How many male genitals Yasmine Allas had weighed in her hand. For a while, that was the question during Writers Unlimited's most shameless programme to date. This latenight talk show addressed the question of how shameless writers actually dare to be these days. Kristien Hemmerechts, always good for a few firm statements, met her peers in Yasmine Allas and Ted van Lieshout.
On how far you dare to go, or how far you want to go, they were actually very much in agreement. In literature for adults, basically anything goes, and now that serious writing in the Netherlands has been overtaken left and right by that damned 50 shades trilogy, they will have to. So they also researched the question of whether or not a man with an erection can pee and whether or not that can be part of wooing. To children's book author Van Lieshout the thankless task of defending all manhood in a discussion led by Elsbeth Etty.
That we might eventually stop talking about sex altogether came as an ominous concluding remark from the left corner of the room, as the majority of over-50s seem to be sexed out. Ht was a question to which we were guilty of answering. Fortunately, Hemmerechts still came up with a nice observation, which may turn out to be truer than we like: it is not the pornographic or otherwise of human relationships in modern literature that is disturbing or not, it is much more striking that relationships are becoming more and more politically correct. Men and women and all their cross forms actually treat each other too nicely in modern books. There are no more awesome assholes and overly dependent females.
In serious literature, at least.
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