100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed

Melissa P.

Ah, the worldwide fascination with kiddie porn. You disagree? What would you call it when a book detailing the sexual exploits of a sixteen-year-old girl sells millions of copies? Okay, it may not really BE kiddie porn, because only the most neanderthal among us still believe that a sixteen-year-old of either gender isn't an adult. But it's hard to deny that part of the attraction of this book has to do with the fact that, if you tried to create a film version of it in America without changing the ages of the participants, you'd probably get arrested. But you put it in book form, and it becomes a bestseller. I love this country.

The main thing to know about 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is that it's not erotica. You may think it's erotica, and the people blurbing it on the back may think it's erotica, but the simple truth of the matter is that there's more of the erotic to be found in the movie The Terminator than there is here. But then again, it's not really pornography, not in the sense of, say, the works of Marcus van Heller, whoever that particularly boring rake was, or the anonymous Victorian who published the infamous magazine The Pearl. Certainly not in the way Peter Sotos is pornography. Yes, there are some sex scenes, and it's slightly possible that the idea of multiple partners, or same-sex partners, might still shock one or two people who have been living in a cave their entire lives. Besides, it doesn't have the classic (and cliché) pornographic structure; the heroine wouldn't sleep with five guys as the first major sex scene in the book in a pornographic novel, that would be the last. Unless the author was a fetishist of some sort, in which s/he'd save that for last. It's a "fictionalized memoir," whatever that may mean. Kind of like Bukowski's Factotum or Ham on Rye, I guess, but without the wit, the panache, the style.

The one thing 100 Strokes... has going for it is that it's readable. The hundred seventy pages of this book will pass before your eyes very quickly. And, well, reading about a (as the cover blazons) "sexually ravenous girl" is not really difficult.

But if you're looking for pornography, you'll look a whole lot more erudite reading Georges Bataille, and you'll probably get more of a kick out of it.