[freddie_mercury]

My biggest complaint about Blood Meridian is it throws all this graphic violence in your face and then has typical American squeamishness about sex. It felt like the inability to depict sex undermined whatever point it was trying to make with graphic depictions of violence. Compare, here is the single sex scene in the book which is "fade to black" blink and you missed it:

I seen you right away, she said. I always pick the one I want.

She led him through a door where an old Mexican woman was handing out towels and candles and they ascended like refugees of some sordid disaster the darkened plankboard stairwell to the upper rooms.

Lying in the little cubicle with his trousers about his knees he watched her. He watched her take up her clothes and don them and he watched her hold the candle to the mirror and study her face there. She turned and looked at him.

Let's go, she said. I got to go.

[robertlagrant]

That doesn't seem squeamish. I think many writers of that era viewed violence as bad, and sex as private. You may disagree with them on that point, of course.

[thebooktocome]

The text is painfully awkward, not McCarthy at his best.

1985 isn't usually considered a locus of Victorian attitudes toward sex, at least in the United States. The Hayes code was abolished in 1968. The Miller test was established in the late seventies, reducing publisher risk for content that would have been considered pornographic a decade or two earlier.

Anxiety about sex—and particularly homosexual sex—didn't significantly rise again until the early 2000s, around the time Lawrence v. Texas was decided. The Puritans have been loudly agitating for blanket censorship ever since.

[robertlagrant]

I'm not talking about Victorian attitudes in particular. Sex is often considered private, even today. I'm pointing to a resolution of the apparently irony of describing violence but not sex.