Shakespeare's Sister this morning pointed Broadsheet to her take on the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" piece about Scooter Libby's 1996 erotic novel, "The Apprentice."
I thought the New Yorker piece, by Lauren Collins, was pretty hilarious, summing up Libby's dubious foray into the literary world and quoting choice excerpts from his book, which is available online for anyone who's curious. According to Collins, "Libby does not shy from the scatological. The narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine, 'turds,' armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood (regular and menstrual)."
Apparently, Libby's story, set in Japan in 1903, also includes moments in which the main character draws hair on the "mound" of a little girl, and in which two uncles have sex with their niece. Collins includes a couple of truly yucktastic sex scenes by Scooter, including this one: "He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his. He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger ..." Rowr!
The book also includes scenes of bear-on-girl bestiality/rape/torture, in which a child is kept in a cage and repeatedly violated by a bear to prepare her for life as a prostitute. And then there's some run-of-the-mill deer mounting.
As I said, I thought the piece was hilarious, until I read Shakespeare's Sister's take, which sobered me right up. While I was laughing my head off, she was pointing out the hypocrisy of the right and their moral values preaching.
"What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution?" she writes. "Oh, right. A conservative one. One that has ... spent its time dreaming up legislation designed to control the sexual freedom of women and gays. It isn't enough that men like Scooter Libby must repress their own sexualities; they have to oppress anyone who doesn't succumb to exhortations to do the same."
Shakespeare's Sister concludes with a damning look at everyone who, like me, giggled at Libby's fiction: "Scooter's craptacular book may seem funny on its face, but it's spawned of the same darkness that motivates a man like Alito to consider a wife her husband's property and deny protection of gay children. There's nothing funny about conservatives or their twisted views of sexuality, because they're inextricably linked to denying freedom."
Shares