I recently discovered Annais Ninn, which has been an incredible experience in transcendental debauchery.

I'll enter the fray here. A lot of my own books & shortt fiction deal with exactly this topic, which still seems to have the power to shock some people. Witness this review -- a good one, despite the headline: "Take a weird trip into a deep pit of moral decay" -- in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer --

www.cleveland.com/bookrevie.../index.ssf

Interesting to note that the fact that the protagonist is both bisexual and over 40 is conidered transgressive.

Check out "Bad Behavior" by Mary Gaitskill.

I do have to admit, and perhaps this is the 'sensitive guy' syndrome, that the sort of crude (more than often detached) reference to sexual matters in men's writing makes me a little ill, so I tend to be turned off when they begin to write that way. I think, more than anything, it comes across as both fake and injurious, to men even more than women.

In my own writing, I always prefer to treat sexual matters in a more emotional way, as has been my personal experience (and nature). Sexuality, to me, has always been just as much about emotion as the physical drive, and my attitude has been quite opposite to this very, very strange distancing act that a lot of men (and women!) seem to have been perpetuating for way too long.

But one thing I've also wondered about is this: There is SO MUCH art generated by men in which men celebrate their various perceptions of female beauty. What I've wondered for years and years is: Where is the heterosexual female perspective on this? Even the female surrealists painted, in general, not sexualized men but sexualized women. (The misogynistic aura surrounding early French surrealism, of course, is not forgotten.) It has seemed to me, from the beginning, that female artists were, and are, far less interested in exploring their personal sexual feelings toward men than they have been in exploring their own personal sexual identity.

So... as a guy... I've often wondered: What about US? Aren't WE physically desirable? Our girlfriends (or wives) will tell us we are, and point out all the tiniest details. But female art does not seem to show this very often (and very rarely on tv or in movies). So... I think my burning, burning, burning question is: Why is female sexuality, publicly, SO inwardly directed?

Regardless of whether or not it might seem elitist: there are so many artists that I've come to know, male and female, who've ended up engendering a loving culture all their own which is quite separate, in various ways, from the fake trash that affects others, and in which men and women / girls and boys are more intimately connected than the television and movies would have non-artists believe.

don't forget pat califia - he did a lot of wonderful writing when he was a woman.

there are many:

lydia lunch, diamanda galas (the shit of god), exene cervenka, tricia warden, ritah parrish, cookie mueller, pat califia, danielle willis, dorothy allison. check out dick for a day, a collection of stories written by women with the premise that they've discovered they've grown dicks