The Pleasure Police - Hardcover
The reading public seems to have an insatiable appetite for books pointing out the annoying and infuriating in American life--from The Death of Common Sense to In Defense of Elitism to I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. The Pleasure Police, David Shaw's wickedly gleeful defense of good sex, good booze, good food and a good cigar, should hit the same nerve.
Why, Shaw wonders, are so many people hell-bent on ruining the pleasures of everyone else? The religious right thunders on about what consenting adults do in the bedroom; the feminist left wants to make flirtation a crime; hysterical health advocates warn against eating anything except tofu and kale; a tidal wave of repressive antismoking laws is passed based on extremely dubious secondhand smoke research; charlatan diet gurus use guilt and quackery to create a forty-billion-dollar-a-year industry; total strangers feel free to comment on the alcohol content of their fellow diners' beverages.
Shaw takes after these zealots with gusto, wit, and just the right bit of malice. In his view life is a feast, not an endurance test, and he takes great glee in mocking out the absurdity and self-righteousness of the crusades of the pleasure police.
The Pleasure Police is the book to be read while sipping an icy cold martini.
Why, Shaw wonders, are so many people hell-bent on ruining the pleasures of everyone else? The religious right thunders on about what consenting adults do in the bedroom; the feminist left wants to make flirtation a crime; hysterical health advocates warn against eating anything except tofu and kale; a tidal wave of repressive antismoking laws is passed based on extremely dubious secondhand smoke research; charlatan diet gurus use guilt and quackery to create a forty-billion-dollar-a-year industry; total strangers feel free to comment on the alcohol content of their fellow diners' beverages.
Shaw takes after these zealots with gusto, wit, and just the right bit of malice. In his view life is a feast, not an endurance test, and he takes great glee in mocking out the absurdity and self-righteousness of the crusades of the pleasure police.
The Pleasure Police is the book to be read while sipping an icy cold martini.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
Whew. Just when the religious right and alarmist left were closing in ever so smugly with an overload of everything--and they do mean everything--gives you cancer, makes you fat or is immoral, David Shaw rescues us with a well-researched defense of pleasurable activities. As Shaw, the media critic for The Los Angeles Times, quotes a sociologist friend, "Don't people realize every scientific study shows that the single best thing you can do for your health is have fun?" Apparently not, as Shaw points out with an investigation into our Puritanical past, the excesses of the 1960s and the contradictions of living in fear during our current improved standard of living. The bottom line? Relax and enjoy.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Name Your Poison
I was twenty-one years old when I had my first drink.
It was bourbon.
It was awful.
The occasion was a small going-away party for the editor of my first daily newspaper. For some strange reason--maybe as a practical joke--the staff of five editors and five reporters unanimously selected me, the youngest and newest member of our little suburban paper, to be in charge of refreshments. I'd never done anything like it before and didn't have a clue what to do. But I'd read books and seen movies and heard stories about reporters and their legendary love of hard liquor, so I went out and bought a lot of Scotch and bourbon. But what do you eat with whiskey? I asked my wife to bake some brownies. That got a few chuckles at the party. But not as many chuckles as what I did with the Scotch and bourbon. Dimly recalling from some movie or other that most people liked their whiskey "on the rocks," I decided that rather than waste ice cubes and, ultimately, dilute my guests' drinks, it made much more sense to just put the bottles of whiskey in the freezer the morning of the party. Then I forgot I had put them there until my guests arrived.
"Omigod!" I said as the first few walked in. "I just realized--I froze the booze. Come in. Sit down. I'll get the bottles out of the freezer and put them in some boiling water. It shouldn't take long to defrost them--should it?"
I'm somewhat more sophisticated about both liquor and entertaining now. But I still don't like the taste of whiskey. In fact, when Lucas recently asked me to describe the taste of the Scotch that Lucy occasionally drinks, I told him it tastes like a particular antibiotic he's taken--one that is so foul he can hardly swallow it. He now refers to Chivas Regal as "Mommy's medicine."
I occasionally drink a margarita at a Mexican restaurant, and I'm not averse to a Bloody Mary at brunch every couple of years but what I really like is wine. Over the past dozen years or so, I have become a wine lover--a wine drinker, a wine buyer, a wine collector. I have a twelve-hundred-bottle cellar in my home. I go to wine auctions. I take my own wine to most restaurants, as well as on airplanes. I ship cases of my wine ahead when I vacation in domestic resort areas.
