching the 1st season of Mad Men last night and in one scene the secretary pool is all giggling over a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. They lend it to the new girl with the admonishment, 'Don't read it on the train, people will get the wrong idea about you.'

That's funny to me because I'm reading Lady Chatterley's Lover and I ONLY read it on the train. I wish I could have scanned in the cover of the copy I'm reading because it's this really amazing stylized drawing of a woman all in black except for one pink nipple. It's also, according to the cover, the 1st edition to come out uncensored. Ooh!

There is a lot of sex but nothing that would raise an eyebrow now. I can see how it would make a stir 80 years ago though, it deals with some pretty post modern themes. Connie, the protagonist, has a rich, landed but crippled husband who can't service her, so she has a few pretty graphic affairs. One with an Irish writer who gets mad at her for not being able to climax when he does (they call it 'coming to their crisis') and one really juicy one with the studly grounds keeper who she can achieve simultaneous orgasm with.
That's how you know it's love.

I also like it because she's constantly referring to money and fame as 'the bitch goddess', which from now on I will also be calling them. Can you really say bitch goddess enough in one day?
I'm sure things will end disastrously for Connie as is always the case for free thinking women in fiction but what can you do? You gotta read something.

PS. this book has had some amazing cover treatment. You can just see the editor's meeting, "We have to convey sex but only use old paintings and black and white photos so people still know it's LITERATURE.'