(Regarding Katie Roiphe’s essay “The Naked and the Conflicted” in the 1/03/2010 New York Times Book Review)

The charts accompanying this piece are glib and arbitrary (Franzen isn’t guilty or explicit? Roth isn’t self-conscious or trepidatious?) and the argument sets up a dozen convenient straw men, but what’s most irritating is her underlying contention that writers like Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon (whom she labels the “New Narcissists”) are taking on an attitude of aloofness and ambivalence with regard to sex for the sake of posture: either as some kind of calculated rebuke to past generations of writers, or in arrogant contempt for the sex act, or else as a kowtow to feminism.

The stance is ungenerous and a bit paranoid. Could it just be that they’re writing about a personal experience of sex, in light of new expectations around men and women of a certain age in a certain society? Have to give credit to the NYT op-eds for spinning a microtrend out of the writings of a half-dozen men, I guess.

Also note the omission of certain celebrated narcissists who just don’t fit the argument—Martin Amis writes prurience without apology, and Nabokov back in his day was always circumspect in his writing about sex, even in Lolita (not a single profanity). Not to mention the entire generation of gay and queer male writers like Adam Haslett, David Leavitt, and David Sedaris, who have done plenty of writing on the outrageousness, obscenity, and psychopathy of sex—or do they not count because they’re gay?