Unlike many of my wine-drinking friends, I don't drink wine just to drink wine--to sip it, sample it and compare it to other wines sipped and sampled. I like making those judgments, but what I really like is drinking wine as a complement to food. I like the way food and wine taste together--the way a rich white Burgundy enhances the flavor of steamed lobster and the way a robust, almost chewy red from Bordeaux accentuates both the taste and the texture of a thick, blood-rare New York steak. I have friends who finish dinner, then open a new bottle and start drinking, tasting and talking all over again. I also have friends who rave about German Rieslings that are "great for sipping on a summer afternoon, while you're reading a book," and still others who wax positively poetic about the charms inherent in a big, hearty Cabernet Sauvignon from California. Not me, not me, not me. First of all, when I'm through with my meal, I'm through with my wine--even if I have a half-full glass left in front of me. Nor do I usually sip wine while reading books. (Well, maybe a glass of port with a cigar, but that's a different matter--and, in part, the subject of the next chapter.) As for California Cabernets, well, I find most of them too heavy and too alcoholic. They don't complement food; they overpower it. That's not why I drink wine.
Unlike some drinkers--beer and hard-liquor drinkers more than wine drinkers--I don't drink wine for the impact of the alcohol. I don't have a drink after work to unwind or before bedtime to help me sleep. Sure, I enjoy the slight buzz and the sense of well-being I get after my first few swallows of wine at the dinner table. But that's only momentary--and secondary. The real buzz I feel in those first few swallows is an appreciation of the flavor of the wine--and, more important, an anticipation of the gastronomic pleasure to come. I have absolutely no desire for escape, release, intoxication, feelings of omnipotence or whatever it is that makes some people want to get drunk. I have several friends who feel differently. One of them, Colman Andrews, is now the executive editor of Saveur magazine, which recently published an excerpt from Benjamin Franklin's list of 228 words and phrases "overheard in taverns to describe the condition of being drunk." (Franklin, you may recall, is the fellow who once pointed out, "There are more old drunkards than old doctors.") A couple of years ago, Colman wrote a story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine titled "In Defense of Getting Drunk." The title was more provocative than precise, since Colman said that when he spoke of getting drunk, he didn't mean "falling-down/throwing-up/screaming-and-flailing-or-sniffing-and-sobbing-out-of-ontrol drunk." What he meant, he said, was drinking to "a state of pleasant inebriation."
"A lot of people who drink, and genuinely enjoy drinking, sometimes drink too much (because they genuinely enjoy drinking)," Colman acknowledged.
Why do they enjoy drinking? Why does he enjoy drinking?
Colman, who once wrote, "My body is not my temple; it's more like my bar and grill," said in his "Getting Drunk" story that he drinks because "I like the way alcohol smells and tastes...I drink because I like the trappings of imbibing, the company it keeps--the restaurants and cafes and bars and (usually) the people who gather in them. And I drink, frankly, because I like the way alcohol makes me feel. I like the glow, the softening of hard edges, the faint anesthesia. I like the way my mind races, one zigzag step ahead of logic. I like the flash flood of unexpected utter joy that sometimes courses quickly through me between this glass and that one."
Colman said he only drinks excessively when the mood and the circumstances permit. He doesn't drive drunk, work drunk or get drunk every night. He hasn't abused, abandoned or neglected his wife and two young children. His drinking does not cause any problems for anyone else, and he is probably doing no more than minor damage, if that, to himself. So whose business is it if he drinks to excess on occasion? Isn't it perfectly appropriate for him to adopt the attitude implicit in the title of the classic Billie Holiday song "Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do"?
I was twenty-one years old when I had my first drink.
It was bourbon.
It was awful.
The occasion was a small going-away party for the editor of my first daily newspaper. For some strange reason--maybe as a practical joke--the staff of five editors and five reporters unanimously selected me, the youngest and newest member of our little suburban paper, to be in charge of refreshments. I'd never done anything like it before and didn't have a clue what to do. But I'd read books and seen movies and heard stories about reporters and their legendary love of hard liquor, so I went out and bought a lot of Scotch and bourbon. But what do you eat with whiskey? I asked my wife to bake some brownies. That got a few chuckles at the party. But not as many chuckles as what I did with the Scotch and bourbon. Dimly recalling from some movie or other that most people liked their whiskey "on the rocks," I decided that rather than waste ice cubes and, ultimately, dilute my guests' drinks, it made much more sense to just put the bottles of whiskey in the freezer the morning of the party. Then I forgot I had put them there until my guests arrived.
"Omigod!" I said as the first few walked in. "I just realized--I froze the booze. Come in. Sit down. I'll get the bottles out of the freezer and put them in some boiling water. It shouldn't take long to defrost them--should it?"
