A short story where sex and conversation switch roles

July 30, 2005 8:42 AM

A friend of mine is trying to identify a short story that she read in high school where conversation and sex have the opposite roles than they do in our society today.

That is, discussion is viewed as intimacy and is done only in private, whereas people will be physical with each other freely in public. She thinks that speaking at all in public may have been taboo, and the consummation of a relationship was an act along the lines of exchanging essays with a partner. She does not remember much of the plot.

I've tried google, but as you might imagine, these terms are a bit difficult to work with.

posted by Turd Ferguson to writing & language (7 comments total)

It sounds a bit like The Taboo of Oobat, though my memory may be faulty here.
posted by willpie at 9:06 AM on July 30, 2005

No, it's not The Taboo of Oobat -- that's about a world in which different body parts are taboo.
posted by kindall at 11:53 AM on July 30, 2005

I swear I read this too. I keep wanting to say it was in a collection of stories by an extremely famous sci-fi author, like Ray Bradbury, but I can't narrow it down more at the moment.
posted by GaelFC at 1:08 PM on July 30, 2005

sorry, don't know the answer either. just reminds me of "fantome de la liberte", where the roles of dining and defecation are reversed.
posted by Silky Slim at 2:14 PM on July 30, 2005

It was a short story in a magazine for young women, I can't remember which one; and there was a boy attracted to this "bad girl" who spoke her thoughts freely? That's all I remember, but it does sound familiar.
posted by pomegranate at 3:11 PM on July 30, 2005

This sounds pretty familiar, but it's been years since I read sf regularly. I'm thinking that New Eves sounds a bit like the anthology GaelFC recalls (one of the editors was 4E Ackerman). From the same site, Feminist SF for Beginners and LQ's Faves might jog a memory.
posted by dhartung at 1:43 AM on July 31, 2005

Thanks for linking The taboo of Oobat. :)
posted by ruelle at 5:38 AM on March 3, 2006