RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: The vagina ideologue  Sat Mar 14, 2009 5:12 pm | |
| Puerile porn or daring feminism? The author of a raunchy new book is still laughing out loud.
Charlotte Roche . . . her book "should make you blush and get warm".
FEUCHTGEBIETE, which translates as Wetlands or Moist Patches, is the debut novel from Charlotte Roche. As it opens, we find 18-year-old narrator Helen Memel in hospital after an accident shaving her intimate parts. The remainder of the book plays out entirely on the proctology ward where, in between ruminating on her haemorrhoids and sexual proclivities, Helen asks her male nurse to photograph her wound, tries to seduce him and hides under her bed to masturbate. She has an insatiable, childlike curiosity about the sight, smell and taste of bodies, especially hers. She is also exuberantly promiscuous.
Hygiene, she reflects, "is not a major concern of mine". When she uses public toilets, she likes to rub her vagina around the lavatory seat and has experimented with long periods of not washing her vagina to investigate its erotic impact - dabbing her pubic perfume behind her earlobes. "It works wonders from the moment you greet someone with a kiss on each cheek."
Wetlands became a literary sensation when it was published in Germany last year, selling well over 500,000 copies - the first German book to top Amazon's global bestseller list. Audience members have fainted at public readings and comparisons have been drawn to J. G. Ballard's Crash, J. D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. It makes The Vagina Monologues sound like a nursery story.
Helen's oblivion to bodily shame and all the normal conventions that govern female sexuality make the novel both shocking and funny - but critical opinion is divided on what it represents. To some, Helen is a daring, feminist heroine; to others the book is a work of puerile pornography - in the words of one German newspaper, "a masturbation pamphlet". The debate has certainly been electrified, and possibly obscured, by the fact that the author is a famous and beautiful young TV presenter.
Roche, 30, was born in the English town of High Wycombe, west of London, but moved with her British parents to Germany as a child and has been a celebrity there since her teens, presenting music and culture shows. We meet in her home city of Cologne and, although she speaks English with only the faintest trace of a foreign accent, vocabulary often escapes her. "English people always think I'm a disabled person," she laughs, "because I sound English but then I don't know really simple words."
In person she is dainty, ladylike and much more playfully ambivalent than the public debate about her book. "Some people don't actually get the humour," she marvels, smiling, "but, for me, writing it was laugh out loud."
Wetlands, Roche says, had originally been intended as a serious polemic against the tyranny of female sexual hygiene. "The first idea I had was a nonfictional thing against chemicals. People think the smell and the liquid in the vagina are dirt and they have to get rid of it. But it's like in the nose - you need the liquid. They think they have to shower three times a day and then they ruin the body's own barriers.
"But then I thought it would be too much like a teacher talking at them, this TV host telling them . . . " - she wags a finger - " 'That's the way I want you to treat your vagina.' And so I thought maybe it's better to have someone who can do all those things who wasn't me and that's when Helen was invented. It was much more fun. I was sitting there laughing. I didn't know that all these things were in my head.
"With self-confident women, everyone thinks, 'Oh, you don't have to worry about them.' We seem to be very strong and open about everything. But when it comes to the vagina, we're not at all open yet. When I talk to people, they never talk to their best friends about any of this. And there is lots of stuff in the book that I am embarrassed about myself. The big misunderstanding is that people think, 'OK, if someone writes a book like this she must be the coolest sex maniac, not ashamed of anything, running around naked, going rarrrrghh!' And it's exactly the opposite, of course."
Roche's mother was a feminist, the sort of mum who talked about contraception and allowed her daughter to have sex at home from an early age. "But I would see as a guest in other families that there's something going completely wrong between mothers and daughters, with the mothers teaching the daughters that the vagina is something dirty." Roche's mother didn't talk to her about masturbation, though, "or teach me that is a good thing for a girl to do. She had a very posh mother; my grandmother in Wimbledon [south London] is like a '50s perfect housewife, teaching my mother to lie in bed with her hands on the blanket so she didn't touch herself. My mother read tons of books to learn all this stuff but I think it's more like an artificial emancipation than something you really believe in. In my generation it's sinking in more, because you actually believe it."
