Tongue First is an exploration of the body in various contexts; to an extent it seeks to inspect more critically the taken-for-granted and engage more openly with the unusual. Emily Jenkins has hit on the bright idea of exploring a number of physical situations and experiences – taking heroin, having a tattoo, total immersion, sleep deprivation, and such like – and discussing her own feelings and reactions as well as musing about larger cultural contexts and meanings. Which is as much as to say that this is another book of autobiography blended with cultural studies passnotes. There seems to be a lot of it about right now.
The title derives from Jenkins’s first French kiss, in which a boy inappropriately named Ace dived in, drooling and drunk, in very much that fashion. But it becomes a handy metaphor for Jenkins’s “adventures in physical culture”; the limits of the body, the first contact of the senses, the risk of tasting the unknown.
First the hard stuff. Jenkins takes heroin, just once, and has a queasy old time of it. Her fear and her disgust (when recounting the story of some addicts who lived in her apartment block) are palpable. She doesn’t take us much further than that; neither users nor non-users are going to find out much from her account, but they are – and I wonder if that is the point – going to learn a bit about Emily Jenkins. This is a problem throughout; her audience is not going to be those people who have actively had “adventures in physical culture” for years, with complete involvement; but it doesn’t even offer enough meat to the less experienced reader who might have been curious, tantalised, titillated by the book’s come-on.
This is a peculiarly shy book. For Jenkins this is deliberate in one sense – she wants to recognize that she has inhibitions, private taboos, and to explore what is happening and where those limits come from. And the text’s Protestant revulsion at physicality, everywhere evident, does help to emphasise the sort of nitty-gritty that is often carefully avoided by our rituals and conventions. But at the same time, it feels like a book in drag.
A chapter called “Fucking” manages to discuss underwear, sex guides, numbers of partners, and so forth; it ducks any greater engagement with the subject. Jenkins’s attempts at the Kama Sutra with her younger boyfriend are mentioned but not described. She manages a section on public displays of affection without ever quite going public herself. There is no discussion of piercing, and Jenkins doesn’t even consider, say, piercing her nipples or clitoris. Her shyness over the description of “Rolfing” leaves one mystified: “Carmen stays outside my underwear, but aside from this one detail her fingers are probing areas even my most adventurous lovers have not explored so thoroughly.”
Finally, there is her outright refusal to try colonic irrigation, defensively announced in a phrase which tellingly reveals how far Jenkins was prepared to make sacrifices to get a book out of them. “I should say up front that I am not going to get a tube stuck up my ass for the sake of literature. One part of my reluctance, of course, is that colonics involve penetration, which is scary if the orifice is unfamiliar.” Unfamiliar? One assumes that Ms Jenkins can tell it apart from her elbow.
Even as Ms Jenkins elaborates on our unquestioning imprisonment not merely by the body but by the codes and conventions with which we surround it, she perhaps fails to adequately acknowledge her imprisonment within the far-from-typical life of Emily Jenkins. Because the book is so personal, one is time and again run up against a white, comfortable, middle-class 30-year-old New York postgraduate. I was irritated by yet another overly achieved piece of confessionalism which – while it purports to be the Full Monty – is more of a flash of untattooed ankle, and a tease.