Title: Talk Dirty To Me
Author/Artist: Sallie Tisdale
Publisher: Doubleday
Media: Book
Reviewer: Maria Mitchell
About three years ago, I came across an article in Harper's by Sallie Tisdale. It was only a couple of pages long, but it sparked a significant change in my behavior. Tisdale's article discussed pornography, which she recommended. Intrigued by her confessional yet thought provoking piece, I became for the first time an occasional patron of the X-rated section of the local video store. Shyly, I asked certain close friends if they had read the article, and what their reaction was. I learned with interest that Tisdale was writing a book on the philosophy of sex.
Talk Dirty to Me received more media attention than any of Sallie Tisdale's earlier books. (She had previously written about the geography and culture of the Pacific Northwest, life in a nursing home, and salt.) As soon as I found out the title, I requested that the public library buy the book, and placed a hold on it. That was in November. Checking the online catalog soon after the book's publication, I found there were nine holds on three copies. My turn came around the first of March.
Meanwhile, I stopped in at our neighborhood bookstore, and judged the price too steep for my budget. Some of that cost must have gone into the book's beautiful design and black dustjacket. I opted for delayed gratification. Only when I finally checked out a library copy did I discover the arresting front cover photograph, an unusually seductive fruit or vegetable held tenderly in someone's fingers. Is it an unripe peach? a weird tomato? a mutant apple? Whatever it is, it looks startlingly like...someone's bare bottom? a hairless vulva? Whatever it looks like, it is definitely...disturbing? exciting? illusory?
And this cover is a perfect introduction to what is perhaps the main theme of Talk Dirty to Me. Tisdale reports on some of her own sexual experiences, and explores what sex means to quite an array of other people, in light of her steadfast belief in the idiosyncratic uniqueness of each individual's sexual response. In the name of freedom, she defends the right of any person to pursue his or her path to sexual fulfillment. In answer to "conservative feminists" who argue that pornography is inherently sexist and violent towards women, Tisdale posits her own assumption about the limits to morally acceptable sexual activity: no harm to others, no harm to oneself, physically or emotionally.
Within these limits, which make sense to me, there is room for both freedom and tolerance. "The main reason I resist censoring any form of speech or expression is a selfish one," Tisdale writes. "I know that sooner or later something I write or something I want to read or see or talk about is going to be forbidden." In Talk Dirty to Me, Tisdale names the unnameable, going behind the scenes of the ongoing sex movies explicit or covert that bombard us every day on television, on the street, in the workplace, in recreational settings and yes, at home. Whatever Catherine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin might say about it, this is a liberating book. It's also a good read. Ask your library to buy a copy.
This review first appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #44 (Fall/Winter 9'7-98, C.A.L. Press, POB 1446, Columbia, MO 65205 1446, USA)