I'm somewhat more sophisticated about both liquor and entertaining now. But I still don't like the taste of whiskey. In fact, when Lucas recently asked me to describe the taste of the Scotch that Lucy occasionally drinks, I told him it tastes like a particular antibiotic he's taken--one that is so foul he can hardly swallow it. He now refers to Chivas Regal as "Mommy's medicine."
I occasionally drink a margarita at a Mexican restaurant, and I'm not averse to a Bloody Mary at brunch every couple of years but what I really like is wine. Over the past dozen years or so, I have become a wine lover--a wine drinker, a wine buyer, a wine collector. I have a twelve-hundred-bottle cellar in my home. I go to wine auctions. I take my own wine to most restaurants, as well as on airplanes. I ship cases of my wine ahead when I vacation in domestic resort areas.
Unlike many of my wine-drinking friends, I don't drink wine just to drink wine--to sip it, sample it and compare it to other wines sipped and sampled. I like making those judgments, but what I really like is drinking wine as a complement to food. I like the way food and wine taste together--the way a rich white Burgundy enhances the flavor of steamed lobster and the way a robust, almost chewy red from Bordeaux accentuates both the taste and the texture of a thick, blood-rare New York steak. I have friends who finish dinner, then open a new bottle and start drinking, tasting and talking all over again. I also have friends who rave about German Rieslings that are "great for sipping on a summer afternoon, while you're reading a book," and still others who wax positively poetic about the charms inherent in a big, hearty Cabernet Sauvignon from California. Not me, not me, not me. First of all, when I'm through with my meal, I'm through with my wine--even if I have a half-full glass left in front of me. Nor do I usually sip wine while reading books. (Well, maybe a glass of port with a cigar, but that's a different matter--and, in part, the subject of the next chapter.) As for California Cabernets, well, I find most of them too heavy and too alcoholic. They don't complement food; they overpower it. That's not why I drink wine.
Unlike some drinkers--beer and hard-liquor drinkers more than wine drinkers--I don't drink wine for the impact of the alcohol. I don't have a drink after work to unwind or before bedtime to help me sleep. Sure, I enjoy the slight buzz and the sense of well-being I get after my first few swallows of wine at the dinner table. But that's only momentary--and secondary. The real buzz I feel in those first few swallows is an appreciation of the flavor of the wine--and, more important, an anticipation of the gastronomic pleasure to come. I have absolutely no desire for escape, release, intoxication, feelings of omnipotence or whatever it is that makes some people want to get drunk. I have several friends who feel differently. One of them, Colman Andrews, is now the executive editor of Saveur magazine, which recently published an excerpt from Benjamin Franklin's list of 228 words and phrases "overheard in taverns to describe the condition of being drunk." (Franklin, you may recall, is the fellow who once pointed out, "There are more old drunkards than old doctors.") A couple of years ago, Colman wrote a story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine titled "In Defense of Getting Drunk." The title was more provocative than precise, since Colman said that when he spoke of getting drunk, he didn't mean "falling-down/throwing-up/screaming-and-flailing-or-sniffing-and-sobbing-out-of-ontrol drunk." What he meant, he said, was drinking to "a state of pleasant inebriation."
"A lot of people who drink, and genuinely enjoy drinking, sometimes drink too much (because they genuinely enjoy drinking)," Colman acknowledged.
Why do they enjoy drinking? Why does he enjoy drinking?
Colman, who once wrote, "My body is not my temple; it's more like my bar and grill," said in his "Getting Drunk" story that he drinks because "I like the way alcohol smells and tastes...I drink because I like the trappings of imbibing, the company it keeps--the restaurants and cafes and bars and (usually) the people who gather in them. And I drink, frankly, because I like the way alcohol makes me feel. I like the glow, the softening of hard edges, the faint anesthesia. I like the way my mind races, one zigzag step ahead of logic. I like the flash flood of unexpected utter joy that sometimes courses quickly through me between this glass and that one."
Colman said he only drinks excessively when the mood and the circumstances permit. He doesn't drive drunk, work drunk or get drunk every night. He hasn't abused, abandoned or neglected his wife and two young children. His drinking does not cause any problems for anyone else, and he is probably doing no more than minor damage, if that, to himself. So whose business is it if he drinks to excess on occasion? Isn't it perfectly appropriate for him to adopt the attitude implicit in the title of the classic Billie Holiday song "Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do"?
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherDoubleday
- Publication date1996
- ISBN 10 0385475683
- ISBN 13 9780385475686
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages307
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