Home » Forbidden but not too much reading – Guido Vitiello

Forbidden but not too much reading – Guido Vitiello

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Dear bibliopathologist,
I am fifty-two years old and I am the father of a thirteen-year-old boy. When I was twelve or thirteen, I discovered sex by reading Pigs with wings by Lidia Ravera that my parents had left lying around. I was a little confused about what males and females, males and males and females and females, could do together and Pigs with wings it opened my eyes. I was not interested in the political part of the book because my parents in the 68’s were already there to catechize me. I have a very sweet memory of those early literary disturbances: you think I should leave a copy of Pigs with wings why do you find my son? Could it still make sense as a literary introduction to sex? Or is it the relic of a forgotten era in the YouPorn era?

– Giuseppe, Monza

Dear Giuseppe,
I cordially hate the slogan “the personal is political”, with its intolerant implications and its subtly totalitarian resonances, but I have to exhume it to answer you – or rather, to explain to you why I am unable to answer you. I grew up in a house that your sixty-eighty parents would probably have called “middle-class”, where it was understood that sexual initiation did not pass from father to son or mother to daughter, but that it involved a generational hiatus. In other words, I would never have tapped into my father’s erotic imagery; at most, skipping a generation, I would have found exciting, say, some mischievous postcards of the early twentieth century or libertine prints kept in a trunk by a grandfather or a great-grandfather. If in the evening, while having dinner in front of the television, we came across a pornographic scene (and it could happen, in the wild times of the local networks) an icy embarrassment would descend upon us, due not so much to the scene itself as to the fact that it forced us to share a common moment of allusive retro-thoughts that we would have gladly spared ourselves.

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But precisely, the personal is political and the politician is personal, and I am the son of a secular southern bourgeoisie – republican father, socialist mother – which anthropologically had very little to do with the sixty-eight, the movements, the collectives, the jargon of “Reappropriation”, the sex-political introspection from the dining room or from the assembly, the books of Reich or Marcuse. For friends who grew up in sixty-eight families it was different, and between the erotic imagery of parents and children there could be continuity, if not explicit sharing. I understand that this is also your case. Your parents found it unsettling Pigs with wings, you picked it up again and you had no inhibitions to retrace the same paths of erotic initiation. Now you wonder if this passing of the baton could also involve your son. I don’t know how to answer you, because in my family it would have been impossible. I could have found that intriguing book only if they had forbidden me to read it, or if they had hidden it … But again, I grew up in one of those bourgeois houses full of forbidden rooms, locked drawers and mysterious attics, and what was impossible in my family it is not said that it was, or it is, in others.

Rather, you are right to ask yourself if that book is a wreck today. I strongly suspect that it is (for what it counts, when I read it at the age of twenty it already seemed to me an archaeological find from an archaic and indecipherable era). I have no children, I don’t know many teenagers and I risk blatantly attracting an OK BOOMER chorus to me, but I believe that a detailed knowledge of what “males and females, males and males and females and females can do together” today spreads among the kids for a thousand other ways, much more precocious and much less literary. Houellebecq is also probably a wreck in their eyes.

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I also have the impression that the focus of erotic initiation has shifted, and is not so much about the things that can be fare, as much as the things you can to be – the exploration of one’s own identity and navigation in the archipelago of a thousand definitions of gender. From this point of view, Pigs with wings it is too carnal-Dionysian a book (just read the first three lines to see it), perhaps not very congenial to an emerging sensibility that is instead entirely Gnostic-Cartesian, and which tends to consider the body as a hardware on which to make the immaterial phantasmagoria run of the most various identity software. What will he ever say Pigs with wings to some angels with bristles?

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