Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier [Hardcover]

Eurydice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 1999

Satyricon USA is a groundbreaking tour of America's contemporary sexual landscape, Written by a young woman who has already been called "the most compelling writer of sex in the English language." Like Petronius, the ancient Roman writer she takes as her model, Eurydice presents a firsthand account of the chaos of human sexuality in all its kinky, confused, and transgressive expressions. With a style that combines erudition, wit, and hipness, and audaciously draws on both the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction, Eurydice transports us inside the nightmarish, breathtaking realms of dungeons and bloodletting clubs, cross-dressing conferences, supersized strip emporiums, as well as military bases and Catholic monasteries. In one chapter she accompanies a sex addict on a voracious nightlong escapade, in the next she meets with men and women who claim to have ongoing sexual relations with aliens, in another she describes the bone-chilling desires of neighborhood necrophiliacs.

Her aim is to understand these people who are drawn to the farthest sexual "fringe." On her journeys, Eurydice learns that, in fact, they are well-educated middle- to upper-class professional Americans. They are housewives and stockbrokers, college students and grandparents, doctors and priests. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, Eurydice probes people's dual lives to answer some fundamental questions: Why is our society simultaneously obsessed with and afraid of sex? How does this widespread sexual eccentricity coexist with our puritanical hysteria about sexual harassment and "moral turpitude"? Are we today more liberated or actually more confined than in the past? Rules and stereotypes, Eurydice reports, are emerging in new forms. As she writes: "What I encountered were mostly ancient, confining sexual mores going by new, emancipatory names." Daring and ferociously smart, Eurydice dives into the "deviant" lifestyle to untangle the contradictions of our modern morality. A unique blend of reportage, memoir, extensive research, and incisive analysis, Satyricon USA is a compelling portrait of a nation in the midst of redefining its sexual issues and needs.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Eurydice takes as her model the Roman writer Petronius, who claimed that his salacious Satyricon was "simple realism and nothing more." Her vivid tour of America's sexual underside in the mid-1990s--ranging from suburban sadomasochism to male cross-dressing conferences, from lesbian bloodletting rituals to supersize Texas strip clubs--is only slightly less fantastic than the original Satyricon, and would be worth reading solely for anthropological interest (or voyeuristic thrill) even if it were not also exceptionally well written, lively, and acute.

Sadly, perhaps, the author finds most of the contemporary deviant practices she observes to be joyless and vaguely pernicious, "the tricky disguise of our self-denials as sexual excesses." Alert to the reactionary undertow complicating each of these supposed advances, Eurydice is especially suspicious of our rush to define our sexual identities in ever-more-specific terms (butch bottom boy, radical fairy, bigenderist, transbisexual), codifying and policing what ought to be fluid and anarchic. "Words and signs are displacing our genitals," she argues. "Emancipation has brought us no peace." --Regina Marler

From Kirkus Reviews

A fascinating tour of the sexual fringes of our society, an inside look at worlds into which most of us will never seek or gain entre. Starting with the notion that activities at the margins of society eventually move into the mainstream, and her belief that our society is simultaneously sexually promiscuous and repressive (as in politically correct codes of sexual behavior), Eurydice plunges into various circles of sexual deviancy, only to be amazed by the ordinariness of the individuals engaging in bizarre erotic behavior. What they did in private might quality as abnormal, she writes, but they did not. What begins as a kind of highbrow voyeuristic tour of the fringes turns into a compelling portrait of contemporary anomie as we are guided through the worlds of cross-dressing, sexual addiction, sadomasochism, cybersex, and even necrophilia. What we see is disturbingpriests who cant overcome their sexual addiction, women who choose to be sex slaves in a S/M relationship, vampires reveling orgiastically in each others bloodbut equally disturbing is the inner deadness that drives them to seek extreme forms of sexual activity. Of women who cut themselves as part of the sexual act, the author writes, for those who wear their scars as badges of honor, . . . What I do find utterly disquieting is that its scars are advertisements for the invisible scars of an increasingly violent and hollow society. All I really want is to feel alive, says one sex addict who has slept with more than a thousand men. Eurydices ponderings about what she sees are not always convincing; in writing about sex in the military, she is irritatingly attracted to the idea that sex and violence must be linked in men who are being trained for war. But at her best, she offers insights into the pleasures and dangers offered by contemporary society. This study of our sexual mores is far from erotic. It is illuminating, provocative, unsettling, dark, and disturbing. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (February 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684839512
• ISBN-13: 978-0684839516
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,020,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born on Lesbos, Greece, and raised under a junta, Eurydice ran off to America at fifteen, where she earned a BA in Fine Arts from Bard College, where she studied with Roy Lichtenstein; an MA in creative writing from the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she also studied at Naropa Institute with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; an MA and an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University where she later taught. She has published books with Scribner (Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier. New York, London, Sydney, Singapore, 2000), Virago Press (f/32: The Second Coming. London, New York: 1993), Richard Kasak Books, and the Fiction Collective (f/32). Her writing has been widely translated, anthologized, taught and reviewed. She has also made documentary films and worked as an investigative reporter for national magazines. She has exhibited in numerous art shows in Europe and the US. With hand-stitching as her latest media of rebellion, and the female nude as her central theme, Eurydice's groundbreaking art connects her with generations of silenced women for whom she hopes to speak.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars intelligent synopsis of fringe sexuality, May 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier (Hardcover)

