Word: emotionlessness
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...even with prodigal use of those two favorite novelistic themes, drugs and sex, the book remains a heavy-handed and smug treatment of emotionless, sterile relationships and the depravity and violence they engender. The dead babies of the title (and Amis spells this out without much subtlety) are the love, understanding and compassion which the characters of the novel have destroyed with their omniverous desire for pleasurable sensations...
...lived, it has never been by virtue of any particular humanity or warmth. At his best, Kosinski is a novelist of terror: The Painted Bird and Steps were catalogues of lurid atrocities, accounts of sadism, bestiality, and so forth, every one more horrible than the last. Kosinski's precise, emotionless prose didn't just render those atrocities in all their harsh reality; it became a part of the horror, inhuman beyond mere colorlessness. Kosinski's bestial imagination hasn't failed him in his new novel: the episodes of rape and dismemberment are as brutal and varied as ever. But there...
...study of the male body, was a stunning example of what good pornography can be. Viva's love story is occasionally a sensitive exploration of a relationship between two people--as it was in the November issue--rather than a few obscene pictures of naked men and women in emotionless encounters...
...long as secondary sex characteristics and fantasies are important to a woman's enjoyment of sex, there will be magazines like Viva and Playgirl. But the naked bodies and fantasies created by them can be more than brainless, emotionless, cheesecake. Surely, sexual liberation must mean more than encouraging women to respond to the exploitation of men's bodies as well as their...
Unfortunately, the emotionless rite has a permanently damaging effect on Steve's (and Bullins's) attitude towards women. Women are seen as sexual objects and survival of the male ego becomes dependent on crushing the female's. "You sonna bitch," Velma, the lonely housewife Steve seduces and mistreats in The Duplex, curses. "You're a sonna bitch," the first black woman he rapes in The Reluctant Rapist cries out as he defiles her. But instead of being offended by the epithets, he wears them boldly as though they were testimonials to his manliness. For Bullins the only law that operates...