Yes, Wetlands is pretty gross. (And most of us are difficult to gross out.) Some examples, in roughly ascending order of grossitude:

— The protagonist, 18-year-old Helen Memel, eats her own boogers [who hasn't?].
— She also eats her own smegma [who ... um ...].
— Helen also likes to rub her vagina all over public toilet seats, picking up "all the pubic hairs, droplets, splotches, and puddles of various shades and consistencies."
— After an anus-shaving accident, Helen needs what my best friend in ninth grade used to call "open-butt surgery," in which doctors stretch her anus out, stuff their hands in, and cut out a big wedge of tissue. This leaves Helen's anus temporarily huge and loose, meaning it constantly emits farts and a liquid-y shit that Helen dubs "ass piss."
— Helen disdains tampons, so she just shoves balled-up toilet paper up her vaginal canal to stanch the flow. Not that gross, right? But sometimes the toilet paper gets lost in there, at which point she gets her dad's barbecue tongs, still covered in char and meat drippings, roots around in her vagina until she finds the offending item, and then puts the tongs back on the grill, now marinated in menstrual blood and assorted lady-juices.

Much of Wetlands is authentically stomach turning, but that last item is also kind of silly. And really, although the novel has been hailed as a feminist battle cry against hygiene by Granta and The New York Times, the tongs incident reveals that ultimately, Roche just wants to gross readers out.

Sure, at first Helen's screw-hygiene message is liberating, especially if you're sick of being expected to smell like a flower all the time, or if you did all the things they said would prevent a yeast infection (like wearing cotton underwear and changing it five times a day and showering before sex and after sex and during sex and whatever) and you totally got one anyway. It's good to remember that being too clean can be bad for your brain and your body, and a little blood/sweat/smegma can actually be hot. But Helen's hygiene-hate goes well beyond the laissez-faire and into the pathological. At one point I found myself asking if everything she ever dropped on the floor had to wind up in her vagina.

Roche does want to make you think, a little, but she really wants to make you barf. Which, in its way, is also a noble thing. We tend to assume that gross-out humor — and grossness for pure grossness's stake — is the province of boys. But any girl who ever wanted one of those squishy bloody eyeball toys, or who whiled away the hours with her girlfriends discussing ways to sneak body fluids into common household products, will know that being totally gross can be empowering for anybody. Gross stuff, in addition to just being fun, also relieves the pressure of pretending that our bodies are odorless, secretionless, effortlessly attractive social-interaction machines, a pressure which still lies much more heavily on women than on men. The truth is, women can be just as gross as men can — they just don't get as much opportunity to do it [heh, I said do it] in the outlets of mainstream culture. So if Charlotte Roche wants to make everybody puke with her story of smegma meals and anal leakage, that's cool. And, okay, maybe a little feminist.

Related: Wetlands [Amazon]
Germany Abuzz At Racy Novel of Sex And Hygiene [NYT]

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As long as I've been aware, I've had hemorrhoids. For many, many years I thought I couldn't say anything. Because hemorrhoids only grow on grandfathers. I always found them to be so un-girly. I was so often at the proctologist because of them! But he advised me to leave them alone as long as they weren't causing me any pain. That they didn't do. They just itched. For that, my proctologist Dr. Fiddel gave me an ointment.

For the external itching, you squeeze a hazelnut-sized amount onto your the finger with the shortest nail and rub it on your pink starfish. The tube also comes with a point attachment with many rings inside, so that you can feed it into your ass and squirt it in there, thereby quieting the internal itching.

Before I had that kind of cream, I'd scratched so determinedly in and around my asshole in my sleep that the next morning I would have a quarter-sized dark brown spot in my underwear. As I said: very un-girly.

My hemorrhoids look really special. Over the course of the years, they'd forced themselves more and more out of my asshole. Now they are cloud-like flaps of skin once around my whole pink starfish that look like an anemone's tentacles. Dr. Fiddel calls it the cauliflower.

He says that if I want it gone, it would only be for aesthetics. He'll only remove it for people that are really burdened by it. Good reasons would be if my lover didn't like it or if my cauliflower made me anxious about sex. That I wouldn't admit.

If someone loves me or is even only hot for me, then my cauliflower shouldn't play a role. Besides, I have already for many years — since I was 15 until now, and I'm 18 — despite my wild cauliflower had successful anal sex. Successful, for me, means I came, even though there was a cock only in my ass and nobody was playing with any other part of me. Yeah, I'm proud of that.

Phew. I guess I know what I'm doing tonight. I think I'll need a cigarette, though.

You see, Helen is in the hospital because of the accidental damage she's done to her precious lady flower with a razor while attempting to achieve a hairless poon. And according to the Times, Wetlands "only gains momentum from there, eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and — here is where the debate kicks in — just possibly female empowerment."

The novel has sold more that 680,000 copies, and according to the Times it has "has struck a nerve [in Germany], catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women’s roles and image in society." But critics — and with a novel so taboo that women have fainted at local readings, there are many — say that the explicit sex in Wetlands obscures and muddles a real debate over things like equal pay for equal work. German women currently earn 22% less than German men, the third worst disparity in all of Europe (behind only Estonia and Cyprus). As the Times puts it, because of Wetlands, " A debate that might more profitably center on career counselors and day care is instead mired in old questions about sexual liberation."

Of course, it brings up great questions for American women as well. Does "empowerment" even mean anything anymore when women claim to be "empowered" by pole dancing lessons and Botox? Where is the intersection of sexual liberation and societal progress for women? I imagine we'll be discussing these questions long after 18-year-old Helen Meyer takes her place in the literary "slut" pantheon with Isadora Wing and Emma Bovary.

Germany Abuzz At Racy Novel Of Sex And Hygiene [NYT]
Publishers Battle To Sign Up Europe's Sex Sensation [Guardian]

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