When the book was originally rejected by a German publisher on the grounds of being pornographic, Roche insisted that it was no such thing. But she admits the defensiveness was somewhat disingenuous. "I wanted to write about female sexuality and go into detail very strongly. And I wanted it to be funny and light to read. So I definitely wrote a few scenes in the book to make people horny. For the reader it should make you sort of blush and get warm, like when you watch a scene like that on TV."
If Wetlands is pornographic, it has certainly subverted the genre. The defining feature of most pornography is the excision of any element of the body judged less than flawlessly alluring, whereas Roche wanted to integrate the erotic with the scatological and menstrual and present a woman's body in its unedited entirety. She is disappointed that women readers admit only under duress that they found the book erotic - "You have to beat them up to get them to say it!" - but men apparently always volunteer their arousal.
It's not always clear, however, whether Helen is sexually liberated or slightly mad. When not trying to seduce the nurse, she is preoccupied by a childish fantasy that if she can only get her long-divorced parents' hospital visits to coincide, they will get back together again. Panicking that she may be discharged before engineering their reunion, she forcibly ruptures her wound to prolong her stay - a feat of self-harm almost unreadable for its violence and ultimate futility. A feminist critique might question why Roche has created a character who seems to conform to the old notion that sexual liberation always comes at the price of instability. "But I would say everybody is damaged," Roche responds.
Another way of reading it could be as an allegory about the self-destructive consequences of women's obsession with shaving. Roche agrees that everything goes wrong for Helen because she tries to shave her anus. But why, if Helen is so liberated, does she shave at all? "Yes, you're right, it would have been more logical if she had had hair. But you see, the book started off very political. But then it got very unpolitical; it just happened."
Ten years ago Roche decided to stop shaving her armpits. "Looking back, I think, how brave, what an amazing thing to do on TV, aged 20. Brilliant! I was on TV with tank tops on and you could see the bundle of hair sticking out. It's probably one of the worst things a woman can possibly do. It really is as if you are a witch; people want to burn you for it. I got emails, especially from females, saying that what I was doing was disgusting and that they wouldn't watch my show. It was written about in the press and taken the piss out of on other late-night shows. They would stick wigs under their arms and go, 'Hah, hah, hah, who am I?' " Eventually she began shaving again, just "to get rid of the issue", and still does.
At public readings women often tell her they daren't have sex with their husbands if they have not shaved their legs for one day. "They think they are so unsexy - they think they are not a woman - because of that one millimetre of hair. It's just so crazy! And young men say to me, 'Your book starts off with this woman shaving her bum hole. Why does she do that? Women don't have hair there.' " She shakes her head in amazement, laughing. "They fall for the whole shaving myth."
The expectation of pubic and genital depilation has been widely attributed to its prevalence in contemporary pornography. When I point this out, though, Roche says quickly: "Yes, but I am very much for pornography. And I think they should be shaved in porn films. It makes sense, for close-ups, so you can see everything."
The fascination in Germany has inevitably centred on how closely Helen's life resembles Roche's own. Her father, like Helen's, was an engineer and her parents divorced when she was five. "Like all children of divorce," her poignant prologue reads, "I want to see my parents back together." She made them both promise not to read the book and has since wondered whether subconsciously it was the protagonist's preoccupation with divorce she wanted to protect them from.
"It's a massive thing in my life that my parents' home broke up. For me it's a very strong problem; somehow I don't feel that I have roots anywhere. I also think it's why I'm a TV host, to get the applause to compensate for something I didn't have in childhood. Which is a very sad thing."
A lot of the critical confusion about how to read the book probably stems from Roche's appealing determination not to be "an author who takes herself too seriously". But it is, for all the humour, a serious feminist book. Roche has a five-year-old daughter and so I ask if she hopes she will grow up to share Helen's relationship with her own body. "Some aspects, oh yes. The using the liquid as a perfume? Yeah. Brilliant! I would love my daughter to have fun with her body and be happy in her body."
Roche looks forward to seeing how Wetlands will be received by a British and an Australian public who have not heard of her. "In Germany the critics can say, 'It's a famous woman talking about vaginas - of course it's going to sell.' " But when people ask her what Helen looks like, "I always say," she smiles wickedly, "exactly like me!
"When it started off, I was afraid people would think it's me but it's also fun. It gives me a sense of strength. Men think they can be disgusting and sexual and stuff, and now I've shown them that women can do the same. When I walk into a pub now, and I see men saying, 'Look, that's Charlotte Roche.' It's as if I've stolen something from them. I like that feeling."
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