This is a smart book, thoughtful and perceptive. It's obviously not meant to provide juicy tidbits -- the reader from Austin, Texas is right, there's nothing new and shocking, but then he obviously missed the point entirely and picked up the book for the wrong reason (recommendation to him/her: try the animal section at your local porn store). I think the author of the book captures well the hypocracy (sp?) of sexuality in America at the end of the century, where "abnormal" sex is so common as to not be aberrant anymore, yet where puritanism still permeates the culture. No jollies here, just good analyis and some very interesting characters opening themselves up. I recommend it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Poor Tourguide Into The Sexual Underworld, May 2, 2008

By 

Candice "Candy" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Satyricon USA : A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier (Paperback)

Eurydice's book is a sometimes fascinating, sometimes painful read- not because of the subject matter (please- anyone the least bit seasoned or knowledgeable in the so-called `fringe' or `extreme' sexualities knows everything in this book), but to watch the authoress herself as she struggles to make sense of what she witnesses. As another reviewer says, it truly does seem like she brings a lot of baggage to the book.

The author, as far as I know, doesn't occupy any public space that makes her worthy to comment on the things she's seen. She psychobabbles on and on, but has no professional, or even academic, experience on psychology/psychiatry. She has had no long-term exposure to any of the communities she enters and willingly pulls all her generalizing comments from oftentimes one single event or only a handful of interviews. I found myself reading and asking why I should listen to what Eurydice has to say: not only does she seem blase towards the subject matter, but her commentary is about on line with being grabbed by an uncle at a family reunion and having all his opinions heaped on you, under the guise of sage and wise advice. It simply doesn't fly.

I'd have rather read a fiery rhetoric about the evils of these various sexual communities- at least that would have some passion. I don't know if Eurydice simply has no real feelings about them (except for her own conflictions, which are ever-present), or if she feels that objective writing must be dry as tinder, but either way, it falls flat. If not for the very exuberance of the subjects themselves (through interviews), it wouldn't be worth reading at all. The book simply tries too hard where it cannot quite deliver. Eurydice's prose is fantastically complex (she even made this grad student pull out her dictionary once or twice) and elegant, which makes me wish that she had either a better medium or a better subject matter, because it often gets in the way. This is by no means a clear perspective on the sexual frontier. There may be occasional moments of brilliance (as well as repeated, disheartening occasions of bigotry hiding under the mask of `objective psychoanalysis'), but it's simply too muddled to be of any real value.

If anyone is reading this review wondering what I mean . . . it's hard to say. I supposed you simply have to sample Eurydice's style for yourself to understand her writing style. Suffice to say, it wasn't cutting it for me- it felt pretentious and tired, she sounded at best bored and at worst terribly jaded, and in the end, the crowning thesis of the book- that there isn't a wild and rampant sexuality underneath our smooth exteriors, but rather a bane normality underneath the crazy acts that [according to Eurydice] we do to feel rebellious and different- well, this isn't big news. Hell, I could have told you that.

The only saving grace of the book is its sheer diversity- Eurydice hits not only the sexual minority "givens" (cross-dressing, BDSM and bloodplay, strip clubs, cybersex), but also talks about a few topics I had not seen elsewhere, including necrophilia, sex in the military, and alien sex. Fresh topics that you simply don't see anywhere else, and it was these chapters that kept me going when I felt like putting down the book.

All in all, "Satyricon" is a book that makes me sad. When I finished reading it, I did not feel like I better understood the sexual minority's participants, and I didn't feel like I'd been shown some great realization about our sexual culture. It simply seemed like the author had grimly set herself out to write a book about sex, and found the whole process disdainful. It comes across on every page, and what stands for objectivity ends up feeling cold, clinical, and even a little mean (you can't help but wonder, oh yeah, Eurydice? Well, what turns you on?). And it's sad that it gets in the way of the material, because she often asks good, thought-provoking questions. If only her attitude were a little different.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Judgements made on a once-over, December 7, 2005

By 

Lady Peregrine (WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier (Hardcover)

If you'd like to read an insightful, psychoanalytic analysis of various fetish communities and sexual subcultures, this is not the book you're looking for. Eurydice seems to be bringing a lot of baggage with her on this trip, not the least of which seems to be an unspoken desire to go back to the fifties, at least in terms of outward gender roles and (according to an interview) in terms of our knowledge of sexuality and the various ways in which it plays itself out.

If you don't know anything about sexual subcultures, please don't get this book. It provides a skewed vision that can lead one to beleive that all sexual subgroups are made up of nuts. May I suggest Violet Blue's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1573441902/ref=ase_tinynibbles-20/103-5793046-4388651?s=books&v=glance&n=283155&tagActionCode=tinynibbles-20">The Ultimate Guide to Sexual Fantasy</a> instead? She also has a new book that interviews people within fetish communities coming out soon.